Background
James Blackton was born on January 5, 1875, in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, the only child of Henry and Jessie (Stuart) Blackton. His father, a carriage maker, soon deserted the family; his mother remarried and had a second son.
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James Blackton was born on January 5, 1875, in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, the only child of Henry and Jessie (Stuart) Blackton. His father, a carriage maker, soon deserted the family; his mother remarried and had a second son.
Young Blackton attended Eton House Collegiate School. He also took night classes at the City College of New York.
For several years James worked as a carpenter, until his artistic talent brought him other jobs. In 1896, while employed as a reporter and illustrator by the New York World, Blackton was sent to interview the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, soon after the first public showing of motion pictures by means of Edison's new projector. Edison, whose studio was turning out short films for the new medium, photographed the young reporter drawing "lightning sketches" with chalk in a kind of performance that Blackton had been giving to clubs and other audiences in company with Ronald Reader, a "prestidigitateur, " and Albert E. Smith, an "illusionist. " Soon afterward Blackton and Smith purchased a Projecting Kinetoscope from Edison and began to exhibit motion pictures. Smith then transformed the projector into a camera, and the two young men began to make their own films. Their first "posed" film, as Smith described it in his diary, was The Burglar on the Roof, produced in 1897, with Blackton as the burglar. This, like the other pictures of their first few years, lasted only one minute. It was designed to take advantage of their studio, the open roof of a building on Nassau Street in New York. Another important early film of Blackton and Smith was Tearing Down the Spanish Flag, made in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Not content to manufacture war news in the studio, Blackton and Smith went to Cuba to photograph the war at first hand. The close-up shots that Blackton made for their newsreels antedate by some ten years D. W. Griffith's development of the close-up as a standard element of the dramatic film.
When Blackton and Smith began to make films, they called their enterprise the Vitagraph Company of America. In 1900 they incorporated the company, with William T. ("Pop") Rock as a third shareholder. Blackton was vice-president and the artistic leader of Vitagraph. Originally one of the industry's leading directors as well as a cameraman, as Vitagraph grew he began to relinquish the direction of some of his films to others and developed the position of supervisor (or "producer, " in the later language of the industry), in which he could guide the course of several films simultaneously. His The Haunted Hotel (1906) is said to have been the first film employing single-frame animation, a kind of trick photography. He is also reported to have made the first animated cartoon for theatrical projection and to have been the first to use dialogue in subtitles. In 1909 Blackton produced the first films of feature length, Les MisÏrables in four reels and The Life of Moses in five; these were not shown as single features, however, but in installments, at the rate of one reel a week.
Before America's entry into the First World War, Blackton made several films to advocate American preparedness, the most publicized being The Battle Cry of Peace (1915). Most of the early films of the Vitagraph Company were made in Brooklyn, where in 1903 Blackton, Smith, and Rock located its first studio. In 1911 they established a studio in Hollywood as well, though Blackton remained in the East at this time. Fond of boating, he became commodore of the Atlantic Yacht Club (1912 - 1917) and adopted the title in his business life. He was the first president of the Motion Picture Board of Trade of America, organized in 1915.
Blackton resigned from Vitagraph in 1917 to accept a contract as producer and director with the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. This arrangement lasted only briefly, however, and he next went to his native England to produce films, among them The Glorious Adventure (1921) and The Virgin Queen (1923). The first was among the earliest feature films to be photographed in color. In 1923 Blackton returned to Vitagraph, which was then operating chiefly in Hollywood, as a producer; he remained with the company until it was sold to Warner Brothers in 1925. Blackton prospered with the rise of Vitagraph, but lost his fortune in ill-advised real estate and other investments and was declared bankrupt in 1931. During the depression he was appointed the director of a federal relief film project in Hollywood. He died in Los Angeles in 1941, of injuries received in an automobile accident; following cremation, his ashes were placed in a crypt in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.
James Blackton is considered a father of American animation. He was one of the first filmmakers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation, and was the first to bring many classic plays and books to the screen. As a leader in the early film industry, Blackton helped organize in 1908-1909 the Motion Picture Patents Company, a trust of the holders of patents on equipment used in the making and projection of films. In 1910 he founded Motion Picture Magazine, the first magazine designed for film fans; though it was initially conceived as a means of publicizing Vitagraph pictures, popular enthusiasm soon forced it to broaden its scope.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Blackton was married four times: in 1897 to Isabelle Mabel MacArthur, by whom he had two children, James Stuart and Marian Constance; in 1908, following a divorce, to the actress Paula Dean (Pauline Hillburn), by whom he had two children, Violet Virginia and Charles Stuart; on January 31, 1931, two years after his second wife's death, to Dr. Helen R. Stahle, a Los Angeles orthodontist, who died in 1933; and, on October 17, 1936, to Mrs. Evangeline Russell de Rippeteau, a film actress known professionally as Evangeline Russell.
