Digitalization brought piracy to the fore in the entertainment industry, but it’s not a new problem. As Andrew A. Erish tells it, America’s first movie studio, the Thomas Edison corporation, routinely copied films by indie competitors, repackaging and renting them as their own. The indies did the same to Edison—and each other.
Erish’s new book, Vitagraph: America’s First Great Motion Picture Studio, is a valuable history of filmmaking in its earliest days. The focus is on one of Edison’s competitors, Vitagraph, a name easily confused even by movie buffs with Vitaphone and Biograph. The author is on a mission to set new parameters for understanding the development of cinema by debunking the notion that Paramount and Fox invented feature films and Universal devised the star system.
Before Hollywood existed, Vitagraph, shooting short films from the rooftops of Manhattan before moving to a purpose-built complex in Brooklyn, set the precedent for the Hollywood studio system long before the company was purchased by Warner Brothers in 1926.
Unlike the studios that coalesced in the 1910s and early ‘20s in Hollywood, Vitagraph’s founders were British immigrants, J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith. They got started as “variety” entertainers in New York, staging “family-friendly” shows involving comedy skits, magic tricks and “shadow plays” that projected shapes of faces and animals by hand gestures through bright light onto a screen. When, in 1895, they came across “Thomas Edison’s Latest Marvel, the Kinetoscope,” they were ready to venture into the nascent medium of film.
According to Erish, Vitagraph may have produced the first stop-motion picture and even the first animation. He offers the company’s history after careful sifting through the paperwork—boxes of it—and many miles of microfilm. He sinks many claims made by Vitagraph’s founders whenever the facts contradict them. Erish is an honest researcher, willing to set aside his enthusiasm for Vitagraph in pursuit of the truth.
However, early cinema is a field of Rashomon moments, complicated by simultaneous breakthroughs in motion picture technology that occurred in several countries. The litany of court cases involving Edison’s claim to own that technology tends to obscure other aspects of pre-Hollywood film. The importance of one early studio versus another is in the eye of the beholders and the beholders are at least half blind, given that most early silent movies have disintegrated or disappeared, leaving behind traces in movie reviews or studio catalogs.
Buttressing Erish’s claim to Vitagraph’s importance is the scale of its Brooklyn studio. By 1908 the company employed 200 people, “including painters, machinists, costumers, carpenters, lab technicians, editors, and sundry other specialized workers. Vitagraph also employed several young women to evaluate the thousands of scripts submitted inhouse and from the public,” Erish writes.
Vitagraph: America’s First Great Motion Picture Studio is published by University Press of Kentucky.
