Griffith in Fort Lee

Although he was already spending half the year in California by 1912, D. W. Griffith still spent every summer and fall in New York. Avoiding the cramped Biograph studio on East Fourteenth Street whenever possible, Griffith and his company preferred to take the ferry to Fort Lee where exteriors for all the films in this program were shot (even those that seem to have been shot on the Lower East Side). There he could work on uncrowded streets and tap into a supportive infrastructure of local hotels, businesses, and movie-struck extras, treating the town as his personal back lot.