Biograph Company

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American Mutoscope and Biograph Company
)

Biograph Company
Area served
United States, Europe
Key people
Products
Silent films

The Biograph Company, also known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a motion picture company founded in 1895 and active until 1916. It was the first company in the United States devoted entirely to

Svensk Filmindustri and France's Pathé. The company was home to pioneering director D. W. Griffith and such actors as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore
.

Founding

Thomas A. Edison
, prior to the formation of Dickson's own film studio

The company was started by

Elias Koopman to incorporate the American Mutoscope Company in New Jersey on December 30, 1895.[3] The firm manufactured the Mutoscope and made flip-card movies for it as a rival to Edison's Kinetoscope for individual "peep shows", making the company Edison's chief competitor in the nickelodeon market. In the summer of 1896 the Biograph projector was released, offering superior image quality to Edison's Vitascope projector. The company soon became a leader in the film industry, with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world, including the British Mutoscope Co. In 1899 it changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and in 1908 to simply the Biograph Company.[4]

Motion Picture Production Code

To avoid violating Edison's motion picture patents, Biograph cameras from 1895 to 1902 used a large-format film, measuring 2+23⁄32 inches (69 mm) wide, with an image area of 2 by 2+1⁄2 inches (51 mm × 64 mm), four times that of Edison's 35 mm format. The camera used friction feed instead of Edison's sprocket feed to guide the film to the aperture. The camera itself punched a sprocket hole on each side of the frame as the film was exposed at 30 frames per second.[5][6] A patent case victory in March 1902 allowed Biograph and other producers and distributors to use the less expensive 35 mm format without an Edison license, although Biograph did not completely phase out 68 mm production until autumn of 1903.[7] Biograph offered prints in both formats to exhibitors until 1905, when it discontinued the larger format.[8][9] Commenting on the 1902 Biograph Company short film The Flying Train, Ashley Swinnerton of the Museum of Modern Art said that the 68 mm format has become "of particular interest to researchers ... because the large image area affords stunning visual clarity and quality."[10]

Biograph films before 1903, were mostly "actualities," documentary film footage of actual persons, places and events, each film usually less than two minutes long, such as the one of the Empire State Express, which premiered on October 12, 1896, in New York City.[11] The occasional narrative film, usually a comedy, was typically shot in one scene, with no editing. Spurred on by competition from Edison and British and European producers, Biograph production from 1903 onward was increasingly dominated by narratives. As the stories became more complex the films became longer, with multiple scenes to tell the story, although an individual scene was still usually presented in one shot without editing. Biograph's production of actualities ended by 1908 in favor of the narrative film.

Studio

Main article: Biograph Studios
Biograph's first studio was similar to Edison's Black Maria, pictured here, only located ...
... on the roof of 841 Broadway in Manhattan

The company's first studio was located on the roof of 841

short, not a feature-film release.[13]

There was the problem of the underground "duping" business, where people would illegally duplicate a copyrighted movie and then remove the title screen with the company and copyright notice and sell it to theaters. In order to make the theater audience aware that they were watching an American Biograph movie (regardless of whether it was illegally "duped" or not) the AB logo would be prominently placed in random parts of the movie.[14]

Rise of D. W. Griffith

Biograph moved into this Manhattan brownstone in 1906 and continued to produce films there until 1913

genres helped the company become a major commercial success. Many early movie stars were Biograph performers, including Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Robert Harron, Arthur V. Johnson, Florence Auer, Robert G. Vignola, Owen Moore, Alan Hale Sr., Florence Lawrence, Blanche Sweet, Harry Carey, James Kirkwood Sr., Mabel Normand, Henry B. Walthall, Mae Marsh, and Dorothy Davenport. Mack Sennett honed his craft as an actor and director of comedies at Biograph. After debuting at Biograph, Mary Pickford also became a top star at the studio and would soon be known to audiences as "The Biograph Girl".[16]

In January 1910, Griffith and Lee Dougherty with the rest of the Biograph acting company travelled to Los Angeles. While the purpose of the trip was to shoot Ramona in authentic locations, it was also to determine the suitability of the West Coast as a place for a permanent studio. The group set up a small facility at Washington Street and Grand Avenue. After this, Griffith and his players decided to go a little further north to a small village they had heard about that was friendly and had beautiful floral scenery. They decided to travel there and fell in love with this little place called Hollywood. Biograph then made the first film ever in Hollywood called In Old California, a Latino melodrama about the early days of Mexico-owned California.[17] Griffith and the Biograph troupe filmed other short movies at various locations, then traveled back to New York. After the East Coast film community heard about Hollywood, other companies began to migrate there. Biograph's little film launched Hollywood as the future movie capital of the world. It opened a studio at Pico and Georgia streets in downtown Los Angeles (where the Los Angeles Convention Center now stands) in 1911, and sent a film crew to work there each year until 1916.

PLAY partial copy of The Wanderer (1913) directed by Griffith for Biograph; runtime time 00:06:23.

