From the Archives: 2798.65 Miles and One Hundred Years from Fort Lee to Hollywood USA

Recently I took my vacation and spent it on a labor of love, the story of the first woman filmmaker, Alice Guy-Blaché.  As reported in previous From the Archives pieces, Alice was born in France and was one of the first three filmmakers in France in the 1890s at Gaumont.  She came to the United States in 1910 and in 1912 she built her studio, Solax, on Lemoine Avenue here in Fort Lee and for the next several years she directed, produced and wrote hundreds of films before women in the United States had the right to vote.

For the past two years the Fort Lee Film Commission has been working with Hollywood based filmmaker Pamela Green and her colleague Jarik van Sluijs on their project, a documentary on Alice Guy-Blaché.  As I have stated many times, Madame Blaché has much significance on an international level as regards her status as a true film pioneer.  What she did while a filmmaker, a business person and a resident of Fort Lee is truly unbelievable given the time frame in which she lived and the lack of opportunity for women in almost any profession in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  So her story is not just a Fort Lee story, but also a story that should be of import to anyone interested in the history of world cinema.

I ventured west on my recent vacation, sort of Hollywood or bust as they used to say.  My trip took me from the streets of America’s first film town, Fort Lee, to the studios and back lots of the world’s most well-known film town, Hollywood USA.  I spent some time in the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as I researched through boxes of material from the early to mid 20th century following the story of another Fort Lee film pioneer, MGM superintendent Eddie Mannix, but that’s for another piece.  One of the main reasons for this trip was to meet with filmmaker Pamela Green at her studio in Hollywood.  The Fort Lee Film Commission has opened our film and photographic archive up to Pamela for her use in the production of her Alice Guy-Blaché documentary titled Be Natural.  Madame Blaché had a sign on display in her Solax Studio in Fort Lee for all to see and it read “Be Natural.”  This was her direction to all her actors and if you see her surviving films you will soon learn that her actors took this direction to heart as these films remain vibrant a century after their production.

Pamela greeted me and gave me a tour of her studio and I met her co-director of Be Natural Jarik van Sluijs.  They screened a trailer they created for this documentary that will also serve as a tool to raise the remaining funds they need for completion of this work.  Robert Redford is the Executive Producer of Be Natural.  As a rule, documentary films of this nature are labors of love and the profit margin on such films is negligible.  This work on Alice is truly one of passion on the parts of Pamela and Jarik.  While in studio they interviewed me on the importance of Alice in connection to Fort Lee.  In terms of all the film pioneers who began their careers in Fort Lee and who developed the American film industry while at work in our borough, Alice stands at the same level if not greater than pioneers such as D. W.  Griffith, Oscar Micheaux, Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Lewis Selznick and Sam Goldwyn, just to name a few.  Pamela hopes to visit Fort Lee and our museum archive this fall to tape footage and interviews as part of this documentary. I left Hollywood to return to Fort Lee with a sense of linkage between the birthplace of the American film industry and the legendary center of American film production.  Though the span of years between Alice’s work at Solax and my trip to Hollywood is at the century mark, through her surviving films and this documentary we can hope that Alice’s work will be new to the current generation of both American and international film lovers.

Please visit this link and support this documentary on Fort Lee’s Alice Guy Blache' - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/benatural/be-natural-the-untold-story-of-alice-guy-blache