The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a motion picture company founded in 1895 and active until 1928. It was the first company in the United States devoted entirely to film production and exhibition, and for two decades was one of the most prolific, releasing over three thousand short films and twelve feature films.[1][2]
A new corporation with the same name was incorporated in California in 1991.[3]
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The company was started by William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film. Dickson left Edison in April 1895, joining with inventors Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and businessman Elias Koopman to incorporate the American Mutoscope Company in New Jersey in December 1895. The firm manufactured the Mutoscope, and made flip-card movies for it, as a rival to Edison’s Kinetoscope for individual “peep shows”, making the company Edison’s chief competitor in the nickelodeon market. In the summer of 1896 the Biograph projector was released, offering superior image quality to Edison’s Vitascope projector. The company soon became a leader in the film industry, with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world including the British Mutoscope Company. In 1899 it changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and in 1909 to simply the Biograph Company.[4]
To avoid violating Edison’s motion picture patents, Biograph cameras from 1895 to 1902 used a large-format film measuring 2-23/32 inches (68 mm) wide, with an image area of 2 × 2½ inches, four times that of Edison’s 35 mm format. The camera used friction feed, instead of Edison’s sprocket feed, to guide the film to the aperture. The camera itself punched a sprocket hole on each side of the frame as the film was exposed at 30 frames per second.[5][6] A patent case victory in March 1902 allowed Biograph and other producers and distributors to use the less expensive 35 mm format without an Edison license, although Biograph did not completely phase out 68 mm production until autumn of 1903.[7] Biograph offered prints in both formats to exhibitors until 1905, when it discontinued the larger format.[8][9]
Biograph films before 1903 were mostly “actualities”: documentary footage of actual persons, places and events, each film usually less than two minutes long. The occasional narrative film, usually a comedy, was typically shot in one scene, with no editing. Spurred on by competition from Edison and British and European producers, Biograph production from 1903 onward was increasingly dominated by narratives. As the stories became more complex, the films became longer, with multiple scenes to tell the story, although an individual scene was still usually presented in one shot without editing. Biograph's production of actualities ended by 1908 in favor of the narrative film.
With the increased reliance on narrative films, Biograph moved in 1903 from its rooftop studio on Broadway in New York City to a converted brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street, just west of Union Square in Manhattan. This was Biograph's first indoor studio, and the first movie studio in the world to rely exclusively on artificial light (photo). Biograph moved again in 1913, as it entered feature film production, to a new, state-of-the-art studio on 175th Street in the Bronx.
There was the problem of the underground "duping" business, where people would illegally duplicate a copyrighted movie and then remove the title screen with the company and copyright notice and then sell it to theaters. In order to make the theater audience aware that they were watching an American Biograph movie (regardless of whether it was illegally "duped" or not) the AB logo would be prominently placed in random parts of the movie.[10]
Director D.W. Griffith joined Biograph in 1908 as a writer and actor, but within months became their principal director. In 1908, the company's head director Warren McCutcheon grew ill, and his son, Warren McCutcheon Jr. took his place, but was not able to make a successful film for the company.[11] As a result of these failed productions, studio head Henry Marvin gave the position of head director to Griffith, whose first film was The Adventures of Dollie.[11] He helped establish many of the conventions of narrative film, including cross-cutting to show events occurring simultaneously in different places, the flashback, the fade-in/fade-out, the interposition of closeups within a scene, and a moderated acting style more suitable for film. Although Griffith did not invent these techniques, he made them a regular part of the film vocabulary. Griffith’s prolific output, often one new film a week, and willingness to experiment in many different genres helped the company become a major commercial success. Many early movie stars were Biograph performers, including Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Robert Harron, Florence Auer, Carol Dempster, Alan Hale, Sr., Blanche Sweet, Harry Carey, Mabel Normand, Henry B. Walthall and Dorothy Davenport. Mack Sennett honed his craft as an actor and director of comedies at Biograph. After debuting at Biograph, Mary Pickford also became a top star at the studio and would soon be known to audiences as "The Biograph Girl".[12]
In January 1910, D.W. Griffith, and Lee Dougherty with the rest of the Biograph acting company, traveled to Los Angeles. While the purpose of the trip was to shoot the film Ramona in authentic locations, it was also to determine the suitability of the West Coast as a place for a permanent studio. The group set up a small facility at Washington Street and Grand Avenue (where the Los Angeles Convention Center now stands). After this, Griffith and his players decided to go a little further north to a small village they had heard about that was friendly, and had beautiful floral scenery. They decided to travel there, and fell in love with this little place called Hollywood. Biograph then made the first film ever in Hollywood called In Old California, a Latino melodrama about the early days of Mexico-owned California.[13] Griffith and the Biograph troupe then filmed other short movies at various locations, then travelled back to New York. After the east coast film community heard about Hollywood, other film companies began to migrate there. Biograph’s little film launched Hollywood as the future movie capital of the world. Biograph opened a studio at Pico and Georgia streets in downtown Los Angeles in 1911, and sent a film crew to work there each year until 1916.
Griffith left Biograph in October 1913, after finishing Judith of Bethulia, unhappy with their resistance to larger budgets, feature film production, or giving onscreen credit to him and the cast. With him went many of the Biograph actors, his cameraman Billy Bitzer, and his production crew. As a final slight to Griffith, Biograph delayed release of Judith of Bethulia until March 1914, to avoid a profit-sharing arrangement the company had with him.[14]
In December 1908, Biograph joined Edison in forming the Motion Picture Patents Company in an attempt to control the industry and shut out smaller producers.[15] The "Edison Trust,” as it was nicknamed, was made up of Edison, Biograph, Essanay Studios, Kalem Company, George Kleine Productions, Lubin Studios, Georges Méliès, Pathé, Selig Studios, and Vitagraph Studios, and dominated distribution through the General Film Company. The Motion Picture Patents Co. and the General Film Co. were found guilty of antitrust violation in October 1915, and dissolved.[16]
Shielded by the Trust, Biograph had been slow to enter feature film production. Biograph contracted with the theatrical firm of Klaw & Erlanger in 1913 to produce movie versions of the latter’s plays. Their first released feature, Classmates, came out in February 1914, after sixty-nine other American features had been released in 1912–1913.[17] Distribution was hampered by Biograph using a special perforation pattern on the Klaw & Erlanger features which was incompatible with standard projectors, forcing exhibitors to lease specialized equipment from Biograph in order to show the films. With the exodus of the studio’s best actors with Griffith, Biograph was unable develop a marketable star system as the independent companies were doing, and after the Trust’s fall, Biograph found itself behind the times. The Biograph Co. released its last new feature-length films in 1915, and its last new short films in 1916.[18] Biograph spent the remainder of the silent era reissuing its old films, and leasing its Bronx studio to other producers. When the Biograph Company fell on financial hard times, the studio facilities were acquired by one of Biograph Company's creditors, the Empire Trust Company, although Biograph Company continued to manage the studio. Herbert Yates acquired the Biograph Company studios and film laboratory facilities in 1928. Biograph Studios in the Bronx was made a subsidiary of his Consolidated Film Industries in 1928.[19][20] The studio and laboratory facilities burned down in 1980.[21]
In 1954–1957, Sterling Television Company distributed a package of 100 quarter-hour television shows titled Movie Museum, featuring Biograph, Edison, and other early films from the vaults of the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House.[22][23][24][25]
