Charles Simone

Biography

Charles Simone arrived in New York Harbor in 1887, a thirteen-year-old from Italy who traded seminary Latin for stage verse. By twenty he was sharing boards with Eleonora Duse, playing the doomed count in “Il Conte san Germano” at the National Theatre on a snowy February night in 1903. Between curtain calls he built a barn-storming stock troupe that rattled up and down the Eastern seaboard, scripting its own one-acts on the train’s baggage paper. When flickering storefront nickelodeons began to outdraw footlights, Simone slipped through the scenery flats and into the new machinery of pictures. He sold gags and glowing press copy for Nestor, then supervised the rise of a red-brick studio in Bayonne, New Jersey, where winter light bounced off the Hackensack River. Boardroom seats followed—first with the feisty Motion Picture Distributing & Sales Company, later inside Universal’s newborn tower on 1600 Broadway—where he bolted together poster presses, photo labs, and finally the scenario vault that fed five-reel dreams to the nation. Smelling longer stories on the horizon, he jumped to Venus Features to hawk “features” before the word itself was fashionable. A hunch that sunshine and open space beat frostbite sent him west with Centaur Film; in California he traded Bayonne fog for citrus breezes and launched the company’s first epics in ermine and armor: Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and the caravan saga “The Gypsy Life.” Between sword fights he coaxed ink-drawn mischief to life, releasing the earliest “Desperate Desmond” and “Mutt and Jeff” cartoons to bemused matinee crowds. A Griffith camera turned his manuscript “In Life’s Cycle” into swirling melodrama while he watched from the director’s chair. Universal lured him back as Carl Laemmle’s publicity drum-beater; passports stamped Rome, Paris, and Sofia followed when Fox Films dispatched him to swap dollars for lire and dinars, 1927-28, under the title Directtore Generale in their Roman headquarters. United Artists borrowed the same cosmopolitan shoulder when Europe’s exchange rates waltzed. Between steamship crossings he still found time to keep the books and the faith for Bergenfield’s Democratic Club, balancing budgets and ballots in equal measure until the talkies had fully found their voice and he closed his industry ledger in 1931.