-
The World, the Flesh, and William A. Brady
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The World, the Flesh, and William A. Brady Motion pictures are just a fad. —William A. Brady to Adolph Zukor UNTIL THE MID-1920S, the East Coast film industry, particularly the studios in Astoria, Queens, and Fort Lee, New Jersey, rivaled that of the West. Most cinemas were in the large eastern cities, and in addition to providing a pool of actors, artists, and technicians, New York housed the banks that funded production. Jules Brulatour dominated Fort Lee. He wasn’t French but had been born in New Orleans. As well as monopolizing the supply of Eastman raw film stock, Brulatour processed it and warehoused the completed motion pictures. The studios he built at Fort Lee attracted both American producers and French film companies such as Éclair and Pathé, which made films for both markets. With the outbreak of war in 1914, the French halted U.S. production. Local companies faltered as well, no longer able to rely on European sales. Fort Lee was rescued by Lewis J. Selznick. Raising money on Wall Street and enlisting Brulatour as an ally, he formed the World Film Company by combining a number of independents, including Brulatour’s Peerless, William A. Brady’s Paragon, and Arthur Spiegel’s Equitable. He also recruited the unemployed French filmmakers. William Aloysius Brady emerged as the driving force of World, his importance signaled by the company’s slogan, “World Pictures— 19 Von Sternberg 20 Brady-made.” Beginning as a street newsboy, he had been an actor, playwright, producer, theater builder, and fight promoter. With his brusque manner and clothes dusted with cigar ash, Brady brought a sense of the barroom and the boxing ring to the movies he financed and circulated, which numbered about twenty a year between 1914 and 1917. To service his prints, he acquired a small company whose owner had developed a system for cleaning and repair. Among its employees was Josef von Sternberg. Von Sternberg dated his own discovery of the cinema to around 1910 and his days of “sleeping rough,” when a nickel or dime would buy a few hours off the streets in a warm if smelly and noisy nickelodeon. But the film Fun in a Chinese Laundry, whose title he borrowed for his autobiography (it was two films, in fact, since both Lubin and Edison used the name), was made in 1901, suggesting an earlier acquaintance. In the summer of 1911, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, he took shelter under a footbridge during an electrical storm. Two girls joined him, one of whom fainted when lightning struck a nearby tree. After the storm the girls took him to meet a friend, who showed off the machine his father had constructed in his basement for repairing films. By the time Josef left, he had a job cleaning and patching films and mending torn sprocket holes. He also ferried prints by motorcycle between the city’s cinemas—the most important part of his work, since his employer appears to have indulged in the lucrative practice of “bicycling.” After cleaning a print, he would rent it illegally for a day or two before returning it to the film exchange that collected fees on behalf of producers. World’s purchase of the film repair company transformed von Sternberg’s life. For a while he continued to service prints, but Fort Lee offered many opportunities. “Shortly after graduation from the bench where sprocket holes were mended,” he wrote, I was made head of the shipping department centered in a film laboratory, and entrusted with the task of seeing to it that the theatres promptly received their copies. As films are usually completed barely in time to reach a theatre, this meant that not only had I to watch the films being hauled out of the developing tanks [54.81.33.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:39 GMT) The World, the Flesh, and William A. Brady 21 to be dried on giant drums but I also had to mount them swiftly on metal reels, pile them into an old battered Ford, and then drive them through a storm-lashed New Jersey coast road to a Hoboken express office to make certain that the films would reach their destination in time. From shipping he graduated to editing. Von Sternberg told his son that he won a promotion when his boss was fired for graft— perhaps a consequence of the earlier “bicycling” scam—but his memoirs contain a more glamorous version. He was viewing a film...