1. Charles Urban was a German-American film producer and distributor, and one of the most significant figures in British cinema before the First World War.
20 Facts About Charles Urban
1. 2.
Charles Urban was a pioneer of the documentary, educational, propaganda and scientific film, as well as being the producer of the world's first successful motion picture colour system.
3.
Charles Urban lost the sight in his left eye aged twelve after a baseball accident.
4.
Charles Urban changed his names to Charles after leaving school in 1882, then worked as a book agent across Ohio, before managing a stationery store in Detroit, Michigan.
5.
Charles Urban first entered the film industry in 1895 when he exhibited the Kinetoscope in Detroit, Michigan early in 1895.
6.
Charles Urban moved to Britain in August 1897, and became managing director of the Warwick Trading Company, where he specialised in actuality film, including newsfilm of the Anglo-Boer War.
7.
In 1904, Charles Urban made a 2,500-feet documentary film called Living London.
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William Randolph 8.
Charles Urban made fiction films, of which the most notable examples are the proto-science fiction films of Walter R Booth such as The Airship Destroyer and The Aerial Submarine.
9.
Charles Urban established Kineto Limited in 1907, primarily for the production of scientific and non-fiction films.
10.
Charles Urban had nothing to do with this film or with the Kinemacolor Company of America once he had sold the American rights to the process to the Kinemacolor Company of America.
11.
Charles Urban made his last Kinemacolor film in 1915, and the last film to feature Kinemacolor was probably, made in Japan in 1917.
12.
The process was created because Charles Urban wanted to continue showing his huge library of old Kinemacolor films.
13.
Charles Urban produced the documentary feature Britain Prepared for Wellington House, which included Kinemacolor sequences of the British fleet at Scapa Flow.
14.
Charles Urban was recruited to promote this film and other British propaganda productions in America, although he faced considerable resistance from US exhibitors who were resistant to any form of war propaganda.
15.
Charles Urban worked with the Patriotic Film Corporation, formed by William Robinson to support distribution of what had been retitled How Britain Prepared, but he ran into trouble with the British propagandists when he tried to do a deal with William Randolph Hearst's International News Service, which the British viewed as pro-German and anti-British.
16.
Charles Urban edited the classic documentary The Battle of the Somme, making the crucial decision to release the footage in feature-length form rather than as a series of short releases.
17.
Charles Urban continued to edit and promote British documentary films in America to the end of the war, editing the government newsreel Official War Review.
18.
Charles Urban formed a new business, the Kineto Company of America, in 1917.
19.
Charles Urban built a large studio at Irvington, New York, where he planned to introduce a new color film system called Kinekrom, based on the earlier Kinemacolor, and to distribute educational films on disc using the Spirograph.
20.
Charles Urban died in Brighton in 1942, at age 75, in relative obscurity.