12 Facts About Biograph Company

1.

Biograph Company, known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a motion picture company founded in 1895 and active until 1916.

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2.

Biograph Company was started by William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film.

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3.

Biograph Company soon became a leader in the film industry, with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world, including the British Mutoscope Co.

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4.

Biograph Company offered prints in both formats to exhibitors until 1905, when it discontinued the larger format.

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5.

Biograph Company moved in 1906 to a converted brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street near Union Square, a building that was razed in the 1960s.

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6.

Biograph Company moved again in 1913, as it entered feature-film production, to a new state-of-the-art studio on 175th Street in the Bronx.

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7.

Many early movie stars were Biograph performers, including Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Dorothy Gish, Robert Harron, Arthur V Johnson, Florence Auer, Robert G Vignola, Owen Moore, Alan Hale Sr.

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8.

Biograph Company then made the first film ever in Hollywood called In Old California, a Latino melodrama about the early days of Mexico-owned California.

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9.

Griffith and the Biograph Company troupe filmed other short movies at various locations, then traveled back to New York.

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10.

In December 1908 Biograph joined Edison in forming the Motion Picture Patents Company in an attempt to control the industry and shut out smaller producers.

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11.

Biograph Company spent the remainder of the silent era reissuing its old films, and leasing its Bronx studio to other producers.

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12.

From 1954 to 1957, Sterling Television Company distributed a package of 100 quarter-hour television shows titled Movie Museum, featuring Biograph, Edison and other early films from the vaults of the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House.

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