Biograph Company

The Leprans family's effort to secure Louis' place in history later intersected directly with Edison through litigation.

In 1898, Edison sued the American Mutoscope Company, a major competitor in the developing motion picture business, alleging infringement of his motion picture camera patent.

Edison sought to establish the breadth and priority of his patent claims.

The defense in turn had reason to demonstrate that important motion picture work predated Edison's.

And what if you didn't just have one of these things? What if you owned two, three, a dozen, 100? At that very moment, Carl Laemmle knew exactly how he was going to spend the money he'd been saving.

Within a few years, Laemmle owned a large chain of Nickelodeon theaters and was turning over a handsome profit showing short films produced by American Pathé, Vitagraph, Star Film Company, and Biograph, bringing the wonders of the world to members of the public for a nickel a time.

However, in 1908, Thomas Edison, who owned most of the patents relating to motion picture cameras, forced all the motion picture producers to form a trust known as the Edison Trust, which sought to charge a fee to every exhibitor in the United States each time a trust-produced film was shown, essentially creating a monopoly on film production and distribution.

Each Nickelodeon owner suddenly saw a sharp dip in profits, but having no alternative, had to cough up the exorbitant tax or face the prospect of losing their supply of films.

Laemmle, however, believed otherwise.

Throughout the first decade of the 20th century, the most popular star of the cinema was a beautiful, enigmatic actress without a name.

Because she acted in pictures produced by Biograph Films, she came to be known only as The Biograph Girl.

She starred as a society beauty in Betrayed by a Handprint, as an Indian girl in The Red Girl, as the adulterous Katusha in D.W. Griffith's Resurrection.

Passing the old 14th Street studio one day, I stopped in for a moment for a glimpse of the old cradle of the movies as it appears today.

It is still used for making pictures, though it is now rented out to smaller companies since the Biograph moved to their big modern plant near the end of the Bronx subway.

A director was at work, leisurely rehearsing a comedian in a scene requiring only two actors.

everything was very quiet very orderly william thomas senior veteran property master who has been there since its earliest days as a studio showed me through the rooms it's the cradle of the movies all right he said as we ended our short tour and it certainly did some rocking you can imagine how they kept me jumping the way they kept getting new ideas every day just fancy sir we think we're handicapped now putting on these little comedies In those days we had three directors working at once.