Before Hollywood There Was Fort Lee, N. J.

Director Maurice Tourneur [left] with his 1st cameraman Lucien Andriot
and 2nd cameraman John Van den Brouk on the set of 'Poor Little Rich Girl',
Paragon Studios, Fort Lee, New Jersey, 1916.

I came across the film Before Hollywood There Was Fort Lee, N. J. on Netflix. I had seen this documentary sometime in college, and used it in a film course I taught.

My New Jersey students had a tough time accepting that Fort Lee, New Jersey was once the center of American film production. Uh huh. This was at a time when Hollywood was full of orange groves.

This documentary combines photographs from private collections and restored footage from such films as Thomas A. Edison's "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest" and D.W. Griffith's "The New York Hat," featuring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore and filmed at the studios in Fort Lee.

D. W. Griffith made many one-reel Biograph dramas there (Mack Sennett appeared in his first film). Pearl White endured the "Perils of Pauline," and Mary Pickford and Theda Bara starred in early features.

The American film industry got its start with the construction of Thomas Edison's "Black Maria", the first motion picture studio, in West Orange, New Jersey. New Jersey offered land for studios for much less than nearby New York City. By about 1916, a dozen major movie studios were operating across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

The movies came to Fort Lee when pioneer companies started to look for new filming locations. In 1907, it was found that the Palisades near Fort Lee and Coytesville could be used for “Wild West” scenes and other outdoor scenes. Rambo’s Hotel on First Street was used as a place to dress as well as for the exterior of a Western saloon.

In 1907, Thomas Alva Edison used the cliffs of the Palisades for the exterior of "Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest." It was in this picture that D.W. Griffith, later to become more famous as a director, first appeared in a starring role as an actor.

In 1914, with the expansion of the giant French film companies into the United States market, Maurice Tourneur moved to the United States to direct silent films for Éclair's American branch studio in Fort Lee.

His once-lost 1917 feature, A Girl's Folly, is included on the DVD in a half-hour abridgement with views of the glass stages, rotating sets, tank for water effects, projection room, and crews at work, along with his hour-long 1914 feature, The Wishing Ring. Watching these early films, you can see the development of film language with the early use of editing, intercutting and the variety of shots (fewer long shots and more close medium shots) which was rare in early films.

Of course, by the early 1920s, movie production was moving to California due





Further Reading

Fort Lee Film Commission

Fort Lee: Birthplace of the Motion Picture Industry

Fort Lee: The Film Town (1904-2004)

The Making of THE HURT LOCKER

Screenwriter Mark Boal and director/producer Kathryn Bigelow discuss The Hurt Locker, a suspenseful portrait of the military’s bomb squad technicians. This heart-pounding look at the effects of combat and danger on the human psyche is based on the first-hand observations of Mark Boal, who was embedded with a special bomb unit in Iraq.

Listen to this interview from The Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC-NPR)

Facebook Popularity

Who do you think is the most popular brand on Facebook?

With over 3.6 million fans, Starbucks has passed Coca-Cola to become the the most popular brand on Facebook.

Their Facebook Page plus promotions plus paid ads on the Facebook home page must work. They added almost 200,000 fans this past week.

As old-fashioned as it may be, people still love coupons. They gave away a free pastry this month and that caused a big spike in new fans.

Hemingway Patrols Paris

Today is the 110th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's birth.

Hemingway's longtime publisher, Scribner, is reissuing all his novels this year.

There is also a new book about him coming out in August called The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Hunt for U-Boats Aboard the Pilar.

That's a pretty odd time in his life. It seems that he was itching to play a part in World War II. Using his his own ship, the Pilar, which was designated by the military as a Q-Ship, he and his crew set out to monitor German submarine activity off Cuba and the Florida coast.

I don't know exactly what anyone would have expected them to do if they actually encountered a sub with this fishing boat. There's a section of Islands in the Stream (the novel and the movie version) that deals with this period in his life.

Hemingway did get to be a war a war correspondent for Collier's magazine, and observed the D-Day invasion from offshore on a landing craft. (Apparently, his wife of that time, Martha Gellhorn, upstaged him by making it on shore on June 7 disguised as a nurse.

A more interesting 2009 Hemingway release is A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. It's one of my favorite Hemingway books.

When Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, the manuscript of this memoir wasn't finished. (No title, introduction, or final chapter.) and it wasn't published until 1964 after his fourth wife, Mary, and an editor put together the pieces.

It's about when he was young and writing in the Paris of the 1920s. When I first read it in college, I loved the talk about writing and Paris and the food and the drinking, but hated his unkind treatment of his "friend" F. Scott Fitzgerald who was another literary hero of mine.

Actually, he's also pretty rough on Gertrude Stein and Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife. He had it in for rich people then , and he seemed to be still attached to his first wife Hadley.

In reading about this new edition, I discovered that the new editors are Pauline's grandson, Sean Hemingway, and his uncle, Patrick Hemingway (Pauline's son). I'm guessing that Pauline gets better treatment this time out, though I don't know if that was Ernest's intent.

I know a number of people who really dislike Hemingway as a man and as a writer - most of them are women. I have liked his writing, especially the short stories, since I was about 14 and wanted to be a writer.

I actually feel bad for Hemingway. I think he was really misunderstood. I think he became a victim of his own celebrity and began to play the role of Hemingway in the same way as other celebrities, like Marilyn Monroe.

