Lubin's Betzwood Studio-Historical Place

 place with historical importance, interesting place, film/video production studio/facility, historical layer / disappeared object

In 1912 Sigmund "Pop" Lubin bought the 340 acre Betzwood Estate as an expansion of his Philadelphia Studio. There's historic marker along the Schuylkyl Trail.

He was born as Siegmund Lubszynski in Breslau or Posen, Silesia, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) on April 20, 1851, to a German Jewish family, in which his father was a successful ophthalmologist. In 1876 he emigrated to the United States, where he also worked as an optometrist in Philadelphia.

He soon progressed to making his own camera and projector combination, which he sold. In 1896 he began distributing films for Thomas Edison. In 1897 he started making films and in 1902 formed the Lubin Manufacturing Company, incorporating it in 1909. His company also sold illegally copied prints of many films by other directors, notably those of Georges Méliès, making Lubin one of the foremost early practitioners of film piracy.

By 1910 his company had built a film studio, "Lubinville", in Philadelphia at 20th and Indiana Streets. In 1912 Lubin bought this property, the Betzwood Estate, and set up a "nomadic" troupe roaming the southwest looking for an ideal shooting location. Eventually, Lubin established a studio in the Los Angeles area. In this year he also set up a studio in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

This property consisted of a lower area, known as "Farm 1, where most of the filming took place and the upper area known as "Farm 2" which operated as a working ranch with barns and cattle and a working crew.

A fire at its studio in June 1914 destroyed the negatives for his unreleased new films. When World War I broke out in Europe in September of that year, Lubin Studios and other American filmmakers lost foreign sales. After making more than a thousand motion pictures, on September 1, 1917, the Lubin Film Company went out of business. In February of 1916, this property was purchased by Clarance Wolf and reorganized as the Betzwood Film Company and was out of business by 1922.

Lubin went back to work as an optometrist. and died on September 11, 1923, at his home in Ventnor, New Jersey. He was buried on September 14, 1923

Lubin is considered one of the true pioneers of American Cinema, and arguably was the first true "Movie Mogul."

www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigations/704_lu...
mc3betzwood.wordpress.com/
mc3betzwood.wordpress.com/betzwood-studios/