Richard Koszarski:
Fort Lee: The Film Town (1904-2004)
"The 100th anniversary of the incorporation of the Borough of Fort Lee, New Jersey, provides an ideal moment to reflect on the role this new community played in the development of the American motion picture industry. Laid out by General George Washington at the time of the American Revolution (he was soon forced to abandon it when British forces succeeded in crossing the Hudson a few miles to the north), Fort Lee was for its first century a rural satellite of New York. Farming provided the basic occupation, but towards the end of the 19th century the area also became an attractive tourist mecca. The Palisades, which General Washington felt might protect the spot from invasion, had succeeded in retarding the commercial development which had overcome most of the Hudson’s Jersey shore. No railroad line was ever built along the Palisades, and most direct access was by ferry across the Hudson River and then up the Palisades via interurban trolley car. To take advantage of this relative isolation vacation cabins were constructed as summertime rentals, while tourist hotels and livery stables catered to New Yorkers seeking a bucolic getaway only a day trip from midtown Manhattan. And Fort Lee was not only unspoiled and close at hand, it offered surprising topographical variety, with cliffs, cornfields, rocky shoreline, country estates, and winding village roads all within its geographical boundaries. By 1907 the tourists had been joined by filmmakers.
Gene Gauntier and Sidney Olcott of the Kalem company claimed to be the first to discover the value of this community as a production center. In any case, they were soon joined by Biograph, Pathé, IMP, the New York Motion Picture Company, and other early producers, trust members and independents alike. James Young Deer shot Pathé’s first American westerns here in 1910, while D. W. Griffith made nearly 100 short films in Fort Lee. Soon, “Jersey scenery” had become so commonplace on motion picture screens that the term acquired an unfortunate generic meaning: an overused landscape failing to pass as something it is not. That same year Mark Dintenfass decided to take Fort Lee filmmaking indoors, opening the Champion studio at the borough’s northern boundary. At that moment, Fort Lee passed from being just another interesting location and began its brief career as America’s first “motion picture town”. Within a few years the borough’s tax rolls would be completely dominated by motion picture studios and laboratories.
Champion was soon joined by American Éclair and Alice Guy Blaché’s Solax, the beginnings of a French invasion that would shape the character of Fort Lee filmmaking for a decade. Backed by Eastman raw stock mogul Jules Brulatour, Éclair’s Charles Jourjon built the Peerless studio next door to Éclair as a center for feature film production. When World War I changed Jourjon’s plans, the World-Peerless studio was taken over by his partners, Broadway impresarios Lee and J. J. Shubert, with Lewis J. Selznick and later William Brady as managing partners. For several years the Éclair and World studios served as a dissemination point for French filmmakers, film style, and film technology. Maurice Tourneur, Albert Capellani, Ben Carré, Lucien Andriot, Francis Doublier, and Georges Benoît were all on staff here, as was a certain Monsieur Grisel, employed as interpreter (Émile Cohl and Étienne Arnaud had already returned to France, while Léonce Perret and Henri Ménessier were busy down the road at Solax).
In 1914, laboratory specialist “Doc” Willat had opened his own lab and two large greenhouse studios just south of Éclair. The World-Éclair-Willat properties constituted an unprecedented film superblock, crowded with stages and laboratories (today known as Constitution Park, it is home to summer concerts and outdoor film screenings). Willat rented his stages to William Fox, then to Triangle and Fine Arts. Theda Bara, Douglas Fairbanks, and “Fatty” Arbuckle would work here over the next few years. Just across the street from the Willat stages, Universal built the largest glass-enclosed studio in the world in 1915, the same year that they opened a western “Universal City” in California. In 1917 it would become home to the new Goldwyn Corporation, and Fort Lee’s ferries would be renamed for Goldwyn’s stars, Mae Marsh, Geraldine Farrar, and Madge Kennedy.
Just as California’s “Hollywood” studios were scattered far beyond the confines of that locality, so the name of Fort Lee (now generic in its own way) was often stretched to include such outlying facilities as Herbert Brenon’s Ideal studio in Hudson Heights, Kalem’s open-air stages in Cliffside Park, and the impressive studio built by E. K. Lincoln at Grantwood. Pathé, which had discovered the advantages of Fort Lee even before it constructed its Jersey City studio in 1910, continued to return to the Palisades, especially when filming Pearl White’s cliffhanger serials.
