New York Times: ‘Be Natural’ Review: Rescuing Alice Guy Blaché, a Film Pioneer, From Oblivion

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

Directed by Pamela B. Green

Documentary 1h 43m

By A.O. Scott

At the beginning of Pamela B. Green’s lively and informative new documentary, a bevy of movie people — directors, actors, scholars and others — are asked if they know anything about Alice Guy Blaché, who is the subject of the film. A few of them do (Ava DuVernay, for one), but most admit that they have no clue. Viewers who are similarly ignorant shouldn’t feel bad, and in the best pedagogical spirit Green turns blank looks and sheepishly shrugged shoulders into a teaching moment. “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché” seeks both to help rescue Guy Blaché from oblivion and to explain how she got there in the first place.

Alice Guy was born into a bourgeois French family in 1873. An interview conducted more than 90 years later reveals a woman very much of her era and class, with crisp diction, faultless grammar and a mildly ironical way of talking about even painful and contentious matters. Trained in stenography, Alice was hired, at 22, as an assistant to Léon Gaumont, who would soon become one of the founders of the French film industry.

Guy (who married the British cameraman Herbert Blaché in 1907) merits that description as much as her boss. Often referred to as a pioneer — one of a handful of important women filmmakers active in cinema’s earliest days — she was more than that. Present at an early, private Paris showing of one of Louis and Auguste Lumière’s first shorts, Guy was among the first to explore the storytelling potential of the new medium. At the Gaumont studio, where she worked until 1906, she directed hundreds of fantasies, comedies, melodramas and historical films. After moving to the United States, she set up her own company, Solax Studios, continuing her prolific output in the burgeoning proto-Hollywood of Fort Lee, N.J.

She was, in sum, a studio chief as well as a director and producer — a key figure in the emergence of two major national cinemas. The recovery of this reputation is central to Green’s project, and she builds on the work of historians and archivists, including Guy Blaché’s biographer, Alison McMahan. “Be Natural” is its own making-of documentary, following Green’s gumshoe efforts to track down letters and ledgers, artifacts and descendants. She enlists a specialist in facial recognition to determine whether a woman in an ancient moving picture is indeed Guy Blaché. She zigzags across Los Angeles in search of a lab that will digitize antique videotapes. She details her own cross-country and trans-Atlantic peregrinations as well as those undertaken by her heroine more than a century earlier.

The result is occasionally a little frantic — animated segments sometimes bring the past to life and sometimes get in the way — and often tremendously moving. The interviews with Guy Blaché and with her daughter, Simone, bring a tender, complicated dimension of personality, and make it feel as if the dawn of movies is not so far away after all. The present-day celebrities, who seem to become instant experts after their initial confessions of cluelessness, add little beyond their own boldface names. (An exception is Jodie Foster, who provides voice-over narration and served as an executive producer.) The preservationists and film historians are the truly fascinating characters, and it would be good to learn even more about the work of rescue and recovery they do.

“Be Natural” is inspiring because it is also appalling. The near-forgetting of Guy Blaché wasn’t just an accident of film history, though the fact that most of her work belongs to the years before World War I made it especially vulnerable to loss. Green notes that she is less well-known than contemporaries like Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner, but those women were also written out of film history or pushed to its margins.

Guy Blaché found America a more welcoming working environment than France. But in both countries the record of her achievements was erased. Her early Gaumont pictures were attributed to her male assistants, and their originality and quality went unrecognized, in spite of evidence of her influence on later auteurs like Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock. When it was remembered at all, Solax Studios was thought of as Herbert Blaché’s company.

Green’s revision of that record is long overdue and just in time, given the present-day reckoning with Hollywood’s stubborn traditions of behind-the-scenes (and onscreen) sexism. Most intriguing are the clips the documentary gathers from Guy Blaché’s films. Many of them look less like old curiosities than lost classics, and their range — from the surreal slapstick of “The Drunken Mattress,” to the domestic melodrama of “Falling Leaves,” to the social satire of “Consequences of Feminism” — is astonishing. (Several have been issued by Kino Lorber in the indispensable “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” collection). By the end of “Be Natural,” you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was; you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.

New York Times: Overlooked No More: Alice Guy Blaché, the World’s First Female Filmmaker

Even before women had the right to vote, Blaché, in her actions and in her films, expressed female drives, desires and self-determination.

Published Sept. 6, 2019

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

By Manohla Dargis

In 1911, The Moving Picture News wrote that Alice Guy Blaché, the first female filmmaker in history, was a “fine example of what a woman can do if given a square chance in life.”

Blaché had already founded a successful film company in the United States by the time the article was published, announcing a new studio she was opening in New Jersey. She soon built that studio, adding to her triumphs. Cinema was Blaché’s passion — she called it her Prince Charming — and it took her across continents and centuries in a life shaped both by soaring achievements and by some of the same struggles that women moviemakers face today.