He was a heavy drinker, an alcoholic in his later years, suffered from manic depression. He was actually given electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic which he blamed for his memory loss. It saddens me to think that for someone like him who loved to write, who needed to write, could not go on if he could not write.

Hemingway is buried in Ketchum, Idaho, but on a memorial outside town overlooking Trail Creek is a eulogy he actually wrote for a friend (Gene Van Guilder) but that applies well to his own life.

Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
And above the hills
The high blue windless skies
Now he will be a part of them forever

Ernest Hemingway - Idaho - 1939


On the Amazon website, they link to two pdf files of the original handwritten manuscript. I like this section that contains his idea about writing "one true sentence."

see full pages

Peering Into the Pillars of Creation

The Eagle Nebula (M16): Peering Into the Pillars of Creation (A nearby star-forming region about 7,000 light years from Earth.), originally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution.

A composite image of the Eagle Nebula (M16) with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope penetrates the dark columns of gas and dust to reveal how much star formation is happening there. The Chandra data (red, green, and blue represent low, medium, and high-energy X-rays respectively) show very few X-ray sources in the so-called "Pillars of Creation" themselves. This indicates that star formation peaked in this region several million years ago.

Weekend Words About Summer

I guess my post last week on summer reading didn't get out all I wanted to say on that topic, so I added a Weekend in Paradelle post today that goes into more detail. Stop by the weekend retreat and say hello.

Will You Pay For The News?

Recently, the New York Times e-mailed a survey to its print subscribers to ask how they felt about paying for online content. For access to its website, nytimes.com, they are considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to view articles, blogs and multimedia.

Right now it is all free. That's a hard model to back away from and expect users to stpay. Will there be added value?

While all print media is having problems, some are moving to the web with some success. It can't all be free - that's no "business" model.

The Rocky Mountain News shut down. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer became a web-only publication. The business model has been to run online advertising, but that probably can't fund full news services. Subscriptions - sort of a cable TV versus free broadcast TV model - is hardly a new idea.

I don't have the answer for them, but I don't think this recycled ideas are it.

Best Beach Books Ever

I never quite understood the "beach book" genre. I know it means more lightweight, entertaining reading. The thing is, especially in my teaching years, summer was one of the few times I had to do ANY outside reading, so I tended to read whatever was on my "to read" list. If the book happened to be non-fiction of Literature, it didn't much matter.

If you are a serious novelist, would being on the beach book list be an insult?

Last month, NPR asked folks to send in nominations for the Best Beach Books Ever and they ended up with 600 titles. Then their book reviewers, editors and producers cut it to 200 titles, which they now offer for voting.

NPR gives its own definition as books that are "enthralling enough to inoculate vacation-goers against the vagaries of missed flights and bad weather" and acknowledges that while many "great books" aren't beach book that both The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice were popular nominees.

If you choose to vote, you get to pick 10 books to create their final list of 100. They will post the final tally on July 29 and I'll post my own ten choices from their list.

The Ghost in Love

Another ghost post for me. A friend read my post last week about Alan Lightman's novel Ghost and asked if I had read The Ghost In Love by Jonathan Carroll.

I hadn't read it. Actually, I hadn't read anything by this expatriate writer who many people think is the best writer of fantastic (that's not fantasy) novels in English. I'm reading it now, but I am a very slow and distracted reader (the kind who starts 4 books at once and takes a few months to finish any of them), so this is my in-progress review.

Here's the film treatment version of the plot for The Ghost in Love: Ben falls in the snow, hits head on curb, dies but doesn’t die. Ghost (Ling) is sent to take his soul to the afterlife, gets confused, asks Angel of Death for clarification, not sure say AoD, stay with him until I get back to you.

Now the boy meets girl part. Ghost falls in love with Ben's girlfriend. Oh yeah, Ling is a woman. Ben discovers he did not die when he was “supposed to." Human beings can take their fates back from the gods?

I like that we meet the Angel of Death in a cafe having a meal with Ling. I like that Death isn't so much mad that Ben's fate is out of his control, but is "fascinated to see what will happen to him now."

I like Carroll's little ghost inventions, like the reason why ghosts have Chinese names:

A Chinese farmer invented the idea of ghosts three thousand years ago as a way of explaining to his precocious grandson what happens to people after they die. God thought it such a novel and useful idea he told his angels to make the concept real and allow it to flourish within the system. In honor of the inventor, ghosts have always had Chinese names.

I like ghosts.

Kindle time?

The Amazon Kindle is now $299, so is it time to buy one? I have yet to actually know someone who has one, so all I know is the hype. Any Kindle love stories out there?

Download and read first chapters for free before you decide to buy. Over 300,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, and magazines. Many of the New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99.

It is tempting...

Basic Heart

Basic Heart by Renée Ashley is a primer on the emotional topography of the human heart, its complexities and fluctuations, its nuances and metaphors. From tropes grounded in the fantastic landscapes of awareness, of desire and despair, Ashley draws us a map of a world and shows us just how that "world is turned like a pig on a spit." She brings us back to the recognition that we are all ordinary, that sometimes we need saving, and that "what is saved just might turn beautiful."

Best Books of 2009 (So Far)

The kind of list that is always good for debate - Best Books of 2009 (So Far).

They break it down if you are more interested in fiction books, non-fiction or young readers.

Have you read any of these "hidden gems" of books from this year?