Background
He was born on April 21, 1870 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, United States, to Thomas Richard Porter, a merchant, and Mary Jane (Clark) Porter; he had three brothers and one sister.
He was born on April 21, 1870 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, United States, to Thomas Richard Porter, a merchant, and Mary Jane (Clark) Porter; he had three brothers and one sister.
He attended public schools in Connellsville and Pittsburgh.
After studies Porter worked, among other odd jobs, as an exhibition skater, a sign painter, and a telegraph operator. He was employed for a time in the electrical department of William Cramp & Sons, a Philadelphia ship and engine building company, and in 1893 enlisted in the navy as an electrician. During his three years' service he showed aptitude as an inventor of electrical devices to improve communications.
Porter entered motion picture work in 1896, the first year movies were commercially projected on large screens in the United States. He was briefly employed in New York City by Raff & Gammon, agents for the films and viewing equipment made by Thomas A. Edison, and then left to become a touring projectionist with a competing machine, Kuhn & Webster's Projectorscope. He traveled through the West Indies and South America, showing films at fairgrounds and in open fields, and later made a second tour through Canada and the United States.
Returning to New York, he worked as a projectionist and attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up a manufacturing concern for motion picture cameras and projectors. In 1899 Porter joined the Edison Company. Soon afterward he took charge of motion picture production at Edison's New York studios, operating the camera, directing the actors, and assembling the final print.
From his experience as a touring projectionist Porter knew what pleased crowds, and he began by making trick films and comedies for Edison. One of his early films was Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King, a satire made in February 1901 about the then vice-president-elect, Theodore Roosevelt.
His The Great Train Robbery was enormously popular. For several years it toured throughout the United States, and in 1905 it was the premier attraction at the first storefront nickel theatre. Its success firmly established motion pictures as commercial entertainment in the United States. After The Great Train Robbery Porter continued to try out new techniques. He presented two parallel stories in The Kleptomaniac (1905), a film of social commentary like his technically more conventional film of 1904, The Ex-Convict. In The Seven Ages (1905) he used side lighting, close-ups, and changed shots within a scene, one of the earliest examples of a filmmaker departing from the theatrical analogy of a single shot for each scene. Between 1903 and 1905 he successfully demonstrated most of the techniques that were to become the basic modes of visual communication through film. Yet he seemed to regard them only as separate experiments and never brought them together in a unified filmmaking style.
In 1909 Porter left Edison and joined with others in organizing an independent motion picture company, Rex. He also took part in launching a company to manufacture Simplex motion picture projectors. After three years with Rex, he accepted an offer from Adolph Zukor to become chief director of the new Famous Players Film Company, the first American company regularly to produce feature-length films. Porter directed the stage actor James K. Hackett in the first five-reel American film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1913), and also directed Mary Pickford and John Barrymore in feature films. But his directorial skills had not kept pace with rapid changes in motion picture art, and he left Famous Players during a reorganization in 1916. From 1917 to 1925 Porter served as president of the Precision Machine Company, manufacturers of the Simplex projectors.
After his retirement in 1925 he continued to work on his own as an inventor and designer, securing several patents for still cameras and projector devices. During the 1930's he was employed by an appliance corporation. He died at the Hotel Taft in New York City at the age of seventy-one.
He was a modest, quiet, cautious man.
Quotes from others about the person
Zukor said of Porter that "he was more an artistic mechanic than a dramatic artist, a man who liked to deal with machines better than with people. "
He married Caroline Ridinger on June 5, 1893; they had no children.