She was aware of her singularity.

“I have produced some of the biggest productions ever released by a motion picture company,” Blaché told the entertainment weekly The New York Clipper in 1912.

She made — directed, produced or supervised (often doing triple duty) — about 1,000 films, many of them short, the standard at the time.

She would later leave the industry at a time when her life was marred by personal and professional disappointments, then spend years trying to claim her place in the very history that she had helped make.

Like other trailblazing women from cinema’s formative years, Blaché has been discovered, somehow overlooked and rediscovered anew. Only now, largely because of the feminist film scholars who are writing women back into history, does her place seem secure.

Blaché got her start in films when she was 22 and working as a secretary in Paris for Léon Gaumont, an inventor who had begun manufacturing motion-picture cameras. To demonstrate them to clients, his company made short films that Blaché thought could be better.

“I had read a good deal,” she wrote in “The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché,” which was ushered into publication posthumously in 1976 by the historian Anthony Slide. And she had done some “amateur theatricals.”

Blaché, center, in a scene from “Sage-Femme de Première Classe” (“First Class Midwife”), from 1902, about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)Credit...Photograph Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

She asked Gaumont if she could film a few scenes.

“It seems like a silly, girlish thing to do,” Gaumont told her, Blaché recalled many decades later in a French television interview, “but you can try if you want. On one condition: that your office work does not suffer.”

Armed with a cameraman, an actress and a painted backdrop, she made “La Fée aux Choux” (“The Cabbage Fairy”) in 1896, her first film. A pantomimed one-minute charmer, it shows a young woman who, with a smile and a bosom wreathed in flowers, plucks squalling naked babies from a cabbage patch constructed out of wood. Some historians believe that Blaché’s inaugural effort was “Sage-Femme de Première Classe” (“First Class Midwife”) her 1902 remake about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)

Gaumont soon made Blaché the head of film production at his company, where she produced and supervised hundreds of films, helped create an organized studio system years before Hollywood was a company town and trained luminaries of the art like Louis Feuillade. When she moved to the United States, where she resumed her film career, her time at Gaumont was touted in profiles. In 1912, the trade journal The Movie Picture World, wrote: “She inaugurated the presentation of little plays on the screen by that company some 16 or 17 years ago.”

Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born in Saint-Mandé, on the eastern edge of Paris, on July 1, 1873. Her parents, Marie and Émile Guy, were French but lived in Chile, where her father was a bookseller; Marie returned to France for Alice’s birth and then left the child with a grandmother. Three years later, Marie returned for Alice, and they sailed to Chile. While passing through the Strait of Magellan, near Chile’s southern tip, as she recalled in her memoir, she conjured up fairies and beasts on walls of ice — an early, whimsical prelude to her screen reveries.

Assorted tragedies in Chile followed, and the Guys eventually returned to France, but over time the family disintegrated, leaving Alice to support her mother.

Much of Alice’s early years seemed to prepare her for a life in cinema, filled as they were with adventures, deprivations and moments of fortitude. In her first secretarial position, in an all-male factory, she recalled, she boldly stood up to a sexual harasser.

“My youth, my inexperience, my sex,” Blaché wrote of her entrance into moviemaking, “all conspired against me.” But she was hardworking and tenacious, and would prove to be prolific.

In 1894, she talked Gaumont, then the second-in-command at a photography company, into hiring her. Not long after, Gaumont formed his own company and Blaché became a pioneer, making films that were colored by hand and others that used a pioneering sound system, which synced visuals with prerecorded wax cylinders. Blaché can be seen in one clip starting a phonograph while she directs both the cast and the crew. Among her Gaumont titles are “La Femme Collante,” a risqué charmer about a maid with an amusingly sticky tongue, and “Le Matelas Alcoolique” about a peripatetic mattress with a drunken man sewn into it.

In 1907, she married Herbert Blaché, another Gaumont employee, and resigned as head of film production to accompany him to the United States, where he was sent to promote Gaumont’s sync-sound film system. The undertaking was a bust. But in 1910, two years after giving birth to their daughter, Simone, Alice Blaché formed the Solax Company and began making her own movies. She was so successful that in 1912 — the year she gave birth to their son, Reginald — Blaché built her own state-of-the-art studio in Fort Lee, N.J., then a bustling film town.

She kept up a heroic pace at Solax. She would jump in her car or on a horse to scout locations, including an orphanage, an opium parlor, night court and Sing Sing prison, where she declined the invitation to witness an execution. She supervised other directors and assistants, oversaw a stock company of adult and child actors, and corralled a menagerie of animal performers, among them rats, lions, panthers and a 600-pound tiger named Princess. On one studio wall she hung a sign that read, “Be Natural.”

