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FAQ: Auditorium ProgramsAmerican audiences once supported thousands of local nickelodeons, moving picture entertainments found everywhere from urban business districts to villages and seaside resorts. The one-reel farces and melodramas that fueled this explosion were often imported directly from Paris. Pathé Frères dominated the market but the Société Française des Films et Cinématographes Éclair found a way to establish a foothold of its own. If Pathé opened a film lab in New Jersey, Éclair would go one better, and in 1911 broke ground for the first motion picture studio in Fort Lee—the opening shot in a French invasion. Richard Koszarski, author of Fort Lee, the Film Town discusses the impact of these French studios and introduces two Fort Lee films, Robin Hood and Alias Jimmy Valentine.
Centennial Screening
Introduction by Richard Koszarski
Andrew Simpson, piano
Éclair's 1912 production of Robin Hood, a half-hour epic inspired by the once-popular Reginald de Koven operetta, has recently been restored with all its original color tints by the Fort Lee Film Commission. (Étienne Arnaud, 1912, 35 mm, 35 minutes)
Introduction by Richard Koszarski
Andrew Simpson, piano
Hoping to expand production to feature-length films, the Éclair company sent director Maurice Tourneur from Paris to Fort Lee in 1914. Over the next four years Tourneur and his associates would make 30 features, combining the style and sensibility of French production with the energy and local color of the Americans. One of their finest was Alias Jimmy Valentine, a brilliantly photographed crime thriller based on an O. Henry short story. This was the first of Jimmy Valentine's many filmed adventures but the only one so noticeably in the tradition of Fantômas, Judex, and the other great French crime serials. (Maurice Tourneur, 1915, 35 mm, 50 minutes)