page_title: Will Barker
section_title: Advancing the British film industry
hierarchical_section_title: Will Barker / Biography / Advancing the British film industry
caption_attribution_description: English: Still from motion picture: Sixty Years a Queen (1913) B&amp;W Film&#160;: Eight reels / 7500 feet Format: standard 35&#160;mm spherical 1.37:1 Director: Bert Haldane. Cast: Blanche Forsythe, Mrs. Lytton, J. Hastings Batson, Jack Brunswick, Gilbert Esmond, Fred Paul, Roy Travers, E. Story Gofton, Rolf Leslie. Will Barker Film Company production. Produced by Will Barker, Jack Smith and Ernest Shirley in association with G.B. Samuelson. Scenario by G.B. Samuelson, Arthur Shirley and Harry Engholm, from a book by Sir Herbert Maxwell.
context_page_description: William George Barker was a British film producer, director, cinematographer, and entrepreneur who took film-making in Britain from a low budget form of novel entertainment to the heights of lavishly-produced epics that were matched only by Hollywood for quality and style.
context_section_description: He then set about to improve the viewing experience of the public by popularising films which were released on a rental only basis.  The very first of these for hire only films is now considered by film buffs to be the first important British film. This is despite no copies of this production surviving.
  This film was a lavish adaptation of Henry VIII. Barker even used some of the original stage sets from Her Majesty's Theatre. He was reported to have paid Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (who was actor/manager of the before-said theatre), £1,000 for doing his interpretation of Cardinal Wolsey for the film. After being shown to record audiences, the total film stock was ceremoniously burned before the press to promote hired films as a way of ensuring the public saw only good quality stock whilst at the same time maximise his own profits by maintaining control of the prints.
  Another entrepreneur and film distributor called G.B. Samuelson, persuaded Barker to make what became another very important British film: Sixty Years a Queen (1913) about the life of Victoria. Samuelson, also heavily financed the production of this film and so further increased his fortune through its success. After Barker made his last films in the 1920s, Samuelson went on in 1924 to found the Southall Film Studio, just 4 miles (6.4 km) west in a converted aircraft hangar which stood in Gladstone Road.  Unfortunately both studios then suffered from the recession.
  He died on 6 November 1951 in Wimbledon, London.
  In 2001 and after many changes of ownership at Ealing Studios, Ealing Council approved planning permission to demolish the West Lodge as part of a major new studio development project; the original Lodge survives as studio offices.
caption: Still from Sixty Years a Queen
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