Kalem Company

In 1907, Samuel Long and Frank J. Marion, needing finance and a distribution network for their proposed new movie studio, approached George Kleine, the forty-three-year-old owner of a Chicago-based optical company. Long was the superintendent of American Mutoscope and Biograph’s Hoboken factory, and Marion worked as the studio’s sales manager and occasional screenwriter. Both men knew Kleine through their work for Biograph, whose films he had distributed since 1903. Kleine agreed to join their new venture, and despite his larger financial investment, each partner had a one-third stake.

The studio operated out of a loft building on 24^th Street in New York. It released its first one-reel film, A Runaway Sleighbelle directed by Sidney Olcott, in February 1907. Olcott, one of the new company’s first employees, was another Biograph defector and would become Kalem’s chief director for the next six years. He churned out simple, low-budget shorts at a hectic pace, which saw Kalem clear a weekly profit of $5,000 in 1908. By the end of the year, the studio was important enough to be included as a founding member of the Motion Picture Patents Company.

Another of the studio’s early recruits was the actress and screenwriter Gene Gauntier. She recalled that, “They secured a floor in a loft building at 131 W. 24^th Street, partitioned off a small room dividing it into two offices, installed the simplest of laboratories in the rear and were ready for business. It was all very primitive and looked as if a slight shove might push apart the walls. No provision had been made for a studio.”

 In 1907, she wrote the scenario for Kalem’s adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur. Unfortunately, the studio neglected to obtain the rights to the book. Subsequent litigation resulted in the film’s withdrawal and the studio receiving a fine of $25,000 plus court costs in 1911.

In December 1908, the studio established a permanent winter film studio in Jacksonville, Florida, to escape the harsh New York weather. Twenty-six other companies filmed there in the silent era, making Jacksonville the ‘Winter Film Capital of the World.’ Kalem eventually stopped visiting after setting up in California. Its first tiny studio out West was situated in the backyard of a drugstore on Orange and Broadway in Glendale. Within a year, as part of a planned expansion programme, the studio moved to a more suitable location in Verdugo Canyon. It opened a second studio in Santa Monica in 1911 and maintained both sites until it bought the old Essanay property in 1913.

The studio became noted for the quality of its cinematography. In February 1909, Moving Picture World noted that, “Photographically, the Kalem Company’s films are some of the grandest I have seen…The Kalem work is technically so very beautiful in its photography…”

In 1910, Kalem became the first American studio to film overseas when Olcott and Gauntier led a crew to Ireland to make The Lad from Old Ireland and other films. It was a journey they would repeat several times between 1910 and 1915, earning their unit the nickname of the O’Kalems.

Olcott and Gauntier travelled even further afield in 1912, venturing to the Holy Land, where they filmed From the Manger to the Cross, an epic religious feature chronicling the life of Jesus. Seen as controversial by some, the film resulted in the formation of the British Board of Film Censors in the UK. Angered by Marion’s refusal to allow them to be credited on the film or to receive a raise following its enormous success, both Olcott and Gauntier left Kalem.

The following year, the studio appeared to move towards producing features with the release of George Melford’s three-reel western The Invaders (1913), starring Carlyle Blackwell and Marin Sais. However, following the death of Kalem’s president, Samuel Long, in 1915, Frank Marion announced that, “long pictures… tie up a lot of money… We will keep Kalem going [only] as long as short pictures last, and then we’ll quit.” The ailing MPPC shared his philosophy on feature production—and this view would contribute to the failure of both organisations long before the decade was over.

In November 1914, Kalem released the first episode of its monumental 119-chapter serial The Hazards of Helen, in which Helen Holmes, directed by her husband, J. P. McGowan, played a plucky telegrapher encountering a new perilous situation each week. Most of the episodes were self-contained, so it was more of a series than a serial, but it nevertheless proved influential within the genre. Helen Gibson replaced Holmes after forty-eight episodes, and Kalem followed it up with The Ventures of Marguerite (1915).

Another success during Kalem’s later years was the ‘Ham and Bud’ series of comic shorts starring Lloyd Hamilton and Bud Duncan. Beginning in March 1915, the popular comic duo made over one hundred shorts for the studio over the next two years.

By late 1915, most of Kalem’s biggest stars had left the studio, and it began re-issuing old Alice Joyce and Carlyle Blackwell one-reelers. Samuel Long, the studio’s president, died on 18^th July 1915 and was replaced by Marion, with William Wright becoming secretary and treasurer. Both men were fatally out of touch with popular taste. In early 1917, Moving Picture World wrote of the studio, “Its determination to stick to the short-length pictures that are the logical kind for the smaller theatres to exhibit, is based upon carefully tabulated statistics which prove, to Kalem’s satisfaction, that one and two reel features are as necessary to the industry as films of greater length.”

In 1917, Vitagraph bought out Kalem and all its properties, while the newly formed Creation Films purchased the company’s New Jersey studio. Creation used the studio for storing props in the four years preceding a fire on 9^th December 1921 that destroyed three of its five buildings. 

Sources: Early American Cinema, Anthony Slide; Continued Next Week: A History of the Moving Picture Serial, Kalton C. Lahue; Bound and Gagged: The Story of the Silent Serials, Kalton C. Lahue; American Film Studios: An Historical Encyclopedia, Gene Fernel.