‘Made in New Jersey: Films from Fort Lee, America’s First Film Town’ Available Now

Made in New Jersey will become available to own on Blu-ray on June 24, 2025, with a SRP of $44.95.

Fort Lee was already a favorite location for New York filmmakers when Mark Dintenfass arrived in 1910 and established Champion as the first of many studios in that sleepy town. Biograph, Éclair, Kalem, Fox and Universal soon followed making Fort Lee and New Jersey the birthplace of the American motion picture industry.

Curated by Richard Koszarski, author of Fort Lee, The Film Town and the enclosed 20-page booklet, this special edition 2-disc Blu-ray set gathers 14 wonderful and historically significant films and 2 documentaries from archives around the world. Featuring two restored Biograph chase films by D.W. Griffith (The Curtain Pole and The Cord of Life), the legendary The Vampire (1913), which popularized the character of the “vamp” or “femme fatale,” the earliest surviving film version of Robin Hood, and a new 4K restoration of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Ukrainian operetta Cossacks in Exile (1939) famously shot at Little Flower Monastery in Newton, Made in New Jersey: Films From Fort Lee is a landmark release for cinema history and simply a joy to watch.