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For any film enthusiast, the short films of Georges Méliès are a romantically

significant staple in the history of film. The legend goes something like this: A

Frenchman put his heart and soul into making films, pioneered the art form, distributed

his films worldwide, was taken advantage of by “the industry,” and committed artistic

suicide by burning what remained of his negatives. This is a fascinating tale, indeed, but

is also a bit over-simplified for the deeply curious historians. In regards to the

distribution, duping, double-crossings, and downfall of Méliès in the United States, one

name seems to find it’s way into the history books with a slightly different story behind it

each time: Gaston Méliès.

What we take for granted about the history of Gaston (the older brother of

Georges and the illustrious man behind the curtain in his business affairs) is that he set up

an office in Manhattan, New York in 1903, then in Chicago, Illinois in 1908, and then in

San Antonio, Texas in 1910, the latter two of which he actually produced his very own

films out of. It is around 1908 when Gaston applies for a license through Edison, and

later The Motion Picture Patents Company, that history seems to get a tad blurry and

inconsistent over a span of various sources. Frank Thompson, a partial Gaston Méliès

biographer, mentions that Gaston’s filmmaking career and legal decisions were in

response to “the Méliès brothers anticipat[ion] that Georges might have trouble keeping

up with the trust quota,” (Ranch, 8)i while historian Eileen Bowser raises an eyebrow to

Gaston being “something of a rascal” in this instance who “had recently ceased sending

back both money and reports to his brother in Paris, and trading on the Edison license

granted in both their names to obtain financial backing, had set up his own production

company in the United States” (Transformation, 30). Georges himself had written in 1930
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“I am quite fixed, and certain that I have not made any mistake in saying that he acted

against my interests,” but may have exaggerated a bit when speculating that Gaston had

made “agreements with the pirates” (Crawford, fr. 646).

What I seek out to do upon writing this investigative report is clarify this moment

in history that seems to have quite a few sides to it by cross-referencing much of this

written “fact” (which is based heavily on public articles in Moving Picture World and

The New York Dramatic Mirror) with the recently compiled Papers of Thomas A. Edison

containing dated correspondence between Gaston (and his partners) and Edison

Manufacturing Company. Much of this correspondence was written in confidence.

Though done before access to these papers was made public, Merritt Crawford conducted

this very investigation in 1931 and wrote to Georges his findings. His advantage, of

course, is that his gap between history and investigation was roughly 20 years (he could

still contact many of the players involved) while mine is roughly 100 years. Through his

investigation, he concluded that “from 1904 until 1909, [he was] convinced… that

Gaston was entirely loyal to his brother” (Crawford, 576)ii. Bowser (mentioned earlier)

was not only completely aware of Crawford’s work upon writing her account of this

moment in history, but is also the very person who compiled The Merritt Crawford

papers in the first place.

The first mention of Gaston is in a letter from Frank Dyer (Gaston’s consistent

contact with Edison who would later take Gilmore’s position as Vice President) to Vice

President & General Manager of Edison Manufacturing Company William Edgar

Gilmore dated May 7, 1903. Dealing primarily with “suits on the Edison Reissue

Kineteoscope and Film Patents” against Siegmund Lubin and William Selig (people who
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are now known to have pirated a good deal of Méliès films), it is merely acknowledged

that “Mr. Gaston Melies intends on opening up a manufacturing plant for films in this

country.” Having distributed films without the intervention of the Motion Picture Patents

Company upon his arrival in New York, the Méliès name ceases to appear again in any

correspondence for quite a few years. It isn’t until a list of patent assignments on January

4, 1908 that his name finds its way onto the list briefly, and then in a license agreement

printed on February 8, 1908 that under licenser Thomas A. Edison was listed “GASTON

MELIES, for himself and as Attorney for GEORGE MELIES, of Paris, France.”

Shockingly enough, it is as early as March 1908 that Gaston becomes involved in

(or at least is offered the opportunity to be involved in) a good deal of shady business.

The exact date could not be certain as the cablegram correspondence between Gaston and

Frank Dyer was hand-written by Dyer himself, translated, compiled, and delivered to

Gilmore in a single folder on March 14. Understandably enough, Gaston requested a

distribution license for his son and partner, Paul, but Dyer relayed quite the ultimatum on

behalf of Edison stating that “Edison is willing to give a license to Paul Méliès… if he

can secure agency of some European firms. Among them should be Gaumont of Paris

and London and either Urban or Cines.” Reassuring quite fairly, of course, that they

“shall be sold with the trade marks of the European Manufacturers.”

