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It was one of the largest film production facilities in the world at the time, and the most advanced film processing plant. Between 1912 and 1921, more than 110 movies were made there, features as well as shorts, starring performers like Marie Dressler and Jacob Adler, the most famous Yiddish actor of the day.
Today, only a couple of relics survive as testament of what went on there: an old processing plant and a scenery storage building that are being renovated as office space by O'Neill Properties, the lot's current owner. The state last year placed a historic marker on the site explaining the significance of Betzwood Studio.
Also surviving are about 30 of the films.
Joseph Eckhardt, professor of history at Montgomery County Community College, has made it his business to see that the remaining films are preserved. For more than a decade, he has been in charge of a Betzwood Film Archive at the college library.
"The archive has copies of 27 Betzwood films," Eckhardt says. "Some are on 16mm, and fragments of others are on video. If the film is complete enough that we can project it, we try to get it on 16mm; if we have just one reel, we document it by having a video copy of it."
The 15th annual Betzwood Silent Film
Festival is scheduled for Friday, May 14 (at MCCC's Blue Bell Campus), and Friday,
May 21 (at the Pottstown Campus). Show time is 7:30 at both locations. This year's program will include a one-reel melodrama, Where The Road
Divided (1915); High Pockets (1919), a feature cowboy film with Louis Bennison, Betzwood's primary Western star; and a two-reel comedy, The Skipper's Narrow Escape (1920). All will be accompanied live on the organ by Don Kinnier.
Eckhardt says Betzwood movies have turned up all over the world. Breaking Home Ties, a 1921 Betzwood drama about Jewish immigrants in America, was found in a film archive in Berlin. Master negatives for two Betzwood cowboy films thought to be lost turned up in a garage in Norristown, in the original cans.
"They were in surprisingly good condition," Eckhardt says. "Sometimes you find films missing so much there's no point in trying to screen them.
"Film archives in the '90s were telling one another what they had, and films were being shipped back to the country of origin. That's when a lot of Betzwood films turned up."
Eckhardt obtained the films with money from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Montgomery County Community College Foundation and private contributions.
"One man made a contribution in memory of his aunt and uncle, who had worked at Betzwood," Eckhardt recalls.
In addition to teaching and film restoration work, Eckhardt also has penned a biography of Siegmund Lubin (1851-1923), the film pioneer who established Betzwood. A German immigrant, Lubin began as an optician, and through his interest in lenses, gradually began tinkering with the new toy of the day, motion pictures.
Lubin initially made his reputation filming "reproductions" of the 1898 Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. Between 1898 and 1912, his company made hundreds of short Westerns in what was then the wilds of Delaware County.
"By 1912, Lubin had pretty much worn out his welcome in Delaware County," Eckhardt says. "Factory workers there would become so distracted by the filming that it would cut into productivity, and owners resented it. And some people of the time didn't like seeing the actresses - 'painted women' - smoking cigarettes. Lubin also was just using the same locales over and over again."
Lubin's main studio at 20th and Indiana in North Philadelphia had no back lot for outdoor filming, so he bought the two contiguous farms that made up the Betzwood lot.
It was an area that could stand in for a lot of different locales.
"You had battlefields for Civil War pictures," Eckhardt says. "Spread a little lime over a field, add a few cactus plants and you have a desert."
One glass stage was constructed for daylight production; two others were totally enclosed and electrically lighted.
"There were sets built out in the open air," Eckhardt says. "Sometimes, they built whole towns and then burned them down.
"At one point, they built a town over an abandoned quarry for a film about a mine fire, called Through Fire to Fortune, or The Sunken Village. It was like Centralia, only here, the whole town collapsed into the ground. Unfortunately, that film doesn't survive."
The studio attracted some of the top stage talent of the day. Dressler, who became a major movie star in the early '30s, made one picture at Betzwood in 1915, Tillie's Tomato Surprise. (Only the first reel survives.) Adler, Broadway star Raymond Hitchcock, actress (and notorious femme fatale) Evelyn Nesbitt Thaw - all worked at Betzwood.
Perhaps of more enduring importance than the film production were the technical innovations created at the studio. Lubin's technicians patented camera devices and processes to polish, perforate and print film.
"In earlier days, you had to print each shot separately and employ hundreds of girls to piece the film together," Eckhardt says. "At Betzwood, they came up with a continuous printing process. A machine changed the lighting exposure so the film went out as one piece. Now you didn't need hundreds of people, and it also looked better on screen."
Betzwood's reputation as the world's most advanced film processing plant quickly spread.
In 1913, a pair of young producers named Cecil B. deMille and Samuel Goldwyn came to Betzwood in a panic. They had sunk all of their resources into a feature Western called The Squaw Man, but the film was unviewable.
Frank Haas, one of Lubin's technicians, immediately saw the problem: The film had not been perforated properly. The Lubin team repaired it, and The Squaw Man went on to become a huge success that helped establish Goldwyn and deMille in Hollwood.
"Lubin saved their butts," Eckhardt says.
Lubin soon opened other production facilities in Florida and California and had traveling film production companies in Rhode Island and Arizona. By 1915, he was spending about $30,000 a week in payroll, a hefty amount for the time.
But Lubin's empire fell even more quickly than it had risen. There were a number of factors: The outbreak of World War I eliminated his essential European market; he, Thomas Edison and other large producers had formed a joint corporation to corner all existing film patents, and the group lost a landmark anti-trust case; and Lubin simply miscalculated, producing too many short films and not enough features.
By 1916, he was bankrupt, and Drexel Bank seized Betzwood Studio. Lubin spent the remaining seven years of his life in retirement in Ventnor, N.J. True to form, at the time of his death, he was tinkering with the next wave of the future: radio.
But that wasn't the end of Betzwood Studio. It was closed for a couple of years, then was purchased by some entrepreneurs and reopened in 1918 under the management of Ira Lowry, Lubin's son-in-law. More films were made there over the next three years, including a popular series of two-reelers based on the Toonerville Trolley comic strip.
But the studio was not the operation it had been under Lubin.
"It had gone from being one of the most important studios in the world to being a backwater," Eckhardt says. "The movies had gone west by that point."
By 1921, it was all over at Betzwood.
The nature of the business takes film historians to some unlikely places - for example, Dawson City, Alaska, the last stop on a film distribution route in the days of silent movies. There, some years ago, old films were found bulldozed into a hole, including one Lubin short starring a very young Oliver Hardy.
"You never know what's going to turn up next," Eckhardt says.
The Betzwood Silent Film
Festival is scheduled for Friday, May 14, at Montgomery County Community College's Blue Bell Campus and Friday,
May 21 at the Pottstown Campus. Show time is 7:30 at both locations. Admission is $6. Call 215-641-6518.
The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer Siegmund Lubin by Joseph Eckhardt is published by Farleigh Dickinson University Press.
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