World Film Company

[6] The destruction by fire of the French-based Eclair's New Jersey studio on March 10, 1914, and the outbreak of World War I the following August drove a re-organization of foreign film-industry assets in Fort Lee, including the employees.

Within World Film a number of French directors and cinematographers, many of whom had been brought over to work at American Eclair, organized themselves in a separate French-speaking unit, with its own sensibility.

For about three years Maurice Tourneur, Léonce Perret, George Archainbaud, Emile Chautard, Albert Capellani and Lucien Andriot, among others, worked together on films such as 1914's The Wishing Ring: An Idyll of Old England, the 1915 versions of Camille and Alias Jimmy Valentine, the 1916 La Bohème.

and taught a young apprentice film cutter at the World studio: Josef von Sternberg.

[7] Others were also hired into World Film: actress Clara Kimball Young (the second wife of director James Young, married and divorced) hired away from Vitagraph, Sidney Olcott hired away from Kalem Studios, screenwriter Frances Marion, actress Elaine Hammerstein, and vaudeville star Lew Fields, and Clara Whipple (third wife of director James Young, married and divorced).