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

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Link: Vitagraph page at Kevin Walsh's forgotten-ny.com

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Updated June 29, 2000.