[3] Young George received a relatively modest education, completing just two years of high school before quitting to find a job and a career.

The Mirror, a weekly, provided some traditional news reports but focused on covering the world of theatre, reviewing stage acts, and Broadway plays.

The newspaper in the first years of the twentieth century only allotted occasional coverage to the emerging industry of motion pictures, a relatively small patch of entertainment that The Mirror and many others in the New York media regarded then as a passing oddity, a "queer freak", that did not warrant considerable print.

[4] Around 1910, Terwilliger left The Mirror after working there for nine years to accept a job at The Morning Telegraph, another long-established New York weekly newspaper.

[5] To supplement his limited income as an employee of newspapers published just once a week, Terwilliger wrote and edited stories, and sold "scenarios" to Biograph Studios in the Bronx such as The Lucky Toothache in 1910 and The Battle, directed by D. W. Griffith and released in 1911.