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MOVING PICTURES

Chasers

The 1890s had been the decade of the moving picture—or so Americans thought. By 1903 audiences had become used to film technology and bored with the silent newsreels, parlor tricks, sight gags, stage scenes, and "panoramic" vistas that were the subjects of most screenings. Movies were shown at penny arcades on kinetoscopes—hand-turned viewing machines that presented about a half-minute of action. Films were also a staple of vaudeville bills, usually as "chasers"—concluding features meant to head the audience out the door before the next set of live acts began. Even the most rural communities were regularly visited by traveling projectionists. But although exhibitors sometimes provided piano music, accompanying lectures, and off-screen live actors who spoke dialogue, audiences were unimpressed with early-twentieth-century film. Then, in 1903, Edwin S. Porter, a director and cameraman for Thomas Edison's motion picture company, created a twelve-minute Western with continuous action from one scene to the next, as well as flashbacks: The Great Train Robbery became the most popular film of the decade in America. Because of Porter and those who hurried to imitate him, "the movies" became, virtually overnight, a booming industry and a budding art form.

The Industry

The Edison Company was producing, patenting, selling, licensing, and exhibiting films across the nation by 1900, but Edison had many eager competitors. Production companies that challenged Edison often found themselves in court, and the years 1900-1903 in particular were marked by litigation, although "out-of-court settlements"—in the form of smuggling, spying, theft, and physical altercations—also often determined ownership and distribution rights. By 1907 there were nine leading companies: Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Lubin, Selig, Kalem and (from Europe) Méliès and Pathé; their business practices became standard, and the three-part structure of the American film industry—producer, distributor, and exhibitor—was established. In 1908 these nine companies combined to form the Motion Picture Patents Company, a monopolistic trust. Independent producers, among them Carl Laemmle and William Fox, urged fellow producers to join them in resisting the trust; Laemmle and Fox would, in future decades, head Universal Pictures and Fox Studios. Other independents prospered as well: the New York Motion Picture Company would foster the careers of Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin; Porter eventually left Edison to found the Rex Company, which would one day become Paramount Studios. Hollywood was not to become synonymous with the motion picture industry until the 1910s, but in New York City, Chicago, and elsewhere from 1900 to 1909, the movie industry was thriving.

Storefronts and Nickelodeons

In 1902 the first permanent movie theater in the United States—Thomas Tally's Electric Theater in Los Angeles—opened its doors, featuring a continuous run of films from 7:30 P.M. to 10:30 P.M. and changing its program every four weeks. It was perhaps the best known of the "storefront" movie houses of the decade. Storefront theaters, which operated with minimal overhead (folding chairs, no live acts, and six shows a day) but charged ten-to-twenty-five-cent admission prices, were touch-and-go propositions. Even when featuring such technical wizardry as Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902), storefront profits fluctuated and eventually fell. In 1905, however, a Pittsburgh storefront opened with plush seats, a piano, frequent program changes, and nickel admission. It was the first film theater to be called a "nickelodeon," and within four years there were over four thousand nickelodeons in the country. By 1908 it was estimated that eighty million nickelodeon tickets were sold every week. The movie theater era had begun.

The Art

The advent of the nickelodeon era created an enormous demand for film, but little demand for film as art. Comedies and melodramas on limited subjects were turned out by the dozens, with few American films of note. Biograph's Everybody Works but Father (1905) was based on the popular minstrel song; Edison's Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), with its special hallucination effects, took an unprecedented two months to make, and Edison sold 192 copies to distributors in the first year of its release. The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1905) was adapted from a popular picture postcard. Vitagraph produced a fast-paced and violent crime drama called The Automobile Thieves (1906), an impressive twenty-three-shot reel. Sigmund Lubin's controversial 1907 film version of the Harry K. Thaw-Stanford White murder case, The Unwritten Law, highlighted White's supposed seduction of showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt (later Thaw's wife) and suggested Thaw's vengeful attack on White was justified by spousal prerogative. It was banned in many cities but was the biggest hit of the year in others. Clearly, cinema had a long way to go before it would begin to aspire to becoming an art form. Although in 1907 a French company, Film d'Art, was formed to explore the creative interpretation of the genre, and eventually drew the interest of American producer Adolph Zukor, U.S. studios shied away from the idea of longer or more-serious productions because it was felt that the film audience would not sit through a single picture that was longer than fifteen minutes.

Infancy

The art and craft of the moving picture that became associated globally with the United States in the later twentieth century was in its infancy from 1900 to 1909. Indoor scenes were static and lifeless; outdoor shots could be ruined by a day of rain or a wayward wind; plots revolved around jealousy, revenge, and innocents in peril—cinematography and screenwriting were as yet unheard-of professions. In 1908 the most important quality a film actor could have was skill at pantomime. Self-respecting theatrical performers and even vaudeville headliners refused to be seen on-screen; actors who did work in movies averaged five dollars a day. But the cinema industry was healthy and growing, despite the economic recession of 1907, and thanks to the creative individuals who nurtured it, within the next decade cinematic art also thrived.