What was even more shocking was Gaston’s response. Though he may have had

prior notice from his European competitors when making his retort, a tone of greed can

certainly be read when he says “it is urgent to know if Edison would object that good

negatives only made by European Manufacturers should be imported by us and sold as

being Star Films – this would cut out the Biograph combination and would be of good
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advantage to Edison who would get the royalties.” Whether Gaston meant to attribute

these films to the authorship of he and Georges is unclear, but it does appear to be in

response to Dyer’s proposition that the films be sold with their respective European

trademarks. It is also possible that Gaston acknowledged Star Films as a marketing tool,

assuming an audience would be more eager to see another Star Film than a Gaumont

film. This can be likened to the North American DVD release of Wong Kar Wai’s

Chungking Express in 2002, which had Quentin Tarentino’s face and name plastered all

over the DVD cover simply for having distributed it. Some trends never die. The final

piece of this particular correspondence comes with Dyer’s response beginning with the

ever-ominous “Confidential. All arrangements to be made on the quiet before the opening

of the Convention.” The convention he refers to is the European convention Gaston

would attend the next day (presumably with representatives of aforementioned firms)

where he assured Dyer he “shall settle this business.” Perhaps through Gaston’s clever

intervention, Gaumont would later sign a contract with Edison on September 19 of that

year.iii

Gaston found himself quite immediately defending Star Films from the penny-

pinching antics of Edison. He requested of Edison Manufacturing Company on July 10,

1908 “that royalties should be paid only from the date that the license was really

enforced.” It appears that Edison began charging royalties on sales made by Geo. Méliès

of Paris (Gaston’s company name) on the day after the agreement was initially printed. It

had not been signed by Gaston until days later, and had not gone into effect until March

1, 1908. No response of honoring or denying this request has been recorded.

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The event alluded to by Eileen Bowser of Gaston trading in licenses appears to

manifest itself in a series of letters between Gaston, Siegmund Lubin, and George Scull

of The Edison Mfg. Co.iv in late August, 1908. Scull inquires of Lubin approval of “Mr.

Melies’” desire to have “the Edison Manufacturing Company make a license agreement

with the ‘George Melies Co.’, in the place and on precisely the same terms as the one

now in existence with George and Gaston Melies.” This inquiry is dated August 17 while

Gaston’s typed request is dated a few days later, August 21. Suspicious? Perhaps, but

let’s not get carried away just yet. Scull agrees on August 24 to “draw up the new license

agreement as soon as possible.” The license agreement (dated September 18, 1908)

reveals that the license for the George Méliès Company replacing the prior for Gaston

and Georges individually entails the mandatory partnership of Gaston, J. J. Lodge, and

Lincoln J. Carter.

As the license had successfully shifted, Gaston inquired on September 22 to Scull

about the possibility of a little side business, which would leave Edison slightly out of the

picture. His intention was “making special subjects and selling them to a Company which

would be [bound] not to buy films [from] anyone else but [him].” It would appear that

Gaston would feel excused for such business since it did not entail the film hardware

patented by Edison in the United States, but rather utilizing “films [that] should be rented

by this Company to shows and theatres with a special apparatus and disks or rolls for

talking machines.” He unfortunately slipped a curse word in this proposition that turned

the heads of some Edison employees: “rented.” Scull warned in response on September

25 that “such an arrangement would bring about trouble” and he did “not think it was

advisable.” Gaston’s proposition may have been a sort of cover-up for something that had
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happened behind the scenes of the business. According to Dyer’s Memoranda in 1910

(containing enclosures printed from Edison’s legal department in December 1908), in

breach of the agreement initially printed, Lodge had sold the stock control of the George

Méliès Company to Max Lewis, a businessman “who conducted an independent

exchange for buying, selling, and renting moving pictures, and who also dealt in

unlicensed films.” It is directly after the forming of The Motion Picture Patents Company

between the Edison Company and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company that

Dyer was tipped off by William Selig of the Selig Polyscope Company and George K.

Spoor of the Essanay Film Company to these dealings. Gaston denied any knowledge of

this transaction, though his letter requesting the sale and rental of special subjects was

rather vague and may very well have been in reference to dealings with Max Lewis.

