Vitagraph 9 continued from page
8
Moe Howard claims to have been a
juvenile actor for the studio, and the roster of the "Vitagraph Family"
includes such names as Oliver Hardy, Boris Karloff, Adolphe Menjou, Victor
McLaglen, King Vidor, and the ever-popular Francis X.
Bushman. In the '20s, Vitagraph
came under increasing pressure from Hollywood filmmakers, especially
Adolph Zukor of Paramount, to drive it out of business. Beginning in
February 1925, a very entertaining series of articles on the history of
Vitagraph were run weekly in Motion Picture News. The last installment, in
the April 18th issue, concluded: "it is fitting to say that the Vitagraph
Company is at this moment on the eve of momentous decisions. And so, THE
END." It was prophetic. Four days later, the sale of Vitagraph to Warner
Brothers surprised the industry. Renamed
Vitaphone, the Warners would use the studio for short talkies until 1939.
And, indeed, a studio was rented by NBC in 1952 to be used for color
programs until NBC closed it in August 1957.
When Albert Smith purchased the Greenfield property in 1903, fifty-foot
wooden cars with trolley poles that operated at street level, growled past
the site of what would become the Vitagraph "Village." When he sold the
company 22 years later, eight-car express trains of 67-foot-long steel
cars roared past the plot on a four-track embankment. Their route no
longer zigzagged through the borough to a terminal just across the
Brooklyn Bridge in lower Manhattan. Now trains ran by a tunnel under
Flatbush Avenue to the Manhattan Bridge, thence to a subway under Broadway
that took passengers into the heart of the
city. All the while,
the bucolic Brooklyn surrounding the railroad was vanishing; the chestnut
wood that was the enchanted forest of A Midsummer Night's Dream
and impersonated the Forest of Arden in As You Like It
, along with the farms and fields of the Dutch
and English settlers, were supplanted by homes that beckoned the first
generations of new immigrants. Meanwhile, the
film industry had abandoned New York for Los Angeles (Vitagraph itself had
opened a studio in Santa Monica in 1913). The Big V's original studio
buildings, too, would soon disappear, along with the stars and the
excitement of its ambitious little village where only a dozen years
earlier an average of nearly one film per day had been produced. It did
not take long for the local memory of the Big V to disappear too. This
seems to be the fate of most things in the ever-changing human landscape
of cities. And
it is a shame. Everywhere. But nowhere more than Brooklyn. Indeed, now the actors
are all spirits ... their insubstantial pageant faded ... leaving but a smokestack behind.
It is a witness to the aspiration, imagination and inventiveness of a
young industry, to the first dream factory that for a time made Brooklyn
the center of the moving picture world. Dumb luck? Nah! Between you and
me, pal, it could only have happened in Brooklyn.
About the author
* * *
Link: Vitagraph
page at Kevin Walsh's forgotten-ny.com
*
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©2000 The Composing Stack Inc. All rights
reserved. urbanography is a service mark of The Composing Stack
Inc. Updated June 29,
2000. |