Charles Pathé — The Rise of Pathé (1916) 🇺🇸
Charles Pathé — The Romance of a Great Business
Great businesses do not, like the dragon’s teeth of mythology, spring into life fully equipped and formidable in the panoply of might. Rather are they the slow evolution of a big idea in the mind of a genius to which has been brought the propelling force of vigorous personalities, strong wills and generally a high standard of commercial ethics.
In all the history of business there is no more remarkable growth than that shown by the motion picture industry. Realizing that today it is the fifth in importance of all the great businesses of the United States, it is hard for one to reconcile himself to the fact that some twenty years ago there was no picture business — merely an idea, that drama, opera and comedy sat all powerful and apparently inviolate on the throne of the speaking stage, and that the man who would have prophesied that they must yield supremacy to the long rolls of celluloid film and the flashing of rays of light upon a snowy screen would have been looked upon as a fool or a dreamer. But genius gives vision or the sons of men would today be living the life of the troglodytes of past ages. Let us then concede that the pioneers of the world’s greatest amusement were geniuses and men of vision.
The photodramas we see today are built upon no greater romance than the rise of the house of Pathé, the great international business with factories, studios and selling organizations in all parts of the globe, yet only about twenty years ago it was founded by four brothers who each contributed his whole capital of 2,300 francs apiece — less than $500 for each, and less than $2,000 for all, and after only three weeks two of them, horrified by their own rashness, withdrew, taking their money with them. Today Èmile [Émile Pathé] and Charles Pathé, the two to whom was given vision and who remained, are drawing $100,000 apiece per year in salaries alone, besides their great profits from the business.
Harking back to those early days we find Charles Pathé with two of those primitive machines where one was privileged by depositing a coin to see a succession of tiny photos tumbling over one another, and giving the effect of life action. The original idea had been our own Edison’s [Thomas A. Edison], and Mr. Pathé was the one man in Europe to recognize that there was the germ of great things. In a tiny store he placed these machines on view and quickly saw that it was profitable. There were no changes of program in these machines — and but one picture to each. Mr. Pathé saw that to make his patrons come back again and again it was necessary to provide new pictures. Then and there was born the modern film exchange idea, for he purchased twenty machines, placed them in twenty different towns, and switched his pictures in weekly rotation.
From his profits he secured Lumière’s [Louis Lumière | Auguste Lumière] motion picture camera, then just completed, and began to take his own pictures, ten or fifteen feet at a time. His wife feeding chickens, a railroad train entering a station, a man running, sheep grazing; these were his early subjects.
The idea of projecting these strips of film onto a screen helped the infant industry tremendously. Mr. Pathé took his fragmentary films in his pockets to London, Berlin, Rome, traveling third class because of his limited means and sold them there. Gradually his films lengthened and his markets increased, but for some time he was his own cameraman, shipping clerk, manufacturer, salesman and demonstrator.
One day the idea came to him that a story could be worked out upon the screen — that such film stories would possess a wider appeal than the bare facts of everyday life which he had been filming. He hired Max Linder, then an actor limp of purse, at $4 a day to work in comedies, and Louis J. Gasnier, a stage manager and play producer of Paris, to direct the taking of these pictures. Here was born the photoplay of today, and from this beginning have come the Cabirias, The Births of a Nation, etc., with their universal appeal and gripping power. Max Linder, still considered by many critics the greatest comedian of the screen, up to the time of the war was drawing $70,000 per year, a colossal figure for France. Louis J. Gasnier, the first Pathé director, is today general manager and vice-president of the vast Pathé American interests.
A wise man has said we cannot stand still — we must either progress or deteriorate. The house of Pathé through all the years has not retreated, but has consistently kept at the head of the procession. The one-room factory of twenty years ago today is represented by a 14,000,000 franc factory in Joinville, France, with sisters in Montreuil, and other places; by others in England and the United States; the open air platform where the first plays were staged was the ancestor of huge modern studios in France, the United States, England and India; the selling force of one man who carried his tiny films in his pocket is today represented by scores of offices and exchanges in all parts of the world, there being nearly forty in the United States alone; the news film which even today in the face of wide competition is associated in the minds of most people with the “Pathé Weekly,” the first to be made, has a lusty family in the Pathé News in the United States, the Pathé Gazette in Great Britain, the Pathé Journal in France, the Pathé Giornale in Italy, and another with an unpronounceable name in Russia.
It is truly good for one’s own inspiration’s sake when looking at a Pathé Gold Rooster Play, the name by which the best films of the Pathé product are known, to remember the busy man who was not too busy to have vision, tramping the broad highways with his camera some twenty years ago!
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Lubin to Offer “Souls in Bondage”
Nance O’Neil, the celebrated international star, is hard at work on the multiple reel feature Souls in Bondage and is enthusiastic in her praise of the story. Souls in Bondage is an original story written for the screen by Daniel Carson Goodman, author of The Gods of Fate and is being produced by Edgar Lewis, whose masterful work on The Great Divide stamps him as one of the best directors in the country.
Souls in Bondage was chosen by Miss O’Neil as the story best suited to exploit the talents for which she is known the world over. It is a “sex drama” in five acts, and runs the gamut of emotion. Much could be said on this wonderful subject, but Miss O’Neil and Mr. Goodman prefer it to be a surprise for the patrons of the motion picture theaters. Sufficient to say that, upon its release early in January, Nance O’Neil will add fresh laurels to those already won. It is suggested to the exhibitors, by the Lubin Manufacturing Company, that they get busy at once on the booking of this feature of excellence.
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Triangle Hires a Railroad
It is common enough in the West for film companies to lease sections of railroad laid on “the sand,” but in the East the leasing of busy, stone ballasted tracks for play purposes is somewhat of a rarity. John Emerson, the Triangle director, and Douglas Fairbanks [Douglas Fairbanks Sr.] did the unusual stunt the other day when they hired the branch of the Lackawanna Railroad that runs through Dover, N. J., for the filming of the railroad scenes in the coming Triangle-Fine Arts play His Picture in the Papers. The plot called for an attack on the train by crooks, Mr. Fairbanks’s fight with them, and the blowing up of a freight car by dynamite. All traffic was suspended for three hours.
Collection: Motography Magazine, January 1916