The old Universal Pictures backlot in Fort Lee, which had its own water tower.
FORT LEE — When pioneering movie mogul Carl Laemmle co-founded Universal Pictures, he did not initially set up shop on the West Coast. A century ago, the studio made movies in New Jersey.
Back in 1912, when Hollywood had more cattle than cameras, Fort Lee was the center of the cinematic universe. Icons from the silent era like Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore and Lillian Gish crossed the Hudson River via ferry to emote on Fort Lee back lots.
Tom Meyers, executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, hopes Hollywood will tip its hat to the Garden State as Universal marks its centennial. The company’s official 100th birthday is tomorrow.
"Their Fort Lee studio was the biggest studio in the world until they built Universal City," says Meyers. "Fort Lee was really the first film town. You had these gigantic studios in a very small town. On the old Universal lot, they had this huge water tower that survived until 1964. Universal built the tower because there was no water pressure on Mondays. Why was there no water pressure? Because Monday in Fort Lee was wash day."
The studio’s first feature-length movie, "Traffic in Souls," was shot in Fort Lee.
"The subject matter was pretty risqué," says Eric Chin, a senior corporate archivist at NBCUniversal. "It was about prostitution. During that time, there was no government censorship so filmmakers could take on a difficult subject matter and address social issues."
All that remains of Universal’s Fort Lee complex is a humble building that stands near the corner of Fifth Street and Washington Avenue. Every other movie landmark has been destroyed by fire or leveled to make way for parking lots and strip malls. The Fort Lee Film Commission is posting historical plaques with archival photos where cameras once rolled.
This historic building is where Universal Pictures shot some of its early films circa 1915.
"I think New Jersey gets lost in the shuffle even though all the action was in the east when Universal was incorporated in 1912," says Meyers, who’s organized a summer series of commemorative events, including screenings and walking tours.
Meyers continues, "Even people who live in Fort Lee don’t realize the history. It’s not taught in schools. The only reason I know about it is because my grandparents worked for the studios."
Laemmle started producing movies in Fort Lee in 1909. His first company was called Independent Motion Pictures, aka IMP Studios.
"IMP’s first film was ‘Hiawatha,’ based on a Longfellow poem," says Chin. "They made it in Fort Lee. They also shot a version of ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ in New Jersey. I wish we had the production notes from those films because I’d really like to know how these movies were shot."
Laemmle, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, consolidated IMP with a group of independent studios to create the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. in 1912. Its offices were in New York, but its production hub was across the Hudson.
"It wasn’t very easy for Jewish immigrants to mainstream themselves into industry or business during the 1910s," says Meyers. "The movie industry was a new business where there was a lot of diversity. You had female filmmakers. You had African-American filmmakers and a lot of Jewish filmmakers. Everything they were doing was brand new. It was really fly by the seat of your pants. According to legend, Laemmle was looking for a name for the studio and one day he looks out his office window and sees a truck called Universal Plumbing."
A staging area at Universal Pictures' Fort Lee production facility circa 1912.
Chin says that the plumbing truck story is part of the mythos that surrounds Laemmle.
After Universal set up its Fort Lee facility, competitors came to town. A rival studio, Fox Film Corp., leased a neighboring complex with a lab and two glass buildings, allowing directors to use natural light instead of glaring lamps. Other companies that operated in Fort Lee included Goldwyn Pictures, Biograph Studios, Metro Pictures and the Solax Co., co-founded by Alice Guy Blaché, a trailblazing female filmmaker.
"The movie industry was a real boon that provided great employment opportunities," says Meyers. "Before the studios came to Fort Lee, it was hard to make a buck. If you wanted to farm, you put a shovel in the ground and you hit the palisades rock."
Fort Lee appealed to filmmakers because it had a surplus of open space, unlike Hoboken nearby, and its steep cliffs provided a dramatic backdrop for fantastical storytelling.
The riverfront community was transformed into a dusty frontier town for "Wild and Woolly" and "The Man from Painted Post," westerns starring Douglas Fairbanks. A Bergen County grove of trees doubled as Sherwood Forest in the first American adaptation of "Robin Hood." D.W. Griffith filmed a Civil War short in Fort Lee, "The Battle," a prologue to his ambitious and divisive 1915 epic, "Birth of a Nation."
Stars and auteurs may have strolled along Washington Avenue but Fort Lee never became a realm of red carpet glitz and swirling searchlights. The town didn’t have a single-picture palace to host premieres during its heyday, according to Meyers.
Memorabilia from Universal Pictures during its Jersey era circa 1912.
"This was a blue-collar place," says Meyers. "People who weren’t in the creative end of the business, they could still make a living in the film industry. They could put food on the table and that’s basically what it was. The film industry allowed for people of very meager backgrounds in terms of money to make a living so they could buy groceries."
Fort Lee’s reign as a film town was short-lived. It declined when silent movies gave way to talkies. Converting existing facilities into soundstages was so expensive, the studios left Jersey for shiny new back lots in California.
"After the 1920s, the opportunities dried up and the Depression came and Fort Lee was in a bad way," says Meyers. "Everyone thought the George Washington Bridge would bring great wealth to Fort Lee but the town overextended itself borrowing money to build a high school and a borough hall."
Back when filmmakers first began burning images onto celluloid, they used a highly flammable photochemical mix and lots of prints were destroyed in blazes.
When Fox’s Little Ferry film vault exploded in 1937, scores of silent Jersey movies were consumed in the fire. The studio lost virtually every reel of its Theda Bara collection.
"Theda was the first sex symbol of the American film industry," says Meyers. "She had a whole publicity machine around her, saying she was born on the Arabian sands and she lived in a Gothic apartment in New York with snakes and incense. The fact of the matter was that she was a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati. She created this persona and rolled with it and made tons of movies with Fox, including what is supposed to be the definitive version of ‘Cleopatra.’ "
Another lost Fort Lee treasure is "Saved from the Titanic," starring Dorothy Gibson, an actress who’d actually been onboard the doomed ocean liner. The hybrid documentary/drama was shot and released within weeks of the 1912 tragedy.
The original Fort Lee studio where Universal Pictures shot dozens of silent movies.
"Basically, as soon as she came off the rescue boat, they whisked her to Fort Lee and shot a film in which she appeared in the actual outfit she wore when she was picked up from the Titanic," says Meyers. "This was the first film version of the Titanic disaster and unfortunately the only known prints caught fire in 1914."
Perhaps the most coveted missing canister is "Humor Risk," the movie debut of the Marx Brothers. The touring comedy troupe shot the silent short in Fort Lee as an experiment with a new medium. Fans of the satirists still debate whether the print was accidentally destroyed or purposely discarded after it failed to win laughs the first and only time it screened.
"I don’t know what happened to it," says Meyers. "I know Groucho went on TV many years later and offered to pay thousands of dollars for a print of his own film."