Harold Joshua Binney was born in Missouri in 1889. Died Los Angeles 1956. In between he was a legitimate producer, director, and star of silent films and talkies; also a conman

He started his show biz career in vaudeville. Not much more is known about his early days.

In 1918 he founded the Florida Film Co., in Jacksonville, and its main arm, Josh Binney Comedies, for which produced and directed silent two-reelers that were built around an overweight clown named Hilliard Karr, also known as “Funny Fatty Filbert.”

By 1922 he was in Salem, Oregon, beguiling the mayor of that capital, as well as the state’s governor, with visions of Hollywood productions. It doesn’t seem that he made any movies in Oregon, and, in November of 1923 Binney visited Sonoma looking to produce film comedies in the Valley of the Moon.

In 1924 he leased Wolf Baron’s Coney Island Resort on the Santa Rosa Road, as Highway 12 was then known (site of the current Mary’s Pizza) to establish his studio.  He  started production on a proposed series of twelve short comedies,  the first one (the only one, it turned out) titled “The Account of the No Account Count,” a copy of which is in the collection of the Sonoma Valley Historical Society.

Images from this film are wonderful archival shots of local scenes.

Later that year he was caught passing a bad check with local merchants. His backers paid his debts, but he was soon under investigation in Montana for bilking investors there. Extradited to Butte, in 1924, he was tried and convicted of fraud and sentenced to three to six years in prison. He was paroled in November of 1925.

Undaunted, Binney went on to have a career as a producer /director in Hollywood. One of his best-known movies was “Hi Dee Ho” starring Cab Calloway. I’m not including the “Hi Dee Ho” poster because of racist imagery.

See “Midnight Menace” here.

The dark side of Josh Binney: Terribly ironically, in 1922, in Helena Montana, Binney advertised in the Helena Daily Independent “The Vigilante Picture Corporation,” with aim of depicting the “activities of the vigilantes” in a production that would be “as great or greater than the Birth of the Nation,” which is famously a propaganda piece for the KKK. The ad was a solicitation for investors. Of course, it was a scam, but one that catered to the racist feelings of white Montanans. This is truly ugly and I’m sorry it’s part of the story!