Movies Made in Key West II

 Key West's First Starring Role

January 22, 1912, was probably the greatest Monday anyone living in Key West had ever seen. The train came to town. Visitors arrived from all over the world to witness the event­ they had come from Cuba, from Washington, D.C., from Columbia and Panama, from France and Italy, and from Kentucky.

One man who had arrived in town on Friday, the 19th, was here to record the event for posterity. He was John J. "Jack" Frawley, long-time trusted employee of the Lubin Manufacturing Company. And what the Lubin Company manufactured was optical equipment and eyeglasses, and cameras, and movies.

Frawley was often sent around the country to film what were called by Lubin "actualities"­ disasters, attempts to cross the Atlantic in Dirigibles, etc. He had gone to San Francisco in 1906 to film the city after the earthquake. Now he was in Key West to document the arrival of the train.


1912: On that unequaled January day, an observer of the scene took a photograph of our movie cameraman in action. He, the camera and an assistant are encircled above the fray, and if you look closely, Henry Flagler can be seen below them, crowned with a shock of white hair and being shaded by an umbrella .

Siegmund Lubin was an immigrant from Breslau (then Germany, now Poland) who had opened an optical shop in Philadelphia and had turned a fascination with lenses and a business interest in the film industry into one of the first motion picture companies. He was the first to own a chain of movie theaters and to conceive of mass marketing of films. His studio, Lubinville (in Philadelphia), churned out one- and two-reelers with great rapidity. Both Oliver Hardy and Marie Dressler, who went on to great fame, were first contract players with Lubin. He mentored Samuel Goldwyn and Jesse Lasky. He should be talked about in the same movie-history breath as Edison and D. W. Griffith.

Frawley was Lubin's very first employee and stayed with him until his retirement in 1915. By 1912, Lubin had opened a satellite studio in Jacksonville, so it is possible Frawley and his crew took a ship from there to Key West for the grand event. Their intent was to stay for three weeks in Key West and film what was, in fact, a travelogue for the city as well as a commemoration of the train's (and Flagler's) arrival.

The finished product would then have played all over the country. It certainly played in Key West. In March or April, the film showed here­ probably at the San Carlos or the IOOF Hall on Caroline Street between Duval and Whitehead. It was Key West's first movie­ now probably lost forever. A huge fire at Lubin studios in 1914 destroyed many negatives - maybe Key West's movie was one of them. The film stock in use then had a short lifespan and the film may have been lost to that. But it's suspected the Lubin film of the train arriving in Key West on that wonderful day may be sitting on a shelf. A shelf that belongs to a railroad buff who has no idea what he's got. For all intents and purposes, this important piece of Key West history is lost forever.

For their assistance in the preparation of this article, special thanks go to Tom & Linda Hambright and to Professor Joseph P. Eckhardt, author of "The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer, Siegmund Lubin."