1. Ramsaye, Million and One Nights , p. 492; Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Actophone , no. 5-105, C.C.S.D.N.Y., filed 24 December 1909, NjBaFAR. Edison was granted a preliminary injunction in this case on 12 January 1910.

2. "The Inception of the 'Black Top,'" MPW , 15 July 1916, p. 368.

3. MPW , 30 July 1910, p. 239.

4. Balshofer and Miller, One Reel a Week , pp. 43-53.

5. NYDM , 18 June 1910, p. 20.

6. NYDM , 14 September 1910, p. 34.

7. NYDM , 28 September 1910, p. 31, and 5 October 1910, p. 32.

8. Again, Defender executives may have referred to World Film Company negatives in order to throw MPPCo detectives off the track. Moreover, it is hard to imagine Swanson and Engel investing scarce funds in a new studio when Porter was performing so poorly in one he had just built. The mystery is deepened by Budd Schulberg ( Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince [New York: Stein & Day, 1981], p. 15) who reports that Porter handed a copy of the scenario for The Schoolmarm's Ride for Life to his father, Benjamin Schulberg, suggesting that he was its producer.

9. NYDM , 15 March 1911, p. 34.

10. MPW , 16 December 1911, p. 968.

11. MPW , 4 March 1911, p. 463.

12. NYDM , 22 February 1911, p. 32.

13. NYDM , 8 March 1911, p. 32. Porter's tendency to recycle subjects is evident in the Rex releases, but not in those for Defender, yet another argument against Porter's responsibility for the earlier company's productions.

14. NYDM , 15 March 1911, p. 34.

15. "Rex Company Success," NYDM , 23 August 1911, p. 20.

16. A print of Fate survives at the George Eastman House.

17. "Too Near the Camera," MPW , 25 March 1911, pp. 633-34.

18. "The Rex Director," MPW , 24 February 1912, p. 674.

19. MPW , 27 January 1912, p. 269.

20. The film-related activities of the Edison Manufacturing Company shifted to Thomas A. Edison, Inc. in mid 1911, placing various Edison-owned business ventures under the umbrella of a single corporation.

21. Kinetogram , 1 November 1910, p. 2; 1 August 1911, p. 15; and 15 September 1912, p. 17.

22. Kinetogram , 1 March 1910, p. 2.

23. "Dawley Goes West," Kinetogram , 1 August 1912, pp. 14 and 16.

24. Horace Plimpton to Frank L. Dyer, 24 April 1912, NjWOE.

25. To meet overseas demand in this period, the Edison Company made two negatives and shipped one overseas.

26. Kinetogram , 1 October 1912, p. 4.

27. Stephen Bush, "Queen Elizabeth," MPW , 3 August 1912, p. 428.

28. "Observations by Our Man About Town," MPW , 26 October 1912, p. 326.

29. "E. S. Porter Resigns from Universal," MPW , 2 November 1912, p. 441.

30. American Film Institute Data Base.

31. James O'Neill v. General Film Company , New York Supreme Court, County of New York, filed 18 November 1912, NNNCC-Ar. The James O'Neill character plays a key role in Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night . The play is set in August 1912, immediately before O'Neill made The Count of Monte Cristo .

32. Adolph Zukor with Dale Kramer, The Public Is Never Wrong (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1953), p. 84.

33. MPW , 1 March 1913, p. 871.

34. New York World , 19 February 1913, p. 7.

35. MPW , 1 March 1913, p. 871.

36. MPW , 12 April 1913, p. 124.

37. "With the Film Men," NYDM , 4 December 1912, p. 31; see Schulberg, Moving Pictures , for a loving, witty portrait of B. P. Schulberg and his association with Porter at Famous Players.

38. "Laura Sawyer Joins Famous Players," MPW , 30 August 1913, p. 465.

39. "'A Good Little Devil' Shown," MPW , 26 July 1913, p. 407.

40. "Mrs. Fiske as Tess," NYDM , 10 September 1913, p. 28; J. Searle Dawley, manuscript, CLAc.

41. "'Little Mary' in Fine Role," NYDM , 17 September 1913, p. 28.

42. New York Telegraph , 16 November 1913, p. 3E; Dawley also claimed directing credit for Caprice —suggesting the continuation of his collaboration with Porter.

43. "Famous Players Co. Makes Innovation," Pittsburgh Post , 10 August 1913, p. 4B.

