Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, 1909-1918. Q. David Bowers, foreword by Anthony Slide. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8108-3455-3. CD-ROM release 1.0 for IBM compatible PCs with Windows 3.1/95/98/2000/XP. Produced by Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc. in cooperation with the Library of Congress. More information is available at the following Web site: www.thanhouser.org/cdrom.htm.

The Thanhouser Company, founded in 1909, operated outside the control of the Edison and Biograph-dominated Motion Picture Patents Company "trust."

Promotional Poster from the CD-ROM Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, 1909-1918.

As one of the more prominent and respected independent film producers, Edwin Thanhouser released his one-reel films weekly along with those produced by Carl Laemmle (IMP and Universal), Adolph Zukor (Famous Players and Paramount), and Harry Aitken (Reliance and Majestic). Producing films in its suburban New Rochelle, New York, studio, the Thanhouser Company was a medium-sized firm well-known for its high quality films featuring dramas drawn from literature, genteel comedies and the "high class" performances of its stable of actors. However, like many other early studios, Thanhouser did not make the transition to California-based production and spectacular feature films, and it closed in 1918. With the dominance of Hollywood studios and the vagaries of what was preserved by archives and studied by academic film historians, the achievements of the Thanhouser Company were largely forgotten.

Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History by Q. David Bowers is thus a terrific resource for anyone interested in the history of American film, and in how movies produced by one early film studio commented on tensions and concerns of American culture during the Progressive Era. The project encompasses a company history of an unjustly neglected film studio, its personnel, performers, and film releases. It single-handedly rescues the Thanhouser Company from obscurity and re-establishes its importance as one of the major film producers from the late-nickelodeon era up to the First World War. Yet the Thanhouser Films CD-ROM provides so much more than a single book could; it is not only a compendium of information about the studio, its films, players, directors and producers. Through the author’s tremendous research effort, it also contains thousands of primary documents—original reviews and news articles from film trade journals and entertainment industry newspapers, advertisements and publicity releases, local newspaper stories, and items from the early fan magazines—plus more than 400 images and over 20 minutes of film clips.

"The Sleeping House of the Tribe of Ganesa." Silent film clip from Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, 1909-1918.

Volume One contains a narrative history of the studio, well over 500 pages long. Eleven chapters, each divided into 20-30 subtopics, are generously illustrated with photographs, film stills, and trade paper advertisements. Written in a non-academic yet knowledgeable popular-journalism style, Bowers’ text covers company founder Edwin Thanhouser’s early career in the theater, and the establishment and development of the Thanhouser Company film studio. It discusses the studio’s place in the expanding film business, and how the early fan magazines and movie fan culture responded to Thanhouser films and stars. It also documents the local-history context of the film studio and its personnel in New Rochelle, New York.

What makes this volume so valuable to academics and movie buffs alike are the thousands of excerpts from articles in local newspapers, the film business trade journals, and other primary sources. The author and his assistants spent hundreds of hours reading microfilm for this project, combing through all the significant entertainment trade journals of the day—Moving Picture World, the Nickelodeon, Billboard, Exhibitors Trade Review, Moving Picture News, New York Dramatic Mirror, Exhibitors Herald, Film Index, and Variety. Bowers also drew from rare studio publicity material, such as the Mutual publication Reel Life; and from the earliest fan magazines Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay.

Spectators watch filming of "The Million Dollar Mystery." From Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, 1909-1918.

Nevertheless, Bowers makes an important caveat about the reliability of film industry sources: "A challenge to the film researcher is to determine the truth. News releases issued by Thanhouser and other companies were one thing, and the truth was often likely to be another. Trade publications, careful not to offend advertisers or to criticize the film industry, usually reprinted verbatim whatever was sent to them…. In an effort to sort fact from fiction, corporation records, court documents, contemporary newspaper clippings, and other data have been particularly helpful." His extensive research in newspapers from New Rochelle, Manhattan, Jacksonville, Florida and Los Angeles added a different historical dimension: "Information concerning marriages and divorces, hirings and firings, accidents, legal actions, and, especially, anything unfavorable—the type of material that would not contribute to the image of the subject involved and thus might not find its way into Moving Picture World and other trade journals—was to be found in newspapers."

Promotional poster from Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, 1909-1918.

Bowers also located long-retired actress Muriel Ostriche, who in her 90s was one of the last surviving and most important of the Thanhouser players; in a series of interviews she contributed many first-hand recollections of days at the studio. Bowers has also written Muriel Ostriche: Princess of Silent Films (Vestal, NY: Vestal Press, 1987), the research for which inspired him to undertake the larger Thanhouser project.

The CD-ROM’s second volume, the filmography, contains entries on more than 1,000 documented Thanhouser releases. Each entry includes cast, director and producer; the text of trade paper advertisements and publicity releases; synopses and selected reviews and articles from Moving Picture World, the New York Dramatic Mirror, and many other sources. There are also detailed notes on production and cross-references to discussion of the film in the narrative history. There are clips from 33 films and illustrations from many more. The films are searchable chronologically, alphabetically, or by word.

The search function quickly moved examination of film themes far beyond the often-innocuous film titles to demonstrate that the Thanhouser Company produced hundreds of one-reel films drawn from the headlines and concerns of the Progressive Era of reform.

