Category: Silent Films

Palo Alto Early Filmmakers

In the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge sparked the motion picture industry with is work at Leland Stanford’s stock farm in Palo Alto. His multi-camera configuration enabled him to capture sequences of images. These could be presented side-by-side on a single page to show indicate the subject’s motion.

Muybridge went on to invent the first motion picture projector. He placed the images around the edge of a circular disk through which a light would shine to project the sequence of images on a white screen.

This inspired other inventors to experiment, leading to the sprocketed film reels we know today.

Over three decades later, one motion picture company, Exactus Photo Film, set up shop in Palo Alto, California. Like Los Angeles, the climate was quite favorable to motion picture filming. That company did not succeed. It was absorbed into a second motion picture company, Palo Alto Film Company, based in Palo Alto. However, that company also did not succeed.

These are their stories.

Palo Alto Early Filmakers – Mike Forster – v1 Sept 2023Download

Edendale – The Film Years

by Mike Forster

*** News 21 September 2023: A new version of this eBook as a PDF download for US$11.99 (plus tax where applicable) is available at:

https://knowledgewise.lemonsqueezy.com

The first film studios in Los Angeles were not in Hollywood along Vine Street, Sunset Boulevard or La Brea Avenue, nor in Culver City, nor in Burbank.  The first purpose-built film studios in Los Angeles were located along Allesandro Street in the pleasant valley and the surrounding foothills known as Edendale about three miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.  Edendale is now known as Echo Park and Silver Lake, and much of Allesandro Street was renamed Glendale Boulevard in the 1920s.

This tells the stories of these early studios: Selig Polyscope, Pathé, the Norbig rental studio including Hal Roach, Bison, Keystone, Mack Sennett Comedies, Mixville, and others. The studios story starts in 1907 in downtown Los Angeles and ends with Mack Sennet moving from Edendale to Studio City in 1928. 

This story emphasizes the studios, filming locations, creativity, production advances, and participant experiences at the Edendale studios … to give the reader a feel for what it was like to produce silent motion pictures from 1907 into the 1920s. It also touches on the Pacific Electric Edendale and Glendale-Burbank trolley car lines, remnants of the Edendale studios, and growth occurring in and around Edendale during these decades.

408 pages: over 210 pages of narrative followed by over 190 pages of research notes and references; over 170 figures including photographs, maps, tables, and sketches, and over 700 reference links that touch on over 1500 individual page references.

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