Hollywood wasn’t always the center of the U.S. film industry. For a handful of years in the early 20th century, the nascent industry blossomed in the small town of Fort Lee, New Jersey. This fascinating new 2-disc Blu-ray collects a vast assortment of the films produced in Fort Lee, offering a rare glimpse into the largely forgotten genesis of American film.
Buy Made in New Jersey: Films From Fort Lee Blu-rayThanks to its proximity to New York City and inexpensive real estate, Fort Lee offered a tantalizing option for filmmakers setting up studios from scratch. With no roadmap to success, the industry grew through its trial-and-error days in Fort Lee, churning out short silent films with an unfettered spirit of creativity unburdened by Hollywood’s later corporate overlords. Most of the narrative films in this collection average only 10 minutes in length, except for the half-hour Robin Hood and The Vampire. Two documentaries are also included: The Champion (2015) and Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee (1935), providing historical perspective of the town’s film heritage both a century later and a couple of decades after its peak.
The collection starts off with two early films directed by D.W. Griffith, a Fort Lee mainstay. The restorations are so good for these two that they look like modern parodies of silent films, with super clean picture quality and fluid motion, although persistent undulating waves in the first one, The Curtain Pole (1909) hint at the apparent warped condition of the origin print. From there, we move to the first filmed version of Robin Hood (1912), varying the tints of film throughout to offer added visual appeal.
Oddly, The Champion documentary appears next in sequence, serving as a jarring transition for viewers who select “play all”. It’s a fine documentary about the barely surviving traces of the studio facilities in Fort Lee as of a decade ago, but seemingly something that would normally be segregated as a bonus feature selection, or at least ordered at the end of the collection to maintain some semblance of chronology. The rest of the disc offers a batch of shorts of varying entertainment value, aside from the ambitious The Vampire (1913), at 39 minutes the longest feature on Disc One.
Disc Two is subtitled “After Hollywood”, and includes only three productions, in contrast to Disc One’s whopping collection of 13. The first, The Danger Game (1918), is the most consistently entertaining entry in the set, although it gets off to the roughest start. The opening scenes are missing, so text gets viewers up to speed before the earliest surviving scenes appear in seriously deteriorated, nitrate-damaged condition. It’s a relief when the tinted film settles into decent quality for the remainder of the hour-long feature, especially since the story is so worthwhile. When a society girl writes a gritty novel and subsequently gets slammed for having no life experience, she goes out and immerses herself in the underworld, leading to amusing misadventures in this “melodramatic comedy” starring Madge Kennedy, most famous for her later TV work as Aunt Martha in Leave It to Beaver.
Next up is the biggest oddity in the collection, a Ukranian musical filmed in Fort Lee decades after its decline. Cossacks in Exile (1939) is the only narrative feature with sound, and boasts a huge cast, impressive costumes, and the longest runtime at 84 minutes. Based on an operetta, it’s sung through for most of the film and includes English subtitles. Even long after the industry had moved west, the film proved that Fort Lee was still a viable location for film production, even if it was for a niche international market.
Rounding out the collection is the 1935 documentary that closed the book on the Fort Lee experiment, which I enjoyed even more than the 2015 effort due to its relative chronological proximity to the town’s glory days. The archival silent documentary includes abundant exterior footage, revealing what the area looked like while many of the studio facilities were still standing. Shockingly, the suburban malaise is quite evident in the throes of the Great Depression, with buildings already falling into disrepair and the area looking more like a war zone than a recently bustling hub of cinematic experimentation.
The Fort Lee studios ultimately vanished with barely any remaining trace, but played an integral role in the creation of the thriving U.S. film industry. While the films in this collection mostly serve as historical curiosities rather than masterful works of art, they’re all intriguing glimpses of how it all got started and later refined into Hollywood magic.
The Blu-ray contains an excellent booklet chock full of background details about each of the films. Also, jaunty piano accompaniment by various composers has been added to all of the silent films, providing consistently clean, engaging soundtracks to the varying image restoration levels of the films. While there are no designated bonus features, the two documentaries help to paint a vivid picture of what once was and has now faded into history.
