not equally distributed, and one of FBO's most successful franchises has disappeared entirely: not even a fragmentary print of any of the six Gene Stratton-Porter films put out by the studio has been found. Due to its zeal for cost cutting, FBO was reputed to be especially meticulous in the execution of a practice then common among distributors: rounding up its release prints at the end of a picture's run and melting them down to recover the silver in the film emulsion. As for FBO's biggest star, among America's biggest at the time, of the twenty films Fred Thomson made for the studio, for years just a single one was known to remain intact in a US archive: Thundering Hoofs. About three reels' worth of the five-reel Galloping Gallagher (1924) were also known to survive. In 1982, film scholar Bruce Firestone wrote that "the disappearance, through loss or destruction, of virtually all of his films [has] turned Thomson into one of the least-known cowboys in the history of American movies." According to the Library of Congress's American Silent Feature Film Database, to this tiny corpus may now be added complete prints of The Dangerous Coward (1924) and A Regular Scout (1926) at the George Eastman House. Seven more Thomson features are held by archives abroad. Headliners and celebrity casting Sessue Hayakawa, the first star of any magnitude associated with the Robertson-Cole brand, made a total of twenty films released by the studio, from A Heart in Pawn in March 1919 to The Vermilion Pencil in March 1922. Hayakawa was regarded as one of the finest screen performers of his time, but as anti-Japanese sentiment grew on the West Coast, R-C terminated its relationship with the Chiba-born actor. Two months after The Vermilion Pencil opened, he sued the studio for breach of contract. Pauline Frederick, celebrated for her performance in the September 1920 Goldwyn Pictures tear-jerker Madame X, immediately cashed in with a top-tier contract from Robertson-Cole, for whom she starred in more than half a dozen melodramas, beginning with A Slave of Vanity just two months later. She was said to have been paid an extravagant $7,000 or $7,500 a week under her R-C deal. Early in her career, ZaSu Pitts acted in six R-C releases—Better Times (1919) gave Pitts her first ever top billing—from the Brentwood Film Corporation, founded by a group of doctors. In the years after the