Before Hollywood: The Biograph Company

The Biograph Company, also known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a film company founded in 1895 and active until 1916. 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 3000 short films and 12 feature films. The company was home to pioneering director D. W. Griffith and such actors as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore.


Swedish postcard by Förlag Nordisk Konst, Stockholm, no. 922. A rare portrait of the famous American film director D.W. Griffith.


British postcard no. 54. Photo: American Biograph. Mary Pickford. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.


Spanish collector's card by Chocolate Amatller, Series B, Artist no. 3, no. 10. D. W. Griffith.

Edison's chief competitor in the nickelodeon market

The Biograph company was started in New York City 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 on 30 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 Co. In 1899 it changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and in 1908 to simply the Biograph Company. To avoid violating Edison's motion picture patents, Biograph cameras from 1895 to 1902 used a large-format film, measuring 2 23⁄32 inches (69 mm) wide, with an image area of 2 by 2 1⁄2 inches (51 mm × 64 mm), 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. 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. Biograph offered prints in both formats to exhibitors until 1905, when it discontinued the larger format.

The first film of the Biograph Company was Empire State Express (1896). Biograph films before 1903, were mostly such "actualities," documentary film footage of actual persons, places, and events, each film usually less than two minutes long. Other early production efforts, including filming U.S. presidential candidate William McKinley on the campaign trail in 1896, Pope Leo XIII at the Vatican in 1899, and U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in the early 20th century.

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 favour of the narrative film.

The company's first studio was located on the roof of 841 Broadway at 13th St. in Manhattan, known then as the Hackett Carhart Building and today as the Roosevelt Building. The set-up was similar to Thomas Edison's ‘Black Maria’ in West Orange, New Jersey, with the studio itself being mounted on circular tracks to be able to get the best possible sunlight (as of 1988 the foundations of this machinery were still extant). The company moved in 1906 to a converted brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street near Union Square, a building that was razed in the 1960s. This was Biograph's first indoor studio, and the first film studio in the world to rely exclusively on artificial light.

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 sell it to theatres. In order to make the theatre 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 film.


British postcard, no. 16. Photo: American Biograph. Blanche Sweet as Daphne Wayne, the name which was given to her for British audiences by the MPSA Motion Picture Sales Agency. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.

Blanche Sweet (1896-1986) was an actress of the silent screen, who first acted at Biograph in countless shorts and the feature Judith of Bethulia (1914) by D.W. Griffith. In the 1920s she acted at e.g. Lasky/Paramount, became a highly paid star, and was married to director Marshall Neilan. For both Anna Christie (1923) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1924), Sweet received raving reviews.


British postcard, no. 24. Photo: American Biograph. Percival Hemming a.k.a. William Chrystie Miller.

William Chrystie Miller (also written as W.M. Christie Miller) (1843-1922) was an American silent film actor. He appeared in 139 films between 1908 and 1914. Miller frequently appeared in films directed by David Wark Griffith, including Ramona (1910) and The Lonedale Operator (1910). He was known to film audiences as the "Grand Old Man of the Photodrama".


British postcard, no. 25. Photo: American Biograph. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.

Gladys Egan (1900-1985) was an American child actress during the silent film era. She appeared in 110 film shorts, between 1908 and 1914, including many that were produced by D.W. Griffith.


British postcard, no. 26. Photo: American Biograph. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.

Kate Bruce (1860-1946) was an elderly American silent-screen actress who often played mother characters for American Biograph. Bruce who often used the alias, Phyllis Forde, was D.W. Griffith's favourite matriarchal figure.

Marlene Pilaete: Please note that Kate Bruce, Claire McDowell and William Christie Miller, never used aliases of their own doing. As Biograph had an "anonymous players" policy, the names Phyllis Forde, Doris Carlton and Percival Hemming were given to them for British audiences by the MPSA Motion Picture Sales, which distributed the Biograph movies in Great-Britain and the British Dominions and which wanted to be able to advertise its leading players. In fact, those names “Phyllis Forde”, “Doris Carlton”, “Percival Hemming”, “Daphne Wayne”, “Muriel Fortescue”, etc., were never used in the U.S.A. and stayed unknown from the American audiences. Nobody in the U.S.A. had ever heard of “Phyllis Forde” or “Doris Carlton”. I even doubt that MPSA ever asked the stars’ permission to give them fictious names and I’m also wondering if the stars were ever aware that such a decision of renaming players had been made in Great-Britain. That’s a fascinating story about the early days of movies."


