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Film
A burgeoning city for cinema
After the Civil War, Philadelphia was Mecca for photographic innovators and inventors. In 1870 Henry Renno Heyl created a "phasmatrope," a projector flashing still images in such swift succession that it gave the illusion of movement.
The city's preeminence in photo technology drew Eadweard Muybridge to conduct his work in motion studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 and 1885. In 1888 John Carbutt pioneered the use of celluloid as a backing for film negatives, selling this lightweight flexible film to another movie pioneer Thomas Edison in Orange, NJ.
While Edison regarded film primarily as an educational tool, it was Philadelphia optician Sigmund Lubin who presciently saw movies as technology, business, art and entertainment. America's first movie mogul developed a vertically-integrated business later imitated in Hollywood. He built motion-picture equipment, made thousands of movies - including Westerns filmed in Fairmount Park. He distributed these films internationally, owned theaters and built the first indoor/outdoor movie studio in 1911 at 11th and Indiana. Betzwood, Lubin's even larger studio near Valley Forge, built in 1915, was the inspiration for Universal Studios in Hollywood.
As the movie industry migrated to California, Lubin's empire collapsed. But Philadelphia continued to make significant contributions to Hollywood. The Virginian, the Western written by Germantown's Owen Wister, was first filmed in 1914. Germantown playwright George Kelly, Grace's uncle, saw many of his works adapted to screen, including The Show Off, filmed on location in Philadelphia in 1924. Other Philadelphia exports to Hollywood included comedian W.C. Fields and songbird Jeanette MacDonald. works adapted to screen, including The Show Off, filmed on location in Philadelphia in 1924.
In his bestseller Kitty Foyle, Haverford's Christopher Morley defined the Philadelphia story as the conflict between his blue-collar heroine and her blueblood husband. Kitty Foyle was filmed in 1940, the same year that The Philadelphia Story (with Bryn Mawr graduate Katharine Hepburn as the Main Line goddess who gets knocked off her pedestal) was released.
Centennial Summer, a Jerome Kern musical singing the achievements of the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, came out in 1946. The following year Crossfire, based on the war novel by Philadelphian Richard Brooks, was released. Writer/director Brooks drew on his experiences as a Philadelphia Record reporter in Deadline USA before making the equally influential realist dramas The Blackboard Jungle, Elmer Gantry and In Cold Blood. Also in the postwar years Grace Kelly of East Falls became a screen queen in High Noon, Rear Window and To Catch A Thief before ascending to the throne of Monaco as Princess Grace.
Another variation on the recurring theme of blue-collar and blueblood, The Young Philadelphians (1960) starred Paul Newman as the lawyer up from the working class who defends Main Line WASP Robert Vaughn. This theme was echoed in Philadelphia (1993) with Denzel Washington defending AIDS-afflicted TomHanks.
In the bicentennial year of 1976 a Philadelphia legend was born in Rocky, written by and starring Sylvester Stallone, veteran of the South Philadelphia and Kensington neighborhoods where the film was shot. This inspirational film – about the palooka who is tapped to be a stooge in a prizefight and surprises himself by going the distance – also marked the debut of the Steadicam, Philadelphian Garrett Brown's lightweight camera (an Oscar winner, like Rocky) fluidly tracked the street pug's ascent from nowheresville up to the top of the Art Museum steps, bringing unprecedented mobility to cinema.
The success of Rocky and of lightweight equipment like the Steadicam ushered in the trend of location filmmaking. The comedy Trading Places starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, the romantic drama Witness and the historical drama Beloved are among the films shot on the city streets and nearby countryside.
Also in 1976, comedienne-turned-filmmaker Elaine May (A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid) returned to her hometown to make Mikey And Nicky.
Philadelphia-born Brian De Palma (Carrie, Dressed To Kill, The Untouchables) shot the assassination thriller Blow Out starring John Travolta on location here in 1981. Susan Seidelman (Smithereens, Desperately Seeking Susan, She-Devil) made the documentary Confessions Of A Suburban Girl in her Abington neighborhood. Joe Dante, graduate of the University of the Arts, went to Hollywood to make Gremlins and Twilight Zone – The Movie. David Lynch, graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, made Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet. And Bruce Willis, pride of Penns Grove, NJ, returned to Philadelphia to score two of his biggest hits, 12 Monkeys and The Sixth Sense.
The most important Philadelphia filmmaker since Lubin is M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs), writer-director of thrillers uniquely humanist and supernatural. In his movies the walls of Philadelphia's historic houses seem to talk and the region's geography has an eerie resonance. If Lubin, showman and businessman, saw the industry he helped found decamp to California, Shyamalan is bringing film production back to the cradle of the motion-picture industry. For more information, please visit the Greater Philadelphia Film Office (www.film.org).
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