'Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood' Starts in Fort Lee

Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood is a 2011 BBC documentary series written, directed and presented by Paul Merton that aired in June on  BBC 2 in Great Britain. Merton is one of Britain’s great modern day comedians and a silent film buff since his childhood. 

Part 1 of his three-part series concentrates on the beginnings of the American film industry in New Jersey with Thomas Edison and the first film studio in the world, the Black Maria, constructed in 1893 by Edison at his West Orange, N.J. laboratory.  

I received word this week from the series producer, Kate Broome, saying says series has been a critical success and has been seen by 2 million viewers.

The Fort Lee Film Commission was contacted by Mr. Merton’s production staff in 2010 to facilitate a tour of Fort Lee where the BBC documentary production crew and Mr. Merton could shoot scenes for Part 1 of this documentary. This was a friendly British invasion, more so than the last one in Fort Lee on November 20, 1776. 

These particular Brits are all fans of early American cinema, and they were thrilled to retrace the steps of Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Roscoe Arbuckle, Oscar Micheaux and Alice Guy Blache right here on the streets of Fort Lee. The highlight of their shoot was when we guided them to cliffhanger point atop the Palisades, where movie serial queen Pearl White hung atop this very cliff in the 1918 serial House of Hate. 

Mr. Merton described the origins of the term "cliffhanger" as having been born on that very spot in Fort Lee courtesy of White and her fellow cinema pioneers.

We also directed Mr. Merton and his crew to the area of Main Street where D.W. Griffith shot his acclaimed 1912 Biograph film, The New York Hat, with Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore. 

Click here to see the film, and take note of the store exterior, which was on Main Street across from the present day Fort Lee Hardware near Gerome Avenue. Also notice the church exterior, which was St. Stephen’s Church on Washington Avenue near Fifth Street in the Coytesville section of town.

Merton is not alone among European documentarians in his visits to Fort Lee. Within the past year, a German TV documentary crew came to Fort Lee to shoot scenes for a film about Universal Studio founder and German immigrant Carl Laemmle, 100 Jahre – Die Carle Laemmle Story. Laemmle shot his first film, Hiawatha, in Fort Lee (Coytesville) in 1909 for his Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP). In 1912, he formed Universal Studios and one of his first studios for Universal still stands on a dead end street in Fort Lee (Fifth Street in Coytesville). This lonely, hidden, dead end street in Fort Lee gave rise to one of the greatest industries America ever produced – the film industry.

Film is America’s largest export, and it helps defines us as a nation. So next time you traipse the streets of your hometown, don’t be surprised if you see a crew of filmmakers trying to re-imagine what Fort Lee was like when it was  America’s first film town.

Editor's Note: The author is Executive Director of the Fort Lee Film Commission.