Edison Versus Biograph: the Remaking of Personal

Remaking a popular American film was the counterpart to duping foreign productions. Since 1896 the Kinetograph Department had intermittently pursued this practice. Now, in August and September, it remade Biograph's two biggest hits: Personal , which was retitled How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns (photographed August 1904) and The Escaped Lunatic , which became Maniac Chase (September 1904). Culminating with these two features, the Kinetograph Department's legal piracy destroyed Biograph's structure of exhibition and sales. Ironically, it was precisely this two-tiered structure, of initial distribution on Biograph's circuit and subsequent sales to non-Biograph exhibitors, that made these remakes so profitable for Edison.

Waters' Kinetograph Company, American Vitagraph, and Biograph were locked in a business struggle for domination of vaudeville exhibition in the east. All three companies had exclusive films for their circuits. While Biograph generally withheld its films from independent exhibitors long after (in some cases nine months after) their first appearance on its programs, Percival Waters had no such advantage. Although occasionally commissioning a specific subject, Waters usually had to make do with the first Edison print to be sold. His exclusives varied from several days to two weeks.^[128] To compensate, Waters began to rent films to theaters and train their electricians to run a projector (which Waters was happy to sell them). He could rent a reel of film for approximately $25 a week, while the Biograph and Vitagraph services, which still included a projector and operator, were almost twice as expensive. The reel of film had become the commodity.^[129] The Kinetograph Company was no longer an exhibition service but a renter, a distributor. Waters' money-saving offer, however, was not adequate inducement for many vaudeville managers to switch suppliers: they wanted first-run hits like Biograph's Personal .

Personal is a comedy about a Frenchman who tries to arrange a rendezvous at Grant's Tomb with prospective American brides by placing an ad in the New York Herald's personal column. Besieged by a large crowd of American working-class women, he panics and makes his escape. The chase scenes that follow are essentially the same: the Frenchman runs toward and past the camera with the women in pursuit. Variation in each scene is created by a different obstacle the pursuers have to overcome—a stream, a fence, a ditch, and so forth. The denouement comes with the European hiding in the bushes, only to be discovered by a "determined Diana" with a gun.^[130] The film's none too subtle lampooning of the fashionable marriages between impoverished European noblemen and the daughters of rich Americans accounted for its immense popularity.

After Waters tried unsuccessfully to purchase a copy of Personal , he induced

the Edison Company to make a comparable version. For Waters the business maneuver had its desired effect: Biograph, which promoted Personal as an exclusive, was embarrassed. According to Waters: "Keith opened a theatre in Cleveland and used the Biograph film as one of his principal attractions and advertised that no one else could exhibit this film, but a rival theatre got one of the Edison films and exhibited it much to Keith's chagrin. Keith evidently went to the Biograph Company and raised a rumpus."^[131] In July of the following year, Keith's circuit permanently abandoned Biograph for the Kinetograph Company.^[132] Biograph's exhibition circuit did not survive the blow.

The Edison Company made a handsome profit on its remake. How a French Nobleman. . . was on the market before the original Biograph production and, according to Waters, exhibitors often considered Porter's film superior.^[133] In the end, How a French Nobleman. . . was the most successful Edison headliner in 1904, selling eighty-five complete prints during 1904-5. The eventual addition of the Keith circuit to Waters' list of customers also meant the Kinetograph Company was in a position to buy more Edison films in the future.

The Edison remake forced Biograph to put Personal on the market at a reduced price. To recoup its losses and prevent similar remakes in the future, the company also initiated a suit for copyright infringement against the Edison Co. and claimed damages of $3,000.^[134] Edison lawyers defended the legality of the remake on several levels. First they pointed out that their client had not made a dupe and so had not violated the copyright in a narrow sense. Second, they argued that a photograph's content was not copyrightable and that Biograph had failed to copyright its pantomime as a dramatic production, placing the story in the public domain. (After the court case, Biograph would copyright its productions twice—as photographs and as dramas.) Looking for a loophole, Edison lawyers also argued that Personal had been photographed from several different camera positions and on several different strips of film; therefore, Biograph's single copyright offered inadequate protection for what were in fact several different series of photographs.^[135] If the court had accepted this argument, it would have invalidated most of Edison's copyrights as well. As a precaution, the inventor thus started to copyright new productions one scene at a time.^[136]

Edison lawyers also suggested that the idea for the film had come from a comic strip. An actress working at both Biograph and Edison had seen a copy of such a strip lying on the desk of Biograph's production chief, Wallace McCutcheon. "We have not as yet been able to get any clue as to the comic paper from which the idea was obtained by McCutcheon," wrote Delos Holden to Edison's lawyer Melville Church, "but this may not matter much as I shall endeavor to make the statement in the Porter affidavit so positive as to throw the burden on the defendant to produce the publication."^[137] According to Edison lawyers, the question was over two different interpretations of a story

[Full Size]

Porter's remake of Personal. In a new opening scene, his French nobleman 
preens for the mirror. For the next, the filmmaker used the same location as 
Biograph—Grant's Tomb—as women pursue their male quarry.

that did not originate with either party. Therefore, they slanted Porter's deposition to emphasize the artistic differences between the two productions.^[138] Although several of these arguments were ignored by the judge, Edison won the case in the lower courts and again on appeal because Biograph had failed to copyright the film as a dramatic production. When the Kinetograph Department followed How a French Nobleman. . . with Maniac Chase , Edison's rival finally recognized that it would have to offer its films for sale soon after they were first shown.

By mid October 1904 Edison's policy of duping and remaking the films of his competitors was no longer profitable. His company had to take the risk of investing in original productions, and its output for the second half of its 1904 business year reflected the demand for "feature" story films and acknowledged increasing competition from Biograph and Pathé. Edison sales records for the August 1904-February 1905 period yield the statistics in table 3. The commercial importance of staged/acted films is obvious (even exaggerated in this instance, since there were no major news films to boost actuality sales). Feature

acted films had become the Kinetograph Department's principal source of income. A statistical analysis for the 1904-6 period shows a steady relationship between actuality and fiction films in terms of negative production and prints sold (see table 4).

Film historians have tried to pinpoint the moment when narrative acted "features" of approximately 500 to 1,000 feet in length began to dominate the cinema. Robert C. Allen, for instance, has located the shift in 1907 and ties it to the need for greater control over the rate of production. He argues that "the spurt in narrative film production cannot be attributed to a sudden drop in public interest in the documentary film," but occurred despite it.^[139] Allen and others have relied on raw quantitative data of titles copyrighted to reach this

conclusion. This methodological approach has a fundamental weakness, which tables 3 and 4 demonstrate. Quantification by subject titles offers little insight into what spectators are likely to be watching. Furthermore, during 1905 and 1906, the bulk of print sales for actualities came from three major news events: Roosevelt's inauguration, the Russo-Japanese Peace Conference, and the San Francisco earthquake. In many cases, no prints of an actuality subject were sold. Except for a few comparatively rare events of national import, the public had generally lost interest in nonfiction subjects.^[140]

From the summer of 1904 onward, acted headliners were made in substantial quantities and consistently outsold actualities. Excepting occasional "hits," actuality material continued to be manufactured primarily because (1) local news footage was desired by vaudeville houses renting films from the Kinetograph Company and it was considered expedient to accommodate them; and (2) such films were so inexpensive to make that a small profit could be gained on a local subject if two or more prints were sold. The shift to acted "features" was not, as Allen has suggested, a result of the nickelodeon era but a precondition for it. Significantly, story films became the dominant industry product just as the rental of films was replacing the letting of an exhibition service to the theaters. Both were key preconditions for the nickelodeon era.