But The Great Dictator wasn't a silent movie! Goebbels, btw, considered it "dangerously well-made, you've got to grant that to the Jew".
I said that photo "reminded" me about the Vitagraph Film Company and that Chaplin had a house here, not that The Great Dictator was shot here. But you will probably find the last line of the below summation about the upcoming film interesting, Uwe.
Most people do not realize that New York was the original location of the U.S. film industry and that Hollywood not the film industry there did not exist until 1910 and still did not pass New York as the film industry center until 1915....mainly because all the Hollywood based companies were trying to hide their illegal use of Thomas Edison's filmaking equipment patents and Edison was based in NYC area. So, Hollywood was largely founded to commit patent infringement. (The climate was also better than NYC to shoot year round and the longer hours of sunlight better for the early film stock that needed more light.)
A guy I know is actually in pre-production on a film series on the history of Vitagraph:
"When Long Island Was Hollywood: The Forgotten Story of the Famous Vitagraph Company of America.
The film will tell the story of two poor uneducated English immigrants, Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton who stumbled onto the ground floor of the movie business while seeking new technology to incorporate into their second-rate vaudeville act. That technology came in the form of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. Albert E. Smith, also a self-taught machinist, converted the Kinetoscope into a camera and in 1896, the Vitagraph Company was formed.
From its studios in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the Vitagraph Company of America, using the American eagle as its logo, became omnipresent not only in America, but throughout the world. It had the most impressive distribution of any early movie studio in American cinema. With the assistance of a third partner, financial backer and fellow Englishman, William “Pop” Rock, Vitagraph became the cornerstone of the movie industry and a powerful force in the creation and shaping of American cinema.
By the time Vitagraph sold to the fledgling Warner Bros. in 1925, it existed for twenty-nine years, outlasting all it’s early competitors and acquiring Lubin, Selig, and Essanay. By then the movie business was the fourth largest industry in the world, with Vitagraph as the only movie studio owned by Christians in a Jewish dominated industry."
