Jacksonville, Winter Film Capital

Jacksonville earned the title because northern film companies needed winter sunlight, and by 1912 so many movie troupes worked in the city that it was known as the World's Winter Film Capital.

The National Register registration form for Norman Film Studios, certified by the Florida Department of State in 2014, says the winter of 1908 was particularly severe in the Northeast at a time when studio facilities in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago were becoming inadequate. Cold weather and static electricity above the frost line smeared film as it was exposed. The need for scenic variety and abundant sunlight, and Jacksonville's place as the leading commercial and transportation city in Florida, drew a number of producers to set up studios there.

The Interior Department describes the same era: Florida, and in particular Jacksonville, was a winter film capital hosting a number of studios based in New York, whose on-site facilities allowed year-round production.

The Kalem Company was first, leasing facilities in Jacksonville for the 1908 to 1909 winter season and returning regularly after that.

The Norman Film Studios registration form says the film industry in Florida began in Jacksonville, with the first regular use of Jacksonville locations by Kalem, producer of A Florida Feud; Or Love in the Everglades (1908). Kalem's success encouraged other companies to seek out the city.

The same form says the first films with all Black casts made in Florida came from Kalem in Jacksonville in 1908, but that these films, directed by white filmmakers such as Gene Gauntier, were hardly race films because of their pro-slavery and paternalistic overtones, and that Kalem also made comedy shorts with degrading stereotypes. In the 1910s Mark Dintenfass produced several all Black short films in Jacksonville.

At least three studios were built in Jacksonville's Springfield neighborhood in the 1910s, on East 8th Street and on East and West 9th Street.

The Springfield Historic District nomination says Thanhouser Studios opened at 27 and 35 to 37 E. 8th Street in December 1915, closed within two years after personal losses and was torn down. Former vaudeville performer Victor Moore opened the Klever Remedies studios at 32 E. 9th Street in the same period. The last Springfield studio was Henry John Klutho's, built in 1916 at 22 W. 9th Street; as the industry failed in Jacksonville, Klutho sold it in 1922 to Berg Productions, which also closed later that year.

Actors boarded in Springfield while films were made there, the nomination says, among them a young Oliver Hardy and lesser known players such as Billy West and Moore. The nomination also counts Moore among Springfield residents who shaped Jacksonville, calling him one of the founders of the city's short-lived film industry who later became a character actor in Hollywood and on Broadway. When the nomination was prepared in the 1980s, Victor Moore's house and part of the Klutho Studios still stood in Jacksonville; that is the most recent official statement found on their condition.

Arlington's studio began when the Eagle Film Manufacturing and Producing Company of Chicago built Eagle Film City in late 1915 and early 1916 around a former cigar factory.

The registration form says the main building was built as a cigar factory in 1913 by two tobacco growers from Quincy, Florida, and that the factory plan failed; by 1915 the building was available to Eagle. The company bought lots at Arlington Heights from the Alderman Realty Company, which had subdivided 1,100 acres in 1913, and about 60 men built indoor and outdoor stages on the 1.65 acre Jacksonville site in just under five weeks. A January 14, 1916, article in The Florida Times Union called it one of the most modern and complete plants in the country.

Arlington was then reached from downtown Jacksonville by a ferry the realty company set up, with landings at St. Johns Street, now Arlington Road, and East Beaver Street. The form says the films shot at Eagle met with limited success, and when its national releasing agency, the Unity Sales Corporation, went out of business, the studio was left without an outlet. By the spring of 1917 Eagle Film City was bankrupt, and apart from a brief ownership by the Superb Film Corporation the studio sat abandoned until 1922.

The same form explains why the studio felt remote. Arlington lies along the south side of the St. Johns River near where it meets the Trout River, and growth there came slowly until the Mathews Bridge opened in 1953 with a direct connection to downtown Jacksonville. Arlington officially became part of the city of Jacksonville in 1968, when all of Duval County outside the beaches communities and Baldwin voted to join it.

The Jacksonville film industry declined quickly after 1917, as California pulled ahead, public opinion turned and World War I limited production.

The Norman Film Studios registration form lists the causes: California outdistanced Jacksonville in production equipment and personnel; mob scenes and chase sequences filmed in Jacksonville's public areas got out of control and destroyed city property; Mayor J.E.T. Bowden, the city's major movie booster, was voted out in the 1916 election; merchants raised prices and banks hesitated to lend; and war taxes and coal shortages under World War I limited production. It dates the start of the rapid decline to 1917.

The departure opened a door for one independent. The Park Service says Richard Norman saw that the exodus of the major companies from Jacksonville meant reasonably priced studio space was available for a smaller independent company, and he bought the old Eagle studio in Arlington in 1922. The registration form adds that because his was the last studio operation to open in the Jacksonville area, there was no competition for the fully equipped plant, whose staging, laboratories, klieg lighting and on-site power plant were all in working order.

The Florida Department of State frames the end in national terms: the American film industry moved from multiple studios in New York, Chicago and Jacksonville to a centralized industry in Hollywood, although Jacksonville had been an early competitor to become its center.

The main survivor is Norman Studios at 6337 Arlington Road, which the National Park Service calls the last complex from the silent film era located in Jacksonville.

The City of Jacksonville has owned the Arlington studio since 2002 and opened its first restored phase in August 2023. The Interior Department named it a National Historic Landmark in 2016, and the state release called it the last remaining complex from the time Jacksonville led the silent film industry.

Some of the people are remembered in the records too: the Norman Film Studios form says Oliver Hardy, later internationally famous as a comedic actor, made his film debut in Jacksonville in Outwitting Dad in 1913.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by rereading the National Register forms for Norman Film Studios and the Springfield Historic District, the National Park Service place page, the City of Jacksonville parks page, and the 2016 Interior and Florida Department of State releases.