One view of suffrage from Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, 1909-1918.

Searches found three films on eugenics, 13 with a women’s suffrage theme, 16 involving the vote, 50 about politics, 8 on the dangers of alcohol abuse, 29 featuring reformers, 60 concerning poverty, 34 about businessmen and at least 47 about striking workers. Only four films specifically featured immigrants, which challenges the assumption that all early films addressed primarily urban immigrant audiences. On the other hand, 49 mentioned foreigners, 120 involved newspapers, 14 films dealt with vice and six (including the film Dope) were about drug abuse. So urban concerns were indeed addressed repeatedly in Thanhouser films. Thirteen films involved African-American or "Negro" themes, ranging from Brothers Equal to The Mistake of Mammy Lou. Seventeen films, made both before and after The Birth of a Nation, were set during the Civil War. Relatively few films involved cowboys (16) but 36 featured Indians. And at least two films were specifically about movie fans.

The majority of Thanhouser’s brief films dealt with human relationships; it was not surprising to find 544 entries dealing with love. There were also 56 mentions of revenge, 73 films involving murder, 78 on crime in general, and 22 films mentioned hate. Twenty-three film themes involved divorce and eight plots revolved around prejudice. Children were important to the plots of 412 films, and hundreds of entries turned up in searches for fathers, mothers and families. The Thanhouser studio output apparently leaned toward dramatic themes—searching the filmography uncovered 431 entries mentioning comedy and 758 descriptions of dramas. Some films, obviously, had elements of both. Only 63 were described as melodramas, however. Thanhouser also overwhelmingly focused on producing narrative fiction films, as the term documentary came up in only 27 entries.

Bowers writes that "Thanhouser films were as varied as the medium of motion pictures itself. On the one hand were classics—

"The Center of the Web." Silent film clip from Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, 1909-1918.

works from Shakespeare and Dickens, 19th-century novels, stage plays, the foundation stones of literature. On the other hand were comedies with improbable plots. Examples include a lover encased in a suit of armor who is unceremoniously sold to the junk man, the daughter of a prison warden whose cooking was so fine that citizens stood in line to be locked up, and a lad learning to drive an automobile around the living room and dining room of his home in order to avoid the dangers of the street."

Searches located 14 films mentioning Dickens, 27 concerning Shakespeare, 22 involving literature and 56 described as having historical themes; while not large totals, these self-consciously "high-class" films packed a prestigious punch for the studio with critics. Bowers was amused to find the range of opinion on the studio’s releases in his research: "Time and again one reviewer considered a given Thanhouser film to be just about the best ever, while another reviewer with equal conviction consigned it to the trash can."

"It wasn't long after the Thanhouser Company was established that it was considered by reviewers to be head and shoulders above other Independent firms. If one word could summarize the Thanhouser reputation during the early years it is quality," writes Bowers. "In 1913 in nationwide popularity contests held by America's two most important fan magazines, Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay Magazine, Thanhouser players [especially Florence LaBadie, Muriel Ostriche, Marguerite Snow, Mignon Anderson and future-director James Cruze] far outswept the entries of any other studio." Thanhouser’s 23-episode serial of 1914, "The Million Dollar Mystery," was the most profitable serial yet produced, earning more than a million dollars. As Bowers notes, "Clearly, in its day the Thanhouser film enterprise and its players comprised a key element of the industry."

Courtroom scene of woman with tattooed back, from Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History, 1909-1918.

Volume Three of the CD-ROM’s text contains biographic sketches of more than 1,000 people who were connected to the Thanhouser company as players, directors, producers or company personnel, and Bowers ranks them according to their prominence in the films and in studio operations. The text includes expanded entries for 22 of the most prominent Thanhouser players. This section is searchable alphabetically. A fascinating social history of a typical film studio could be written from this mass of information. An appendix lists 108 known surviving Thanhouser films and their archival sources. The CD-ROM also offers as separate browsable files the 33 film clips, 433 black and white images and 7 original posters in color.

In the view of someone who has small experience with CD-ROM technology, this project is quite well organized and user-friendly. While it is a little daunting to encounter so much text single-spaced on a computer screen, those are problems inherent in computerizing three entire book manuscripts. The creative research possibilities that the search function make possible, however, easily outweigh those minor frustrations.

This is not an academic film history, for there is no mention of the outstanding recent scholarly books on early American film history or film theory, and the author attempts no analysis of film content or acting styles. But as a good story and a resource for primary documents, it is marvelous, and it provides fodder for several dissertations and a host of journal articles. Perhaps it may also inspire work on other important but sadly neglected early studios such as Kalem and Essanay.

The Thanhouser Films CD-ROM project truly represents a labor of love for Bowers and the founder’s grandson Edwin Thanhouser, in the attention to detail and the inclusiveness of its coverage of the films, people and history of the Thanhouser Company. The Library of Congress also provided invaluable support for the project. For making all this material available in an innovative format for researchers and readers, we should be grateful to them all. Check out the Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc., Web site at www.thanhouser.org for more history, images, film clips and information about the CD-ROM and videotape collections of Thanhouser films.