- published: 19 Jul 2013
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Alan Crosland (August 10, 1894 – July 16, 1936) was an American stage actor and film director.
Born in New York City, New York to a well-to-do family, Alan Crosland attended Dartmouth College. After graduation he took a job as a writer with the New York Globe magazine. Interested in the theatre, he began acting on stage, appearing in several productions with Shakespearian actress Annie Russell.
Crosland began his career in the motion picture industry in 1912 at Edison Studios in The Bronx, New York, where he worked at various jobs for two years until he had learned the business sufficiently well to begin directing short films. By 1917 he was directing feature-length films and in 1920 directed Olive Thomas in The Flapper, one of her final films before her death in September of that year.
In 1925, Crosland was working for Jesse L. Lasky's film production company Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount Pictures) when he was hired by Warner Bros. to work at their Hollywood studios. He had directed several silent films for Warner, including two with leading star John Barrymore, when he was chosen to direct Al Jolson in 1927's The Jazz Singer. The film would make him famous as the first of the new talkies that changed the course of motion pictures.
Erich von Stroheim (September 22, 1885 – May 12, 1957) was an Austrian-born film star of the silent era, subsequently noted as an auteur for his directorial work.
Stroheim's most recent biographers, such as Richard Koszarski, say that he was born in Vienna, Austria in 1885 as Erich Oswald Stroheim, the son of Benno Stroheim, a middle-class hat-maker, and Johanna Bondy, both of whom were practicing Jews.
Stroheim emigrated to America at the end of 1909. On arrival at Ellis Island he claimed to be Count Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim und Nordenwall, the son of Austrian nobility like the characters he played in his films, but both Billy Wilder and Stroheim's agent Paul Kohner claimed that he spoke with a decidedly lower-class Austrian accent. However Jean Renoir writes in his memoirs: “Stroheim spoke hardly any German. He had to study his lines like a schoolboy learning a foreign language.” Later, while living in Europe, Stroheim claimed in published remarks to have "forgotten" his native tongue.
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.
Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.