United States Motion Picture Corporation

The United States Motion Picture Corporation was an early American independent film studio that produced comedic films on the East Coast. It existed during the "transitional" period before the Hollywood studio system centralized film production. The United States Motion Picture Corporation made one reel silent films in the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, area from 1916 through 1919.

Incorporated in New Jersey on March 2, 1915, The United States Motion Picture Corporation established its main office in the Savoy Building in downtown Wilkes-Barre. Its studios were located across the Susquehanna River in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, on Slocum Street near Wyoming Avenue. The company's studio, established in Forty Fort by the summer of 1915, was a glass and steel building that looked somewhat like a greenhouse, designed to allow maximum light for filming

The United States Motion Picture Corporation was founded by James O. Walsh, who was its president, Fred W. Hermann, who was the vice president, and Daniel L. Hart, who was its treasurer and is also listed as its scenario editor in one newspaper account. Hart, an award-winning playwright, would later serve as the mayor of Wilkes-Barre from 1920 to his death in 1933.

Between October 2, 1916 and November 12, 1917, the United States Motion Picture Corporation produced and released twenty-seven Black Diamond Comedies. "Black Diamond" referred to anthracite coal, deposits of which had made Wilkes-Barre and the surrounding area a center of the mining industry and contributed to the region's wealth. The one-reel silent films were the first comedies distributed by Paramount Pictures, which was then based in New York. Paramount advertised these comedies widely in 1917, sometimes alongside those of Fatty Arbuckle, another Paramount comic artist. The films often followed a comic character named Susie, portrayed by USMPC’s leading lady Leatrice Joy, through mishaps and blunders. The films' advertisements that appear in The Moving Picture World magazine note the use of comic special effects with stop action and film speed experimentation.

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