A newly-released Blu-ray set spotlights a vanished era of pre-Hollywood filmmaking. The two-disc set is titled Made in New Jersey: Films from Fort Lee, America’s First Film Town. It was researched and compiled by several of the top video companies, archives, and film historians.
There are sixteen titles -- shorts, features, and documentaries, 383 minutes of interesting material focusing on primitive and early film production along the cliffs of the Palisades and on residential and business streets of Fort Lee.
Filmmaking started there around 1907. As early as 1909, Biograph, Solax, Éclair America, and other film companies set up production units there. Soon studio buildings were erected. Fox, Universal, Triangle—they all were there.
A forgotten pioneer film producer, Mark M. Dintenfass, headed the Champion Film Company, making entertaining films and turning Nickelodeons into proper silent film theaters. One of his films, The Indian Land Grab, 1910, on disc one is particularly interesting. It tells the story of powerful white men deviously attempting to cheat Indians out of their land. The Champion studio structures were the last of the studios to be bulldozed in Fort Lee, having stood from 1910-2013. The other companies’ buildings were demolished well before that, leaving film historians with photos of junk piles of old, mainly empty reels of film among heaps of broken, rotting wood boards.
This collection of mainly silent and a few sound films has been put together through the efforts of Milestone Film & Video, Kino Lorber, the Library of Congress and other archives, the Film Preservation Society, and the Fort Lee Film Commission. Richard Koszarski, one of the most esteemed film scholars in America and a longtime chronicler of Fort Lee, curated this collection. It also is important to remember that most if not all these rare films came from the holdings of private film collectors who kept the fragile prints or negatives from oblivion for decades before they were preserved.
In addition to teaching the history of America’s first film town, this collection offers some terrific entertainment. I enjoyed seeing the first-ever film version of Robin Hood from 1912. There is a film called The Vampire from Kalen studio in 1913. It’s the earliest film in which an evil woman, a “type” at the time made famous by Theda Bara, a vampire, who takes all she can from a man and ruins his life. What’s extra exciting for me is the star of the film, Harry Millarde, who soon afterwards became a well-known Hollywood director. He was the father of my late dear friend June Millarde. She would have given anything to see her father onscreen.
Presentation counts, and these films are shown in as best condition as possible. The musical scores for each silent film are excellent.
It’s been three or four decades since I first heard about Cossacks in Exile, directed by Edgar Ulmer in 1939. But I had no way of seeing this important film which was shot as the Little Flower Monastery in Newton. It’s a Ukrainian operetta made by one of the most significant directors of Hollywood B movies, such as Detour, The Black Cat, and Blubeard… and several of the most important Yiddish-language features.
Fort Lee was a lively film town for a time, but Hollywood built bigger and better facilities. The talent moved west. The Blu-ray collection Made in New Jersey: Films from Fort Lee helps avid film lovers bring an era back to life.
