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Health & Fitness

From the Archives: A Main Street Marquee and a Mogul – Fort Lee and the MGM Connection

Fort Lee's Metro Theatre on Main Street and the MGM Connection

This past week we at the Fort Lee Film Commission and Fort Lee Historical Society discovered a photo we had never seen before and it one quite interesting.  Thanks to Shawn Kelly we have a new slant on our Main Street history. 

Shawn is a member of the Facebook site we created this past year Coytesville Coytesvillers. This is an offshoot of the popular face book page I Grew Up in Fort Lee. We felt that there was such a mountain of history rolling in from the previous site that it might be wise to add a site dedicated to the northern section of Fort Lee, that being Coytesville. 

Shawn’s roots in Coytesville go back to the mid 19th century and his family albums are a treasure trove of material about the entire borough of Fort Lee.  Shawn’s grandfather was Fort Lee Police Captain John Flynn and thus the photo of a parade of police officers up Main Street just north of Center Avenue circa the 1930’s. 

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This photo is of great interest in and of itself as the buildings in the photo mostly survive today with some changes of course. You can see a small A&P grocery store adjacent to the Cozy Corner soda shop. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s we knew the Cozy Corner as “Pickles”.  

But for me the “find” in this photo is attached to the front of what today is the Main Street entrance to the Parisienne Bakery at 250 Main Street. This same building was constructed in 1919 and built as the Fort Lee Theater. It was the first movie theater in Fort Lee constructed to serve specifically as a movie theatre, as the previous and first theatre in Fort Lee was further east on Main Street in a converted storefront. 

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The Fort Lee Theatre had a storied history and is listed as operating as a theater through 1951. The Fort Lee VFW eventually purchased the building and the VFW still operates out of the building except for the storefront on Main Street, which is a bakery. According to Fort Lee VFW Commander Jim Viola, the Fort Lee Theatre name changed in the 1930s to the Metro. This was to honor a Fort Lee boy who made good in Hollywood,  Eddie Mannix. 

Eddie, from 1924 through his death in 1963, was the Superintendent/General Manager of the MGM  Studio in Culver City, California. Thus, the theater in Fort Lee honored Eddie by naming the theater after the studio he spent most of his career at as a top executive.

Eddie’s story is one worthy of a film itself. We at the Fort Lee Film Commission are compiling a history of Eddie and part of that history is a collection of photos donated to the film commission by members of the Mannix family who visited Fort Lee a few years ago. 

This is the foundation of our growing Mannix collection and we hope to compile enough information to write a book about this colorful Fort Lee character. Eddie’s family owned a wonderful house where the present day Fort Lee Library sits today. Eddie was a rascal as a youth and born in 1891 he was a teenager when nearby Palisades Amusement Park hit its stride. 

In 1910 two brothers, Nick and Joe Schenck, purchased the park. They took this park and turned it into one of the greatest amusement parks in the nation. In 1913, they built the world’s largest outdoor salt-water swimming pool that had a beach and a wave machine. The Mannix story at the park starts when a gang of young men he led was pilfering items from the park. The Schencks, being great businessmen, didn’t deign to involve the local police – what they did was bring the leader of the gang to their office and offer him a job at the park. Thus, Eddie was hired and the problem was solved for no items were stolen from the park from that point onward.

The Schencks took a liking to Eddie and Eddie eventually handled the books for the park. By 1916, when Joe Schenck opened a movie studio in nearby Manhattan he brought Eddie along to help manage the studio. The star of that studio was ex-Keystone comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. 

Arbuckle, while at Schenck’s New York studio met another comedian, young Buster Keaton and it was here at Schenck’s studio that Buster Keaton started his career in film. Roscoe would come to Palisades Amusement Park to shoot his 1917 film A Reckless Romeo and Buster Keaton is listed in the credits but no surviving elements of the film include Keaton. 

Other films to shoot at the park include the historic movie serial The Perils of Pauline starring Cliffhanger queen Pearl White. 

Marcus Loew was a business partner of the Schencks and he formed Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studio in 1924 with Nick Schenck as his right hand man. After Marcus Loew’s death in 1927 Schenck became President of Loews/MGM. When MGM formed in 1924, Loew placed Louis B. Mayer as head of MGM studio productions in California. Loew and Schenck however didn’t trust Mayer so they quickly sent Eddie Mannix out to MGM to become General Manager of the studio and second in command to Louis B. Mayer. 

What happened next is a twist - though Louis B. Mayer hated Nick Schenck he grew very found of the tough talking Irishman from Fort Lee, Eddie Mannix,  and they became fast friends.

There is much more to tell about Eddie that needs more room than this column will allow, thus the book. But the photos included in this archives piece will give you an indication of the power of Mr. Mannix out in Hollywood. One thing should be said, he never forgot Fort Lee and returned here on a regular basis to visit family and friends, of which my grandmother Carrie Viola was one. 

Eddie also always made sure any serviceman who came to the MGM gates during World War II and indicated they were from Fort Lee would be brought onto the lot and treated like a celebrity. I won’t get into the matter of Eddie and Superman…if you don’t know that story look it up or see the 2006 film Hollywoodland where Eddie is portrayed by actor Bob Hoskins, who physically resembles Eddie.

I will end with a story told by legendary MGM screenwriter and producer Sam Marx. When asked during an interview for the documentary MGM When the Lion Roars about Eddie Mannix, Sam smiled, leaned into the camera and said “There are two kinds of tough, Hollywood tough and Jersey tough and Eddie was Jersey tough, like a benevolent Police Chief of the studio lot until you crossed him then watch out."  

So as you view this photo of the long gone movie marquee on Main Street, think of the reach our borough of Fort Lee had in old Hollywood thanks to Eddie Mannix.

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