The last of the great Fort Lee studios, the Paragon, was built just south of Universal in 1915 by Jules Brulatour. Maurice Tourneur was a partner in the Paragon, and it was here that he made A Girl’s Folly, Poor Little Rich Girl, and The Blue Bird. Later it became the New Jersey headquarters of Famous Players-Lasky, and eventually of Selznick Pictures. In fact, Selznick’s would be the last traditional studio operation in Fort Lee: after a series of political, economic, and even environmental pressures forced out most other producers in 1918, only Selznick remained and prospered. By the early 1920s he controlled 2/3 of the studio space in Fort Lee, as well as the Biograph stages across the river in the Bronx.
Unfortunately, Selznick himself was out of business by 1923, and the last silent films shot in the borough were independent productions featuring stars like Richard Barthelmess and Barbara La Marr. Jules Brulatour single-handedly kept the Paragon studio open for his protégée, Hope Hampton. But while most accounts of Fort Lee film history end here, a few of the “old” studios saw new life in the early years of sound. Several stages were soundproofed and made available to independent producers, including racial, religious, and ethnic minorities ignored by the majors. Instead of French, the languages now heard on the stages were more likely to be Italian, Yiddish, or Croatian. Ambitious feature films were shot here by Mormon interests, as well as race film producers like Oscar Micheaux (who had already worked in Fort Lee during the silent era). W. C. Fields, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Harry Langdon all made films here during the early 1930s, or at least tried to. The collapse of film production in the East in 1932, and the general economic depression, left the laboratories and storage vaults as the only vestige of this industry still standing. Today, Fort Lee Film Storage still holds nitrate film in an enormous building put up by Jules Brulatour more than 80 years ago.
While filmmaking in Fort Lee did not strictly precede similar activity in “Hollywood”, this was the first industrial location in America completely dominated by the producing and printing of motion pictures. For a time, cultural critics seemed fascinated by this “film town” on the Palisades, where the movies had supplanted all other commercial activity. But as the studios, and the producing entities that operated them, suddenly entered the dark hole of “orphan cinema”, even historians lost interest. Fifty years ago, Theodore Huff was pretty much alone when he wrote of Fort Lee as “Hollywood’s predecessor”. Did the American film industry really learn anything from Fort Lee? Given the current interest in the “transitional era” of American cinema, this year’s centennial would seem to provide a convenient moment for reassessment." – RICHARD KOSZARSKI
Fort Lee: The Film Town (1904-2004)
"The 100th anniversary of the incorporation of the Borough of Fort Lee, New Jersey, provides an ideal moment to reflect on the role this new community played in the development of the American motion picture industry. Laid out by General George Washington at the time of the American Revolution (he was soon forced to abandon it when British forces succeeded in crossing the Hudson a few miles to the north), Fort Lee was for its first century a rural satellite of New York. Farming provided the basic occupation, but towards the end of the 19th century the area also became an attractive tourist mecca. The Palisades, which General Washington felt might protect the spot from invasion, had succeeded in retarding the commercial development which had overcome most of the Hudson’s Jersey shore. No railroad line was ever built along the Palisades, and most direct access was by ferry across the Hudson River and then up the Palisades via interurban trolley car. To take advantage of this relative isolation vacation cabins were constructed as summertime rentals, while tourist hotels and livery stables catered to New Yorkers seeking a bucolic getaway only a day trip from midtown Manhattan. And Fort Lee was not only unspoiled and close at hand, it offered surprising topographical variety, with cliffs, cornfields, rocky shoreline, country estates, and winding village roads all within its geographical boundaries. By 1907 the tourists had been joined by filmmakers.
Gene Gauntier and Sidney Olcott of the Kalem company claimed to be the first to discover the value of this community as a production center. In any case, they were soon joined by Biograph, Pathé, IMP, the New York Motion Picture Company, and other early producers, trust members and independents alike. James Young Deer shot Pathé’s first American westerns here in 1910, while D. W. Griffith made nearly 100 short films in Fort Lee. Soon, “Jersey scenery” had become so commonplace on motion picture screens that the term acquired an unfortunate generic meaning: an overused landscape failing to pass as something it is not. That same year Mark Dintenfass decided to take Fort Lee filmmaking indoors, opening the Champion studio at the borough’s northern boundary. At that moment, Fort Lee passed from being just another interesting location and began its brief career as America’s first “motion picture town”. Within a few years the borough’s tax rolls would be completely dominated by motion picture studios and laboratories.