British postcard, no. 31. Photo: American Biograph.

Claire McDowell (1877-1966 ) also known as Doris Carlton was an American stage and silent film actress. After appearing on Broadway, she worked for eight years at American Biograph (1908-1916) and acted in many films by D.W. Griffith. Later, she worked for Universal, Triangle, and MGM and played mother roles. She was the mother of Douglas Fairbanks's love interest in The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920), Ramon Novarro's mother in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Fred Niblo, 1925), and John Gilbert's mother in The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925).

The Biograph Girl

Director D. W. Griffith joined Biograph in 1908 as a writer and actor, but within months became its principal director. In 1908, the company's head director Wallace McCutcheon grew ill, and his son Wallace McCutcheon Jr. took his place but was not able to make a successful film for the company. 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 (D.W. Griffith, 1908) with Gladys Egan and Arthur V. Johnson.

Griffith 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 close-ups 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. His prolific output—often one new film a week—and willingness to experiment in many different genres helped the company become a major commercial success.

Despite the fact that Biograph did not permit onscreen credits for actors, Griffith practically invented the star system through his discovery of actress Florence Lawrence, who was billed as "The Biograph Girl." When she jumped ship to competitor Vitagraph, he moved a new "Biograph Girl" into place, who later became "Biograph Mary" and eventually known by her name, Mary Pickford.

Many early film stars were Biograph performers, including Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Robert Harron, Arthur V. Johnson, Florence Auer, Robert G. Vignola, Owen Moore, Alan Hale, Sr., Blanche Sweet, Harry Carey, James Kirkwood Sr., Mabel Normand, Henry B. Walthall, Mae Marsh, and Dorothy Davenport. Mack Sennett honed his craft as an actor and director of comedies at Biograph.

In January 1910, Griffith and Lee Dougherty with the rest of the Biograph acting company travelled to Los Angeles. While the purpose of the trip was to shoot Ramona (D.W. Griffith, 1910) with Mary Pickford 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. 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 (D.W. Griffith, 1910) with Marion Leonard and Henry B. Walthall, a Latino melodrama about the early days of Mexico-owned California. Griffith and the Biograph troupe filmed other short films at various locations then travelled back to New York. After the East Coast film community heard about Hollywood, other companies began to migrate there. Biograph's little film launched Hollywood as the future film capital of the world. It 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.


British postcard. Photo: American Biograph. Mabel Normand as Muriel Fortescue, the name which was given to her for British audiences by the MPSA Motion Picture Sales Agency. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.

Mabel Normand (1892-1930) started as an actress in 1910 at the Eastcoast, at Vitagraph and Biograph. She became a popular American silent film comedienne, in particular in her films with Charlie Chaplin. But alcohol, drugs, and scandal wrecked her career and TBC killed her at a young age.


American postcard by Kraus Manufacturing Co., New York, 1913. Photo: Biograph.

Henry B. Walthall (1878-1936) was a prolific actor at D.W. Griffith's American Biograph and played in countless films there. The culmination of the Griffith-Walthall connection was Walthall's role as Colonel Ben Cameron in The Birth of a Nation (1915). Throughout his career, Henry B. Walthall remained working as a motion picture actor. At the time of his death in 1936, Walthall had appeared in more than 320 films.


American postcard by Kraus Manufacturing Co., New York, 1913. Photo: Biograph. Robert Harron's name is misspelled as Herron.


Swedish postcard by Nordisk Konst, Stockholm.

Robert Harron (1893-1920) was a teenager when he acted in his first films. 'Bobby' soon appeared in the first films of D. W. Griffith and was to rub shoulders with the great silent stars of the time, notably Lillian Gish.

The Edison Trust

David Wark Griffith left Biograph in October 1913 after finishing Judith of Bethulia (D.W. Griffith, 1914), unhappy with the company's resistance to larger budgets, feature film production, or giving onscreen credit to him and the cast. He had directed four hundred and fifty short films for the studio. With him went many of the Biograph actors, his cameraman Billy Bitzer and his production crew. As a final slight to Griffith, Biograph delayed the release of Judith of Bethulia until March 1914, to avoid a profit-sharing arrangement the company had with him.

