It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”. They had set up in an old stable; the cast was made up of Herbert Stern (a local architect), Sibley Watson’s wife Hildegard, and Webber himself. They only had twelve kilowatts of direct current for lighting, and very little heat, let alone room for sets. This was a thoroughly unprofessional production, and as Sibley Watson told Movie Makers, the magazine of the Amateur Cinema League, “the amateur who tries to compete with the professional producer on his own ground is licked from the start.”
