"[3] The years of studio training made Bernard Durning a master of technique, acquainted with every angle of filmmaking.

Even in his directorial debut at Edison Studios he "invented and carried into execution an entirely new idea in the lighting of night scenes in 'Aliens'.

Some very fine silhouette effects were the result..."[4] Aliens was written by Durning and starred his wife, Shirley Mason, as Kiku San, a Japanese girl.

[5] Both Shirley and her sister, Viola Dana, had been child stars on Broadway in The Poor Little Rich Girl.

Viola married John Collins, who directed her in The Cossack Whip (1917) and the still extant Blue Jeans (1917).

Durning and Mason both worked for Fox Studios on the corner of Sunset and Western in Hollywood, California, starting in 1920.

He came home one night with Shirley and Bernie and stayed for three years," Viola told Kevin Brownlow.

When Big Bernie caught Wild Bill in the arms of the starlette of their picture in Buck Jones' dressing room, he proceeded to beat the heck out of him.

"[3] Wellman put what he had learned from Durning to practical use when he finally found his true love in the form of a Busby Berkeley dancer named Dorothy Coonan whom he married and had six children.

Dick Grace the stuntman describes working on two of Durning's films in his book Squadron Of Death, The Eleventh Hour (1923) and The Fast Mail (1922).

"[10] When Sol Wurtzel and Winfield Sheehan, the Fox Studio heads, saw the finished film, Durning confessed and told them to make Wellman a director.

Durning was directing a big special for Fox, called Around The Town, starring Gallagher and Shean in the summer of 1923 when he drank some bad water in Brooklyn and got typhoid fever.