Alice Guy Blaché, Queen of Solax

The first woman to produce and direct her own films, and the only one ever to own her own studio, Alice Guy Blaché had been directing films in Paris since before the turn of the century. Sent to America with her husband, Herbert, to promote Gaumont’s talking film system in 1907, she saw the opportunity to launch her own production company and three years later opened the Solax studio in Flushing. As business took off, she built an impressive new Solax on Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee, which the company moved into during the summer of 1912. But even when Solax was releasing two or three films every week, this busy studio head still found time to direct most of them herself.