Fort Lee: The Film Town (1904-2004)

by Richard Koszarski

Book Overview

During the 1910s, motion pictures came to dominate every aspect of life in the suburban New Jersey community of Fort Lee. During the nickelodeon era, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Mack Sennett would ferry entire acting companies across the Hudson to pose against the Palisades. Theda Bara, "Fatty" Arbuckle, and Douglas Fairbanks worked in the rows of great greenhouse studios that sprang up in Fort Lee and the neighboring communities. Tax revenues...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 086196652X
• ISBN13: 9780861966523
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (Ips)
• Length: 362 Pages
• Weight: 1.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.7" x 9.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

BEFORE HOLLYWOOD THERE WAS FORT LEE

Fort Lee Film Commission member Richard Koszarski's book "Fort Lee: The Film Town" is the first comprehensive book on the first "film town" in America. Scholars now will be able to reference the role this New Jersey community played in American film histroy. The world's first studio was built in New Jersey - Thomas Edison's "Black Maria." America's first studio town was Fort Lee, New Jersey. This book will serve to inform scholar and general reader alike that the film industry did not go from New York to Hollywood but actually from New Jersey to New York & Hollywood.