Made in New Jersey: Films From Fort Lee' showcases the borough's film history
Ricardo Kaulessar northjersery.com Posted June 25, 2025 Link to Article
Before Hollywood became the movie capital of the world, Fort Lee held that distinction. The Bergen County borough was America's early incubator for cinema.
Now, a new Blu-ray set showcases Fort Lee's contributions to film history in the early 1900s as a prime shooting location and home to early studio incarnations of film industry stalwarts like Universal Pictures (formed out of several film companies, including the Champion Film Company) and 20th Century Studios (formerly 20th Century Fox, one half of the Fox Film Corporation).
"Made in New Jersey: Films From Fort Lee," released by Milestone Film & Video of Harrington Park through video distribution house Kino Lorber on June 24 ($35.97), features 14 films and two documentaries made in Fort Lee and across North Jersey, which is a visual history lesson of the early days of cinema. Longtime film historian Richard Koszarski, the museum curator for the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, who wrote the book "Fort Lee: The Film Town" about the borough's film past, curated the titles in the two-disc package.
Koszarski said that the Blu-ray came about because it was an opportunity for Milestone to expand upon a DVD set released in 2015 that included films made in Fort Lee in cinema's infancy, as well as a 2015 documentary about the Champion Film Company, the first film production company that made its home in Fort Lee.
The movies in this set span from 1909 with two shorts by the celebrated yet controversial director D.W. Griffith ("The Curtain Pole" and "The Cord of Life") made for Biograph Studios, to "Robin Hood" from 1912 for Eclair Studios, filmed on Linwood Avenue and Route 5 and considered the earliest surviving film version of Robin Hood, to "The Vampire," made in nearby Cliffside Park in 1913 by the Kalem Company, cited as the first film to depict a seductive female character known as femme fatale.
There's a new 4K restoration of "Cossacks in Exile" from 1939, an adaptation of an 1863 Ukrainian comic opera by independent filmmaker Edgar Ulmer, filmed at the Little Flower Monastery in Newton in Sussex County. Also, two documentaries, "Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee" from 1935 and the more recent "The Champion: A Story of America's First Film Town" from 2015, show the film studios in the Fort Lee area abandoned after moviemaking relocated to California in the early 1900s.
He said he hopes the purchasers of the compilation will learn how Fort Lee played a pivotal role in the development of the motion picture industry from 1908 to 1918, before film companies made their way to the West Coast. Koszarski cited Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures all having their start in Fort Lee.
"Those ten years may be the most important ten years in American cinema because what you see happening in those ten years is that Fort Lee becomes this incubator," Koszarski said. "It was during these ten hot years in Fort Lee that you had the creation of the American studio system."
