{"id":35795,"date":"2021-09-10T11:48:46","date_gmt":"2021-09-10T15:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=35795"},"modified":"2021-09-10T11:49:34","modified_gmt":"2021-09-10T15:49:34","slug":"the-bootleg-files-the-new-york-hat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/10\/the-bootleg-files-the-new-york-hat\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bootleg Files: The New York Hat"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 778:<\/strong> \u201cThe New York Hat\u201d (1912 film directed by D.W. Griffith).<\/p>\n

LAST SEEN:<\/strong> On YouTube.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:<\/strong> On multiple labels offering silent films.<\/p>\n

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: <\/strong>An expired copyright. <\/p>\n

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: <\/strong>It\u2019s already out there, but that\u2019s not why it is in this column.<\/p>\n

In the early years of the silent movies, the bootlegging of film prints was completely out of control. Due the primitive nature of film distribution, it was too easy for cinematic miscreants to swoop in and gather up prints and resell them as their own works, thus denying the profits that the original producers should have recived.
\n<\/p>\n

Since legal controls on cinematic intellectual property had yet to be enacted, film producers were left to their own devices to ensure their work was not being bootlegged. For the Biograph Studios, one strategy that was tested was the forerunner of watermarking \u2013 and this was conspicuously on display in its 1912 one-reeler \u201cThe New York Hat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, \u201cThe New York Hat\u201d is considered as one of the most notable films of the early 1910s due to the talent on both sides of the camera. Behind the lens was D.W. Griffith as director, with G.W. Bitzer as his cameraman, who were working from a story written by then-newcomer Anita Loos and polished into a screenplay by Francis Marion. On the screen was Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore in leading roles and smaller and bit roles distributed to Griffith stalwarts Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Robert Harron, Mae Marsh, Mack Sennett and Alfred Paget.<\/p>\n

At 16 minutes, \u201cThe New York Hat\u201d is a mini-melodrama played out in broadest brush strokes imaginable. The film opens at the death bed of a dying mother who entrusts a wrapped box to her young pastor (Barrymore) while viewed in grief by her husband and daughter (Pickford \u2013 20 years old at the time playing a girl in her mid-teens). The pastor returns to his rectory and opens the wrapped box to discover money and a letter from the now-deceased woman. The letter complains that while her husband worked her to death, she managed to save some money and asked to pastor to use it for buying her daughter \u201cthe bits of finery she has always been denied.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pastor goes to a local millinery shop and purchases a feathered hat that is extravagant in both its appearance and its price \u2013 $10, a princely sum at a time when a woman\u2019s hat at $1.98 was considered pricey. The purchase comes at the right time in the girl\u2019s life, as the only hat she owned became shapeless and her stingy father refused her money for a new chapeau.<\/p>\n

The pastor gives the frilly new hat to the grateful waif, but this creates a new problem: the local gossips start spreading lies about improper relations between the pastor and girl. The miserly old father gets wind of this and destroys the hat. The film ends with a big confrontation at the pastor\u2019s home with the girl, her father, the nasty gossips and the elderly male members of the church vestry \u2013 but when the pastor produces the letter from the now-dead mother giving him permission to buy the girl some fineries, everyone\u2019s opinion changes. The pastor proposes to the girl, who meekly agrees to become his wife.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe New York Hat\u201d is an early example of Griffith\u2019s career-long distaste for self-appointed authorities of proper social behavior along with his championing of spunky young heroines doing battle against the rigid confines of the class structure. <\/p>\n

The film also shows how Griffith was mastering his craft, particularly in the genuinely sincere performances by Pickford and Barrymore \u2013 Pickford\u2019s acting skills will not surprise anyone viewing this film, but the handsome and dashing young Barrymore will be something of an unexpected surprise to contemporary viewers who only know his crotchety old-man-in-a-wheelchair roles. <\/p>\n

But Griffith wasn\u2019t quite at his full game yet \u2013 he could not get a subtle performance from Charles Hill Mailes\u2019 miserly father, and the women playing the gossiping biddies who stir the malice pot \u2013 Mae Marsh, Claire McDowell and Clara T. Blacy \u2013 represent some of the most excruciatingly heavy-handed emoting of early 1910s movie acting.<\/p>\n

Still, for 1912 this was a significant achievement for Biograph, which knew it had a potential hit film with \u201cThe New York Hat\u201d and it was eager to protect its\u2019 investment. The company\u2019s strategy to ensure it would not be bootlegged was both odd and successful.<\/p>\n

In the scenes that take place in the living room of Pickford\u2019s family home, the Biograph corporate logo \u2013 a large circle filled with the letters \u201cAB\u201d \u2013 can be seen on display in the home of Pickford’s character. (If you look at the photograph accompanying the article, the logo is next to the window and midway on the wall.) The logic behind this, the studio executives reasoned, was that anyone who came into possession of a print of \u201cThe New York Hat\u201d knew immediately that this was a Biograph film because its logo was visible in about half of the scenes \u2013 thus, bootleggers passing the film off as something else would immediately be revealed as fraudsters.<\/p>\n

The strategy of inserting a studio logo into the art direction of a film never took root, and over time more effective and less intrusive ways to ensure intellectual property protection were introduced. Eventually, \u201cThe New York Hat\u201d saw its copyright expire and the film fell into the public domain, resulting in endless dupes that presented the work in not-pristine prints.<\/p>\n

Multiple copies of \u201cThe New York Hat\u201d in varying degrees of quality can easily be found online, and the Biograph logo is still clearly visible in these prints. While it may not have put a halt to film bootlegging, the unlikely presence of the logo in this work gained a small degree of immortality for being an unlikely part of this early Griffith effort.<\/p>\n

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen to the award-winning podcast \u201cThe Online Movie Show with Phil Hall\u201d on SoundCloud and his new podcast \u201cBenzinga Show Business\u201d on Benzinga.com\/Podcasts. Phil Hall\u2019s new book \u201cJesus Christ Movie Star\u201d is now available from BearManor Media. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 778: \u201cThe New York Hat\u201d (1912 film directed by D.W. Griffith). LAST SEEN: On YouTube. AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: On multiple labels offering silent films. REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: An expired copyright. CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: It\u2019s already out there, but that\u2019s not why it is in this column. In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":35796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1513],"tags":[2284,2605,2790,2202,938,944,2789],"class_list":["post-35795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bootleg-files","tag-bootlegging","tag-d-w-griffith","tag-lionel-barrymore","tag-mary-pickford","tag-short-film","tag-silent-film","tag-the-new-york-hat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35795"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35798,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35795\/revisions\/35798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}