"Lights, Camera, Ithaca?"

[TTL News 308]

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What now stands as Ithaca’s Stewart Park along the shores of Cayuga Lake was once a film company called Wharton Studio. Opened by Theodore and Leopold Wharton, Wharton Studio produced numerous silent films between the years 1913 to 1920. What started as an effort to film the Cornell-Penn football game in Ludlowville, New Tork, Theodore Wharton returned to Ithaca in 1913 with a cast and crew, including Francis X. Bushman and Beverly Bayne (who starred in the silent film Romeo and Juliet in 1916). Following the opening of their film studio, the Wharton brothers became responsible for bringing many famous actors and actresses to Ithaca from New York City. Ithaca became the unofficial capital of the silent film industry. Many of the silent films were shot within intricate studio sets and in natural sites around Ithaca including the gorges on Cornell University’s campus and in the woods near Beebe Lake. Over 20 different silent films and serials were created in Ithaca, including early filmmaking classics such as The Eagle’s Eye and Beatrice Fairfax. In Barbara Tepa Lupack’s novel, Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema, she credits The Wharton brothers’ films as playing “a vital role in the evolution of cinema as a mass medium and as a form of entertainment for people of all ages and backgrounds; and [the Wharton brothers] became forerunners of today’s ubiquitous crime and mystery procedurals and sensation-filled commercial blockbusters.”

Unfortunately, in the early 1920s, the Wharton Studios moved to Santa Cruz, California, following the majority of the film industry’s migration to California and Hollywood due to its freedom to shoot year-round. Despite the Wharton brothers’ extreme success, much of its products were lost in 1929, when hundreds of the Wharton Brothers’ film reels spontaneously combusted in the storage shed. 

 

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