The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), referred to as the “Edison Trust”, which only allows its own members access to cameras and projectors that use its patents, sets up its own film exchange. This distribution company, The General Film Company, attempts to counter the flood of films being produced by the “independents”.
The noninflammable film stock that had been released by Eastman Kodak in 1909 proves to be so unsatisfactory that commercial film producers go back to using the original, very flammable Nitrate film.
D.W. Griffith, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s chief director, brings a group of actors and technicians to Los Angeles, California, for four months. While there they make 25 films for Biograph.
The huge French film company, Pathè Frères, which accounts for up to one third of the movies shown in the U.S., builds a studio in Jersey City. This New Jersey studio, Pathè-American, specializes in producing Westerns.
Formerly known as the anonymous “Biograph Girl”, Florence Lawrence begins to be mentioned by name in film promotions when she starts making films for Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP). After an extensive interview with her appears on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Sunday magazine, adoring fans mob Lawrence when she visits the city. Florence Lawrence, also known as “The Girl of a Thousand Faces” and “The IMP Girl”, becomes the first “movie star”.
A fire devastates the studios of the Vitagraph Company of America, the leading film producer in the U.S. Numerous negatives are destroyed.
Georges Méliès’s French film company, Star Film, begins to gradually collapse when his fantasy films no longer sell.
Pathè improves its “Pathècolor” process that uses a series of stencils to automatically add color tints to films.
Significant Films:
Vitagraph releases, “The Life of Moses”, a five-reel epic that is said to have cost $50,000.
The Edison Company releases an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s tale, “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus”.