From the Archives: Project to Connect High School Students to Past Via Technology

Next week, Fort Lee High School students in the TV / Media Studies program will—along with their teacher—trek to the Fort Lee Museum at 1588 Palisade Ave. to start a project that connects the past with the present and the future. 

On the second floor of the museum, a room has been dedicated to a digital media archive, where the students will work with Fort Lee Film Commission member Marc Perez. 

Perez is a Fort Lee High School graduate who owns Sirk Productions in New York City. Sirk is a digital media company that produces both commercial and theatrical films. Their most recent film, “Severe Clear,” is about U.S. Marines in Iraq. 

We hope to access Marc’s expertise in a proposed project to have these same students use digital camcorders—purchased by Fort Lee High School via a donation from the Fort Lee Film Commission—to tape Fort Lee Board of Education public meetings and have these meetings broadcast on Time Warner Public Access as well as the BOE web site.

The Fort Lee Film Commission this year received from Time Warner Cable the entire archive of Channel 10 News. Channel 10 News broadcast both on the old Vision Cable and on Time Warner Cable for about a quarter of a century. These hour-long news broadcasts covered towns in southeast Bergen County, including Fort Lee. The hundreds of tapes shelved in the museum archive include video of events and people of great importance to Fort Lee and tell the story of our community over a roughly 25-year period.

Fort Lee High School students will be trained to convert these tapes into a digital format and make the content accessible on the Internet via the Fort Lee Film Commission’s website , the Fort Lee Historical Society’s website and others.

We also hope to make this digital archive available to local researchers, historians and the general public.

The students next week follow a long line of people in Fort Lee who handled film in archives, laboratories and studios over the past century. Fort Lee was the birthplace of the American film industry and the first American film town from approximately 1908 through 1918. 

This small town was the home to dozens of studios that employed most of the citizens of Fort Lee. Universal Studio and Keystone Studio were born in Fort Lee in 1912, and Fox followed in 1914.  The first woman filmmaker in cinema history, Alice Guy Blache, built her Solax Studio in Fort Lee in 1912. 

As these studios closed or left for Hollywood after WWI, many of the buildings were converted into film labs and film storage facilities. The old Universal on Main St. in west Fort Lee became Consolidated / Republic Pictures from 1931 through 1961, and then Bonded from 1964 through the1990s. 

The old Solax on Lemoine Ave. became Bonded Film Storage through 1964.  Numerous Fort Lee citizens worked in these facilities through the better part of the 20th century. 

Today the last film storage facility, Bonded Service, is located in the historic Brulatour building on Jane St., which was once part of the old Universal Studio lot.

Through these photos of the past, our students can claim a heritage in film as they work on preserving the past through digital film technology of the present that will enable future Fort Lee residents and students to get a glimpse into the last 25 years of the 20th century via this collection.

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