page_title: Lubin Manufacturing Company
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lubin Manufacturing Company / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Editing film at the Lubin film studio in Philadelphia, 1914
context_page_description: The Lubin Manufacturing Company was an American motion picture production company that produced silent films from 1896 to 1916. Lubin films were distributed with a Liberty Bell trademark.
context_section_description: The Lubin Manufacturing Company was formed in 1902 and incorporated in 1909 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Siegmund Lubin. The company was the offspring of Lubin's film equipment and film distribution and production business, which began in 1896.
  Siegmund Lubin, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, was originally an optical and photography expert in Philadelphia but became intrigued with Thomas Edison's motion picture camera and saw the potential in selling similar equipment as well as in making films. Known as "Pop" Lubin, he constructed his own combined camera/projector he called a "Cineograph" and his lower price and marketing know-how brought reasonable success. In 1897 Lubin began making films for commercial release, notably Meet Me at the Fountain in 1904. Certain his business could prosper, the following year he rented low-cost space on the roof of a building in Philadelphia's business district. He exhibited his new equipment at the 1899 National Export Exposition in Philadelphia and the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
  The insatiable appetite of the American public for motion picture entertainment saw Lubin's film company undergo enormous growth. Aided by French-born writer and poet Hugh Antoine d'Arcy, who served as the studio's publicity manager, in 1910 Siegmund Lubin built a state of the art studio on the corner of Indiana Avenue and Twentieth Street in Philadelphia that became known as "Lubinville." At the time, it was one of the most modern studios in the world, complete with a huge artificially lit stage, editing rooms, laboratories, and workshops. The facility allowed several film productions to be undertaken simultaneously. The Lubin Manufacturing Company expanded production beyond Philadelphia, with facilities at 750 Riverside Avenue in Jacksonville, Florida, Los Angeles, and then in Coronado, California. In 1912, Lubin purchased a 350-acre (1.4 km²) estate in Betzwood, in what was then rural countryside in the northwest outskirts of Philadelphia and converted the property into a studio and film lot. That same year, director and actor Romaine Fielding traveled out to Prescott, Arizona with cast and crew and set up offices at 712 Western Avenue and an outdoor stage for shooting interiors behind Mercy Hospital (now the site of Prescott College. He filmed approximately a dozen movies there before moving to Tucson, Arizona, where he directed another 60 or so silent short films. William Duncan and Selig Polyscope Company took over the Prescott facility.
  Some of the pioneer actors who worked for Lubin included Romaine Fielding, Ed Genung, Harry Myers, Florence Hackett, Alan Hale, Arthur V. Johnson, Lottie Briscoe, Florence Lawrence, Ethel Clayton, Gladys Brockwell, Edwin Carewe, Ormi Hawley, Rosemary Theby, Betty Brice, Alice Mann and Pearl White. Lubin films also marked the first film appearance of Oliver Hardy, who started working at Lubin's Jacksonville, Florida studio in 1913. Hardy's first onscreen appearance was in the 1914 movie, Outwitting Dad where he was billed as O. N. Hardy. In many of his later films at Lubin, he was billed as “Babe Hardy.” He was most often cast as “the heavy” or the villain and had roles in comedy shorts, appearing in some 50 short one-reeler films at Lubin by 1915.
caption: “A Corner of the Assembling and Joining Room at the Philadelphia Studio of the Lubin Company”, The Photoplay Author, 1914
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