Silents were golden on Long Island

Hollywood classics -- especially those before the advent of sound -- are getting attention these days, thanks to "The Artist," a new silent feature now at Long Island theaters -- and generating major Oscar buzz.

What many may not know, however, is that a fair share of those early classics weren't made in Hollywood at all, but on Long Island.

That's right. Before Hollywood reigned supreme, L.I. churned out silent films and early talkies. Icons like Rudolph Valentino, W.C. Fields and Gloria Swanson all shot on location across Nassau and Suffolk and in studios in Brooklyn and Queens.

We're talking back in the day, when the film industry was as new as YouTube, or iPods.

Versatile backdrop for films

"Filmmakers went to New Jersey, upstate, all over," says Dylan Skolnick, co-director of the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, which hosts a monthly silent-film series. "But Long Island was versatile. There were mansions, farms, woods, beaches. . . . Like now, but with less traffic."

Hundreds of films were shot here, dating as far back as the 1890s. The American Mutoscope Co.'s film shorts include an 1897 sequence with divers at Bath Beach in Brooklyn, and coverage of the hounds and horses of Hempstead's Meadowbrook Hunt Club in 1899.

"Long Island locations were great favorites, and crews were frequently seen in places like Sag Harbor, Huntington, Manhasset, Farmingdale and Great Neck," Rutgers University film historian Richard Koszarski notes in his comprehensive book "Hollywood on the Hudson."

The Vitagraph studio set up shop in Flatbush in 1905, opening a satellite facility in Bay Shore about 10 years later, followed by the Famous Players-Lasky Studio, built in Astoria in 1920. (A few years later, it would become a home for Paramount Pictures, producing more than 120 films in the '20s and '30s.)

The stars lived nearby, in Bayside (Gloria Swanson, W.C. Fields), Great Neck (Groucho Marx) and Manhasset (Vernon and Irene Castle).

The Castles starred and danced in "The Whirl of Life," a 1915 comedy shot in part in Long Beach. D.W. Griffith ventured to Lynbrook in 1911 for "The Stuff Heroes Are Made Of." And "In Pursuit of Polly," a 1918 spy flick shot in Oyster Bay, starred a pre-Glinda the Good Witch Billie Burke.

"I'd always been interested in film but never thought about the local angle," says Joshua Ruff, curator of the carriage and history collections at the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook. Ruff organized a 2005 exhibit covering more than a century's worth of local film production -- but the earliest days were the most surprising, he says.

Picking out local landmarks

Rent a silent movie, and you never know what you'll spot.

The "Dutch windmill" from the 1916 Mary Pickford drama "Hulda from Holland" is from Bridgehampton. The Argentine pampas in Valentino's 1924 scorcher "A Sainted Devil" are stretches of Farmingdale. And the "New England" setting for D.W. Griffith's 1925 comedy, "Sally of the Sawdust," starring W.C. Fields? Bayside and Great Neck, notes Ruff. "In one scene you're clearly looking at Northern Boulevard."

A year later, Fields shot "So's Your Old Man," ramming a Model A Ford into a tree (in Huntington) and performing his famed golf routine (at the original Deepdale Country Club in Lake Success, before it decamped to Manhasset to make way for the LIE).

Perhaps the most mysterious of L.I.'s films is 1926's "The Great Gatsby," the first of three film versions, yet the only one actually shot on the North Shore. Alas, only the trailer remains, showing wild party revelers jumping into a pool and narrator Nick Carraway finding George the mechanic (a young William Powell) dead amid a rolling expanse of pine trees.

The Marx Brothers' "The Cocoanuts" (1929) and "Animal Crackers" (1930) were two of the most successful films shot at the Astoria studio, but by then it was too late.

Movie execs had already realized the obvious -- Hollywood's weather rocks. They could shoot year-round. And by the end of the 1920s they'd consolidated the industry out West.

The studios sputtered out a few last films. "The Emperor Jones," set in the South and the Caribbean, had to be shot here in 1933 due to a clause in Paul Robeson's contract stipulating he wouldn't work below the Mason-Dixon Line. When he washes up on that Caribbean isle? It's Jones Beach.

As late as 1939, a Yiddish-language talkie, "Tevye," was shot on a potato farm east of Jericho. Today, that split-rail fence and dirt road trailing off into the distance is roughly exit 43 on the LIE.

"There's a fair amount of misinformation out there," Ruff admits. "The fact is, we'll probably never know the full extent of the film industry's presence on the Island."

Still, one wonders, with the success of "The Artist," could silent films make a comeback? "I think people are ready," says its director, Michel Hazanavicius. "They're watching movies on computers, on phones, in theaters, on planes -- so why not this? Uh . . . uh, how you say?" he stumbles, searching for the words in English. "What's old . . . it becomes new."