Out With a Moving Picture Machine

Abstract

Although Vitagraph had already acquired land in Brooklyn for a large new studio, they would not move into that facility until the following year. The interiors of this film (given here as Escaped from Sing Sing) were shot on the roof of the Morton Building, 110-116 Nassau Street, in lower Manhattan. Exteriors were filmed in Bronx Park, the location of the Bronx Zoo and Botanical Garden. This was one of the first films made by Vitagraph after they resumed production in 1905, and there is an interesting tension between a new desire for corporate publicity and an existing tradition of filmmaker anonymity. The numerous frame enlargements accompanying the original piece were each carefully labelled as copyright by the Vitagraph Corporation of America. Within the body of the text, however, the word vitagraph appears only in lower case, referring to the camera, and no studio personnel are identified by name. Even the featured actor, Paul Panzer, is only identified by his surname (Panzer, who had already appeared in films for Edison, would be a Vitagraph stock company regular for the next six years). Inset illustrations do show two different cameramen at work; one looks very much like J. Stuart Blackton, the other may or may not be Albert E. Smith. Author Theodore Waters implies that the stage manager on this film was distinct from the camera operator, but fails to identify him. According to Charles Musser, G.M. Broncho Billy Anderson was directing for Vitagraph at this time. Would his presence account for the narrative's remarkable similarity to The Great Train Robbery, a film Anderson had appeared in for Edison two years earlier? Indeed, he chase plot of that film seems merely to have been grafted onto the beginning of Escape from Sing Sing, a 1903 Biograph film taken from a current theatrical melodrama.