Vitagraph Studios

In 1896, English émigré J. Stuart Blackton was moonlighting as a reporter/artist for the New York Evening World when he was sent to interview Thomas Edison about his new film projector. The inventor talked the entrepreneurial reporter into buying a set of films and a projector. A year later, Blackton and business partner Smith founded the American Vitagraph Company in direct competition with Edison. A third partner, distributor William "Pop" Rock, joined in 1899. The company's first studio was located on the rooftop of a building on Nassau Street in Manhattan. Operations were later moved to the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

The company's first claim to fame came from newsreels: Vitagraph cameramen were on the scene to film events from the Spanish–American War of 1898. These shorts were among the first works of motion-picture propaganda, and a few had studio re-enactments that were passed off as footage of actual events (The Battle of Santiago Bay was filmed in an improvised bathtub, with the "smoke of battle" provided by Mrs. Blackton's cigar). In 1897, Vitagraph produced The Humpty Dumpty Circus, which was the first film to use the stop-motion technique.

Vitagraph was not the only company seeking to make money from Edison's motion picture inventions, and Edison's lawyers were very busy in the 1890s and 1900s filing patents and suing competitors for patent infringement. Blackton did his best to avoid lawsuits by buying a special license from Edison in 1907 and by agreeing to sell many of his most popular films to Edison for distribution.

The American Vitagraph Company made many contributions to the history of movie-making. In 1903, the director Joseph Delmont started his career by producing westerns; he later became famous by using "wild carnivores" in his films—a sensation for that time.

In 1909, it was one of the original ten production companies included in Edison's attempt to corner movie-making in the United States, the Motion Picture Patents Company. Due to its extensive European distribution interests, Vitagraph also participated in the Paris Film Congress in February 1909. This was a failed attempt by European producers to form a cartel similar to the MPPC.

Vitagraph brand name

The Vitagraph name was briefly resurrected on two occasions. In 1932–33, producer Leon Schlesinger made six Westerns starring John Wayne and released them through the Warner Bros. exchanges. The studio chose to market these very-low-budget features under the less prestigious Vitagraph banner. In 1960 Vitagraph returned to theater screens (starting with 1960's Looney Tunes cartoon Hopalong Casualty), with the end titles reading "A Warner Bros. Cartoon / A Vitagraph Release". Merrie Melodies of the same period (starting with that same year's From Hare to Heir) had the same end title, with the last line being "A Vitaphone Release." This may have been done to protect the studio's ownership of the two dormant trade names. Both the Vitagraph and Vitaphone names were retired in 1969.

Locations

Vitagraph's first office, opened in 1898, was in Lower Manhattan, at 140 Nassau Street, on the corner of Nassau St. and Beekman St., where they shot their first film, The Burglar on the Roof, in 1897. In 1890, the company moved to 110-16 Nassau Street in Brooklyn, New York. They subsequently opened a glass-enclosed studio, the first modern film studio in the U.S., built in 1906, on property bounded by Locust Avenue, East 15th Street, Elm Avenue, and right-of-way of the BMT Brighton Line of the New York City Subway. Transportation of equipment and costumes from the Nassau Street interior stages was by subway to the adjacent Avenue M (BMT Brighton Line) Subway rapid transit station in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. They created a second film studio in Santa Monica, California, in 1911, and a year later moved to a 29-acre sheep ranch at 4151 Prospect Ave in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, a studio subsequently owned by ABC and currently Disney Studios.

On April 20, 1925, Smith finally gave up and sold the company to Warner Bros. Pictures for a comfortable profit. The Midwood studio (renamed Vitaphone) was later used as an independent unit within Warner Bros., specializing in early sound shorts. Vitaphone closed the Midwood plant in 1940.