User:Zanimum/Aubrey M. Kennedy

Aubrey M. Kennedy

The earliest known reference to Kennedy in film trade magazines was in March 1912, as a director of the Motion Picture Manufacturing & Leasing Company, Inc, at New York City. As of 1912, Kennedy worked at the Colonial Film Company. The studio apparently advertised that they were adapting Clyde Fitch's play Nathan Hale, with Nat. C. Goodwin in the lead role, leading to a public advertisement to the contrary from an attorney representing the Fitch estate, Goodwin, and the General Film Publicity & Sales Company. By the time of the National Convention of Exhibitors, in August, he was with the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. In charge of their Animated Weekly newsreels, he managed to step up production to the point where an Animated Daily was produced.

Kennedy Features, Inc. was launched in January 1914, to produce biweekly films starring English stage actress Constance Crawley and her associate Arthur Maude. The company was based in New York City, but filmed on the west coast. He was also vice-president and general manager of the Criterion Film Corporation, allowing him some control over the films created by the distributor’s seven other studios.

Films with Crawley and Maude included Mary Magdalene.

Kennedy headed to the Pacific Coast in spring 1914, to oversee the script and subsequent production of The Last of the Mohicans for Criterion Feature Film Company. Publicity for the film promised that "1,000 Indians are to be employed in it. This looks like the real thing." No further record of the production is known.

By November, he had moved to the Santa Barbera Motion Picture Company, also a Criterion distributed studio.