Made In America (48 page)

Edison didn’t envision kinetophone viewing as a shared, public experience, but rather as a home entertainment system
– and one whose primary purpose would be to provide an extra, incidental use for his recently invented phonograph. Some of the early motion pictures even had sound. (What slowed the progress of sound movies wasn’t the problem of synchronization but of amplification.) He suspected the whole thing would prove a passing fad, and had so little confidence in it that he decided against spending $150 on an international patent, to his huge eventual cost.
²

The first public demonstration of Dickson’s new system was on 14 April 1894, on Broadway in New York. Despite an admission charge of twenty-five cents, people lined up around the block for the chance to take a look at this marvellous new peep-show.
³
(The invention may have been new, but the word wasn’t;
peep-show
had first been used in 1861 in reference to kinematoscope viewers.) Projected through fifty-foot loops of film, each kinetophone show lasted no more than a minute and sometimes as little as sixteen seconds, with obvious consequent limitations on narrative possibilities. That the camera which recorded the moving images weighed 500 lb. and was the size of a modern refrigerator acted as a further deterrent to adventurous scenarios. As a result, the first kinetophone films consisted of simple amusements: quick vaudeville turns, pratfalls, dancing bears and – something of a surprise hit – a brief but lively feature called
Fred Ott’s Sneeze
(Fred Ott being an Edison employee), which has the distinction of being the first copyrighted motion picture.

The shortcoming of the kinetoscope was that it could be viewed by only one person at a time. Unwilling or unable to see its potential, Edison failed to exploit his head start and was soon left behind in the hunt for a projection system that would allow motion pictures to become a shared experience. Rival systems began to sprout up everywhere, particularly in Europe where there were no copyright problems thanks to Edison’s miserly failure to secure a patent. In one of the more
intriguing developments, an inventor named Louis Aimé Augustin le Prince briefly excited Paris in 1890 by demonstrating a fully developed system in which moving film was projected on to a screen to the delight and astonishment of an invited audience. Shortly after this acclaimed performance, le Prince left his house on some errand and was never seen again. Another inventor in Paris, one Jean Leroy, thereupon demonstrated a rival system, again to great acclaim, and likewise mysteriously vanished.
⁴

Not until 1895 did anyone else crack the problems of projecting film. Then in quick succession came three workable systems, all developed independently. One was the
cinématographe,
invented by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. From this evolved both the French and British words for the movies as well as such terms as
cinematography, cinematographer
and, much later,
Cinerama.
The word occasionally appeared in America in the early days, though usually spelled
kinema.
In Germany, meanwhile, the brothers Max and Emile Skladanowsky developed their
Bioskop,
anglicized in America to
Bioscope.
And in England Robert Paul invented the
Theatrograph
or
Animatographe,
which was as technically sophisticated as the other two, but failed to prosper and soon dropped from contention.

At last it dawned on Edison that there was money to be made in the film game. Unable to invent his own projection system, he did the next best thing. He bought one and claimed to have invented it. The system was in fact the invention of Thomas Armat. The only thing Edison invented was the name:
Vitascope.
Armat based his system on Edison’s kinetophone, but improved it substantially. One improvement was the addition of a small reel that gave the film another loop. Called the
Latham
loop after its American inventors, the brothers Otway and Greg Latham, it didn’t look much, but it transformed the history of the movies. Before the Latham loop, movies of more than a minute or so
were impossible because the film would so often break. The Latham loop eased the tension on the film and in doing so made it possible to create films of more than a hundred feet. For the first time real movies, with plots, were possible.

The first public display of this new wonder was on 23 April 1896, as an added attraction between live shows at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall on Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway (a site now occupied by Macy’s).
⁵
Not having enough films of his own to show, Edison illegally copied some of the Lumière brothers’ early works.
⁶
Motion picture
was coined in 1891, but wasn’t used much at first. The earliest movies were called
life portrayals
or
mechanically reproduced theatre entertainment,
though by the end of 1896 people were calling them
moving pictures
and by the early 1900s had shortened this almost everywhere to
movies
(though until as late as the 1920s people sometimes referred to them as
movie plays
)
.
People who took the pictures were called
camerists. Cameraman
didn’t occur to anyone until 1905.