Her interest in realism as well as performance dovetailed with what her biographer Alison McMahan said was Blaché’s greatest achievement. Her films, McMahan said in a phone interview, “focused on the psychological perspective of the central characters.

Blaché told The Clipper in 1912: “I have always impressed upon my associate directors that success comes only to those who give the public what it wants, plus something else. That something else I would call our individuality, if you please.”

Blaché expanded her repertoire at Solax with cowboy films like “Two Little Rangers,” which features a pair of gun-toting heroines, one of them a girl with long curls who backs a villain off a cliff. Whether or not it was feminist by design, the film is feminist by default. Blaché wondered if women were ready for the right to vote, but in her actions and in her films she expressed female drives, desires and self-determination.

At Solax, she successfully made the transition to feature filmmaking, creating longer, more narratively complex titles that were well-received, though they also entailed higher production costs and longer preparations. Yet while Blaché navigated the shift to features creatively, she didn’t weather the seismic changes affecting the fast-growing movie world, including monopolistic distribution practices. By 1914, she and Herbert Blaché had joined forces with another enterprise for which they both directed.

The last chapter of Blaché’s filmmaking career was marred by setbacks and disappointments both in her new ventures with her husband and as a director for hire. She made “The Ocean Waif,” a touching romance about an abused young woman and a writer that gives (almost) equal weight to both.

Other films followed, but by the time she directed the well-regarded “Her Great Adventure,” Blaché was struggling with her health, financial difficulties, a broken marriage and continued industry upheaval. She declined to direct a “Tarzan” movie. In 1922, the Solax studio was auctioned off, and Blaché, now divorced, returned to France with her two children.

In France she tried to find film work with no luck. It’s unclear why she didn’t succeed, although by the 1920s, the movies were a big business and no longer as hospitable to women who wanted to make their own films. She sold her books, paintings and other possessions and wrote articles and children’s stories.

She and her daughter, who worked for the American Foreign Service, spent the last years of World War II in Switzerland, where Blaché began writing her memoir. She also tried to find her films, but most were unavailable and presumed lost. She nevertheless persevered, gave interviews and in time gained some recognition for her pioneering role in cinema.

Blaché wrote of her life: “It is a failure; is it a success? I don’t know.” She died on March, 24, 1968, in a nursing home in New Jersey. She was 94.

In 2012, the Fort Lee Film Commission installed a new gravestone for Blaché. The original one had noted only her name and the dates of her birth and death. The new memorial states that Alice Guy Blaché was “first woman motion picture director,” the “first woman studio head” and the “president of the Solax Company, Fort Lee, N.J.”

The memorial is also adorned with the Solax logo: an image of the sun rising on a new day.

NorthJersey.com: One of the first movie moguls was a woman — and her studio was in Fort Lee

Jim Beckerman, North Jersey Record

Published 6:54 a.m. ET April 24, 2019 | Updated 7:27 a.m. ET April 24, 2019

When the movie business began — roughly 1895 — it was the Wild West. There were no rules. And consequently there was no one to tell Alice Guy-Blaché that ladies do not become movie directors.

So you can hardly blame her, in 1896, for becoming the first female film director — for that matter, one of the first film directors, period.

Nor can you blame her for being an innovator in narrative film, sound film, comedy, fantasy, Westerns, and films of social comment, for becoming one of the first film executives, or for building one of the largest, most advanced movie studios of the day in Fort Lee, in 1912. For being, in short, one of the great formative figures in film history.

"She's the mother of cinema," says film director Pamela B. Green, whose documentary film "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" opens April 26 at New York's IFC Center on Sixth Avenue (it will later platform out nationwide). It's already been featured at the Cannes, New York and Telluride film festivals.

"She did the work, took the trail, climbed the mountain," Green says.

Jodie Foster narrates the film, which includes commentary from Ava DuVernay, Julie Taymor, Julie Delpy, Geena Davis, and Sir Ben Kingsley and several Blaché relatives, not to mention New Jersey's own Tom Meyers, executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, and Teaneck film historian Richard Koszarski ("Fort Lee: The Film Town"). Fort Lee is a big part of this story.

"This was the first American film town, before the industry moved to Hollywood," Meyers says. "That's why Alice Guy-Blaché moved here."

In an era when women are demanding, more than ever, a place at the Hollywood table, "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" is a reminder that in the early days, women took a seat anyway — invited or not.

"She had intelligence, and a great sense of humor," Green says. "She was extremely determined, and passionate, and a hard worker. I related to those elements."

"Be Natural" was the phrase, posted on signboards, on the glassed-in stage of Solax Studios, the enormous $100,000 facility that Guy-Blaché, assisted by her husband, Herbert, built on Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee (where the Acme supermarket, next to Fort Lee High School, is now).

