Siegmund Lubin
Siegmund Lubin ( born April 20, 1851 in Wroclaw or Poznan, † September 11, 1923 in Ventnor City ) was an early German -American cinema pioneer.
Life
Siegmund Lubin was born in 1851 as Siegmund Lubszynski in Wroclaw or Poznan in a German - Jewish family. He studied at the University of Heidelberg where he earned a degree in ophthalmology. In 1876 he emigrated to the United States, settled in 1883 settled in Philadelphia, where he worked from 1885 at the latest as an optician. He also ran a Penny Arcade and produced projection images for the magic lantern. In 1896 he began to sell films for the company of Thomas Edison, of which he was sued in 1898 for violating its patents.
From the inventor C. Francis Jenkins in 1896, he earned his first movie camera and turned his own films. He drove his own film projectors, cameras, films, screens, phonograph, tickets and Vorführzelte for vaudeville manager and projectionist. In 1902, he invested the proceeds from his Vorführgeschäft in the first permanent Nickelodeon in Philadelphia. In the following years he founded a chain of movie theaters and thus expanded in six U.S. states. In order to maintain the operation and be able to satisfy the needs of the audience for new films, Lubin was constantly copy movies of its competitors. This business practice was accompanied by a ten-year period quarrel with Thomas Edison to copyright and patent rights, until 1908 with the forced inclusion Lubin in the Motion Picture Patents Company ( MPPC ) has been terminated.
From the sale proceeds of his cinema chain in the course of the reorganization of its film activities was established in 1909, the Lubin Manufacturing Company, the operation since 1910 in the North Philadelphia's own studios ( " Lubin Studios " ) - at that time the largest in the world. Among his specialties were actuality films, comedies and chases. The artistic and narrative development of the film at the beginning of the 1910s was Lubin indifferent; his focus was directed at the financial usability. Its market analyzes often contradicted the MPPC. He sat for a time independent Jewish film producers such as Mark Dintenfass, Harry Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille and was regarded as a prototype of the Jewish movie moguls.
In June 1914 Lubin film studios, the film archive and the recordings to numerous actuality films were destroyed by a major fire. Exacerbated the resultant economic problems of the company were further because the company by the outbreak of World War I lost access to many major foreign markets in the same year. The decline of the Lubinschen company was also due to the mediocrity of his film productions at this time. In 1917, the Lubin Manufacturing Company eventually went bankrupt. Without success Siegmund Lubin tried to get into the movie business again in the following years and worked next to it again as an optician in Philadelphia. He died in 1923 at his home in New Jersey.
Although Lubin is now largely forgotten ( also because it is only a few early silent films ), he is one of the most important American film business from the early days of the medium. For his contributions to the film industry, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (Address: 6166 Hollywood Boulevard).