Jules Greenbaum was a German pioneering film producer.
16 Facts About Jules Greenbaum
1.
2.
Jules Greenbaum founded the production companies Deutsche Bioscope, Deutsche Vitascope and Greenbaum-Film and was a dominant figure in German cinema in the years before the First World War.
3.
Jules Greenbaum is known for his early experiments with sound films around twenty years before the success of The Jazz Singer made them a more established feature of cinema.
4.
Jules Greenbaum married Emma Karstein in c1887 and moved to Chicago in the United States, where his first son Georg was born 1 November 1889.
5.
On his return to Berlin in 1895 aged around 42, Jules Greenbaum moved into the newly established film business and founded Deutsche Bioscope in 1899.
6.
Jules Greenbaum acquired a camera in Amsterdam, and a cameraman, Georg Furkel.
7.
Jules Greenbaum registered a new cinema company, Bioskope-Theater GmbH, on 24 February 1908.
8.
When Jules Greenbaum left Deutsche Bioscop on 8 September 1909, the Bioskope-Theater became Deutsche Vitaskope Gmbh, releasing films under the 'Deutsche Vitascope' name.
9.
Jules Greenbaum's firm invented and used Synchroscope, which synchronised the visual picture of films with phonograph records to create a working sound and vision system.
10.
Jules Greenbaum produced a number of these sound shorts of vocal classical music, and in 1908 entered into contracts to supply the machinery to Carl Laemmle's Movie Service Company in Chicago and to another American, Charles Urban, in Britain.
11.
In January 1914 Jules Greenbaum merged his Vitascope firm with PAGU, owned by his rival Paul Davidson, in order to compete with the larger French studios who were flooding the German market with their films.
12.
Jules Greenbaum broke with Davidson's PAGU and founded Greenbaum-Film out of Vitascope.
13.
In 1916 Jules Greenbaum closed a deal with Albert Bassermann, who starred in seventeen films for Jules Greenbaum-Film by 1920.
14.
In 1919 Jules Greenbaum affiliated with Ufa, which the State had quietly established as the giant of German film industry during the war, but the deal led to a series of legal disputes and the virtual bankruptcy of Jules Greenbaum-Film.
15.
Jules Greenbaum negotiated a monopoly contract with Ufa to supply films to Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey.
16.
Jules Greenbaum lost the factory and everything else, and died in 1924 in a mental hospital aged 57.