Porter ES
NAME: Porter, Edwin Stratton.
ACHIEVEMENT(S): American film director who introduced the technique of cutting scenes together.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None.
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 21st April 1870, at Connellsville, PA
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 30th April 1941, at New York City, NY.
Aged 71.
DISCIPLINE: Director, producer, inventor.
FIELD: Motion pictures.
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Thomas Richard Porter and Mary Jane Clark.
SIBLINGS:
SPOUSE: Caroline Ridinger, married in 1893.
CHILDREN: ?
EDUCATION: Public schools of Connellsville.
MAJOR WORK: 'The Great Train Robbery', 1903.
LIFE AND TIMES: Edwin Stanton Porter was the son of a merchant, Thomas Richard Porter and Mary Jane Clark. He attended local public schools and, in 1893, the year he married Caroline Ridinger, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy for three years. While in the navy, he started to work with electronics where, in conjunction with Alan Fiske, he perfected a rangefinder.
After leaving the navy in 1896, he joined the laboratory of <worked for> Edison*, first in New York for Raff & Gammon, agents for Edison, exhibiting Edison's Vitascope and, later, for Edison at his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey.
He then went to work for one of Edison's competitors, Kuhn & Webster, exhibiting their Projectorscope from Canada to Central America, meanwhile learning what cinema audiences throughout the continent wanted from motion pictures.
In 1899, he re-joined Edison's operations in New York, in charge of motion picture production. Until this time, films were mostly one- or two-reel records of single incidents, news, or comedies.
Over the next ten years, Porter effectively revolutionized film production. He had learned from his travels as a projectionist that what people wanted was narrative, so he worked to create a means by which the audience could follow a story visually, through the use of editing. In 1901 he produced 'Teddy, the Grizzly King', about President-elect <made film about> Theodore Roosevelt*, and 'Jack and the Beanstalk' in 1902.
His first great success was 'The Life of an American Fireman', the first U.S. documentary
film, which he directed for The Edison Company in 1903. Into stock footage of actual fire scenes, he inserted scenes of actors playing a fire-chief hero and a trapped mother and child. To heighten suspense, Porter cut back and forth from the terrified mother to the coming rescuers, using dissolves and introducing the close-up shot.
Porter took his place in the history of film with 'The Great Train Robbery' in 1903. The film featured classic Western action and capitalized on the public's interest in the theme: the last train robbery of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, already famous in dime novels and the newspapers. Although certainly not the first Western film, Porter's work established the genre and identified an audience for it:
Porter’s innovative techniques used in ‘The Great Train Robbery’ made it the most successful film in the U.S. for the next several years. The film format was: the crime being committed, the chase, and the final showdown. It set the three-part structure of many modern-day Westerns.
By editing together scenes shot in various locations, Porter was also able to introduce the idea of time lapses within a developing story.
In 1907, he again made history by giving the great director <cast> D.W. Griffith* his first acting role, in 'Rescued from an Eagle's Nest'. Porter left Edison in 1909 and unsuccessfully attempted to establish his own production company, Rex Films. Adolph Zukor then offered him the job of chief director of the Famous Players Film Company in 1911, supervising the production of the company’s entire output.
Porter’s innovative streak in cinema storytelling faded, perhaps because he then became an early pioneer of the 'studio system' film, with its rigid formats, which later became the norm for all studios.
While at Famous Players, Porter directed five of Mary <directed> Pickford*'s films. In 1915, he directed 'The Prisoner of Zenda' with James K. Hackett, the first five-reel film produced in the United States and, after directing his last film, 'The Eternal City' (1915), he retired from film making.
By late 1915, he had sold his share of Famous Players stock, left the studio and invested his savings in a company that produced motion picture equipment, the Precision Machine Corporation. In 1925, he retired, a rich man, but in 1929 his company crashed with the stock market and he never recovered his fortune.
Instead, at the age of fifty, he returned to work in much humbler surroundings, fixing various motion picture devices in a small workshop. He died in 1941 at the Taft Hotel in New York City.
ASSESSMENT: Porter’s career, although short, established him as an outstanding contributor to the motion picture industry.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None.
ONELINER: ES Porter, movie pioneer
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Dictionary of American National Biographys