Before Hollywood, there was Brooklyn — Midwood, to be precise. On Avenue M and East 15th Street is a former movie studio that today serves two very different uses: the Shulamith School for Girls and a television production facility. The latter has been used for soap operas like “Another World” and for prime-time hits like the “Cosby Show.” The whole complex, once upon a time, was as important to the nascent American movie industry as any complex in the country.

The Museum of Modern Art is honoring that history with a film series, running now through November 13, called “Vitagraph: The Big V on Avenue M.” Known as Vitagraph Company studios, it was the child of J. Stuart Blackton. Born in 1875 in Yorkshire, England, as a boy Blackton moved with his family to New York City. He attended City College, and became a skilled illustrator. He tried to make a go of it in vaudeville, as a presenter of “magic lantern” shows in which he projected his rapidly drawn illustrations. Not finding success in vaudeville, he went to work as a reporter for the New York Evening World, and in that capacity met Thomas Edison when the inventor was working on his Vitascope film projector.

Edison made a film of Blackton performing one of his magic lantern shows, and Blackton was so impressed that he purchased a Vitascope projector and made a success of showing Edison’s films. In those days, you could project a film of clouds rolling by and audiences sat mesmerized. Blackton then formed Vitagraph, originally based in Lower Manhattan. Blackton and his partner Albert Smith began making fiction films. They are among the pioneers of those early days when the new medium underwent experimentation that resulted in the kinds of films we all take for granted today.

The Brooklyn studio came after Blackton and Edison had engaged in a series of court battles over several years. Edison claimed proprietary rights over Blackton’s — and everyone else’s — productions. Eventually, Edison was signatory to the creation of the Motion Pictures Patent Company, which included 10 studios, including Chicago’s Essanay and the Méliès and Pathé studios (the latter the owner of the Lumière patents) of Paris, as well as Edison and Vitagraph. The Midwood studio opened in 1906, and Blackton could soon claim to be the largest producer of motion pictures in the country. Midwood in 1906 was still largely countryside, dotted with “high-class” suburban subdivisions. It provided Blackton with the space he could not obtain in Manhattan. Blackton, for all his ability to innovate, was unable to keep pace with the dizzyingly fastmoving industry. He went “Hollywood” and opened a California studio around 1910, running it concurrently with the Midwood facility.

At first, Midwood remained the main studio, but by 1920 most of the production had shifted to California. In 1925 Blackton sold his company to Warner Brothers, made a heap of money on the deal, then went broke in the 1929 crash. After holding a series of minor jobs in the film industry, and hitting the circuit as a lecturer on the old days of silent movies, Blackton died in a car crash, a nearly forgotten man, in 1941. Warner Brothers continued to use the Midwood studio, mainly for short subjects, until 1939. After years of inactivity, the studio became part of the National Broadcasting Company from 1952 to 1957.

In its Midwood heyday, between 1906 and 1925, Vitagraph was one of the great pioneers of movie making. Beginning with newsreels, the company moved on to making feature-length films, including the first U.S.-made film adaptations of Shakespeare plays, such as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” of 1915. One of Vitagraph’s early stars was John Bunny, the first of the great movie comedians, predating Charlie Chaplin. (Bunny, who is buried in Brooklyn’s Evergreens Cemetery, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.) Florence Turner, known as the “Vitagraph Girl,” is said to have been the most popular American film actress in the world at one time. (She played Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”) Equally popular was Maurice Costello, the matinee idol with whom she was often paired. (He was also the great-grandfather of actress Drew Barrymore.) Though Bunny, Turner, and Costello were superstars in their day, their names, like Blackton’s, are barely remembered today.

Perhaps the best known today of the Vitagraph stars was Norma Talmadge, whose great career as a silent film actress began at Vitagraph when she was still a student at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush. Like many big stars of silent cinema, Talmadge was unable to make the transition to the talkies, and her career abruptly ended.

A persistent rumor has it that both Rudolph Valentino and Leon Trotsky — yes, Leon Trotsky — appeared as extras in Vitagraph productions. I have never been able to determine if this is true. Others who claimed to have worked for Vitagraph, or have had such claims made on their behalves, or who actually appeared in Vitagraph films include Moe Howard (another Erasmus Hall kid), Boris Karloff, and Oliver Hardy. Winsor McCay, one of the greatest pioneers of animated films, worked for Vitagraph in Midwood.

The series featuring MoMA’s collection of films made at the Midwood studio includes the 1909 “Life of Moses,” an extensive John Bunny program, and the 1910 “In Neighboring Kingdoms,” starring Norma Talmadge at age 17. Today, a smokestack rises high near the Avenue M station of the Brighton Line. The name “Vitagraph” appears vertically on the smokestack, a ghostly reminder of early movie glory. Now MoMA helps us to assess for ourselves the importance of Vitagraph.

fmarrone@nysun.com