Movies: The Business, the Studios, the Stars

The Early Business in New York.

By 1910 the movie business had been in existence for nearly a decade, concentrated in and around New York City. In 1908 the major studios formed what was essentially a trust, the Motion Picture Patents Company, under Thomas Edison, whose inventions had enabled the development of the moviemaking process. The Motion Picture Patents Company had nine production companies—Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Selig, and Lubin, as well as Pathé Frères and Méliès (American subsidiaries of French companies)—and had an exclusive agreement with Eastman Kodak, then the only manufacturer of raw film. By 1912 the trust also controlled nearly sixty film-distribution companies. Two of the first companies to operate successfully outside the trust were Carl Laemmle's Chicago-based Independent Motion Pictures Company (IMP) and the New York Motion Picture Company. During the early 1910s almost all the...

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