Film Comedy As Family Business: George Albert Smith & Laura Bayley
I was interviewing a husband-and-wife filmmaking team this week for an upcoming pair of episodes for the podcast. Catherine Dee Holly and Fray Forde work together in Los Angeles as COKI Productions where they have produced and acted in some wonderful short films. We were talking about a pair of husband-and-wife filmmakers from the late 19th century who will be featured in the 1897- and 1898-themed episodes.
“Did it surprise you,” I asked, “when I shared with you the information about these couples?”
Fray answered, “No. Not really. Filmmaking has always been about collaboration. There’s always someone else working with you. Even if only one person is getting the credit, they didn’t do it alone.”
And I think that sums up the story of some of our early film pioneers very nicely. One of the things I’ve noticed in my project to teach myself the history of film comedy from 1895 to the present day is that a great deal of attention is often paid to specific individuals with passing notice (if any) given to the supporting cast who worked with the person in the spotlight. And, I think this is especially true when the team happens to be a married couple. It isn’t terribly shocking or surprising that most of the attention is often focused on the husband, given the culture these couples worked in and even the culture we live in now. Happily, in my interviews with film historians about George Albert Smith and Robert W. Paul, both historians were quick to point out to me their belief that the wives of these gentlemen were overdue for credit of their own as full creative partners in the pioneering of film and film comedy.
With this blog entry, I want to highlight one of these couples as a sneak preview of the upcoming episodes. Perhaps it will spawn an irregular series here on some of the hidden figures who have helped build the history I’m now so happily exploring. In this post, I’m going to give a quick introduction to a most fascinating pair of film pioneers: George Albert and Laura Bayley Smith.
George Albert Smith (1864-1959) and Laura Bayley (1862-1938)
Husband and wife film pioneers George A. Smith and Laura Bayley are pictured here in a scene from A Kiss in the Tunnel (dir. George A. Smith, 1899).
I’m only a few “years” into this project, but George Albert Smith and his wife Laura Bayley have easily been my favorite new-to-me discovery so far. I find that I am loving the back story of this couple as much as I’m loving their surviving films.
I was fortunate to interview film historian Frank Gray, principal lecturer at the University of Brighton’s School of Media, on the history of Albert and Laura. Gray is the author of The Brighton School and the Birth of British Film*, one of my resources for the episode and this post.
Laura Bayley was born in the English seaside town of Ramsgate in 1864 as the third of four sisters. Laura’s older sisters, Eva and Florence, began a stage career as singers around 1871 with Laura and her little sister Blanche joining the family musical group by 1873. The Bayley Sisters developed a fine career touring and performing to venues throughout southeastern England as part of a revue featuring songs, sketches, magic lantern displays, dramatic readings, and other entertainments. In addition to singing, Laura also took on many of the lead acting roles associated with the family troupe’s performances at annual British pantomimes during the Christmas holidays in the 1880s, including roles as Cinderella, and as the “Principal Boy” (a pantomime tradition of a young woman playing the role of the male protagonist) in pantomimes such as Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood, and Aladdin. While performing musical sketches as one of the “little misses Bayley” and through her years as a lead actress in pantomimes and other performances, Laura had been establishing herself as a multi-talented comedienne.
In 1887, the Pier Pavilion in Hastings hosted a show in celebration of the careers of the Bayley Sisters, featuring guest performances from all sorts of variety entertainers. One of the performers at the benefit/tribute show, was a young man named George Albert Smith.
Britain’s first great film comedian?
Laura Bayley in a scene from Mary Jane’s Mishap (dir: George Albert Smith), 1903.
George Albert Smith was born in 1864 in East London. By 1881 at the age of 17 he is living with his mother and three sisters in Ramsgate, the Bayley Sister’s hometown. This area of England is known for a string of sea coast towns built around the tourist economy. The towns, primarily Brighton, were a short train ride from London and provided tourists with all manner of entertaining distractions such as pleasure gardens (think of them as something like a Victorian-era amusement park), aquariums, music halls, museums and halls of curiosities, lecture halls, and more. He quickly joined in with this tourist/entertainment economy, taking to the stage at the age of 18 as a “mesmerist” and “thought reader.”
He was soon providing lectures and demonstrations of mesmerism on the sea coast entertainment circuit. Learning that Smith was a Victorian-era mesmerist delighted me for several reasons, notably that it puts him squarely inside the world of stage magic and spiritualism. If you’ve listened to the podcast’s second episode [Who were the early adopters of film and comedy? (1896)], you already know that the inhabitants of this world were some of the earliest users of film technology. (And if you haven’t already listened to the episode, I hope you will.)
His success as a performer earned him an invitation to perform at a variety show tribute to the Bayley Sisters in 1887 in Hastings. I don’t know if this was the first time Smith and the Bayleys had met. It seems like they should likely have crossed paths while performing before then, but Frank Gray points out in his book that this is the first time the two performers are mentioned together in the press. A year later, Albert Smith and Laura Bayley would be married, and their careers would soon take on a new trajectory.