She wanted to remind her actors not to exaggerate, not to be "theatrical," but to behave like real people. Or, as director John Ford later said, in his gruff, masculine way, "Don't act, react." But Guy-Blaché said it first.

"She wanted them to give a sense of realism, so audiences could emotionally relate and say: That's me, or that's my aunt, or that's my cousin," Green says. "She wanted people to have an emotional connection with the films she was making."

Making a name

In her day, movie directors were seldom credited on screen. But Guy-Blaché was still known, at least within the film community.

She gave interviews. She wrote for magazines ("There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man," she said in Moving Picture World in 1914). Her work was admired — and imitated — by other directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein. Viewers loved her use of naturalistic settings, and her ability to coax believable performances from actors.

"She helped develop the grammar of cinema," Green says. "She helped move the medium forward when it was in its infancy, when people didn't believe in it."

Guy-Blaché, who spent her last years in Mahwah and is buried there (she died in 1968), spent the final years of her life writing her autobiography, trying to round up the 1,000 or so films she wrote, directed or produced between 1896 and 1922, and trying to set the record straight with film historians (mostly male), who — when they didn't ignore her completely — often attributed her films to other directors.

"If she had lived just a little bit longer, maybe it could have been different," Green says. "But she was old, and the world wasn't ready. I guess my purpose was to be her last chapter, to restore her legacy, which she couldn't do herself, but which she wanted to do very badly."

Guy-Blaché was in the right place at the right time. The time was 1894. The place was Paris, where the 21-year-old Alice got a job as a secretary to a camera company — which was in turn bought by a consortium that became Gaumont, one of the giants of the early film industry.

Movies, then, were little one-minute slices of life: workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station. Motion — any kind of motion — was miraculous enough. 

Not for Guy-Blaché. She was literary: Her father had been a bookstore owner. She pronounced the real-life snippets of street traffic, the seaside bathers and frolicking children, dull. She asked her bosses if she could try to make a film of her own. 

"La fée aux choux" — "The Cabbage Fairy" — made in 1896, depicts a sprite in a cabbage patch, harvesting all the newborn babies (Guy-Blaché knew all about cabbage patch kids 80 years before the American toy industry). It was one of the first — if not the first — staged, fictional films, one of the first to tell a story.  And it launched Guy-Blaché on a 25-year career. In short order, she became head of production at Gaumont.

"She gave film the gift of storytelling," Meyers says. "In America, the first narrative film was 'The Great Train Robbery' [1903]. But Alice was making narrative films well before that."

Her range was prodigious. She made dramatic films like "The Birth, Life and Death of Christ" (1906), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1913), and "Esmeralda" (1905), an early version of "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame." She made comedies, like "Matrimony's Speed Limit" (1913) and "Canned Harmony" (1912). She made Westerns, like "Algie the Miner" (1912) and "Two Little Rangers" (1912).

She made sound films ("True Jiu Jitsu," 1905, "Indiscreet Questions," 1905) more than two decades before "The Jazz Singer." She made fantasy films with trick effects. She made — notably —  films about gender equality, about reversals of sex roles, about women as take-charge heroes ("In the Year 2000," 1912, "A House Divided," 1913, "Hubby Does the Washing," 1912).  For good measure, she made one of the first films with an African-American cast, "A Fool and His Money" (1912).

Coming to America

In 1910, she had come to America with her her husband, Herbert Blaché, who was then chief of Gaumont's American operations. Soon after, they left Gaumont to form their own studio. 

Solax was originally based in Flushing, Queens, but two years later relocated to Fort Lee — then the center of American movie production, with some 17 studios grinding out films. Several of those studios — notably Solax, Éclair, and Pathé — were French. The French, at that time, were at the forefront of film technique. But America was where the audience and the money were. 

"There were so many French filmmakers living in Fort Lee at this time," Meyers says. "There were French-language newspapers here."

The studio, however, didn't last. Guy-Blaché eventually lost Solax — apparently the financial mismanagement of her husband had a lot to do with it — and in time the studio became a film storage facility. In 1964, the building was torn down.

"It was the 1960s, and there wasn't much thought given in those days to film history," Meyers says. "It's only recently that there's been some acknowledgment. Back in the 1960s, it was pretty forgotten."

Forgotten, also, was Guy-Blaché — as were the many women who followed in her footsteps.

While Guy-Blaché was the first female film director, she was not the only one in the early days.

Lois Weber, Ruth Baldwin, Dorothy Arzner, Leontine Sagan, Lotte Reiniger and Wanda Tuchock are just some of the other women who, in cinema's age of innocence, were calling "Lights, camera, action!"  And it wasn't just directors. There were women screenwriters (Anita Loos, Frances Marion, Jeanie MacPherson, June Mathis). There were women producers (Mary Pickford, Alla Nazimova). What happened to them all?