Champion was soon joined by American Éclair and Alice Guy Blaché’s Solax, the beginnings of a French invasion that would shape the character of Fort Lee filmmaking for a decade. Backed by Eastman raw stock mogul Jules Brulatour, Éclair’s Charles Jourjon built the Peerless studio next door to Éclair as a center for feature film production. When World War I changed Jourjon’s plans, the World-Peerless studio was taken over by his partners, Broadway impresarios Lee and J. J. Shubert, with Lewis J. Selznick and later William Brady as managing partners. For several years the Éclair and World studios served as a dissemination point for French filmmakers, film style, and film technology. Maurice Tourneur, Albert Capellani, Ben Carré, Lucien Andriot, Francis Doublier, and Georges Benoît were all on staff here, as was a certain Monsieur Grisel, employed as interpreter (Émile Cohl and Étienne Arnaud had already returned to France, while Léonce Perret and Henri Ménessier were busy down the road at Solax).
In 1914, laboratory specialist “Doc” Willat had opened his own lab and two large greenhouse studios just south of Éclair. The World-Éclair-Willat properties constituted an unprecedented film superblock, crowded with stages and laboratories (today known as Constitution Park, it is home to summer concerts and outdoor film screenings). Willat rented his stages to William Fox, then to Triangle and Fine Arts. Theda Bara, Douglas Fairbanks, and “Fatty” Arbuckle would work here over the next few years. Just across the street from the Willat stages, Universal built the largest glass-enclosed studio in the world in 1915, the same year that they opened a western “Universal City” in California. In 1917 it would become home to the new Goldwyn Corporation, and Fort Lee’s ferries would be renamed for Goldwyn’s stars, Mae Marsh, Geraldine Farrar, and Madge Kennedy.
Just as California’s “Hollywood” studios were scattered far beyond the confines of that locality, so the name of Fort Lee (now generic in its own way) was often stretched to include such outlying facilities as Herbert Brenon’s Ideal studio in Hudson Heights, Kalem’s open-air stages in Cliffside Park, and the impressive studio built by E. K. Lincoln at Grantwood. Pathé, which had discovered the advantages of Fort Lee even before it constructed its Jersey City studio in 1910, continued to return to the Palisades, especially when filming Pearl White’s cliffhanger serials.
The last of the great Fort Lee studios, the Paragon, was built just south of Universal in 1915 by Jules Brulatour. Maurice Tourneur was a partner in the Paragon, and it was here that he made A Girl’s Folly, Poor Little Rich Girl, and The Blue Bird. Later it became the New Jersey headquarters of Famous Players-Lasky, and eventually of Selznick Pictures. In fact, Selznick’s would be the last traditional studio operation in Fort Lee: after a series of political, economic, and even environmental pressures forced out most other producers in 1918, only Selznick remained and prospered. By the early 1920s he controlled 2/3 of the studio space in Fort Lee, as well as the Biograph stages across the river in the Bronx.
Unfortunately, Selznick himself was out of business by 1923, and the last silent films shot in the borough were independent productions featuring stars like Richard Barthelmess and Barbara La Marr. Jules Brulatour single-handedly kept the Paragon studio open for his protégée, Hope Hampton. But while most accounts of Fort Lee film history end here, a few of the “old” studios saw new life in the early years of sound. Several stages were soundproofed and made available to independent producers, including racial, religious, and ethnic minorities ignored by the majors. Instead of French, the languages now heard on the stages were more likely to be Italian, Yiddish, or Croatian. Ambitious feature films were shot here by Mormon interests, as well as race film producers like Oscar Micheaux (who had already worked in Fort Lee during the silent era). W. C. Fields, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Harry Langdon all made films here during the early 1930s, or at least tried to. The collapse of film production in the East in 1932, and the general economic depression, left the laboratories and storage vaults as the only vestige of this industry still standing. Today, Fort Lee Film Storage still holds nitrate film in an enormous building put up by Jules Brulatour more than 80 years ago.
While filmmaking in Fort Lee did not strictly precede similar activity in “Hollywood”, this was the first industrial location in America completely dominated by the producing and printing of motion pictures. For a time, cultural critics seemed fascinated by this “film town” on the Palisades, where the movies had supplanted all other commercial activity. But as the studios, and the producing entities that operated them, suddenly entered the dark hole of “orphan cinema”, even historians lost interest. Fifty years ago, Theodore Huff was pretty much alone when he wrote of Fort Lee as “Hollywood’s predecessor”. Did the American film industry really learn anything from Fort Lee? Given the current interest in the “transitional era” of American cinema, this year’s centennial would seem to provide a convenient moment for reassessment." – RICHARD KOSZARSKI
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