Jacksonville Had More Than 30 Silent Film Studios. Here's Why Hollywood Left and What's Still Standing

Jacksonville, Fla. - Before Hollywood, there was Jacksonville. By 1916, the city's telephone directories listed more than 30 motion picture companies, according to the Norman Studios Silent Film Museum. Filmmakers came south to keep shooting through the Northern winter.

The Florida Department of State calls Jacksonville "an early contender" for the center of the film industry before the business settled in Hollywood. One studio complex from that era still stands: Norman Studios, in Old Arlington.

Jacksonville's film era at a glance

Sources: Florida Department of State; Norman Studios Silent Film Museum.

Why filmmakers came south

In the 1900s and 1910s, much of the American film business was based in New York, where winter weather made outdoor filming hard. Jacksonville offered mild winters, and by 1916 dozens of film companies had set up here.

Norman Studios and the "race films"

The studio complex in Arlington was built in 1916 as Eagle Film City, the Norman Studios museum says. Richard E. Norman bought it in 1920, at 29.

Norman made "race films": silent movies with Black casts, made for Black audiences. The Florida Department of State says his films showed Black actors in professional roles such as lawyers, bankers, pilots and doctors, at a time when mainstream films rarely did.

The museum says Norman's company was one of 109 "colored" film companies formed nationwide between 1916 and 1930.

The films

The Norman Studios museum lists these Norman productions:

• The Green-Eyed Monster
• The Love Bug
• The Wrecker
• Sleepy Sam the Sleuth
• The Bull-Dogger, starring rodeo cowboy Bill Pickett and actress Anita Bush
• The Crimson Skull
• Regeneration
• The Flying Ace (1926)
• Black Gold

The Flying Ace, the film that survived

The Flying Ace, released in 1926, follows Capt. Billy Stokes, a World War I pilot who comes home to work as a railroad detective. He has to solve the disappearance of a payroll agent and a $25,000 satchel.

The museum says the film was inspired by Bessie Coleman, America's first Black woman licensed as a pilot, who was killed in a plane crash in Jacksonville in April 1926. Norman based the film's heroine, Ruth Sawtelle, on her.

The film was shot at the studio and in Mayport. It was billed as "the greatest airplane thriller ever filmed," but the dueling planes were a single plane filmed from different angles, the museum says. The upside-down flip was done by flipping the camera.

In December 2021, the Library of Congress added The Flying Ace to the National Film Registry, its list of films to preserve for their cultural, historic or artistic importance.

Why the film business left

The museum says filmmakers moved west, and by the early 1920s Los Angeles was the center of the industry. It also points to "an ultra-conservative new Jacksonville mayor" as part of the reason.

Norman kept working in Jacksonville for most of another decade. He developed a system to sync sound with film and sold about a dozen units, the museum says. Sound-on-film technology soon made it obsolete. He later turned to distributing other filmmakers' work and making corporate training and promotional films.

What's still standing

- Norman Studios, Old Arlington. The City of Jacksonville bought four of the five buildings in 2002. Since then, it has partly restored them with three state historic preservation grants and city matching money, the Florida Department of State says. The nonprofit Norman Studios Silent Film Museum is working to finish the restoration. It lists open hours on the first and third Saturdays of the month, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., subject to change.

The Florida Department of State calls Norman Studios "the only preserved film studio in the nation that once specialized in silent films starring African-Americans."

Quick answers

Was Jacksonville really a movie capital?
Yes. More than 30 motion picture companies were listed in the city by 1916, according to the Norman Studios museum.

What's left of Jacksonville's film era?
Norman Studios in Old Arlington, a National Historic Landmark and the last surviving studio complex from that time.

Can you watch a Norman film today?
The Flying Ace (1926) survives, is on the National Film Registry and still gets screenings.

How we did this

Jax Times rebuilt this story on Oct. 24, 2026, from these sources:

• The Florida Department of State's 2016 announcement of Norman Studios' National Historic Landmark designation
• The Norman Studios Silent Film Museum's history and film pages

Earlier versions of this story relied on Wikipedia. We removed details we couldn't confirm in these sources.