As a long time lover of silent movies, especially those made before the advent of the Hollywood Studio System in 1924, I found this book absolutely indispensible. Vitagraph (the name means “living pictures”) was founded by two British born Americans, J. Stuart Blackton & Albert Smith, in 1897 and lasted until 1925 when they sold the company to Warner Brothers. During that time they went from the nickelodeon era to building the largest East Coast motion picture facility in Brooklyn. They released around 3,500 films (the majority of them were short one and two reelers) during that time period. That facilty, which became a Yeshiva school, lasted until 2014 when it was demolished for a condominium complex which has been named The Vitagraph.
Sadly, only around 20% of those movies survive today with most of them to be found in British archives. The vast majority of them in this country were deliberately destroyed by Warner Brothers in the 1940s to make room for their own films. What few we do have come from the Library of Congress who released a few of them to home video around the turn of the century. Among those are the gender bending comedy A FLORIDA ENCHANTMENT (1914) which is of far more interest today than it was then. Also available are some one and two reel comedies of John Bunny and Flora Finch and the frenetic gag comedies of Larry Semon (who gave Laurel & Hardy their start) that are literally live action Road Runner cartoons.
Author Andrew A. Erish and his associates have done yeoman work in sifting through various films and numerous documents to separate fact from fiction and to help set the record straight regarding the earliest days of American cinema and Vitagraph’s vital part in it. They say it’s the winners/survivors who write history but of course it’s from their perspective. The earliest Hollywood moguls (Louis B.Mayer, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, and Adolph Zukor) are the ones credited with creating the movie business as it is today. We know this because they themselves and their biographers have told us so. Before the creation of the Hollywood Studio system, all movies outside that system except those made by D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin were labeled crude affairs.
This book explodes that myth by systematically following a time line from Thomas Edison’s earliest days of movie development in the late 1890s through the era of the nickelodeons (1903-1911) to the acceptance of the feature length film with BIRTH OF A NATION (1915). By the end of World War I all the early film companies (Edison, Biograph, Selig, Essanay, Kalem and a host of others) with the exception of Vitagraph had gone out of business. Meanwhile the Hollywood pioneers (Fox, Paramount, MGM) had developed their own chain of movie theaters which would show their movies but not those of others. This factor plus some shaky financial decisions from outsiders, brought about the downfall of Vitagraph.
In early 1925, tired of fighting uphill battles due to the endless machinations of the moguls and Adolph Zukor of Paramount in particular, founders Blackton & Smith sold the company lock, stock, and barrel to the new kid on the block, Warner Brothers (then only 2 years old and with their own chain of theaters) turning them into a major Hollywood player overnight. WB kept the Vitagraph name on short subjects and cartoons until the 1960s. It was 1946 when they decided to get rid of all the Vitagraph movies in their possession. Fortunately several survive in foreign archives allowing a long overdue re-evalution to take place. This book certainly does its part to restablish the Vitagraph name. An easy read, it’s a must for anyone interested in the history of the movies.
The Capsule Critic 