Griffith left Biograph in October 1913 after finishing

profit-sharing arrangement the company had with him.[18]

Decline

In December 1908 Biograph joined Edison in forming the

Lubin Studios, Georges Méliès, Pathé, Selig Studios and Vitagraph Studios, and dominated distribution through the General Film Co. The Motion Picture Patents Co. and the General Film Co. were found guilty of antitrust violation in October 1915 and dissolved.[20]

Shielded by the Trust, Biograph had been slow to enter feature film production. It contracted with the theatrical firm of

star system as the independent companies were doing, and after the Trust's fall, Biograph found itself behind the times. The Biograph Co. released its last new feature-length films in 1915 and its last new short films in 1916.[22]
Biograph spent the remainder of the silent era reissuing its old films, and leasing its Bronx studio to other producers.

Still from Biograph's film Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1903)

When the company fell on financial hard times, the Biograph Studio facilities and film laboratory in the

Herbert Yates acquired the Biograph Studios facilities and film laboratory in 1928. Biograph Studios facilities and film laboratory were made a subsidiary of his Consolidated Film Industries in 1928.[23][24] The studio facilities and laboratory burned down in 1980.[25]

In 1939,

African American
cast, was found among the many cans of film, and shown at MOMA in November 2014.

From 1954 to 1957, Sterling Television Company distributed a package of 100 quarter-hour television shows titled Movie Museum, featuring Biograph, Edison and other early films from the vaults of the Museum of Modern Art and the

George Eastman House
.

Filmography

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0-8108-3021-3
    .
  2. ISBN 91-7410-001-7
    .
  3. ^ New Jersey. Dept. of State (1900). Corporations of New Jersey: List of Certificates Filed in the Department of State During the Year 1895–1899 Inclusive. MacCrellish & Quigley. p. 30.
  4. ISBN 0-8108-3426-X
    .
  5. ^ Billy Bitzer. "The Biograph Camera". The Operating Cameraman. No. Spring 1995. Society of Camera Operators. Archived from the original on November 1, 2004. Retrieved November 30, 2004.
  6. ISBN 0-520-08533-7
    .
  7. ^ "Continued Legal Battles". A Guide to Motion Picture Catalogs by American Producers and Distributors. Rutgers University.
  8. ISBN 0-252-06366-X
    . Accessed via Google Print.
  9. Google Print
    .
  10. ^ Swinnerton, Ashley (August 6, 2020). "Film Vault Summer Camp, Week One: First Programs". moma.org. Museum of Modern Art.
  11. ^ SilentEra entry
  12. ISBN 0060960809
    , p. 147–148
  13. ^ Graham, Cooper C.; Higgins, Steve; Mancini, Elaine; Viera, João Luiz. Entry for "Chocolate Dynamite", D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company. Metuchen, New Jersey and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1985, p. 210. Retrieved via Internet Archive (San Francisco, California), June 15, 2023. Refer to Wikipedia page for Chocolate Dynamite to see a 1913 photograph of the new glass-inclosed studio at Biograph's Bronx facilities.
  14. ^ Griffith, Richard; Mayer, Arthur; Bowser, Eileen. The Movies, Simon & Schuster (1981 edition)
  15. ^ a b "D.W. Griffith Biography". starpulse.com. Archived from the original on August 30, 2008.
  16. ^ "Mary Pickford, Silent Movie Star". goldensilents.com. Retrieved July 24, 2019.
  17. ISBN 0-8230-7943-0
    . Although In Old California was the first movie shot specifically in Hollywood, Biograph had already filmed A Daring Hold-Up in Southern California in Los Angeles in 1906. Niver, Kemp R. (1971). Biograph Bulletins, 1896–1908. Los Angeles: Locare Research Group. p. 262. The
    Edendale
    , just east of Hollywood, in 1909.
  18. ISBN 0-520-08534-5
    .
  19. ^ "Motion Picture Patents Company". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Archived from the original on May 8, 2006. Retrieved April 13, 2007.
  20. ^ "Company Records Series – Motion Picture Patents Company". The Thomas A. Edison Papers. Archived from the original on May 25, 2007. Retrieved April 13, 2007.
  21. ISBN 0-520-06301-5
    .
  22. ISBN 91-86568-01-9
    .
  23. ISBN 0-911370-73-0
    .
  24. ^ "Screen News Here and in Hollywood". The New York Times. September 27, 1939. p. 29. Empire Trust Company, one of Biograph's creditors, had acquired the Bronx studio but retained some of the Biograph staff to manage it. Empire Trust later reassigned the management of the studios to one of its own subsidiaries, The Actinograph Corp., which held it until 1948. R.H. Hammer, Biograph's ex-general manager going back to its Griffith days, donated what remained of Biograph's film collection to the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, around the time Actinograph Corp. closed its Biograph Bronx studio and laboratory facilities. Iris Barry, "Why Wait for Posterity?" Hollywood Quarterly, January 1946, pp. 131–137. Reprinted in Hollywood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945–1957.
  25. ^ "Bronx Blaze Damages Old Biograph Studios," The New York Times, July 9, 1980, p. B4.

External links

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