Needless to say, the licenses issued to the George Méliès Company were

terminated as per a notice sent by Frank Dyer on January 14, 1909. This termination

letter bookends a gap in correspondence until a reissued license in May 14, 1909, hence,

a bit of a gap in history. Bowser speculates based on a vast array of court records and the

appearance/disappearance of the Méliès name in film journals of 1909 that “claiming

ignorance of these dealings… [and] by sticking with the members of the Patents

Company in the lawsuit that followed, Gaston got his reward in the form of a license to

produce.” However, no trial according to Bowser’s bibliography took place between

Lodge and MPPC until July of 1913, eliminating the possible correlation between

Gaston’s cooperation and this new license. It is possible that, given the twists and turns of

the legal system, the trial either dragged for four years or was not recorded officially until

then, but even still, it seems excessive for a “reward” to be delayed until five months after
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a cooperative deed. Unfortunately, though I pose a few gripes with Bowser’s statement of

what I have a hard time calling fact, I offer no concrete replacement in this gap. I can

only speculate that perhaps the temporary license was issued as a result of Gaston

incessantly writing letters to staff members of Edison Mfg. Co. until a pacifying

compromise was reached, or perhaps he pulled some strings with his European contacts

to sweeten the deal. Regardless, I must retire again to factual documents.

According to the letter sent from Gaston’s attorney Charles Hamill to MPPC on

May 14, 1909, he had attended a conference earlier that afternoon with Gaston, and Scull

and Caldwell of Edison Mfg. Co. in which a conclusion was to be reached in regards to a

license for Gaston and Georges. The suggestion made is that a temporary license be

issued to Georges and Gaston under the stipulations that Gaston “refuse to lend his aid or

cooperation to the George Melies Company,” he only associates with those that are

approved by the MPPC, and their combined manufactured output (between he and

Georges) does not exceed 1,000 feet per week. On May 17, 1909, Gaston writes to Frank

Dyer a plea to reconsider the restriction claiming that he and his brother “should be

considerably handicapped in [their] plans for the future.” Though the conference was

held on May 14, the plea was written on May 17, and a reply by Scull on behalf of Dyer

was sent to Gaston on May 19 assuring his statement will be considered, Gaston sent a

rather hot-headed letter full of typos and bad English to Dyer on May 24, claiming that he

had been waiting eleven days for a response sent on his behalf from Mr. Hamill, had

taken a very expensive trip from Chicago to New York, and has been delaying a response

to the George Melies Company of Chicago which he would seemingly continue to work

with if a response did not come in a timely manner. He demands for a “business like”
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response and signs the letter with an incredibly erratic signature in comparison to his

others. What he receives, of course, the next day is another letter from Scullv. He assures

Gaston that it seems “undoubtedly” the intention of the MPPC to issue a license “broader

in its terms than the proposed provisional license.” Though no response is recorded from

Gaston, he finally got his much-requested letter from Dyer on June 23, 1909 stating:

[T]he Motion Picture Patents Company and the

Edison Manufacturing Company hereby refuse to issue the

licenses demanded in your letter, and will not further

consider the granting of such licenses until the time when

the Court of final resort shall have determined the relative

rights of the two above named companies to the George

Melies Company and your brother George and yourself.

What follows, of course, is yet another gap in correspondence. There is little proof

throughout any of these transactions that Georges himself had any knowledge of any of

Gaston’s American business affairs, even going as early as 1903 when Gaston first set up

the office. According to Dyer’s 1910 memoranda with the enclosed legal document, it is

stated that “not only Mr. Dyer testified, but also George Melies, who of course

understood how objectionable such transfers of stock were.” This would imply that either

Georges made an appearance in the United States (which it does not seem is the case) or

that Edison and Dyer had direct contact with him through this trial (and we have learned

that Dyer can speak French since a handwritten letter of his transcribing of Gaston’s

cablegram from 1908 was headed with “Translation”). Only assuming the latter to be the
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case, this would quite confirm Merritt Crawford’s initial theory that Gaston was loyal to

Georges up through 1909.

Through Georges’ correspondence with Crawford in 1930-31, we learn that

Gaston had sent him anywhere from 50,000 to 60,000 francs per year, suddenly cutting

off correspondence and payments at a date that is not disclosed in his writing. Though he

had been out of touch with Gaston and heard nothing of his business for quite a few

years, he claims a correlation between the time he cut off correspondence (seemingly

now, 1910) and the time that Gaston began making “G. Méliès” Star Films, about which

Georges pulls no punches calling them “The wors[t] in the world!” regardless of his

brother having been dead 15 years already upon Georges’ letters to Crawford. Georges’

sources for acknowledging that he “had been properly robbed” were Smith, Rock, and