The mesmerizing George Albert Smith
One of the pioneers of British cinema and film comedy
As Laura and her sisters, under management from one of Laura’s brothers-in-law, would continue to perform at music halls and other venues in the late 1880s/early 1890s, Smith pivoted away from mesmerism and hypnotism shows toward becoming a magic lantern projectionist and lecturer. (Not coincidentally, you can learn a little historical background on magic lanterns and English music halls in Acting Funny’s third episode.)
Smith and Bayley soon became the managers of a pleasure garden in Hove, England, near Brighton. The garden was home to a mineral spa, wooded parkland, picnic areas, and host to all sorts of entertainments including tightrope walkers, open air theatrical performances, parachuting demonstrations, educational lectures, demonstrations of Edison’s phonograph machine, comedy revues, afternoon teas, children’s activities, a monkey house, fortune tellers, magic lantern shows, and more.
Smith had become quite skilled at presenting magic lantern entertainments and in 1896 he added a new technology to his skill set when he began demonstrating film projectors and assembling a small program of films to show curious audiences. By 1897, he had converted a building on the pleasure garden grounds to a darkroom for film development and entered the filmmaking business on his own.
What’s interesting about Smith is that when he sets up his new film company, he promotes it immediately as a company specializing in comedy films. It seems an odd thing to do in 1897, as almost no one who is making films is specializing in anything really at this point. Most everyone is making a mish-mash of films across a wide range of genres from documentary to comedy, early horror and science fiction, fairy tales, dance demonstrations, nature scenes, travelogues, and whatever else a cameraman could manage to capture on 40-60 seconds of film reel. I believe this is where Laura’s influence can first be seen in their creative partnership. Laura from her work on-stage and in entertainment business, would know that specializing in a genre is an effective way to build a loyal audience and, not coincidentally, her particular genre was comedy.
Laura also had many connections in the performance world, particularly again among comedians, and this allowed Smith to build a cast of regular performers for his early movies. This included most frequently Laura herself, but also included comedians such as Tom Green who often appears on screen as Laura’s husband or suitor. In fact, some of the notes in Smith’s cash ledger suggest that Laura may have been the uncredited director of some films that are currently credited to her husband. An example of this would be Comic Face, an 1897 short film featuring Tom Green drinking a beer and making a series of funny faces for the camera as his character gets progressively inebriated (the film is also known as Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer).
While Laura was often on screen, she was also busy behind the camera, too. She is known to have been the cinematographer for some of Smith’s films, particularly those using the Biokam, a camera/projector/printer combination created by Smith and other business partners designed for home and personal use in the late 1890s and early 1900s— well before we all thought we had become cinema auteurs with the advent of the home camcorder in the 1980s.
Smith’s films make use of his talents learned as a magic lanternist, where he grasps the possibility of lantern tricks such as dissolves and quick change jump cut-style animations as potential additions to the cinematic language. His early films are notable in their use of multiple scenes at a time when many filmmakers were still producing single-scene films staged in front of the camera as if for a photograph or stage production.
One of these films, The X-Rays (aka The X-Ray Fiends) from 1897, is going to be Acting Funny’s featured film for podcast episode #4, which is set to debut on Monday, February 15. In the film, you will find Smith has put together a film with three scenes by using jump cuts to pull off an early special effect sequence meant to poke fun at a brand new technology: x-rays. In this episode, we will talk at length about George Albert Smith and Laura Bayley with guest expert Frank Gray from the University of Brighton. We’ll also revisit Laura and George in our 1903-themed episode with a conversation with film historian Maggie Hennefeld on women in early film comedy, featuring the film Mary Jane’s Mishap later this spring.
Some additional recommended reading on Laura Bayley can be found on the Women Film Pioneers Project.
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little bit about one of my new favorite families in film comedy: Laura Bayley and George Albert Smith. If you aren’t already listening to Acting Funny, the podcast that takes film comedy seriously, and my quest to teach myself the history of film comedy one year at a time, from 1895 to the present, please do take a moment to like, follow, or subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast listening service. You can find a listing of available sites on the Where to Listen page, or you can also find episode descriptions and embedded podcast players on each episode’s entry in the Episodes section of this site.
If you want to be updated once a month on future topics and guests, please feel free to subscribe to The Banana Peel, the free monthly newsletter for Acting Funny. You can find a subscription form on the bottom of any page on this site. Thanks for reading and listening!
This blog post is part of the Home Sweet Home Blogathon hosted by Realweegiemidget Reviews and Taking Up Room.
* Acting Funny and Shane Rhyne are participants in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, and as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This site only recommends products or services I use personally or are directly related to the subject of my podcast episodes and blog posts. While I do accept review copies, all books, films and other products or services reviewed were purchased by me through normal retail channels unless otherwise noted.
I was provided a digital review copy of The Brighton School and the Birth of British Film by the author.