Elsie Janis, another child star three years older, recalled meeting “Baby Gladys,” at Shea’s Theatre in Toronto. “She was a very grown-up baby,” Janis later wrote. “She would gaze wide-eyed at my array of dresses, hanging on the dressing room wall, a different one for each performance, and two performances a day. ‘Mother,’ she would say plaintively, ‘do you suppose I will ever have pretty dresses like those?’”

By the age of 15, she was mature enough to travel on her own, and she was setting her own goals. Gladys decided that she should work for one of New York’s most famous producers, David Belasco. It seemed like a thousand to one shot for a teenage road show performer to break into Broadway, but she did it. It was Belasco who insisted she find a new name. In the summer of 1907 she cabled her mother in Canada "GLADYS SMITH NOW MARY PICKFORD - ENGAGED BY DAVID BELASCO TO APPEAR ON BROADWAY THIS FALL."

Mary Pickford appeared in the long run of only one Belasco play, The Warrens of Virginia, before she discovered the movies. “Flickers,” they were called in those days. The typical film was a single reel, eight to twelve minutes long. Often the script, called a “scenario,” was a simply idea in someone’s head, or an outline of shots on paper. Scenes were improvised with minimal dialogue (which of course the audience would never hear). “Intertitles,” just long enough to explain what could not be revealed by mime, were written after the film was edited. These films were shown in storefront “Nickelodeon” theatres, which would run a program of five or more “flickers” in rotation for an admission charge, as the name implied, of a nickel. It was rudimentary fun, but in 1909 this infant medium of “flickers” was changing in leaps and bounds. Some directors, a man named D.W. Griffith at the forefront, were attempting to adapt classic literature to this twelve-minute pantomime; in his first year as director Griffith produced a one-reel version of The Taming of the Shrew.

In April, 1909 Mary Pickford walked up to the Brooklyn brownstone in which the American Biograph Company had set up their studio and asked for a job.

D. W. Griffith arranged an immediate screen test for her, applied her makeup personally, and gave her a small part in a scene for a film that was shot the same afternoon. At the end of the day he invited her to dinner, and when she declined he asked, “Will you come back tomorrow? Our pay for everybody is five dollars a day. We pay only by the day.”

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