Brooklyn Bookbeat: Margo Donohue investigates Brooklyn on the big screen
Her new book ‘Filmed in Brooklyn’ chronicles the borough’s rich cinematic history
Despite what you may think, the birthplace of America’s major motion picture industry is not Los Angeles – it’s Brooklyn. In 1907, before the first studio opened in Hollywood, the most prolific film production company was located in Midwood and went by the name of Vitagraph Studios (after Thomas Edison’s Vitaphone — the world’s first film projector).
Today, over 115 years later, a giant smokestack with the word VITAGRAPH marked down the side is still visible at 1277 East 15th Street in Brooklyn, at the site of the original studio where now a high-end apartment complex stands. This standing artifact; this link between the past and the present is what Margo Donohue’s latest book Filmed in Brooklyn is all about.
Over the course of ten chapters, Donohue dexterously weaves us through the different neighborhoods and their cameos in the movies we’ve come to know and love. It’s a heartfelt journey that lays plain the vast possibilities Brooklyn has held for filmmakers since the art form’s inception, bolstered by historical images and archives (the Brooklyn Daily Eagle itself is cited consistently).