Edwin S. Porter

Edwin S. Porter
Porter, 1912
Born	Edwin Stanton Porter (1870-04-21)April 21, 1870 Connellsville, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	April 30, 1941(1941-04-30) (aged 71) New York City, U.S.
Occupations	Film director film producer studio manager cinematographer

Edwin Stanton Porter (April 21, 1870 – April 30, 1941) was an American film pioneer, most famous as a producer, director, studio manager and cinematographer with the

Porter was born and raised in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, to Thomas Richard Porter, a merchant, and Mary (Clark) Porter; he was the fourth of seven children with four brothers (Chales W., Frank, John, and Everett Melbourne) and two sisters (Mary and Ada). Named Edward at birth, he later changed his name to Edwin Stanton, after Edwin Stanton, the Democratic politician from Ohio who had served as Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War.^[3] After attending public schools in Connellsville, Porter worked, among other odd jobs, as an exhibition skater, a sign painter, and a telegraph operator. He developed an interest in electricity at a young age, and shared a patent at age 21 for a lamp regulator.^[4] Eventually becoming a merchant tailor, Porter was battered by the Panic of 1893. He filed for bankruptcy on June 15 and enlisted in the United States Navy four days later on June 19.^[5] He served three years as a gunner's mate, serving on the USS New York (ACR-2) and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Career

Early career

He was employed initially in the electrical department of William Cramp & Sons, a Philadelphia ship and engine building company. During his three years' service he showed aptitude as an inventor of electrical devices to improve communications.^[6]

Porter entered motion picture work in 1896, the first year movies were commercially projected on large screens in the United States. He was briefly employed in New York City by Raff & Gammon, agents for the films and viewing equipment made by Thomas Edison, and then left to become a touring projectionist with a competing machine, Kuhn & Webster's Projectorscope. He traveled through the West Indies and South America, showing films at fairgrounds and in open fields. He later made a second tour through Canada and the United States.

Returning to New York City in early 1898, Porter found work at the Eden Musée, a Manhattan wax museum and amusement hall^[7] which had become a center for motion picture exhibition and production and licensee of the Edison Manufacturing Company. While at Eden Musée, Porter worked assembling programs of Edison films, most particularly exhibitions of films of the Spanish–American War, Edison productions which helped stir an outbreak of patriotic fever in New York City. As an exhibitor, Porter had tremendous creative control over these programs, presenting a slate of films accompanied by a selection of music and live narration.^[8]

Edison

Porter joined the

The Great Train Robbery and after

Porter's next film,

. Its success firmly established motion pictures as commercial entertainment in the United States.

After The Great Train Robbery Porter continued to try out new techniques. He presented two parallel stories in

Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), based on the comic strip by Winsor McCay. Between 1903 and 1907 he successfully demonstrated most of the techniques that were to become the basic modes of visual communication through film. For instance, he helped to develop the modern concept of continuity editing, notably in The Trainer's Daughter; or, A Race for Love (1907), and is often credited with discovering that the basic unit of structure in film was the "shot" rather than the scene (the basic unit on the stage), paving the way for D. W. Griffith's advances in editing and screen storytelling. Yet he seemed to regard them only as separate experiments and never brought them together in a unified filmmaking style. Porter directed future filmmaker Griffith in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest

(1908).

Defender and Rex Film Companies

In 1909 after tiring of the industrial system set up to feed the booming nickelodeon business, Porter left Edison and founded a company to manufacture Simplex motion picture projectors. In 1910 he founded Defender Film Company,^[10] which folded after one year. In 1911 he joined with others in organizing the Rex Motion Picture Company.^[11] In 1912 he sold out and accepted an offer from Adolph Zukor to become chief director of the new Famous Players Film Company, the first American company that regularly produced feature-length films. He directed stage actor James K. Hackett in their first feature film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1913). He also directed Mary Pickford in her first feature film, A Good Little Devil (1913), also directing Pauline Frederick and John Barrymore.

3D movie pioneer

But his directorial skills had not kept pace with rapid changes in motion picture art, although his technical skills were piqued by 3D. Porter's last film premiered on June 10, 1915, Niagara Falls,^[12] the first

anaglyph 3D

movie. In 1916 he left Famous Players during a reorganization.

Precision Machine Company

From 1917 to 1925 Porter served as president of the Precision Machine Company, manufacturers of the Simplex projectors.^[1] After his retirement in 1925 he continued to work on his own as an inventor and designer, securing several patents for still cameras and projector devices. During the 1930s he was employed by an appliance corporation.

Death

External videos
Edwin Stanton Porter House, Somerset PA, (5:04) by Berkeley Chapman, May 23, 2011

Aged 71, he died in 1941 at the Hotel Taft in New York City^[1] and was buried in Husband Cemetery, Somerset, Pennsylvania. He was survived by his wife, Caroline Ridinger, whom he had married on June 5, 1893; they had no children.

Legacy

Porter remains an enigmatic figure in motion picture history. Though his significance as director of The Great Train Robbery and other innovative early films is undeniable, he rarely repeated an innovation after he had used it successfully, never developed a consistent directorial style, and in later years never protested when others rediscovered his techniques and claimed them as their own. He was a modest, quiet, cautious man who felt uncomfortable working with the famous stars he directed starting in 1912. Zukor said of Porter that he was more an artistic mechanic than a dramatic artist, a man who liked to deal with machines better than with people.^[13]

See also

• Edwin S. Porter filmography

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} "Edwin S. Porter. Pioneer in Films. Collaborator With Edison on Invention of Motion-Picture Camera Dies in Hotel. Once Partner of Zukor. Ex-Head of Simplex Projector Company Was Producer of 'Great Train Robbery'". The New York Times. May 1, 1941. Retrieved July 21, 2007.
2. ^ Goodman, Ezra (June 2, 1940). "Reminiscences of Edwin S. Porter, or the History of the Motion Picture". The New York Times. Retrieved April 26, 2008.
3. ISBN 978-0-520-06986-2
   .
4. ^ Eagan, Daniel (2010). America's Film Legacy. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 11.
5. ISBN 978-0-520-06986-2
   .
6. ^ "Edwin Stanton Porter. Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 3: 1941–1945. American Council of Learned Societies, 1973.
7. ^ "A Visit To The Eden Musée". New York Public Library. Retrieved March 11, 2013.
8. JSTOR 1225418
   .
9. ISBN 978-0-520-06986-2
   .
10. ^ Internet Movie Database
11. ^ Internet Movie Database
12. ^ Guinness World Records
13. ISBN 978-0-679-75549-4
    .

External links

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Edwin Stanton Porter

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Edwin Stanton Porter.

• Works by or about Edwin S. Porter at Internet Archive
• Edwin S. Porter at
  IMDb
• Edwin S. Porter at Find a Grave
• Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. Free Online - UC Press E-Books Collection