Lubin is best-known for duping all his competitors' films in the early 1900's, and staging "reproductions" of famous boxing matches that Edison had the exclusive rights to film. If that is all that you know about Lubin, then you really don't know him though.
Lubin taunted Edison's patent trust early on in trade ads nearly as much as Carl Laemmle did in the early 1910's. He gleefully filed patents on (mostly) useless inventions just to keep Edison's patent lawyers at bay. Lubin was the only Jewish mogul allowed to join the patent trust when General Film was formed. After that, he was staunchly loyal to Edison.
And if not for failing health and some bad decisions, Lubin might have been the last patent trust firm still standing. Lubin was smart enough to see the handwriting on the wall, and started early producing feature films. They were not just longer short films, but planned as features. Some were planned as disaster-genre films, long before these became a staple in the 1970s. For one feature, a huge city-block set was rigged to fall apart as an earthquake scene. For another feature, two trains were actually crashed head-on.
Beside's Lubin's Philadelphia studio, he had studios in other parts of the country. The most modern one was in Betzwood, Pennsylvania. After Lubin's company went belly-up, films were still produced there for several years. The book has an extra chapter documenting these films.
Louis Bennison in High Pockets (1919), filmed in Betzwood.
Lubin's Jacksonville, Florida studio made a lot of cheap comedies. Their main claim to fame is the discovery of comedian Oliver Hardy, from Georgia. Romaine Feilding's western studio churned out lots of high quality Western films. Lubin's main studio boasted a cafeteria, and everybody on the lot got a cheap meal.
I don't want to give the whole book away, but Lubin made a few mistakes that cost him dearly. While he went into features in a big way in the early teens, he never stopped churning out one-reel potboilers for nickelodeons. While they made great money for a few years, by the mid-teens he had too many companies making one-reelers for dwindling audiences. He also ended up with too many studios, with all of their extra overhead. Like Laemmle at Universal, he gave jobs to many of his sons-in-laws and relatives, and this began to hurt when his finances were short.
The book is very well researched, will many, many footnotes. There's lots of photos, that will make you actually want to see some Lubin films. I can highly recommend it. Joe Eckhardt runs a Betzwood Film Festival every year in Pennsylvania, that spotlights films made by Lubin and others there.
