Music composed and recorded by Mengxue Tan, 2021.
Chicks Made to Order (1903) 1 min.
Lubin’s dupe of the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. film. Lubin cinematographers (and perhaps the technical expert Sigmund Lubin himself) took a rival’s distribution print and used a Lubin 35mm film camera (or contact printer) to rephotograph it onto new celluloid. The company sold these new prints as their own productions. At the time, this was not illegal.
Biograph shot the original — copyrighted as Chicks to Order — at its studio in New York, June 24, 1903. Camera: G. W. “Billy” Bitzer. Cast: Kathryn Osterman
Source: National Archives and Records Administration. Here’s the NARA catalog record for Chicks Made to Order, with a downloadable silent video copy (43 seconds).
A symptom of hasty film-to-film copying?
A Lubin employee’s fingerprint left on the celluloid.
Read about how these film prints came to the National Archives. Heidi Holmstrom, “Pioneers of Movie Piracy and the Expansion of Copyright Law,” The Unwritten Record, National Archives blog, Feb. 12, 2020.. See also Peter Decherney, “Copyright Dupes: Piracy and New Media in Edison v. Lubin (1903),” Film History 19 (2007): 109-124.
This video of the Lubin dupe with the new music by Mengxue Tan is also viewable at stream.nyu.edu/id/1_afbb60dx.
New music for old films. A collaboration between the Orphan Film Symposium and NYU’s Screen Scoring Program.
See the list of all films on the project’s home page.
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Dan Streible, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies
NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies
Orphan Film Symposium director