Blackton of Vitagraph Co. whom he dined with in Paris. He would learn soon after that

many of these people are the very ones responsible for much of the illegal distribution of

his films in the United States. Crawford would inform Méliès on March 17, 1931 that the

piracy of his films (which Méliès seemed quite confident that Gaston had been involved

in from the beginning) including A Trip To The Moon, had occurred hardly weeks after

their initial release in Paris and London. Abadie (one of Crawford’s sources) had

concocted a scheme in 1902 to acquire negatives from Georges by paying one Charles

Gershel to pose as a man interested in exhibiting some Star Films at his brother’s theatre

in Algiers, then passed them along to Abadie who shipped them to a man, Arthur White,

who duplicated these films for export to Edison in Orange, New Jersey, who would then

sell them to Rock of Vitagraph. From there and sometimes from Edison, they were sold

to Siegmund Lubin. Considering the shortly lived provisional license agreement that was
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proposed by MPPC in January 1909 only to be denied to Gaston in June, it seems

unlikely that he had any sort of cooperation with them at this time. It is in January 1910

when his correspondence with Edison would suddenly resume without any prior mention

of their bad history (the letters deal only with some new printing machines) that the event

Crawford mentions in his letter (576) had probably just recently taken place:

[Gaston] was offered by Berst and Smith and

Blackton a franchise in the General Film Company, which

was the distributing organization of the Patents Company.

They told him that with this franchise, he could distribute

films that he produced, but under these terms: the films,

which you produced would have to be distributed by one of

the other companies, namely Vitagraph. It was in this way

that the Vitagraph obtained many of your best negatives,

and I need not assure you that they were fully aware of the

whole situation.

It would appear that this under-the-table deal, which had not been published in

Edison’s correspondence collection, would be the most likely cause of Gaston’s suddenly

good standing with the Patents Company and would allow me to conclude that his shift in

loyalty occurred anywhere between July of 1909 and January of 1910. Existence of any

document or correspondence within this time frame has yet to surface, but with further

investigation, this 6-month gap may be narrowed in even further, though I personally

doubt it could be due to the unscrupulous nature of the agreement. Though this history

proves that Gaston had, in fact, made at least one decision against his brother’s wishes, it
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also labels him as quite the romantic filmmaker. Though his films were only moderately

received and many of his attempts left him losing much more than he was making back,

he was willing to sell out the integrity of his own brother just to be able to make them.

Crawford relays a memory in aforementioned letter from William Haddock, a long-time

collaborator of Gaston’s who directed many films with him. As it closed his investigative

report (578) quite romantically, I can only do it justice by closing mine in the same

manner.

It seems that a certain situation in the picture that they

were going to make involved one brother doing a great

wrong to another and Haddock objected to the situation as

being an impossible one. He said that the two brothers

could not feel that way toward each other. Gaston told him

that, alas, it could be so. He said, “I have not written or

communicated with my brother, George, for a long time.

We do not speak nor write to each other. But,” he said “it

is my fault. I have been in the wrong.” Haddock then said,

“Well, why don’t you admit your fault to your brother and

straighten the matter out? It would be much better for both

of you to do so.” Gaston said, “Alas, I cannot. My pride

will not let me.”

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No document from the so-called “Trust” indicated a minimum quota,

which would need to be filled, but rather a maximum that was allowed
from Gaston and Georges combined (see page 7) as the result of a
possible mistrust in Gaston caused by the Max Lewis incident (see
pages 5-6).
ii
Crawford’s investigation questioned Jean LeRoy, William Haddock,
Arthur White of Kinetographic offices, and Al Abadie, who worked
closely with Croydon Marks, Edison’s Patent Attorney. He would reveal
quite elaborate schemes to Crawford about the pirating of Méliès’
films (see pages 9-10 or The Merritt Crawford Papers fr. 574-578).
iii
It should be noted that I did not review this contract personally,
but read of its existence through the Digital Edition of The Thomas
Edison Papers.
iv
The Digital Index of The Thomas Edison Papers wrongly attributes
this correspondence (“GFS/MJL” typed with no signature) to Frank
Dyer, which cannot be true as it does not match his initials. Also,
the entire correspondence between “GFS/MJL” (initials signed by Scull
in other documents) and Gaston/Lubin was eventually forwarded to Dyer
on September 4, 1908 by Matthew Stevens, Manager of the Foreign
Department.
v
Though the initials at the bottom of the page read “GFS/ARK,” it
seems unlikely that George Scull would refer to himself in the third
person, which would be the case had he written this.