Theirs was the fate of the cowboy, and the internet startup — the fate of the pioneer.

After the freebooting early days are over, big money, regulation and standardization force out the trailblazers. And when Hollywood became big business, one that men could start taking seriously, the powers-that-be decided — in so many words — that a woman's place was in front of the camera, not behind.

"Once it became a viable business, once people saw that movies had a future and could make money, then women got pushed out and men took over," Green says.

Today, as women are struggling to regain a foothold in an industry they were forced out of, 100 years ago, Alice Guy-Blaché is their patron saint.

"She was an artist and an entrepreneur, and that makes her significant," Green says. "She was a mogul."

benaturalthemovie.com

Daily Mail.com: America's First Film Town

The small New Jersey outpost across the river from Manhattan that pre-dated the glamour of Hollywood as the center of the film industry

• Before Hollywood, Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the first-ever film town in the 1910s, at the birth of the motion picture industry

• By 1915 a high concentration of film studios had gathered in the New Jersey borough, including the original Universal Studios, the American branch of the French Éclair Studios and the Solax Company

• The proximity to New York City and the diverse landscapes ranging from open fields to rural neighborhood streets to the cliffs of the Palisades made Fort Lee an ideal location for the brand-new film industry

• By 1918, however, changing circumstances including America's involvement in the First World War and the 1918 influenza epidemic disrupted the film industry in Fort Lee

• Studios closed their doors in the small town and moved out to Hollywood, leaving Fort Lee practically abandoned and forgotten

• A new documentary about Fort Lee, The Champion: A Story of America's First Film Town, has just been nominated for a New York Emmy

• The film follows the story of Fort Lee's first film studio, the Champion Studio, which was built in 1910

By ANN SCHMIDT FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 12:12 EDT, 7 March 2018 | UPDATED: 12:13 EDT, 7 March 2018

When Tom Meyers thinks of growing up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he always goes back to the summer of 1971 when he was 10 years old. He and his friends would go to Gus Becker's Saloon on First Street where the owner, in his late 80s, would give the boys sodas and tell them about bartending in the 1910s, when Fort Lee was crawling with movie actors, crew members, directors and producers.

Meyers remembers a poster of Florence Lawrence, the first American movie star, on the wall. Lawrence personally signed the poster to Becker who told the boys about her, the actress Pearl White and the acting family, the Barrymores, who all shot and worked – and in the case of the Barrymores lived – in Fort Lee.

The New Jersey borough just across the Hudson River from New York City became the first American film town in the 1910s when a concentration of film studios operated all within a few blocks of each other, producing thousands of silent films. At its height in the mid-1910s, the town had 11 working studios including Fox Film Corporation, the Goldwyn Picture Corporation, Éclair Studios and The Solax Company.

By 1918 however, changing circumstances were disrupting the film industry, particularly in Fort Lee. With the United States' entrance into the First World War in 1917, the 1918 influenza pandemic and the frozen-over Hudson River in 1918, many of the East Coast studios shut their doors and moved out west to Hollywood, leaving Fort Lee mostly deserted with empty lots and abandoned studios.

Despite two short documentaries about the borough, one made in 1935 and the other in 1964, Fort Lee's film history was mostly forgotten in the wake of Hollywood. Its history wasn't even taught in Fort Lee itself, Meyers says. Instead, he learned about it from his parents and grandparents, who had worked in the industry, and from Becker.

Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the first-ever film town in America in the 1910s, even before Hollywood. At its height, the small New Jersey borough across the Hudson River from upper Manhattan had 11 working studios in close proximity to one another. Pictured is America's first named movie star, Florence Lawrence, on a film set

Studios were drawn to Fort Lee as the perfect place to shoot a variety of films because of the wide range of landscapes. The borough had open fields, quiet residential streets and the cliffs of the Palisades. Starting in 1907, the first New York City-based studios were taking day trips to Fort Lee for filming. Pictured is a still from an unknown Western made by the Champion Studio and shot in Fort Lee

Fort Lee's history has been brought back to the light, however, with the release of a documentary which has just been nominated for a New York Emmy. The Champion: A Story of America's First Film Town was produced by the Fort Lee Film Commission, of which Tom Meyers is the executive director and founder. 

The 30-minute documentary follows the story of the Champion Studio, Fort Lee's first film studio founded by Mark Dintenfass in 1910. When the Fort Lee Film Commission started the project in 2013, the studio had just been sold and was in danger of being demolished. As much as commission tried to preserve the historic building, it was torn down that same year.

After it was demolished, the scope of the documentary changed. The project was no longer just about the studio, it became about 'trying to save American film history. It told a story wrapped around Fort Lee as the first American film town', Meyers says.

