DATE: Wednesday, August 20, 1997            TAG: 9708200014

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: LARRY MADDRY

                                            LENGTH:  183 lines

NORFOLK'S UNDERWATER DREAM MERCHANTS MOTION PICTURE-PIONEERING BROTHERS WERE THE FIRST TO FILM OCEAN DEPTHS, CREATING A SENSATION IN 1913.

THE OCEANS - which Herman Melville once described as watery graveyards littered with the bleached bones of drowned men - were a mystery to most Americans at the turn of the century.

Millions flocked to beaches for summer bathing in the cooling waves, but what lay beneath that heaving surface of salty liquid was unknown - as unrevealed as the surface of the moon until NASA missions there.

The first to pierce the veil of mystery shrouding the ocean floor for millions were a pair of Norfolk brothers who, in 1916, created a silent drama featuring untethered divers, a giant mechanical octopus and a submarine.

Financed in part by Norfolk businessmen, the film by John Ernest and George Maurice Williamson - based on Jules Verne's ``Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'' - was the first underwater drama done with movie cameras. It was a worldwide sensation, breaking all cash receipt records.

Their story has been captured in Thomas Burgess' book ``Take Me Under the Sea - The Dream Merchants of the Deep.'' (Published by The Ocean Archives; Salem Oregon, 244 pages with photos and illustrations. $13.95.)

``Their little company established a format for every screenplay on shipwrecks, lost treasure and undersea perils that Hollywood would produce in the years to follow,'' Burgess says.

Burgess, friend of George Williamson and a natural history specialist for motion pictures, will give a lecture and video and slide presentation tonight at 7 and 9 at the Virginia Marine Science Museum's Owl Creek Marsh Pavilion Theater. For reservations, phone 437-6006 by 5 p.m.

Ernie and George Williamson were born in Liverpool, England, and moved to Norfolk while very young. Their father, Charles, had been a clipper ship captain who operated a yard here that converted ships for the grain trade.

As boys grew up playing around the ships anchored at their father's yard. When they were 16, their father insisted that the youths become apprentices at the Newport News Shipyards.

They later moved briefly to Colorado and might never have become celebrities - and contributors to photo and movie history - had their father not been an inventor.

Capt. Williamson had invented an apparatus for underwater viewing called the Williamson Submarine Tube, which enabled a person to climb down a retractable tube to considerable depths beneath the sea without air hoses, to an iron observation chamber with portholes. The air breathed on the underwater end was the same air surrounding the barge from which the 3-foot-wide tube dangled. Capt. Williamson believed the device's future lay in salvage work.

By 1913, Ernie Williamson was a cartoonist and photographer for The Virginian-Pilot. He was drawn to the undersea world while reading a copy of the London Illustrated News in a Norfolk barbershop.

As the barber's scissors snipped away, Ernie's eye fell on an article featuring the attempts of two men experimenting in various ways with underwater observations. One had been using oil and watercolors to depict scenes he had observed while diving in Tahiti. The other had taken photos of freshwater fish in a glass observation chamber he had constructed beside a pond.

Wheels turned like camera sprockets in Ernie's head. His father's submersible tube would enable him and his brother to take real underwater photos - not merely those from a pond. He also knew that a motion picture exposition would open soon in New York.

Ernie foresaw the potential for underwater movies - something unheard of in the infant motion picture industry, which was only 5 years old. (D.W. Griffith's epic silent film about the Civil War was still in production.) Ernie was looking through a tube toward the future, and what he saw was fame and fortune.

He immediately wired George, who was still in Colorado, explaining his plans, and George returned to Norfolk as enthusiastic about undersea photography as his brother.

If there was enough light for a still camera to make an image underwater, motion pictures would be inevitable, they reasoned.

In June 1913 the pair boarded a barge towed into the Chesapeake Bay carrying the collapsible tube and a frame containing a reflector and a battery of tungsten lamps capable of a 1,000 candle power.

During a weekend of filming with a camera appropriated from The Virginian-Pilot, they took photographs from the chamber, lowering it and the lamp frame as far down as 30 feet.

Both brothers used the camera. They took still photos of pilings. They took pictures of fish, and when the fish lost interest, they used a baited line to attract them. They took photographs of junk.

Burgess notes in his book: ``George, always the promoter, even swam down and held a Scientific American in front of the (viewing) port.'' The magazine had run an article on their father's submarine tube years earlier, and they hoped to prompt another.

