Leaders All — Carl Anderson, Who Filmed Victoria’s Jubilee (1924) 🇺🇸
Leaders All — Carl Anderson
Because for over a quarter of a century he has been storing up information that will equip him for the better carrying out of the work that now lies ahead of him; because in 1897 he sensed the value of the screen as a means of conveying the big news of the day to the public and was one of the first to photograph world happenings for the benefit not only of present but future generations.
Come back with us to the early summer of 1897, in the latter part of June of that year to be exact, and listen to the story of the making of a six-reel motion picture at that time. If you ask us how long each of those reels were we will tell you they probably did not average over 100 feet!
It was nearly twenty-seven years ago that Carl Anderson, now the head of the organization bearing his name, photographed some of the outstanding events of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, the diamond one, as it was the sixtieth.
The subject very likely may claim to be the original “topical” and if not that at least the initial “multiple reeler.”
The event was photographed, developed, printed and screened in the marvelous time of two weeks.
In those days there were no controversies between producer, distributor and exhibitor. Mr. Anderson solved these difficulties or rather avoided them by performing the three functions himself. Also laboratory costs for prints were not exactly a factor in distribution, either. But one copy of the work was made.
And of course there was no such institution as an exchange to buy any extra copies.
Early in 1898 Mr. Anderson made a picture of the opening of the then famous Kiel Canal, which the equally famous Kaiser had caused to be constructed for the benefit of his navy.
He made a picture of the naval parade, which was an imposing affair, and was headed by the Kaiser and the Czar Nicholas of Russia. These were perhaps the first motion pictures of the many that were later to be taken of the ruler of Germany.
The pictures were shown to William and later on also to the young Queen Wilhelmina of Holland. There were five or six subjects in the film, each averaging about a hundred feet in length. Both were “command” performances.
As Mr. Anderson recalls the attitude of the public at that time the majority looked on the screen merely as a novelty in variety entertainment, one that would wear off soon.
It was not until producers began putting a story behind the picture that the public really became interested. Then the “nickelodeons” quickly came into existence.
Before these appeared, however, pictures as a distinct form of entertainment had been shown to the public in the United States under canvas, under what was known as “black tops,” so called because the tents were made of black material to keep out the daylight. Calcium served the purpose of illuminant.
Carl Anderson was a part of the development of the business, through the store show and the vaudeville phase to the regulation motion picture theatre.
He was assistant stage manager of Koster & Bial’s in New York, in those days nationally famous, at the time the chief attraction of the big variety house was Around the World in Eighty Minutes.
The main drawing card of the show was a boxing match between Jim Corbett, then the world’s champion, and Muldoon, “the solid man.”
When Jesse Lasky and his associates formed the Lasky Company Mr. Anderson became general manager. After the making of The Squawman and several others, perhaps four or five, Paramount was formed and the Lasky company became a part of it, Mr. Anderson continuing in the same capacity in the enlarged organization.
In the summer of 1918, shortly after the outbreak of the war, Mr. Anderson entered the service of the Government as a confidential agent of the Department of State.
It is not generally known that under his direction there was a staff of 105 persons hidden away in a downtown New York building handling matters of international importance. Here he remained until the signing of the armistice, when Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, asked him to go to Washington and organize the visual instruction section of the Bureau of Education.
When this assignment was completed, Mr. Anderson returned to New York, and shortly afterward, in 1919, became general manager of Educational Film Exchanges. He remained with this company through its period of great development into an international organization.
It was in the spring of 1923 he resigned from Educational to start the Anderson Pictures Corporation, a distributing company, the declared purpose of which is very simple — that of eliminating from the national sales quota a large amount of the overhead that is added to the actual cost of a picture in the form of home office and production overhead.
Mr. Anderson believes through his method of distribution and his alliance with the Theatre Owners Distributing Corporation he will assure the largest possible gross sales with the lowest selling expense.
“It is a matter of gratification to us that the Theatre Owners’ organization is actively interested in our success and working with us because our plans fit in with the thing that they have been planning to do for two years,” said Mr. Anderson in December.
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Collection: Exhibitors Trade Review, 19 January 1924
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