Film Making On Long Island

Tom has a long and distinguished career in the music and media business, is a historian of early American cinema, and is currently President and Executive Director of the Long Island Film Festival, and founder of Santorelli Historical Media.

 

He peppered his talk with dozens of photos from his company’s extensive library of photos, films and documents dating from silent era to modern times.

 

Tom began by profiling some of the early entrepreneurs in the film making industry, and describing how they got their start in the era of silent movies and the early talkies.

Years before Hollywood established a virtual monopoly on the industry, producers made films at major studios in Brooklyn and Queens, and, for a short time, at the Vitagraph Studio in Bay Shore.

The Vitagraph Company, established in Brooklyn in 1905 to exploit Thomas Edison’s late nineteenth century motion picture inventions, was one of the earliest and most prolific producers of movies on Long Island, and considered one of the more important New York studios in the 1910's and early 1920's. A smaller studio was opened in Bay Shore in 1915 to take advantage of filming locations on Long Island.

 

World War I spelled the beginning of the end for Vitagraph. With the loss of foreign distributors and the rise of the monopolistic Studio system, Vitagraph was slowly squeezed out of the business; it was sold to Warner Bros. in 1925.

 

Movie buffs are well aware of the offerings of the Long Island Film Festival (LIFF); all are encouraged to check it out.

 

Established in 1982, the LIFF is the longest running film festival on Long Island, and the first of its kind to stage public screenings and champion the creative, visionary and storytelling talents of both professional and student filmmakers from both America and abroad. The latest film entries can be viewed from their website: longislandfilmfestival.org.

 

Tom has also designed the LIFF Pioneer Awards, honoring actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers that worked and made their homes, primarily in the Bay Shore-Brightwaters area.

 

Tom is shown above with Babylon Rotary President Megan Noble.