Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee

The Fort Lee Film Commission won a Bergen County History Grant to produce a documentary about the Champion Studio, which up until December of 2013 was the oldest standing studio in the United States.  Built in 1910 the Champion was purchased by movie pioneer Carl Laemmle and it was the first home to Laemmle’s new Universal Studio.  It survived as a studio through the early 1920's when it was sold to be used as a printing plant.  That printing plant, operated by the same family for 80 years, was being sold in 2013 so the Fort Lee Film Commission secured a grant to produce a documentary in the hopes we could save this historic site.  The building itself, though always listed as Coytesville, was a few feet over the Fort Lee border and in Englewood Cliffs, which made it decidedly more difficult to save the structure.  On the heels of our victory in saving historic Rambo's Saloon in Fort Lee (thanks to the efforts of Councilman Armand Pohan, Mayor Sokolich and the entire Fort Lee Council and Fort Lee Housing Authority).

Before we could finish the documentary the building was razed in December of 2013.  Our concept changed from saving the building to saving film history across the nation and the world.  We hope that this documentary about the Champion Studio and the fall of all the studios in America’s first film town, Fort Lee, will help the cause of the preservation of film and also the preservation of historic film sites.  We have been able to gather the existing films shot at the Champion Studio from the Library of Congress.  In addition we will have access to the Fort Lee Film Commission archive of still photos and artifacts.  We also conducted interviews inside the Champion Studio before it was demolished and the interviewees include noted American film historian Rutgers Professor Richard Koszarski, Englewood Cliffs historian Al Wunsch III whose family built the studio building in 1910 and the former owner of the building Bill MacPhail. In addition we did off site interviews.

Among the footage we will integrate into this documentary will be that culled from an interesting short film produced in 1935 by Englewood historian Theodore Huff.  His film Ghost Town: The Story of Fort Lee was likely influenced by a series of articles by Edmund J. McCormick, which appeared in the  Bergen Evening Record in July, 1935.  Basically Huff toured the remains of the old Fort Lee studios and the town itself a decade after most of the production headed to Hollywood.  You can see some of these images from frame grabs in this article.  When viewing these photos of Fort Lee in 1935 it seems like chapter out of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.  There is no sound to this short documentary but the images speak loudly as to what happened to the birthplace of the American film industry.  We are quite fortunate to have some  historic film sites still with us here in Fort Lee and they include of course Rambo’s as well as the Brulatour Building now housing Bonded Film Storage on Jane Street.

Our documentary on the Champion Studio will  be complete within the next few weeks and we hope will premiere in competition at the September 25-28 Golden Door International Film Festival run by the Sorvino acting family in Jersey City.  At some point we will screen this doc in Fort Lee but our goal remains to have this screen at festivals across the nation and world and hopefully on TCM so in a small but important way the ghost of the Champion Studio can serve to save world cinema history in the 21st century.