New York The Movie Lover's Guide The Ultimate Insider Tour To Movie New York

1 New Jersey: In the Beginning For all intents and purposes, the motion picture as we have come to know it was born in the late 1880s some sixteen miles due west of the island of Manhattan at the Edison laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey. Recognizing that fact, we begin our movie lover's odyssey there. It wasn't just the Edison Company, however, that made New Jersey a powerful force in the early motion picture industry, because, from the very beginning, the state was home to scores of other ?lm companies. These included long-forgotten studios with names like Centaur, Nestor, Champion, Eclair, Victor, Solax, and Worldas well as many that are still familiar, like Fox, Metro, Selznick, Goldwyn, and Universal. All took advantage of New Jersey's then wide-open spaces and its pristine fields and forests for location shooting. The world's first Westerns were not done in Colorado or Californiathey were done in New Jersey. Needless to say, today's New Jersey is a very different place and tracking down traces of the state's early film history can be as challenging as working on an archaeological dig. But for the intrepid movie lover who knows where to dig and what to look for, the rewards to be unearthed along thewestbank of the Hudson River are many. These range from ancient movie studios to famous and infamous silent film locations and even to the world's first screening room. Easier to find are the sites and locales associated with New Jersey's current big comeback on the film and television frontespecially with the popularity of shows likeThe SopanosandEd. This chapter also explores this exciting new New Jersey world. 1. Edison Laboratory Main Street and Lakeside Avenue, West Orange For the movie lover, this is probably the single most important site connected with the development of the motion picture in Americaif not the worldfor it was here that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Edison researchers perfected and successfully marketed a practical system for photographing and exhibiting moving images. Thomas Alva Edison is often credited as the inventor of the movies, but it is difficult to attribute this achievement to any one person since various inventors in America and abroad were experimenting with "moving pictures" at around the same time. And, indeed, even if we credit the Edison Laboratory with coming up with the first commercially viable motion pictures, it seems that Edison himself had relatively little to do with the project. The real force behind the endeavor was Edison's assistant, an Englishman named W. K. L. Dickson who, as early as 1889, came up with a machine called the Kinetograph that showed moving pictures backed up by synchronized sound provided by an Edison phonograph. (It is said that the main reason Edison gave his go-ahead to motion picture development was because he saw the new medium as a way to further enhanceand thus further capitalize onhis already immensely successful phonograph.) The big breakthrough made by Dickson's device, however, was not the fact that it employed synchronized sound, but the incredible realism of the moving images it recorded. To achieve this, Dickson had taken advantage of George Eastman's newly invented celluloid film, which was thin, tough, and flexible. Cut into continuous 35mm strips and perforated with four holes per frame, the film was fed through the Kinetograph by means of sprockets, another key design element because these regularly stopped the film for that fraction of a second needed to record the image on the frame. Today, more than a hundred years later, even with the rise of digital technology, most motion pictures still use 35mm film as well as this same basic stop-and-go sprocket mechanism. In 1893, an improved version of this Kinetographredubbed the KinetoAlleman, Richard is the author of 'New York The Movie Lover's Guide The Ultimate Insider Tour To Movie New York', published 2005 under ISBN 9780767916349 and ISBN 0767916344.