Sidney Olcott
| Sidney Olcott | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
John Sidney Allcott 20 September 1872 Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | 16 December 1949 (aged 76) Hollywood, California, United States |
| Occupation | Film director, producer and Screenwriter |
| Years active | 1904 – 1942 |
Sidney Olcott (September 20, 1872 – December 16, 1949) was a Canadian-born film producer, director, actor and screenwriter.
Born John Sidney Allcott in Toronto, he became one of the first great directors of the motion picture business. With a desire to be an actor, a young Sidney Olcott went to New York City where he worked in the theater until 1904 when he performed as a film actor with the Biograph Studios. Within a short time he was directing films and became a general manager at Biograph.
In 1907, Frank J. Marion and Samuel Long, with financial backing from George Kleine, formed a new motion picture company called the Kalem Company and were able to lure the increasingly successful Sidney Olcott away from Biograph. Olcott was offered the sum of ten dollars per picture and under the terms of his contract, Olcott was required to direct a minimum of one, one-reel picture of about a thousand feet every week. After making a number of very successful films for the Kalem studio, including Ben Hur (1907) with its dramatic chariot race scene, Olcott became the company's president and was rewarded with one share of its stock.
In 1910 Sidney Olcott demonstrated his creative thinking when he made Kalem Studios the first ever to travel outside the United States to film on location.
Of Irish ancestry, and knowing that in America there was a huge built-in Irish audience, Olcott went to Ireland where he made a film called A Lad from Old Ireland. He would go on to make more than a dozen films there and later on only the outbreak of World War I prevented him from following through with his plans to build a permanent studio in Beaufort, County Kerry, Ireland. The Irish films led to him taking a crew to Palestine in 1912 to make the first five-reel film ever, titled From the Manger to the Cross, the life story of Jesus.
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