“It’s not so bad, you know, five dollars for simply riding a horse in the wilds of Fort Lee on a cool spring day.”
So D.W. Griffith, visionary director (“Intolerance”), bigot (“The Birth of a Nation”) and granddaddy of cinema, described his early days as an extra in the movie capital of the world: New Jersey.
The movies were born here. The Black Maria, the first movie studio in the world (1893), was in West Orange. “The Great Train Robbery,” the first movie hit (1903), was filmed in Paterson.
Universal Pictures, Fox Studios (later 20th Century Fox and now just 20th Century) and the Metro and Goldwyn studios (later MGM) were all originally in Fort Lee. So was the first studio founded by a woman: Solax, headed by Alice Guy-Blaché. At least 15 studios were churning out pictures in North Jersey.
New Jersey: Where the stars shone
The Black Maria replica in West Orange
Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Douglas Fairbanks, W.C Fields, John Barrymore, the Marx Brothers, Rudolph Valentino and Mack Sennett all made movies here. The Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, which opened in 2022, celebrates this early legacy of film in the state.
“There are still a lot of people who don’t know about it,” said Tom Meyers, past executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, who spent many years raising awareness of Fort Lee’s role in movie history.
“Without knowing the history, you can’t get a handle on the present,” he said. “The history is a big part of it.”
Location, location, location
Why New Jersey? A lot of good reasons.
For one thing, it’s right next to New York — where the actors are.
Broadway players could sneak across the Hudson by ferry (movie acting was considered déclassé), shoot their scenes in the daytime, and then be back to make their 8 o’clock curtain.
Here’s how it happened: New Jersey has become Hollywood East
For another, New Jersey has scenery, also one of the things driving the state’s 21st-century movie renaissance.
Westerns could be filmed on the Raritan River Railroad. Urban scenes could be shot in downtown Fort Lee. Cliffhangers — movie serials — could be made on the Palisades cliffs.
“They could shoot whatever they wanted to in one day,” Meyers said.
The lure of California
So if New Jersey was so great for the movies, why did the movies leave New Jersey?
That, too, can be chalked up to several things.
One: the weather. As we’ve been reminded lately, Jersey winters can be harsh. California, with its year-round sunshine, was attractive to an industry that spent much of its time outdoors — and, in the beginning, depended on natural light even in the studio.
Two: the law. In the early 1900s, the movie industry was a monopoly. A “film trust,” headed by Thomas Edison, sought to regulate both films themselves and the devices that made them.
Anyone who used non-Edison equipment, or failed to pay a weekly “licensing fee,” was harassed by the authorities. In some cases, strong-arm goons would invade the premises, smashing cameras and equipment. No wonder early movie moguls found it advisable to move to California — out of reach of the process servers, and for good measure within easy distance of the Mexican border.
Goodbye — and hello — to New Jersey
“West Side Story,” filmed on location in Paterson
By the 1910s, the film industry had begun to migrate to a little suburb of Los Angeles — Hollywood. By the 1920s, the Jersey studios were mostly abandoned. A few continued to be rented, piecemeal, to low-budget filmmakers: Some early classics of Jewish and African American cinema were made here in the 1920s and ’30s.
But today, few traces of those early studios remain. The 21st-century magnates who seek to reinvent New Jersey’s movie industry are, of necessity, starting from scratch.
Except, of course, for the memories. New Jersey will always have those.
“What I would hope for is that the industry coming back will renew interest in this history,” said Teaneck film historian Richard Koszarski (“Fort Lee: The Film Town”), who has written extensively about New Jersey’s early film history.
“This is part of a tradition,” Koszarski said. “It will remind people to look over their shoulder. There is a reason to return here. It’s not like the movies are returning to a place that they never were.”
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Fort Lee NJ movie filming location was original Hollywood