44. The exhibition of this latter film, however, was restricted for a time as the issue of rights was challenged in the courts ("Injunction Against 'In Bishop's Carriage,'" New York Telegraph , 21 September 1913, p. 1E).

45. "Mary Pickford with Famous Players," MPW , 29 November 1913, p. 1015; New York Telegraph , 23 November 1913, p. 2E. She left for California shortly after attending the opening of Caprice , at which she was mobbed ("Little Mary Receives Ovation While at Hamilton Theatre," New York Telegraph , 16 November 1913, p. 3E). The star had been ill.

46. MPW , 21 February 1914, p. 927; Variety , 20 February 1914, p. 23.

47. NYDM , 25 March 1914, p. 34.

48. MPW , 3 April 1914, p. 40.

49. Zukor, Public Is Never Wrong , p. 110.

50. MPW , 20 December 1913, pp. 1374-5; "Famous Players Sign Ford, Stanhope, Morange," New York Telegraph , 7 December 1913, p. 1E. Hugh Ford had been the stage director for Israel Zangwill's hit play, The Melting Pot (1909).

51. NYDM , 23 December 1914, p. 32.

52. "The Eternal City," NYDM , 6 January 1915, p. 26.

53. "Evolution of the Motion Picture," MPW , 11 July 1914, p. 206.

54. Zukor, Public Is Never Wrong , p. 120.

55. "Porter Sells Famous Players Holdings," MPW , 20 November 1915, p. 1468; "Zukor Buys Out Porter," Variety , 19 November 1915, p. 21.

56. Cassady, "Monopoly in Motion Picture Production and Distribution: 1908-1915," 325-40; Michael Conant, Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 18-21.

57. W. L. Eckert to Edison, 16 February 1915, NjWOE.

58. L. W. McChesney to Wilson, Maxwell, and L. C. McChesney, 23 October 1914, NjWOE.

59. McChesney to Plimpton, 23 October 1914, NjWOE.

60. Although My Friend from India (August 1914), a special, 3½-reel feature distributed by the General Film Company, cost a modest $5,548 to produce, one year later it had yet to yield a profit. Perhaps this helps to explain the delayed shift to features.

61. Stephen B. Mambert, financial executive memorandum no. 3324, 20 November 1915, NjWOE.

62. L. W. McChesney to Charles Wilson, 17 March 1915, NjWOE.

63. L. W. McChesney to Messers Ridgely, Collins, McGlynn, Wright, Ridgwell, Louis, Turbett & George, 9 December 1915, NjWOE.

64. L. W. McChesney, report of recent activities of Motion Picture Division, 5 December 1916, NjWOE.

65. Ben Singer, "Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope," Film History 2 (1988): 37-69.

66. "At Last the 'Talkies' Are Before the Public," New York World , 18 February 1913, p. 6.

67. Miller Reese Hutchinson to Thomas Edison, 25 July 1913, NjWOE.

68. Rosalind Rogoff, "Edison's Dream: A Brief History of the Kinetophone," Cinema Journal 15 (Spring 1976): 58-68.

69. L. W. McChesney to J. W. Farrell, 11 May 1916, NjWOE.

70. MPW , 15 July 1911, p. 1.

71. "Stereoscopic Films Shown," NYDM , 16 June 1915, p. 21.

72. Dawley, manuscript, CLAc.

73. For example by reading and "correcting" Terry Ramsaye's manuscript for A Million and One Nights .

74. Porter file, NN; Jack Spears, "Edwin S. Porter," Films in Review , June-July 1970: 351-54.

75. Stan Brakhage represents personal cinema at its most extreme. Sayles writes, directs, and edits his own films; Emile de Antonio frequently declares that he makes every cut on his films and that the editor is "just a pair of hands."

76. A number of scholars have explored the relationship between early cinema and the avant-garde, particularly in terms of representation. See Miriam Hansen, "Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema," October 46 (1988): 179-98; Noel Burch, "Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach," in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 483-506; Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space of Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film," in Fell, ed., Film Before Griffith , pp. 335-66 and "The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,'' Wide Angle 8, no. 3/4 (1986): 63-70.

77. For such reasons, independent or avant-garde filmmaking has contributed extensively to our understanding of early film form. It is safe to say that without the "experimental" cinema of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, historians would still find it difficult to recognize early cinema's otherwise unfamiliar representational practices for what they were—something quite different than a simplified, rudimentary precursor of a natural, universal "film language."