Returning to Norfolk with their camera, the brothers developed the underwater photos in their darkroom. Virtually every negative pulled from the soup of chemicals was sharp. They wanted to be in movies. And they had the vehicle for it in hand.

With no money to underwrite their dream, they waited only a few days before appealing for help to Keville Glennan, city editor of The Virginian-Pilot. They wanted the paper to bankroll an expedition to the tropics, where they intended to make underwater movies.

Glennan offered no financial help but was as excited as the brothers over the still photos they had clicked beneath the Bay. Like the Williamsons, Glennan believed they had made the world's first undersea photographs - a logical presumption because news traveled less frequently and more slowly in those days. (In fact, undersea photos had been printed in various overseas publications since the 1890s. And photos made from a glass-bottom boat had appeared years earlier in The National Geographic.)

What Glennan understood correctly was the dramatic appeal of the Williamson photos and the inevitability of underwater movies.

He set up a special Sunday feature page with the headline ``Submarine Movies to Reveal the Wonders of the Deep.''

Glennan wrote the story himself. The two photographs printed - one of a pair of croaker fish and another of minnows nibbling at bait - were accompanied by diagrams of the picture-taking chamber, a photo of Ernie with a camera going into the tube, and romantic illustrations of a Spanish galleon photographed from a chamber attached to a tube and of a sea cave containing jutting rocks and schools of fish.

Several enlargements of the newspaper page about their exploits and the future of underwater movies were used weeks later at the motion picture exposition in New York as a way of introducing the Williamson brothers to the movie industry.

The brothers made important contacts in New York. One was C.J. Hite, who was president of the Thanhouser Film Corp., an extensive film distribution service. Hite was eventually to become the majority stockholder in the Williamsons' Submarine Film Corp.

But upon their return from New York, the brothers received financial support from Norfolk businessmen, including Thomas S. Southgate, a Norfolk broker; regional Coca-Cola bottler Alonzo F. Cathey; C.R. Capps of the Seaboard Railway; and Nathaniel Beaman of Norfolk's First National Bank.

In early 1914, the brothers set out for Nassau in the Bahamas to make what was to become the first underwater motion picture. Essentially a nature film, it contained one scene - insisted upon by the Norfolk backers seeking a little action for their money - in which Ernie confronted and stabbed a shark.

The film, later named ``Terrors of the Deep,'' was the first undersea motion picture. It premiered at the Smithsonian Institution and was an immediate sensation. An eminent scientist introduced the film to his audience as follows: ``You are about to view the most remarkable photographs ever made.''

The Boston Independent reported: ``These ocean meadows and forests look very different from the pictures we have seen in books and the specimens we have seen in museums, for we realize that it is life we are looking at.''

The film was distributed in the United States and England, earning rave reviews. In Chicago, it played for seven months.

The brothers became celebrities in the golden age of movie making, establishing their offices in New York, then the headquarters for the movie industry.

Their most famous film, ``Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,''was produced by Universal Studios and was released Oct. 9, 1916, under circumstances beyond the wildest dreams of a film promoter.

On the day before the movie's premiere, a German sub ravaged the sea lanes leading to New York, sinking three British freighters, a British passenger liner and two other ships. The sub attack captured front-page headlines the same day the movie made its debut.

As a Chicago paper put it: ``If the Kaiser had been its press agent, ``Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'' could not have been timed to better advantage.''

The film, about Capt. Nemo, with subplots of soldiers stranded on a tropical island with a beautiful girl and an uprising in India, was all about submarines and a battle with a giant octopus.

``Twenty Thousand Leagues'' broke all box office records and was played in every hamlet in America. It was the grandest of the Williamson brothers' adventures.

After fashioning another film, ``The Submarine Eye,'' the brothers feuded over the direction of their company. George moved to Colorado but Ernie continued his association with movies for years after-ward.

George Williamson died in Denver in 1956. Ernie died in Nassau 10 years later. They never saw each other or communicated at any time in the 38 years between their parting in New York in 1918 and George's death.

Author Burgess notes, sadly, that all copies of ``Terrors of the Deep'' appear to have disappeared, although he will show scenes from ``Twenty Thousand Leagues'' at his lecture.

``The Williamson brothers' contributions to undersea photography popularized marine science, which, I suppose, is why I've been invited to speak at the museum,'' he said. ILLUSTRATION: Photos courtesy of Thomas N. Burgess, c.1993

LEFT: The photosphere...

BELOW: A special edition of The Virginian-Pilot from 1913.

RIGHT: ...Captain Charles Williamson and sons Ernie and George.

Graphic

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