New Jersey gave birth to the American film industry in the West Orange laboratory of Thomas Edison. It was there on the grounds of Edison’s lab that the Black Maria, the first movie studio in America, was built in 1893. More than a decade later, the fledgling American movie business became an industry with the building and consolidation of large movie studios, such as Universal Studios and Fox Studio, in America’s first film town, Fort Lee, New Jersey. Fort Lee was also the site of Solax, the first studio owned and operated by a woman filmmaker. The studio owner and director, Alice Guy Blaché, directed, wrote, and produced hundreds of films before women had the right to vote in America. The cliffhanger serial was also born here a century ago atop the Palisades of Fort Lee with the queen of these cliffhangers, a “Reel Jersey Girl.”
Our “Reel Jersey Girl” was born on March 4, 1889, and her name was Pearl White. Pearl, at the age of 18, joined a touring acting troupe that traveled the American Midwest. In 1910 she made her film debut for the Powers Film Company in New York. Pearl’s real fame came when she was hired by Pathé to star in the 1914 movie serial, The Perils of Pauline. This action serial, directed by Louis J. Gasnier, brought Pearl to Fort Lee for the first time. Here, she literally embodied the cliffhanger as she was dangled from the cliffs of Fort Lee’s Palisades, leaving moviegoers gasping until the next installment in which she was saved. This 20-part movie serial was also shot in Palisades Amusement Park.
Pearl continued to shoot films in Fort Lee. Perhaps her most iconic image is atop Cliffhanger Point in Fort Lee with her cameraman Arthur C. Miller, her director George B. Seitz, and her co-star Antonio Moreno in a production still from the 1918 movie serial The House of Hate. This image is the logo for the Fort Lee Film Commission. The image also appears in large form at the entrance to the film division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
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Pearl’s film career began to wane in the 1920s, when she became more interested in travel, and she actually moved to France. She had done all her own stunts as an actress, and the injuries that she suffered from began to plague her in the 1930s, when she became addicted to drugs to ease her pain.
Pearl died in 1938 at the age of 49. She is buried in the Paris suburb of Neuilly in Passy Cemetery, but her spirit is alive and well on Cliffhanger Point. Throughout her movie career, Pearl would revisit the Palisades of Fort Lee. She never made a film in Hollywood, though she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She was and is our cinematic “Reel Jersey Girl.”
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By Tom Meyers
Tom Meyers is the founder and Executive Director of the Fort Lee Film Commission as well as the Cultural & Heritage Affairs Administrator for the borough of Fort Lee. Prior to these positions Tom worked for both the NBC News and ABC News archives and is the third generation of his family involved in the film industry in Fort Lee.
Photo courtesy Fort Lee Film Commission
