Kidnappers and psycho killers, dangerous aliens and foreign agents, unambiguous heroes and heroines racing against the clock—sometimes with the aid of advanced technology—to save the day if not the world. And at the end of each episode… danger!
The formula of many storytelling series streaming or airing somewhere these days was set more than a century ago in the “serials” produced to lure audiences back to movie week after week. As Barbara Tepa Lupack mentions in her book Silent Serial Sensations (Cornell University Press), the roots go further back to the serialized fiction of the 19th century. A scholar of early cinema, Lupack focuses on her book’s subtitle, The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema.
Although Ted and Leo Wharton were soon forgotten, Lupack maintains that they had “the most profound and sustained impact on the genre” by establishing many of its conventions and building a model that remains discernible in media even today. Since most of their films have disappeared or disintegrated (the fate of many early motion pictures), her claims cannot be fully substantiated but only suggested through the traces left by their work in movie periodicals of their era. They were big back then—and suddenly they weren’t.
The Whartons spent several childhood years in Milwaukee before their family moved to Texas. Both were trained in popular theater with Ted leading the way into film. He learned the craft working for Edison, Kalem and the U.S. branch of Pathé. In 1914 the brothers launched the Wharton Studio—not in Hollywood but Ithaca, NY, close to the places where American cinema began. Their movies were furiously action packed, topical and (melo)dramatizing the concerns of their audience.
The Whartons were funded by William Randolph Hearst but were frustrated by his interference. After he pulled out, focusing on Hollywood rather than Ithaca, the Wharton Studio collapsed.
Lupack writes lucidly and with engagement as she champions her subject. Silent Serial Sensations casts new light on the formative years of American filmmaking.
