Date

Event

30^th March

Harry Aitken and John R. Freuler form The Mutual Film Corporation, which heralds the beginning of the end for the MPPC’s dominance of the American film industry. The MFC is an independent exchange which handles the releases of the major independent producers such as Thanhauser, Reliance, American, Majestic, Great Northern, Eclair, Lux and Comet.

5^th April

Essanay release the comedy short Teaching a Liar a Lesson, which marks the first of more than seventy screen collaborations between Francis X. Bushman and Beverly Bayne, US cinema’s first romantic team.

30^th April

Carl Laemmle organises the merger of six independent production companies – IMP, Powers Motion Picture Co., Rex, Champion Film Co., Nestor, and New York Motion Picture Co. – to create a formidable rival to Edison’s MPPC. The new organisation is called the Universal Film Manufacturing Company.

April

Adolph Zukor, Edwin S. Porter and Joseph Engel found the Engadine Corporation to distribute French and Italian films in the US. It buys the rights to Queen Elizabeth, a four-reel picture starring Sarah Bernhardt, and changes its name to the Famous Players Company.

16^th May

Saved from the Titanic, a dramatic recreation of the disaster in which approximately 1,500 people lost their lives, is released just 31 days after the tragedy. It features Dorothy Gibson, a surviving passenger, in the lead role.

20^th May

H. A. Spanuth’s five-reel version of Oliver Twist, the first feature film made in the USA, is released.

22^nd May

Actress Helen Gardner becomes probably the first actor to form their own production company when she announces the formation of Helen Gardner Picture Players. Its first feature, in which she takes the title role, is Cleopatra.

May

Baron Lang’s Vernon Country Club opens. Located southeast of downtown Los Angeles, and featuring jazz, dancing and revue shows, it becomes known as the “birthplace of Hollywood nightlife.”  

June

The New York Motion Picture Company pulls out of the Universal merger over disputes over who should control the new company.

June

Maurice Costello wins the Popular Player Contest staged by Motion Picture Story Magazine, receiving 430,816 votes from readers. Second is E. Dolores Cassinelli (333,898) and third is Mae Hoteley (204,955).

11^th July

Actress Mae Marsh’s career receives a boost when she stars in D. W. Griffith’s Man’s Genesis in a role turned down by Mary Pickford and Blanche Sweet because it required them to show their bare legs.

12^th July

Les amours de la reine Élisabeth, starring stage legend Sarah Bernhardt, is released.

26^th July

Escape from Bondage, the first episode of the first-ever serial is released. It is the first of 12 episodes in Edison’s What Happened to Mary serial starring Mary Fuller. 

July/August

Mack Sennett leaves Biograph for a one-third share in a new comedy unit, Keystone, with independent film entrepreneurs Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann, owners of the New York Motion Picture Company.

16^th August

The Justice Department files an antitrust suit against the Motion Picture Patents Company following a complaint by exchange owner William Fox.

28^th August

Mack Sennett arrives in Los Angeles with comic actress Mabel Normand to film the first Keystone comedies at the former Bison studio in Edendale.

9^th September

19-year-old Lillian Gish and her 14-year-old sister Dorothy make their screen debuts in D. W. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy.

16^th September

Peril of the Plains, the first film directed by the Warner Brothers (directed by Sam)is released. Hardly anyone notices...

23^rd September

Mack Sennett’s Keystone Pictures Corp. releases its first two films: Cohen Collects a Debt, and The Water Nymph. Both star Sennett, Mabel Normand and Ford Sterling.

3^rd October

Sidney Olcott’s five-reel From the Manger to the Cross, starring Robert Henderson-Bland as Jesus and Gene Gauntier as the Virgin Mary is screened for an audience of clergy at Queen’s Hall in London, England. The film, which was shot in the Holy Land, will not go on general release in the States until early 1913.

15^th October

Richard III, starring Frederick Warde, the oldest surviving American feature film (and the second ever US feature) is released. Believed lost for years, a pristine print was discovered in 1996.

26^th October

The New York Motion Picture cease distributing their films through Mutual. Around the same time, Thomas H. Ince becomes producer and head of the company’s newly formed Kay-Bee unit (named after NYMPC’s founders Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann).

31^st October

Biograph release D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley, one of the first gangster pictures.

13^th November

The Count of Monte Cristo, the first film produced by Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Company, begins a two-day run in Racine, Wisconsin before it becomes the subject of litigation with Selig over a rival three-reel version. It finally goes on general release on 1^st November 1913.

5^th December

Biograph release D. W. Griffith’s The New York Hat, based on a scenario submitted by 23-year-old Anita Loos, for which she received payment of $25.

23^rd December

Keystone release the comedy short Hoffmeyer’s Legacy, considered by some to be the first of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops movies.

After they are forced to sell their exchange to the Trust’s General Film Company for $52,000, Harry Warner sends his brothers Sam to Los Angeles and Jack to San Francisco to open film exchanges.

Estimated daily cinema attendance in the USA reaches up to 5,000,000.

The first independent African American film is made. The Railroad Porter (aka The Pullman Porter) is a short comedy directed by William Foster in Chicago and financed by Henry Abbott Sengstacke of the Chicago Defender newspaper.

Bell & Howell introduce their 2709 35mm camera. By 1919, almost all films in Hollywood will be made using it.