In December 1908 Biograph had joined Edison in forming the Motion Picture Patents Company in an attempt to control the industry and shut out smaller producers. 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 Co. The Motion Picture Patents Co. and the General Film Co. were found guilty of antitrust violation in October 1915 and dissolved.

Shielded by the Trust, Biograph had been slow to enter feature film production. It contracted with the theatrical firm of Klaw & Erlanger in 1913 to produce film versions of the latter's plays. Its first released feature, Classmates, came out in February 1914, after 69 other American features had been released in 1912–1913. Distribution was hampered by Biograph using a special perforation pattern on the Klaw & Erlanger features that were incompatible with standard projectors, forcing exhibitors to lease specialised equipment from Biograph in order to show the films.

With the exodus of the studio's best actors to Griffith, Biograph was unable to 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. Biograph spent the remainder of the silent era reissuing its old films and leasing its Bronx studio to other producers.

When the company fell on financial hard times, the Biograph Studio facilities and film laboratory in the Bronx were acquired by one of Biograph Company's creditors, the Empire Trust Company, although some of the ex-Biograph staff were retained to manage the studio and laboratory facilities. Herbert Yates acquired the Biograph Studios facilities and film laboratory in 1928. Biograph Studios facilities and film laboratory were made a subsidiary of his Consolidated Film Industries in 1928. The studio facilities and laboratory burned down in 1980.

In 1939, Iris Barry, founder of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art, acquired 900 cans of film from the Actinograph Corp. Bronx Biograph studio and laboratory facilities, which was closing its film vault and planning to destroy all the film. One uncompleted film, Lime Kiln Club Field Day (T. Hayes Hunter, Edwin Middleton, 1913), with an all African American cast, was found among the many cans of film and shown at MOMA in November 2014. Biograph was revived as a small independent studio in the 1980s. In 1991 it relocated to California, later establishing its headquarters in Sherman Oaks.


American postcard by Kraus Manufacturing Co., New York, 1913. Photo: Biograph.

Charles West (1885-1943) was an American film actor of the silent film era, who appeared in more than 300 films between 1908 and 1937. In 1908 West started to act with D.W. Griffith at Biograph, where he made hundreds of shorts, starting with The Christmas Burglars (Griffith, 1908), with Florence Lawrence. Being part of the Biograph 'stable' he did many supporting parts but also had leads, as in the Griffith films A Flash of Light (1910), The Broken Cross (1911), The Last Drop of Water (1911), The Blind Princess and the Poet (1911), etc., often being paired with Blanche Sweet. In 1913 he often starred opposite Sweet or/ and Harry Carey and Claire McDowell, in e.g. The Hero of Little Italy, A Frightful Blunder, The Left-Handed Man, Just Gold, The Vengeance of Galora, etc. By then direction at Biograph alternated between Griffith and Andy O'Sullivan. In the mid-1910s West remained with Harry Carey as part of the cast of his Westerns at Biograph.


American postcard by Kraus Manufacturing Co., New York, 1913. Photo: Biograph. McDowell's first name is misspelled as Clair on this card.

Claire McDowell (1877-1966 ) also known as Doris Carlton was an American stage and silent film actress. After appearing on Broadway, she worked for eight years at American Biograph (1908-1916) and acted in many films by D.W. Griffith. Later, she worked for Universal, Triangle, and MGM and played mother roles. She was the mother of Douglas Fairbanks's love interest in The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920), Ramon Novarro's mother in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Fred Niblo, 1925), and John Gilbert's mother in The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925).


Vintage postcard. Photo: Biograph.

William Chrystie Miller (also written as W.M. Christie Miller) (1843-1922) was an American silent film actor. He appeared in 139 films between 1908 and 1914. Miller frequently appeared in films directed by David Wark Griffith, including Ramona (1910) and The Lonedale Operator (1910). He was known to film audiences as the "Grand Old Man of the Photodrama".


American postcard published by Kraus Mfg. Co., N.Y. Photo: American Biograph. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.

Kate Toncray (1867-1927) was an American character actress of the silent era. She appeared in 178 films between 1905 and 1925, always like an older woman.

Sources: Wikipedia, Starpulse, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and IMDb.

Tou can several early Biograph films at the Eye Filmmuseum Player, for free: https://player.eyefilm.nl/en/films/the-brilliant-biograph. And check out our earlier Before Hollywood posts: Vitagraph, and Essanay.