American Cinematographer - March 1989 - 47

Opposite page:
Horsley's Centaur
Studio in Bayonne,

item, Sea Waves, caused the front

row to bolt in panic.
Soon the movies told stories. Edwin Porter's

The Great Train

Robbery, with its landmark editing and
smoking gun finale, was shot in rural New
Jersey in 1903. (The film sits on an odd historical
throne. Actually, like so many other motion picture
events, it was a casual and intuitive development.)
There were more than trees growing in
Brooklyn. In 1900, J. Stuart Blackton and Alfred E.
Smith began cranking out one-reelers at their Vitagraph Studio on East 14th Street and Avenue M, even¬
tually canning prehistoric versions of Black Beauty, The
Life of Moses and Captain Blood, and made do with
unstable weather on the "backlots" of Sheepshead Bay,
Coney Island and Queens.
Even the bookmakers caught on. Addie Kessel ditched his betting sheets when he found Fred
Balshofer idly filming Brooklyn street scenes. They

1907. Left: David

hand-tinted

Horsley.

shook hands with another bookie, Charles Bauman,
and

organized "Kay-Bee." One early effort, Davy

Crockett, featured Balshofer firing buckshot at a wolf¬
skin rug in the wilds of Flatbush. Sufficiently pleased
by this, they renamed themselves Bison Life Motion
Pictures and settles in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1908,
they set up a parent outfit, The New York Motion
Picture Company, on 14th Street/Union Square, and
released one-reelers through their brands Bison, KayAmerican

Mutoscope & Biograph had been
operating on the roof of the Hackett-Carhart Building
at 841 Broadway since 1896, with a revolving stage to
follow sunlight, and relocated to a brownstone at 11
East 14th Street in 1903, where new Cooper-Hewitt
mercury vapor lamps were installed for the first time.
Edison and Biograph soon invaded the Bronx, a conve¬
niently rural area only a nickel subway ride from their
downtown offices. And

it went.

Like distant

pollen spores, the movies gradu¬
ally began to light upon California turf. In Los Angeles
in 1902, Charles Tally opened his Electric Theater, a
"picture parlor" of peepshows and projection holes
seating 200. (At Tally's, one could see New York in a
Blizzard and Melies' A Trip to the Moon.) The Miles
Brothers opened film exchanges in San Francisco and
Los Angeles. Filmmaking followed suit, based on unctious claims by the Chamber of Commerce that "Cali¬
fornia had 350 sunny days a year."
In 1907, director Francis Boggs arrived in Los
Angeles with cameraman Thomas Persons and a Chi¬
cago crew to shoot locations for Selig-Polyscope's The
Count of Monte Cristo. So appealing was the climate,
Boggs megaphoned The Power and the Sultan considered the first dramatic film made entirely in
California
on a vacant lot next to a Chinese
laundry
on Olive and Seventh. He
urged William Selig to leave
Chicago and go west, which he did, and in 1908 set up
-

studio in Edendale, now the Echo Park area of Los

Angeles. (Boggs was reportedly shot to death by a
Japanese gardner who could not deal with the racket of
the camera crew. Selig was wounded but lived. Wel¬
come

March 1989

California.)

Despite the flurried activity, Hollywood
voted

Bee, and Bronco.

separate district of Los Angeles in 1910 - was
still somnolent, virgin territory. There were no tripods
a

planted in the soil, no cowboys and Indians galavanting through the flora. If anyone was to blame for
thrusting Hollywood into the film business, try a hardboiled, one-armed man from Bayonne, New Jersey:
David Horsley, Hollywood's first picturemaker.
The son of a blacksmith, Horsley was born on
March 11, 1873 in West Stanley, a small coal mine
village in Durham County, England. On January 18,
1884, on his way to buy meal for his father's prize pig,
he was struck by the locomotive of a coal train. Three
fingers were severed on the rails, causing his left hand
to be amputated two inches below the elbow.
The family moved to America. They arrived
at Old Castle Garden, the emigrant landing station in
New York, on October 17,1884 and settled in Bayonne,
New Jersey. There, the boy worked as a timekeeper at
the Tidewater Oil Works until the bicycle craze
emerged. Oblivious to his disability, he built twowheelers made to order, and even did his own

enameling.
chased

In 1903, at age thirty, David Horsley pur¬
lot in Bayonne and installed six pool tables in a

one-story building. The venture did well until 1907
when

a national economic
slump hit rock-bottom.
"Horsley's Pool Parlor',' a Runyonesque hangout for
cigar-chomping politicos, dissolved in the crucible.
(The economy had been seeking its level since the
was stilled when U.S. Steel financier J.P.
Morgan organized a posse of Wall Street bankers and
virtually saved the reserves in the U.S. Treasury by
buying $65 million worth of gold backed by his
corporation.)

1890's. Panic

American

Cinematographer

American Cinematographer - March 1989

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 1989