Vitagraph Company of America

On the roof of a building on Nassau Street in Manhattan, in the last years of the 19th century, a magician-turned-showman named J. Stuart Blackton pointed a hand-cranked camera at whatever moved. Within two decades the small partnership he had started would grow into one of the largest and most durable film producers on earth, its Brooklyn lot a factory of moving pictures. And then, almost as fast as the medium it had helped invent moved on, it was gone, sold to a company barely old enough to shave.

Vitagraph began in 1897 as a scrappy collaboration between Blackton, a British-born illustrator and vaudeville "lightning sketch" artist, and Albert E. Smith, a fellow English immigrant with a gift for machinery. The exhibitor William T. "Pop" Rock soon joined them, and together they turned a novelty into a trade. In an age when a "film" meant a single reel lasting a minute or two, a prizefight, a comic gag, a street scene, Vitagraph learned faster than almost anyone how to shoot, print, and sell them in volume.

The company's instincts were commercial and, now and then, visionary. Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) survives as a landmark of early animation, chalk figures springing to life frame by frame. Vitagraph reached for prestige too, adapting literature and history in ambitious multi-reel productions such as The Life of Moses (1909) and A Tale of Two Cities (1911) while the feature was still considered a gamble.

The Trust years and the star machine

In 1908 Vitagraph became a founding member of the Motion Picture Patents Company, the "Edison Trust," the cartel that tried to control American film through pooled patents and licensing. Membership placed Vitagraph at the center of the industry's establishment, and its Brooklyn studio hummed accordingly, releasing shorts at an industrial clip.

It was also a maker of stars before "movie star" was even a settled idea. Audiences knew Florence Turner as the "Vitagraph Girl," followed the matinee idol Maurice Costello, and roared at the rotund John Bunny, one of the screen's first great clowns. Younger talents passed through its gates, among them Norma Talmadge and the comedian Larry Semon. For a stretch, to be a Vitagraph player was to be famous in a way the world had never quite seen before.

Vitagraph's paradox was that it had done almost everything first, and was undone by nearly everyone who came second.

The turn and the end

The forces that lifted Vitagraph eventually left it behind. The Patents Trust was ruled an illegal monopoly and dismantled in the 1910s, stripping away the protective structure its members had leaned on. The feature film, longer, costlier, built around a marquee name, displaced the humble short that had been Vitagraph's specialty. And the industry migrated west to the cheap land and dependable sun of Southern California while Vitagraph's heart stayed in Brooklyn. Blackton drifted away; Smith held on. The company that had helped set the tempo found itself a step behind the beat.

In April 1925 Albert E. Smith sold Vitagraph to Warner Bros. For the ambitious brothers the purchase was transformative: it delivered a nationwide network of film exchanges and physical studio capacity exactly as they prepared the wager on synchronized sound that would remake Hollywood. The Brooklyn facility carried on under Warner ownership, later turning out sound short subjects. The independent studio, after nearly three decades, simply ceased to exist.

Vitagraph still matters because so much of the ordinary machinery of the movies, the star system, the studio production line, the marriage of art and mass manufacture, was worked out on its stages before most of Hollywood had been built. It was a pioneer that hardened into an institution and then into a cautionary tale about an industry that devours its own founders. Warner Bros., the company that absorbed it, is still with us. The older name survives mostly as a mark on Brooklyn maps and in the reels of a medium it helped bring into being.