Jules Greenbaum
[2] Deutsche Bioscope GmbH, Berlin, was incorporated on 18 June 1902 with a capital of 20,000 marks[5] The main offices were at 131d Friedrichstraße, where the firm supplied equipment (including the American Biograph camera), and an 8-hour guaranteed film copying service.
Bioscope's cameramen were sent to Vienna, Munich, Leipzig, Halle, Nuremberg, Kiel, Hamburg, Poznan, Lviv and Riga in search of vaudeville/variety acts to film.
[2] Bioscope built new offices in 1906 at 123 Chausseestraße, in the east of Berlin; a glasshouse studio was erected in the large courtyard at the rear of the Jugendstil building, where Continental-Kunstfilm would later film In Nacht und Eis in 1912.
[9] In February 1908 Carl Schleussner bought Deutsche Bioscop as a manufacturing, copying and sales operation, for a 2/3 share of 140,000 marks, with 1/3 provided by Greenbaum and his brother Max.
[12] In October 1908, Greenbaum opened the Rollkrug [de] Vitascope cinema, a showpiece 500-seat movie theatre equipped to show sound films on Hermannplatz, 1–2 Berliner Straße.
[14] Greenbaum's firm invented and used Synchroscope, which synchronised the visual picture of films with phonograph records to create a working sound and vision system.
Greenbaum produced a number of these sound shorts of vocal classical music, and in 1908 entered into contracts to supply the machinery to Carl Laemmle's Movie Service Company in Chicago and to another American, Charles Urban, in Britain.
[15] Costs had soared by the end of 1908 (the Synchroscope was originally priced at $750 (around $20,000 in 2015);[15] and Schleussner AG bought out Greenbaum's share of Deutsche Bioscope to free up his operations.
Vitascope's first film of 1910 was Arsène Lupin contra Sherlock Holmes produced and directed by Viggo Larsen who joined in 1909 from Nordisk.
[19][2][22] In January 1914 Greenbaum merged his Vitascope firm with PAGU (Projektions-Aktiengesellschaft 'Union'), owned by his rival Paul Davidson, in order to compete with the larger French studios who were flooding the German market with their films.
[23][d] PAGU combined the resources of 800 employees, with main offices in Zimmerstraße and Lindenstraße, 20 "Union" cinemas, glasshouse studios in Tempelhof and in Weissensee, with its duplicating lab.
Director Adolf Gärtner (who worked on Joe May's Stuart Webbs detective series) also moved to Greenbaum-Film and directed nine films in Weißensee.
[2] In 1919 Greenbaum affiliated with Ufa, which the State had quietly established as the giant of German film industry during the war,[24] but the deal led to a series of legal disputes and the virtual bankruptcy of Greenbaum-Film.
This unsettled political situation led to reduced profits; Ufa claimed millions from Greenbaum for lost sales and the dispute escalated through the courts.
[1] During his life Greenbaum launched the career of a number of leading German directors and actors including Max Mack, Richard Oswald and Maria Orska.
His son Mutz Greenbaum ("Max Greene") became a leading cinematographer, whose films include Christopher Columbus (1923) starring Albert Bassermann, Thunder Rock (1942) and I'm All Right Jack (1959).
