Founder, with British co-immigrant J. Stuart Blackton, of the Vitagraph motion picture production company in New York City in 1896. Encouraged by their success with projecting Edison films in a vaudeville act, they decided to enter the filmmaking business. Smith devised a motion picture camera and within days the pair had made their first film. In the beginning they shot mostly topical material with little regard to authenticity. To save the cost of travel fare, they shot a film about the Niagara Falls at the Passaic Falls in nearby New Jersey and passed it off as the real thing. During the Spanish-American War they faked the Battle of Santiago Bay in a water tank. Vitagraph presented its first fictional film, THE BURGLAR ON THE ROOF, in 1897. It was shot in the company's "studio" on top of the Morse building at 140 Nassau St. Vitagraph's output was prolific and within several years the company had become established as a leader in motion picture production. In 1906 it opened a studio in Brooklyn's Flatbush section and in 1911 added another in California. Its films were the most popular among cinema audiences in the early silent era. Among the many stars who started out with Vitagraph were Florence Turner (the "Vitagraph Girl"), Maurice Costello, John Bunny, Norma Talmadge, Anita Stewart, Rudolph Valentino, Adolphe Menjou, and Clara Kimball Young. Vitagraph was the only member of the Motion Picture Patents Company group to survive the aftermath of the antitrust court decision that caused most member companies to be dissolved. Vitagraph continued to prosper into the 20s, until its sale in 1925 to the Warner brothers.  Special Award 1947: To "one of the small groups of pioneers whose belief in a new medium, and whose contributions to its development, blazed the trail along which the motion picture has progressed, in their lifetime, from obscurity to world-wide acclaim." Winners presented Statuettes. (w. Col. William N. Selig, Thomas Armat & George K. Spoor) 1 Special Award