1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society Jump to:
1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society Jump to:
 Early Film Industry: Foundation of Hollywood |
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 Once upon a time in Hollywood: Hollywood was little more than farming village, almost a week's traveling time away from New York. View larger
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With the perfection of a moving picture camera in 1892, and the subsequent invention of the peep hole kinetoscope in 1893, the stage was set for the modern film industry. Previewed at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago during the summer of 1893, the kinetoscope could handle only one customer at a time. For a penny or a nickel in the slot, one could watch brief, unenlarged 35-mm black-and-white motion pictures. The kinetoscope provided a source of inspiration to other inventors; and, more importantly, its successful commercial exploitation convinced investors that motion pictures had a solid financial future. Kinetoscope parlors had opened in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and scores of other cities all over the country by the end of 1894. The kinetoscope spread quickly to Europe as well, where Edison, revealing his minimal commitment to motion pictures, never even bothered to take out patents.
At this time the Dickson-Edison kinetograph was the sole source of film subjects for the kinetoscopes. These early films were only fifty feet long, lasting only fifteen seconds or so. Beginning in 1893 dozens of dancers, acrobats, animal acts, lasso throwers, prize fighters, and assorted vaudevillians traveled to the Edison compound in West Orange, New Jersey. There they posed for the kinetograph, an immobile camera housed in a tarpaper shack dubbed the "Black Maria," the world's first studio built specifically for making movies.
In the earliest years of cinema no one knew quite what they had invented, or to what purposes it could be put. The technology of motion pictures, like that of magazine printing, was the culmination of 19th-century mechanical research.
The goal of recording animal and human motion preoccupied inventors such as. Marey and Edweard Muybridge during the third quarter of the century. Marers "photographic gun", designed in 1882, was a prototype of the filmcamera mechanism. With the development of celluloid roll film the technological requirements for cinema were complete; they merely awaited assembly. But Marey and Muybridge had little interest in developing their inventions further.
Some, including Muybridge himself, thought that one of the principal uses for film would be as mechanical memories, preserving the moving images of individuals for their family and friends after death. Thomas Edison intended to market the Kinetoscope, which he invented with his assistant William K. Dickson in 1893 as home entertainment for wealthy families. It did not project, so the Kinetoscope could be viewed by only one person at a time, and Edison made his profits from sales of the machines rather than of films. Hoping to sell the Kinetoscope in department stores to middle-class customers, Edison was anticipating television rather than movies.
By 1909 motion pictures had clearly become a large industry, with three distinct phases of production, exhibition, and distribution; in addition, directing, acting, photography, writing, and lab work emerged as separate crafts. The agreement of 1909, however, rather than establishing peace, touched off another round of intense speculative development, because numerous independent producers and exhibitors openly and vigorously challenged the licensing of the Patent Company. In 1914, after five years of guerrilla warfare with the independents, the trust lay dormant; the courts declared it legally dead in 1917. Several momentous results accrued from the intense battle won by the innovative and adventurous independents. They produced a higher quality of pictures and pioneered the multireel feature film. Under their leadership Hollywood replaced New York as the center of production, and the star system was born. At the close of the world war, they controlled the movie industry not only in America, but all over the globe.
Of all the facets of motion picture history, none is so stunning as the extraordinarily rapid growth in the audience during the brief period between 1905 and 1918. Two key factors, closely connected, made this boom possible. First, the introduction and refinement of the story film liberated the moving picture from its previous length of a minute or two, allowing exhibitors to present a longer program of films. One-reel westerns, comedies, melodramas, and travelogues, lasting ten to fifteen minutes each, became the staple of film programs until they were replaced by feature pictures around World War I. George Melies, Edwin S. Porter ( The Great Train Robbery, 1903), and D. W. Griffith, in his early work with Biograph ( 1908 to 1913), all set the pace for transforming the motion picture from a novelty into an art.
Cinema was a new commodity, unlike anything previously devised, and its early history was preoccupied with defining what that commodity was. Debates over whether the cinema imitated the theater or was itself a new form provided the esthetic aspect of that preoccupation, but there was more concem about how the new commodity should be sold, and to whom.
The novelty of moving photographic images was at first enough to guarantee its success, and the Lumieres and others exploited this by sending their cameramen/projectionists around the world to photograph exotica for exhibition in Europe and United States. The earliest films lasted little more than a minute, and typically featured scenic views, topical events, boxing matches, and circus or vaudeville acts. Music hall and vaudeville theaters became the cinema' s first permanent home. A dozen films would be presented together as a single turn among the performing animals, singers and comics, and soon managers noticed their popularity, particularly with the more "select" class of patrons.
The sale of films to vaudeville theaters indicated that manufacturers continued to be unsure of what it was they had to sell. The biggest producers were companies such as Edison, Bio23 and Vitagraph, who made films - cheaply and with little technical equipment - merely as a necessary adjunct to their prirnary business of existing projection equipment. Vaudeville provided a convenient outlet as it spared producers the expense of investing in exlŭibition facilities of their own, but it provided little incentive for the development of the medium beyond its appeal as visual spectacle.
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