John R. Freuler(1872-1958)

If John R. Freuler is remembered at all, it is as the man who, in February 1916, offered Charles Chaplin a contract to make 12 two-reel comedies for the astonishing sum of $670,000. Up to that point, no actor or celebrity had received anything remotely close to that figure. In 1933, he would tell an interviewer, "'Just crazy,' is what everybody [told us]. But we made $700,000 clear profit on that contract after those pictures brought us a gross of $3,300,000."

Formerly a real estate banker, John Rudolf Freuler entered the motion picture business in 1906 as co-owner of the Comique, a storefront nickelodeon, located in Milwaukee. Later that year, with brothers Harry and Roy Aitken, Freuler founded the Western Film Exchange, a distribution outlet that would open branches in St. Louis, Joplin and Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1910, Freuler and Samuel S. Hutchinson, another exchange owner, created the American Film Manufacturing Company of Chicago, thus entering the producing arena. Their brand became known as "Flying A." Like other "independent" producers, Flying A was challenged by the Patents Trust companies, and eventually moved production to Santa Barbara, California. (By 1915, the Trust collapsed.)

In March 1912, Freuler, the Aitken brothers, Hutchinson and another partner, Charles J. Hite, merged their exchanges into the Mutual Film Corporation, which locked up exclusive distribution for nearly all of the Midwest. (Hite would also become a producer by purchasing outright the Thanhouser Film Company of New York.) In 1913, director D.W. Griffith joined the Mutual family, but the biggest coup for the organization was its contract with the New York Motion Picture (NYMP) Company, which owned the Bison, Broncho and Domino dramatic brands supervised by Thomas H. Ince, and the Keystone comedy brand supervised by Mack Sennett. As Keystone's distribution outlet, Mutual was among the first to benefit from the sudden stardom of Charlie Chaplin in 1914. The following year, the Aitken brothers left Mutual to form Triangle with the NYMP Company and Griffith, and Freuler became president of Mutual. He helped institute new dramatic and comedy brands that kept the company prosperous, and continually kept Chaplin's Keystone comedies in circulation to meet an ever-increasing demand.

By the time they signed Chaplin directly, Mutual had grown to 68 exchanges throughout the United States and Canada. Freuler and Hutchinson formed the Lone Star Film Corporation to produce the twelve Chaplin comedies that have remained in wide distribution to this day. In addition to Chaplin's enormous salary, Lone Star also paid everybody else's salaries, plus bought and refurbished the studio used by Chaplin (which would eventually pass to Buster Keaton). During this period, Freuler's companies also produced and distributed films starring Mary Miles Minter, Helen Holmes, Ben Turpin, W.C. Fields and many others.

With the loss of Chaplin to First National in late 1917, closely followed by the loss of Minter to Adolph Zukor, Mutual foundered and Freuler and Hutchinson both resigned from the company in May 1918. Freuler remained active as a theater owner, and in the early 1930s returned to the producing end as the head of Monarch Films, a low-budget state rights outfit. By the 1940s, he had come full circle as owner of a single movie house, but had invested wisely and remained a wealthy man and respected Milwaukee citizen up to his death.