The studio that taught cinema how to tell a story.
Over two decades the Biograph Company released more than three thousand short films and twelve features. It launched Hollywood, named the first movie star, and built the vocabulary every motion picture has used since.
- 1895
The American Mutoscope Company is incorporated
On December 30, 1895, William Kennedy Dickson — the inventor who had built Thomas Edison's first motion-picture camera — joins Herman Casler, Harry Marvin and Elias Koopman to incorporate the American Mutoscope Company in New Jersey. To avoid Edison's patents, they design a camera using a 68 mm large-format film and friction feed: four times the image area of Edison's 35 mm.
- 1896
The Biograph projector
In the summer of 1896 the company releases the Biograph projector. Its image quality is so far above Edison's Vitascope that within months Biograph becomes the leading film exhibitor in the country. The first studio sits on the rooftop of 841 Broadway at 13th Street in Manhattan — a stage mounted on circular rails so it can be rotated into the sun.
- 1899
American Mutoscope and Biograph Company
The company is renamed to reflect both halves of its business: peep-show flip-cards on the Mutoscope, and projected pictures from the Biograph. By the turn of the century it has distribution and production subsidiaries around the world, from London to Paris.
- 1906
First all-artificial-light studio
Biograph moves to a converted brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street, near Union Square. It is the first movie studio in the world to abandon sunlight altogether and rely entirely on artificial light.
- 1908
D. W. Griffith joins as director
A failing writer-actor named David Wark Griffith is given the director's chair after head director Wallace McCutcheon falls ill. His first picture, The Adventures of Dollie, is released that summer. Over the next five years Griffith will direct over 450 short films for Biograph, codifying the cross-cut, the flashback, the close-up, the fade — the grammar of cinema itself.
- 1909
The Biograph Girl
A teenage Canadian actress named Gladys Smith — soon to be known as Mary Pickford — debuts at the studio. Audiences, who do not yet know her name, simply call her The Biograph Girl. Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Lionel Barrymore, Mabel Normand, Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh and Mack Sennett will all pass through the company's stages.
- 1910
In Old California — the first film shot in Hollywood
Griffith and the Biograph troupe travel west to scout California. They fall in love with a small floral village outside Los Angeles called Hollywood, and there shoot In Old California — the first motion picture ever made in the town that would become the capital of the medium. Other studios follow within a year.
- 1913
The Bronx studio. Griffith departs.
Biograph opens a state-of-the-art facility on East 175th Street in the Bronx, designed for feature production. But the company's leadership resists Griffith's ambitions for longer pictures and onscreen credit. In October he leaves, taking his cameraman Billy Bitzer and most of the Biograph stock company with him.
- 1916
The lights go dark
Without Griffith — and without the Motion Picture Patents Co. trust that had shielded it — Biograph cannot match the new independent studios racing ahead in California. It releases its final new short film in 1916 and spends the rest of the silent era reissuing its catalogue and leasing the Bronx stages to other producers.
- MMXXVI
Return
One hundred and thirty years after the first reel turned, the Biograph Company reopens. Not as a museum, not as a tribute — but as a working studio, picking up the line of work that began on a Manhattan rooftop in 1895.
To William Kennedy Dickson, who built the camera. To D. W. Griffith, who taught it to speak. To Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, who gave it a face. And to the four hundred and sixty pictures the Film Preservation Society is restoring, one frame at a time.
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