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3/11/1899: Piracy in the Ring
On the 3rd November 1899, at the Coney Island Athletic Club, reigning World Heavyweight boxing champion Jim Jeffries defended his title over 25 rounds against Tom Sharkey. Notable for being the first fight to be filmed under artificial light, the occasion is also remembered as an example of the kind of double-dealing and piracy that was rife in the early days of the American film industry.
Jeffries was managed by the legendary showman William Brady, former manager of Gentleman Jim Corbett, whose career had effectively been ended by Bob Fitzsimmons, Jeffries previous opponent. Brady was distraught over the loss of his prize asset, and wanted nothing more than to see his vanquisher suffer the same fate. Not only that, he wanted the incident recorded for posterity and, earlier in '99, had paid Vitagraph to record the Jeffries-Fitzsimmons fight. To do so required the invention of special lamps containing much larger carbons than usual. Tests indicated that they would do the job, and the company erected one hundred arc lights to ensure a clear picture of the fight. Sadly, half the arc lights burned out within a minute of the fight commencing, and everything else Vitagraph recorded was useless. Brady was furious, but Albert E. Smith and his partner, J. Stuart Blackton, were confident that improvements could be made and that their new lights would herald a new chapter in the technical development of filmmaking.
Brady wasn't about to entrust the recording of Jeffries next fight to them, however; he went over to Biograph, one of Vitagraph's main rivals - and he took details of Vitagraph's lights with him.
Between them, Brady and Biograph paid $100,000 for the rights to film the Jeffries-Sharkey fight. Biograph erected 400 arc lamps over the ring, and used four cameras to record the fight: while one was filming, the second was being focused and the third was being loaded with fresh film. The fourth was kept in reserve in case any of the other three malfunctioned. 198,000 pictures - over seven miles of film - were taken, at a rate of 30 pictures per second. The lamps generated a heat well in excess of 100 degrees, and umbrellas were held over the heads of the fighters between rounds. Points-winner Jeffries was later heard to swear he would never fight under such conditions again. This time, there were no hitches - Biograph had bagged the fight.
However, they weren't the only ones...
Late on the afternoon of the fight, James White, the manager of Thomas Edison's motion picture department, paid a visit on Albert E. Smith, with a story about a wealthy miner friend of his wanting moving pictures of the fight. Smith knew this was unlikely - that it was no doubt Edison who wanted the fight, but who was unable to clandestinely film it with his bulky camera. Smith, however, was still burning over how he felt he had been ripped off by Brady and - against his better judgment - agreed.
A couple of hours later, the two men, together with a Vitagraph worker named Jimmy French, and future songwriter Joe Howard, met at Cohan's Roadhouse on Surf Avenue. The camera was strapped between White's legs "in the manner of a hammock strapped between two trees" under his overcoat, and cartridges and film boxes were stuffed into the other men's coat pockets. Sneaking White past the ticket taker, Smith set up his camera in the stand, about twelve rows up from the ring. Smith, in his autobiography, Two Reels and a Crank recalled seeing Brady and a dozen Pinkerton men take up position at the foot of their row of seats. He filmed on regardless, even when, after a couple of rounds, he was finally spotted by Brady and his men. They tried to charge up the stand to get to him, but were fought back by spectators, furious at having their enjoyment of the gargantuan battle taking place beneath them obstructed.
Seconds after the end of the 25th round, Smith and French were in flight, French having checked out the available exits while Smith cranked the camera. White and Howard had already departed, so the film boxes were spirited out of the club by a jockey named Snapper Garrison. The three men agreed to meet up in room 33 of Cohan's Roadhouse.
White and Howard were waiting for them, but no sooner had the celebrations begun, than Brady, Jeffries, and the Pinkerton men burst into the building. Smith fled once more, taking the film with him this time as he scaled down the wall of the roadhouse, courtesy of a rope ladder. Hiding behind a wall, he managed to give the enraged Jeffries the slip and catch a cab with White back to the safety of the Vitagraph studio in the Morse building on Nassau Street.
Safely making it back to the studio didn't spell an end to the skulduggery, however. While White slept, Smith processed the film, leaving the negatives to dry while he fell into his own exhausted slumber.
When he was awoken by "Pop" Rock the following morning, both White and the negative were gone.
Enraged, Smith made the two hour trip to White's office in the Edison plant in Orange, New Jersey, and snatched the film box from his desk as they argued. Smith fled the plant, with White and a number of Edison employees in hot pursuit, and watched them waving their fists at him from the station platform as his train departed for New York.
The Edison Company still had a print of the film (Edison would later tell Smith that they had intended to give him the print he had swiped from White's desk) and were the first to screen it, hiring a theatre in New York for the occasion. Smith recounts how the enraged Brady leapt onto the stage as soon as the film started, waving his fists and denouncing Edison, and causing an almighty ruckus which ended with the police being called. The following day, Brady obtained a court injunction delaying the showing of the film for many weeks. That, however, didn't prevent Vitagraph from renting their print to Riley and Woods, a travelling vaudeville show for 40 weeks at a charge of $200 per week...
"When we reached the arena that night, I began to get an idea of what we were to endure. Without, advising us, the promoters had planned to take moving pictures of the fight, the first time it had even been attempted. ...They had installed great lights right over the ring: lights strong enough to illuminate a city of forty thousand, pouring their heat down upon us. The lamps were hung so low that, standing in the ring I could reach up and touch them with my glove. ...It was like standing at the mouth of a blast furnace.."
James Jeffries
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