'This is what happens when you don't care for this history,' Meyers tells DailyMail.com about the demolished Champion studio. 'What should have happened there, that could have been a jewel of a building, converted into a place for new filmmakers to learn their craft, like student filmmakers, young people. Right now it's still an empty lot.'

Though film studios were taking day trips to Fort Lee starting in 1907, the Champion Studio (pictured during its construction in 1910), was the first studio to set up shop directly in Fort Lee

The Champion studio (pictured from the 1964 documentary Before Hollywood There Was Fort Lee, NJ) was also one of the last studios to remain in Fort Lee. In 1923, it was sold and turned into a printing plant, which it remained as until it was sold again and demolished in 2013

Though the history of Fort Lee as a film town has been largely forgotten in the shadow of Hollywood, a new documentary about the borough has been released. The Champion: A Story of America's First Film Town was even nominated for a New York Emmy

Fort Lee, named after General Charles Lee by George Washington during the Revolutionary War, is across the Hudson River – and today the George Washington Bridge – from upper Manhattan. After the Civil War it became something of a resort town and by the late 19th century the Palisades Amusement Park in Fort Lee and Cliffside Park, New Jersey, brought even more visitors.

About 30 miles away in West Orange, New Jersey, the American motion picture was born. Thomas Edison built the first film studio, the 'Black Maria' in 1893 and he patented the first motion picture camera in 1897. Though it is often overshadowed by Hollywood, Meyers says this history should not be forgotten.

'All of that happened in the state of New Jersey,' he says. 'It wasn't California, it wasn't New York. This was the state of New Jersey.'

However, production companies did spring up in New York City, filming the short, silent films that were popular at the time inside their brownstone studios on 14th street, or on the roof for exterior shots. By 1907, some studios had discovered Fort Lee as a good place for filming with its dirt roads, residential streets lined with clapboard houses, open fields and the cliffs of the Palisades, all perfect for a wide range of films.

Gus Becker's Saloon, which was then known as Rambo's Saloon, played a huge part in the industry. It was the perfect hangout for actors and crew members when they had finished filming and the upstairs was often used for a dressing room for actors. The saloon itself starred in hundreds of films, its porch easily arranged for different sets.

Because of Fort Lee's close proximity to the city – just a hop, skip and a jump via the new subway system and a ferry across the Hudson – it became the perfect place for filming day trips. It also helped that filming in Fort Lee made it more difficult for Edison's patent detectives to follow independent filmmakers and gather information in order to charge licensing fees for the use of cameras, film and projectors.

The 30-minute documentary follows the story of the Champion Studio within the larger context of Fort Lee and the earliest years of the film industry. Pictured left is a movie poster for All For Love, which was made in Fort Lee by Victor Studio, which had combined with the Champion Studio. Both studios were among those who had been folded into the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912. Pictured right is a scene from the 1911 short, silent film How He Redeemed Himself, produced by Champion Studio and shot in Fort Lee

Pictured is a still from the 1911 short silent film In the Great Big West, produced by Champion Studio and shot in Fort Lee. The film is about a young doctor named Harold Walters who is in love with Dorothy Desmond, but conflicts between his love for her and his duties as a physician

Mark Dintenfass (pictured) was the first to set up his studio, Champion Studio, actually in Fort Lee. He had gotten his start in film producing in New York City, but was put out of business there because of licensing fees put on by Thomas Edison who had the patent for the first moving picture camera

Though Mark Dintenfass had started producing films in New York City, the fees put him out of business, so he decided to set up his company just beside Fort Lee, in the town of Englewood Cliffs. His studio, the Champion Studio, was the 'first permanent motion picture studio to be built in the Fort Lee area', film scholar, Rutgers professor and Fort Lee Film Commission member Richard Koszarski says in the documentary. It was built in 1910 and by the end of 1911, two other studios had already followed suit and set themselves up in Fort Lee.

'It's this concentration,' Koszarski tells DailyMail.com. 'It's what we call the film town, or the phrase that's used is the birth of the American film industry. Now, there were studios around the country before they started building studios in Fort Lee. There were studios in Brooklyn, downtown Manhattan, Philadelphia. What you have in Fort Lee is this concentration. They are packed together. Within one block you'll have three different companies operating studios, which means that you also have around it all the support equipment. You can walk, literally, down the street to your choice of film laboratories.

'That concentration, we think of Hollywood, the concentration of studios. And it wasn't just a coincidence, it was useful for the studios to be together because, so they could interact. But that happened earlier and in an even more compact way in Fort Lee... There was a lot of this cooperation and people could learn from one another. It's a good thing to have a concentration of an art industry like that.'