The first real movie – that is, one with a story-line – was
The Great Train Robbery
by Edwin S. Porter, who had begun in the Edison studios in Paterson, New Jersey, as a general handyman and
camerist
before rising to become head of production. Running eleven minutes and containing fourteen scenes,
The Great Train Robbery
was not only revolutionary in its sophisticated editing and pacing, but also in its content. It was both the first true movie and the first
western
– though that word wouldn’t become general until about 1928; before that they were
cowboy movies
or
gun operas
– and the first to explore the exciting possibilities of violent crime.
⁷
It was a sensation. The excitement it generated and its sense of wondrous novelty are difficult to conceive now. When one of the characters fired a gun at the camera, many members of the audience gasped and recoiled. (This may not seem quite so ridiculous if you pause to consider your own response the
first time you saw a 3-D movie.) A few even fainted. It became one of those things that simply everybody had to see.

Almost overnight movies went from being a craze to a compulsion. By 1905 people everywhere were flocking to
store theatres
(so called because they were usually set up in vacant stores) or
nickelodeons,
where viewers were treated to half an hour of escapism for a nickel.
Nickelodeon
had been used as a word for peep-show arcades since 1888, though the first purpose-built cinema, in Pittsburgh, styled itself not a nickelodeon, but a
Nicolet.
Within two weeks of the Nicolet’s opening, people were flocking to the theatre from eight in the morning until midnight to see Edwin S. Porter’s sensational
Great Train Robbery,
and the proprietors were clearing profits of $1,000 a week.

By 1906 there were a thousand nickelodeons all over America; by 1907 five thousand. Film was designed to run at a speed of sixteen frames per second, but nickelodeon operators quickly discovered that if they speeded things up a little they could get in more shows. For millions, attending the nickelodeon became a kind of addiction. By 1908 New York City’s
movie theatres
– the word had been coined the year before; in 1914 it would be joined by
movie houses
– were clocking up 200,000 admissions every day, including Sundays when they were required by law to be closed. Many non-movie-goers considered the phenomenon alarming if not distasteful. This was partly because of the mildly
risqué
nature of some of the shows – within two weeks of Edison launching the first kinetophone parlour in 1894 some enterprising opportunist was offering a peep-show called
Doloria in the Passion Dance,
which was not terribly titillating by modern standards but was certainly a step up on
Fred Ott’s Sneeze
– and partly because the movies attracted a disproportionate number of lower-class immigrants (for whom language problems often made other, more verbal forms of entertainment impractical), and anything that gave pleasure
to lower-class immigrants was almost by definition suspect. But it was also because of something less specific – a vague sense that going to the pictures was somehow immoral and conducive to idleness – and authorities often had sudden, unprompted purges on the early movie houses, as in 1908 when New York Mayor George B. McLellan arbitrarily ordered shut all 550 of that city’s establishments for no real reason other than that he didn’t like them.
⁸

The word
movies
even began to take on a slightly unsavoury tone. In 1912 a studio called Essanay invited fans to come up with a better name. The winning entry was
photoplay.
It never caught on as a word for the pictures, but it did become the name of a hugely successful magazine.
⁹
(Hollywood’s curious disdain of the word
movies
is reflected in the decidedly inflated title of its most vaunted institution: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