Morality

Movies were an inexpensive and fascinating amusement for the predominantly working-class audience that frequented the nickelodeons. Upper- and middle-class moviegoers—who generally saw the latest movies at the vaudeville show or between the acts of plays rather than in the nickel theaters—enjoyed a variety of movie types. Westerns, Civil War films, slapstick, and detective pictures were popular, as well as "moral" melodramas such as The Convict's Sacrifice (Biograph, 1908) and filmed classics (A Christmas Carol, 1908; Othello, 1909). Movies could be both entertaining and uplifting; and, it was said, motion pictures kept the lower classes away from the saloons. Why, then, did some Americans accuse the movies of fostering immorality? First, unattended children made up a large portion of the audience: working families had quickly discovered the child-care benefits of the nickelodeons, and "order" was a problem in many urban movie houses. Second, the theaters were dark and crowded, frequented as well by "sailors" and "foreigners" (according to an often-quoted Saturday Evening Post article), and the back rows were virtual invitations to illicit sexual behavior. Finally, there was the content of the films themselves: more frequent than moral melodramas were vulgar, low comedies, titillating scenes in such films as The Boy, The Bust, and the Bath (Vitagraph, 1907) and French films. These last, reported the trade periodical Moving Picture Magazine in 1908, were acted with "an abandonment of manner and dress," the sort of thing "Europe may like [but] we don't." By 1909 Moving Picture Magazine was proposing that certain distasteful subjects be omitted from films altogether: prison interiors and prisoners, police stations, sensational crimes, and comedies that degraded people or played on human defects. Reformers bent on rehabilitating the movie-house venue campaigned for lighted theaters, restrooms and nurseries, ushers, and refreshments; those who objected to film content succeeded in instituting a National Board of Censorship in 1909.

The Pioneers

J. Stuart Blackton, G. W. "Billy" Bitzer, Wallace McCutcheon, Edwin S. Porter, William Paley, and James White were all leading filmmakers in the 1900s; under one studio or another they all produced, filmed, and directed many moving pictures, and their remarkable talents laid the groundwork for the flowering of the motion picture as an art form under the second generation of American filmmakers, led by director D. W. Griffith. David Lewelyn Wark Griffith (1875-1948) was a theatrical actor and manager before he entered the movie industry in 1908; he directed his first film, The Adventures of Dolly, in that year—one of numerous one-reel pictures he put out weekly. The following year's productions included A Corner in Wheat (based on the Frank Norris novel The Pit) and Pippa Passes (from the poem by Robert Browning). Griffith was experimenting with new techniques, such as the long shot, deep focus, moving camera techniques, cross-cuts, and shifting emotional "beats" or moments, that would make him the first great director of American film. He also insisted on careful casting of actors, a subdued acting style more suitable to film, rehearsals, and ensemble playing. Among the other pictures Griffith made from 1908 to 1909 were melodramas {The Drunkard's Reformation and The Lonely Villa, both in 1909), American history films (1776; The Hessian Renegades, 1908), and moral allegories (The Devil, 1909). Within seven years Griffith had produced two great classics of the silent-film era, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).

Performers

Movies were sold by "brand" name in the early years of the century: moviegoers chose "Edison" or "Biograph" pictures rather than films by a particular director or with a certain performer. Production companies did not allow their actors and actresses to receive name billing, fearing that an interest in the players would detract from interest in the product—the name-brand film. The star system so prevalent in the other theatrical arts did not enter full force into the movie industry until the 1910s. Most film actors were minor stage players glad to have a job and were hired by the day, or at most, the week: Ben Turpin was a weekly performer with Essanay Pictures; D. W. Griffith and his wife, Linda Arvidson, were "day hires" when they first became involved in pictures. Although some were recognized by the public from one film to the next, most movie actors were anonymous faces to those who saw them on the silent screen. Mary Pickford (1893-1979) made her film debut in 1909; audiences loved her, but movie fans who wrote her letters wrote to "The Biograph Comedy Girl." Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, and Lillian Gish were all unnamed performers for Griffith in 1908-1909. Florence Turner was "The Vitagraph Girl"; Maurice Costello was "Dimples"; and fan letters came to Charles Inslee, who performed in many Westerns, addressed to "The Indian." By 1909 some companies were issuing group photos of their stock players, and by the first years of the next decade, motion picture companies were beginning to realize the money value of the "movie star." Performers' names and faces appeared in the new fan magazines, on posters and post-cards, and even on pillowcases given away as theater door prizes.