Companies including the American branch of the French Éclair Studios, the Solax Company, the Willat Film Manufacturing Company, the Peerless-World Studio and Paragon Studio had brought themselves to Fort Lee in the 1910s, and others including Victor Studios and Goldwyn Pictures were founded in Fort Lee, making it the first-ever American film town.

To stay afloat in the midst of the intense competition between studios, Dintenfass and other smaller independent studio heads joined together into the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912, which bought The Champion and kept Dintenfass on as the manager.

Pictured is a still from the restored 1912 short film Robin Hood, the earliest surviving film version of the story, which was shot in Fort Lee by Solax Studio and directed by Étienne Arnaud

One of the most frequently used sets in Fort Lee films was Rambo's Saloon, which started as a hangout for actors and crew members after a long day of filming. Its upstairs floor became the perfect place for actors' dressing rooms and because the porch could be easily arranged for different sets, the saloon itself starred in hundreds of films. Pictured is Florence Lawrence in her dressing room

Before the Champion documentary came out last year, there were two other attempts to remember the history of Fort Lee. Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee was created in 1935 by Theodore Huff and Mark A Borgatta. Before Hollywood There Was Fort Lee, NJ was created in 1964, directed by Thomas Hanlon

As the first film town, Fort Lee was a center of progress. Filming techniques and technologies were advancing and women were given empowering roles. Actress Pearl White was the star of the adventure film serial, The Perils of Pauline, which showed her riding horses and climbing the Palisades cliffs. Alice Guy-Blaché was the first female film director and studio owner of Solax, which she had built in 1912. She produced thousands of films in her career.

However, by 1918 things were changing for the film industry and Fort Lee. Because of restrictions put in place when the US joined World War I in 1917, East Coast studios would have days without electricity, which prevented them from filming without lights. Meanwhile, the constant sunshine in Hollywood meant West Coast studios didn't need constant lighting. When the influenza pandemic hit the United States in 1918, it started in the East Coast, giving studios another excuse to shut their doors – though it ended up following them west.

But one of the final problems for Fort Lee specifically was that in the winter of 1918, the Hudson River froze, cutting off the only transportation between Fort Lee and New York City: the ferry. The George Washington Bridge, which connects the two today, wasn't completed until 1931.

Koszarski says the East Coast studio owners decided to 'temporarily' close their doors and just focus on Hollywood for a while before returning, 'but then it was really easy to say, well we won't open them again', though he adds they did end up coming back, just not to Fort Lee.

'A number of the companies said, we already have studios on the West Coast and the East Coast, let's just forget about this East Coast thing. Too many problems,' he says. 'Immediately, they realized that was not a perfect solution. So as soon as the war ended, they began to build new studios in the east, but not in New Jersey, because there was no bridge to New Jersey.'

Pictured is an ad for a Goldwyn Pictures film, The Danger Game, released in 1918. Goldwyn Pictures had their studio in Fort Lee. The Danger Game, starring Madge Kennedy in the leading role, is a 'melodramatic comedy' and is included in the DVD set with the 2017 documentary The Champion

Florence Lawrence (painting left and a 1908 portrait right) was a Canadian-American actress and the first movie star. She was at the height of her fame in the 1910s, starring as the leading lady in many silent films shot in Fort Lee. She starred in almost 300 films during her career

Fort Lee stayed relatively quiet after the studios left in the 1920s, with the exception of African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who rented out Fort Lee studios in the '20s and '30s at a time when he wouldn't have been able to shoot in Hollywood. He is considered the first major African American feature filmmaker, who produced both silent and sound films.

Other than Micheaux and other independent filmmakers renting out those spaces, the abandoned industrial properties and empty studio lots remained up until the 1940s and '50s, Koszarski says, though some were used for Broadway company warehouses. Laboratories and film storage warehouses did remain in Fort Lee, fully operational and employing the residents of the borough.

'That was kind of your back office business,' Koszarski says. 'But it employed lots of people. It didn't employ fancy movie stars or directors, so it gets written out of film history.'

Another film included in The Champion documentary DVD set is The Indian Land Grab, a 1910 short Western shot in Fort Lee

The borough only really came back into the limelight in 2013 with the Bridgegate scandal where toll lanes on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge were intentionally closed by political appointees of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. But as far as film history, Fort Lee is hardly, if ever, mentioned. Part of that can be attributed to a stylistic change, Koszarski says, which happened around 1918 and made it so that films made before 1918 weren't preserved.

'The style of making films changed,' he says. 'So that films from before 1918 suddenly seemed very old and early. And films made after 1918, even though they may be silent films, still seemed to work like "real movies". So people who were stars before 1918 or directors, the careers, they just went into a black hole.'

The loss of Fort Lee's history also comes down to the fact that Hollywood was just better at promoting itself.