As movies became increasingly sophisticated they developed an argot to describe the new production techniques –
close-up
(1913),
to pan
(1915),
fade-in
and
fade-out
(1918),
dissolve
(1920),
trailers
(early 1920s), and
captions
(1907),
subtitles
or
titles
(1913) for the frames of dialogue or explication that were inserted into the film at intervals to explain the action. Some were used so often that they passed into the language as stock phrases, notably ‘comes the dawn’ and ‘meanwhile back at the ranch’.
¹⁰
Trailers
were so called because in the early days they followed, or
trailed,
the main film. Many other movie words were taken from the stage.
Slapstick
was a vaudeville term. It described two sticks that were literally slapped together off-stage to accentuate an onstage pratfall (
prat
being an old slang term for the buttocks).
Ham actor,
first recorded in 1875, alludes to the practice of lesser performers having to use ham fat rather than cold cream to remove their make-up. Soon a second-rate actor was known as a
hamfatter;
by 1902 he was just a
ham. Grips,
the term for scenery shifters, was also originally a theatrical term.
They were so called because they gripped the sets and props when they moved them.

By 1925 the movies had become not only America’s most popular form of entertainment, but its fifth biggest industry, and people everywhere dreamed of making it big in Hollywood. How a dusty, misnamed southern California hamlet that never had much to do with the making of movies became indelibly fixed in the popular consciousness as the home of the entertainment industry is a story that takes a little telling.

Let’s start with the name. Hollywood never had any holly or even much wood to speak of. Originally called Cahuenga Valley, it was principally the site of a ranch owned by a Mr and Mrs Harvey Henderson Wilcox. The more romantic name came after Mrs Wilcox, on a trip back east, fell into a conversation with a stranger on a train and was so taken with the name of her new acquaintance’s summer home,
Hollywood,
that she decided to rename the ranch. That was in 1887, and in the general course of things that would very probably have been that. Hollywood would have been an anonymous piece of semi-arid real estate waiting to be swallowed up by Los Angeles.

But between 1908 and 1913 something else happened. Many small independent film companies began moving to southern California, among them the Selis Company, the Nestor Film Company, Biograph and Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios (from which of course would eventually come the Keystone Kops movies). Partly they were drawn by the weather, which would permit year-round filming without a lot of expensive lighting. (Early ‘studios’, if it’s not too much to call them that, were mostly in the open air, with even interior scenes shot on stages that had backdrops but no roofs.) More crucially, they were also trying to escape the threats, legal and physical, of the Motion Pictures Patents
Company, a consortium of eight studios led (inevitably) by Thomas A. Edison. The MPPC had been trying for some years to gain monopoly control of the movie business and had developed increasingly aggressive tactics to encourage competitors to join the consortium and pay its hefty licensing fees. Its idea of exploratory negotiations was to send in a party of thugs with baseball bats. Hence the appeal of a locale two thousand miles away on another coast.

Only one of the studios actually set up in Hollywood, the Nestor Film Company in 1911. Locals were so upset at the sudden appearance of ramshackle film sets and the
louche
appearance of actors that they enacted an ordinance forbidding the erection of further studios. So in fact Hollywood has never really had a film industry. The studios that began to dot the landscape in the following years were all elsewhere – in Culver City, Edendale, Boyle Heights, Burbank, Santa Monica, indeed almost anywhere but Hollywood. As late as 1913, when Cecil B. de Mille filmed
The Squaw Man
in a studio at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine, Hollywood was a country hamlet.
¹¹
Hollywood Boulevard was not yet so named – indeed it was just a dirt road. None the less, by 1915
Hollywood
had become so generic as a term for the movie business that neighbouring communities scrambled to associate themselves with its magic. Ivanhoe and Prospect Park reincorporated as East Hollywood and Lankersheim became North Hollywood.
¹²
Laurelwood, not to be outdone, transformed itself into Studio City,

Beverly Hills, the other southern California name that most of us automatically associate with the movies, and more particularly with
movie stars
(a term coined in 1919), was likewise named on a whim. It was christened in 1907 by a property developer, who named his 3,200-acre housing development (although it had just one house at the time) Beverly Hills after his hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts. It became especially fashionable with the stars after Mary
Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks married in 1920 and moved into a Beverly Hills mansion they called Pickfair.