Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish both started working for D.W. Griffith in the early days of American Mutoscope & Biograph. While it's been claimed that Griffith was immediately infatuated with Lillian, in their first film for him, Biograph's An Unseen Enemy (1912), he thought they were twins. According to Lillian's autobiography, he had to tie different colored hair ribbons on the girls to tell them apart and give them direction: "Red, you hear a strange noise. Run to your sister. Blue, you're scared too. Look toward me, where the camera is.".
Though not a direct adaptation, the premise of the story was strongly influenced by the play Au Téléphone (At the Telephone) by André de Lorde, first published in 1902 and a staple of the Theatre du Grand Guignol in Paris. A previous effort by D.W. Griffith, The Lonely Villa (1909), was a more direct adaptation of the play.
Not only was this Lillian Gish's film debut but the film was directed by one of the future giants of cinema, D.W. Griffiths. Therefore It is interesting to note that Lillian Gish's film career started with one legendary auteur director but her final film, 75 years later was directed by another legendary auteur director, Lindsay Anderson..
Unusually for a film from this era, this film still exists in it's entirety (110 years later). It is also the first film to feature future film legend Lillian Gish (who was 18 years old during filming).