'Hollywood has a much more successful promotional machine,' he says. 'Hollywood had a Chamber of Commerce that promoted itself as the center of the film universe. That this is where all films are made. And they began doing that in the late teens and early '20s and as far as New York was concerned, New York, you know, would sort of look down on this as just like crazy entertainment business... And in Fort Lee, it was a residential community. They were almost happy to see these noisy industries leave. Of course they took the jobs with them. So it was very easy to write it out.'

He adds: 'And unfortunately, there's a huge amount of the product that has just vanished. We don't have it anymore so that even historians can't dig out old films.'

To stay afloat in the midst of the intense competition between studios, Dintenfass and other smaller independent studio heads joined together into the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912, which bought The Champion and kept Dintenfass on as the manager. Pictured is a Universal Set from 1912

When Tom Meyers was growing up in Fort Lee in the early 1970s, he says he and his friends used to go to Gus Becker's Saloon - what used to be Rambo's Saloon - after school. Meyers says Becker, the owner who was in his late 80s at the time, would tell them all about bartending in the 1910s when the film industry was still big in Fort Lee. Becker even had a poster of Florence Lawrence (pictured) on the wall that she had personally signed to Becker

Back in 2013 Meyers heard that Rambo's Saloon was going to be demolished, so he and the Fort Lee Film Commission, which he founded in 2000, worked with the Fort Lee Mayor and Council to prevent that from happening. They were able to arrange for the house to be turned into affordable housing for veterans and their families, while still maintaining the exterior of the building.

Around the same time, there was also word that the Champion studio had been sold and was going to be demolished. Unlike Rambo's, the Champion was in Englewood Cliffs, where the mayor and city council were less interested in preserving the space. The Champion had been sold by Universal in 1923 to a printing plant, which is what it continued to be until 2013 when it was sold and demolished.

Its demolition is what prompted the commission to create The Champion documentary based on Koszarski's 2004 book Fort Lee: The Film Town. The documentary was released in a DVD set in October, which includes the 1935 documentary about Fort Lee called Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee as well as eight silent films produced in the borough from 1910 to 1918. 

Koszarski says the documentary isn't necessarily about just the Champion Studio so much as it is about the importance of taking care of history.

'The Champion documentary is not just important because we said oh here was this studio, this rather small and even in the context of Fort Lee, insignificant studio,' he says. 'It's because the documentary is about trying to save history and reminding people that film history is not just something that comes in a can on reel, but film history also is cultural and there are physical archaeological traces around us.

'It's kind of a reminder that even for a little studio, it did have some firsts. It was probably the first one built out here and so on. I can't, and the movie doesn't, make the argument that they were making the best films, even in Fort Lee. But they were making films… but at least you had this trace, this archaeological trace and then the archaeological trace is gone.' 

After the 1920s, Fort Lee stayed relatively quiet and the closed up studios remained mostly unused with the exception of a few independent filmmakers and African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who is considered the first major African American feature filmmaker and produced both silent and sound films. He rented studios in Fort Lee in the '20s and '30s at a time when he wouldn't have been able to shoot films in Hollywood. Pictured is a still from his 1920 film The Symbol of the Unconquered

Iris Hall (pictured) starred in the silent film. This scene of the film was shot on the side of the Champion Studio (in the background). The Symbol of the Unconquered is the last time the Champion Studio is pictured in a film

For Marc Perez, the director of the documentary, a member of the Fort Lee Film Commission and someone who grew up in Fort Lee as a child, the more he worked on the film, the more passionate he was about it.

'Filmmaking is an art form,' he tells DailyMail.com. 'That's still really new when you compare it to everything else, music painting and sculpture and all these things. It's really like a baby compared to all that and I don't think people yet understand that these short films made in 1915 were a piece of art. Nobody knew what they were doing and they figured out how to tell a story with this technology, but I don't know if [people] understand that it needs to be preserved today or else the film gets disintegrated, it goes away... It's really unappreciated right now. And I think just more of this kind of stuff is needed to appreciate.'  

Despite the loss of the Champion Studio building and the years of its forgotten film history, the Meyers and the commission are working to create a space for film to have a future in Fort Lee. Back in 2001, the Fort Lee Film Commission attempted to save the historic Barrymore House, where the American acting family had lived. Though the house was demolished, the commission plans to open the Barrymore Film Center in 2019, which will have a film museum and a 260-seat cinema where they plan to showcase classic films, art house films and student films.

'We want this to be not just about Fort Lee, although that'll be the anchor,' Meyers says. 'But truly make this really a place where American cinema has a home, the history of American cinema and the future of American cinema and give that through a perspective of world cinema.

'It's going to be a lot of diverse programming and all of this really comes out of the rubble of the Champion Studio. So out of that loss, we're going to enshrine the memory of the Champion and tell that story to future generations in this film center. And we hope that'll help preserve what history has left, not only in Fort Lee, but around the country.'