John KampfeFort Lee, Home, Movie History, New Jersey Movies

Part 1 of a 5-Part Series

Fort Lee was Hollywood before Hollywood became Hollywood.

Yes, that busy gateway to New Jersey sitting atop the Palisades in Bergen County was the original capital of the film industry. Before there were ribbons of highways converging on the George Washington Bridge, before there were imposing high rises towering above the Hudson River, there were studios resembling oversized greenhouses dotting the town’s landscape.

Fort Lee was birthplace of movie studios that are still churning out films today on the West Coast. Several stars of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” during the first half of the 20th Century got their starts in Fort Lee. The first female and African American filmmakers? Yup, they plied their crafts in Fort Lee.

“We had 17 studios up here employing everyone in town,” noted Tom Meyers, Executive Director of the Fort Lee Film Commission. “We were the first American film town, the ‘birthplace of the motion picture industry’ we say. Studios like Universal, Goldwyn and Fox were born here.”

What was it that made Fort Lee so attractive?

“The simplest reason is location,” Meyers explained. “Fort Lee was close to Broadway and the actors and actresses who performed there. Another reason was other towns didn’t like actors and fast-talking production people.

“Fort Lee was a resort community,” Meyers noted. “After the Civil War, hotels and resorts were built and folks would come over from New York City to vacation here because of the cool breezes on the top of the Palisades. Fort Lee residents worked at those hotels and resorts.

“Then Palisades Amusement Park opened so by the time the movie industry came, the residents were used to that environment and wanted to make a buck,” Meyers said. “Fort Lee wanted the movie people in here and when the first movie studios started to go up in 1910, people from Fort Lee were employed.”

The first movie studios began to spring up in Fort Lee in 1910 although filmmakers already had been using the area as a movie location for numbers of years.

“Fort Lee had a very rural main street, and open areas and meadows where (filmmakers) could shoot westerns,” Meyers explained. “In one angle they could shoot a scene involving a cliff and then turn the camera in the opposite direction to film a generic-looking main street that could fit in several different time periods.”

There was a smattering of small studios in New York City. But for exterior scenes filmmakers hauled their equipment with actors in tow across the Hudson via the ferry. Then they would transfer to wagons for the trip up the steep, rural roads to the top of the Palisades and Fort Lee.

An entire movie generally would be shot in one day, according to Richard Koszarski’s anthology, Fort Lee: The Film Town. Of course, the movie was usually just a single reel (about 10 minutes in length per brittanica.com) in those early days.

Before the studios came along, a Civil War era hotel/tavern called Rambo’s located on what is now First Street in the Coytesville section of town served as a base of operations for the movie makers. Remarkably the building still stands.

“On the upper floor of the small hotel were the rooms where the actors dressed,” according to a 1935 history of the film industry in Fort Lee originally published by the Bergen Evening Record and reprinted in Koszarski’s book. “In the rear yard tables were set up for the companies to eat; here knights and ladies sat with Indians under the shade of apple trees that sided the tables.”

Rambo’s also found its way into many movies, as detailed by another media account — a 1974 story published in the Hudson Dispatch — included in Fort Lee: The Film Town.

“Many a pair of cowboys stepped out the front door of Rambo’s saloon and squared off on the dusty road for a shoot-out,” Dispatch reporter Lawrence Vianello wrote. “It was also the place where the stage coach picked up passengers and reported the hold up to the sheriff. Within a stone’s throw stood a tree where each day at least one bad man finished hanging from a rope.”

It wouldn’t be long before filmmakers went all-in on the Jersey side of the Hudson.

Next: The studios come to Fort Lee