Biograph Company
The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company was founded in 1895 in New York City and was the second-oldest movie production company in the United States. Its heyday was the era of silent film.
The company was started by nickelodeon producer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film. Dickson left Edison and joined with Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and Elias Koopman to form the American Mutoscope Company, the first company entirely devoted to film production. The firm manufactured and made films for the Mutoscope as a rival to Edison's Kinetoscope for individual "peep shows" making the company Edison's chief competitor in the nickelodeon market. In the summer of 1896 the Biograph projector was released, offering superior image quality to Edison's Vitascope projector. The company soon became a leader in the film industry with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world, including the British Mutoscope Company. In 1899 it changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and in 1909 to simply the Biograph Company.
To avoid violating Edison's motion picture patents, Biograph cameras from 1895 used a large-format film 2-23/32 inches (68mm) wide, with an image area of 2 by 2-1/2 inches, instead of Edison's 35mm format. A patent case victory in March 1902 allowed Biograph and other producers and distributors to use the less expensive 35mm format without an Edison license. Biograph offered both formats to exhibitors until 1905, when it discontinued the larger format.
Among Biograph's other accomplishments were being the first producers to film the Pope at the Vatican (1896); and the first company to shoot a movie specifically in Hollywood, D.W. Griffith's In Old California (1910).
Director D.W. Griffith joined Biograph in 1908 and helped establish many of the conventions of narrative film as well as helped the company become a major commercial success. Many early movie stars were Biograph performers including Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, and Robert Harron. Mack Sennett honed his craft as a director of comedies at Biograph.
In January of 1910, General Manger Hammer, D. W. Griffith, and Lee Dougherty traveled to Los Angeles. While the purpose of the trip was to shoot the film Ramona in authentic locations, it was also to determine the suitability of the West Coast as a place for a permanent studio. The group set up a small facility at Washington Street and Grand Avenue and spent thirteen weeks filming at various locations. Following this, Biograph sent a film crew to work on the coast each year until 1916.
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. "The Trust" as it was nicknamed, was made up of Edison, Biograph, Essanay Studios, Kalem Company, George Kleine Productions, Lubin Studios, Georges Méliès, Pathé, Selig Studios, and Vitagraph Studios, and dominated distribution through the General Film Company. The Motion Picture Patents Co. and the General Film Co. were found guilty of antitrust violation in October 1915, and dissolved.
Shielded by the Trust, Biograph had been slow to enter feature film production (its first feature, Classmates, was released in February 1914, after sixty-nine other American features had been released in 1912-1913), or to develop a marketable star system as the independent companies were doing, and after the Trust's fall, Biograph found itself behind the times. The Biograph Co. released its last new feature-length films in 1915, its last new short films in 1916, and was dissolved by 1929, having spent its later years leasing its studios to other producers.
The American Mutoscope & Biograph Company incorporated in California in 1991 is unrelated to the original company.