Poker At Dawson City 1899

Later this year we will be publishing Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America’s Favorite Card Game, by Martin Harris. Here is a short extract:

Minute-long films such as Cripple Creek Bar-Room Scene2 and Poker at Dawson City (both 1899) from Thomas Edison’s Manufacturing Company show card-playing, heavy-drinking saloon scenes. Actualities such as Cattle Fording Stream. And Lassoing a Steer (both 1898, Edison) display a fascination with the life. By 1898, just one later, Dawson grew to 30,000 residents to include storekeepers, saloon keepers, bankers, gamblers and prostitutes. By 1899, $30 million in gold was taken from the streams and ground nearby. Dawson City became known as the “Paris of the North,” the largest city west of Winnipeg and north of Seattle.

“Poker in the Movies”

The representation of poker in films likely has had more to do with forming opinions about the game than has any other variety of American popular culture. One could argue that when it comes to shaping ideas about poker, John Wayne, W.C. Fields, and Paul Newman have exerted more influence than anyone who has played the game.

It’s a point worth making, because even though poker can sometimes be exciting and satisfying to watch in the movies, the game is rarely presented in a convincing way, at least to those who actually play poker. A <em>Washington Post</em> article from 2017 listing the 25 best “profession-based movies” as judged by experts in the selected fields leaves off poker altogether. Such an omission might connote doubts about whether or not being a poker player should be regarded as a profession, although the list does include “chess player” and even “bank robber.” However it also could stem from a relative paucity of realistic depictions of poker on the silver screen. “Poker in movies never quite comes off,” David Spanier once wrote, one reason being that in a poker hand “the drama is an interior one, consisting of what goes on in the players’ minds” and is thus difficult to capture and present to an audience. But even when the primary focus isn’t on individual hands but on other contextual matters involving settings and players, those other elements are often also embellished, moving away from realism while reinforcing particular ideas about poker’s significance.

While some filmmakers do endeavor to portray poker realistically, that’s often a secondary concern to using the game creatively to advance plots, build characters, and/or underscore themes. In other words, unless the film is specifically about poker, the game’s portrayal often serves other purposes than showing audiences how poker is <em>really</em> played. In westerns, such distortions frequently help support romantic visions of the Old West and its rough-and-tumble card-playing cowboys….

Poker appeared frequently. In some westerns, the use of poker is merely ornamental. Having characters play the signature card game of the Old West is akin to making sure they wear Stetson hats, ride horses, and carry guns. It’s part of the requisite scenery, like the vast landscape shots typically serving to segue one scene to the next. However, there are many examples of westerns that thoughtfully incorporate poker not just as a casual reminder of the Old West setting, but as an important element of the storytelling. Frequently the game is associated with violence, another way of highlighting hazards on the frontier. Poker also serves as a shorthand method of sorting heroes from villains in the fictional worlds these westerns create, marked as they often are by a kind of “black-and-white” morality, a distinction sometimes even indicated by the color of Stetsons characters wear. Poker games in westerns also become linked to efforts to restore order to among outlaws, or even the cause of more chaotic disruptions.

A film from 1899 called Poker at Dawson City, one of 1,200 or so films emanating from studios owned by Thomas Edison’s companies from the 1890s through 1910s, is sometimes called the first ever “western.” It might also earn the distinction as the very first “poker movie,” even if its running time is less than it takes to play a single hand.

The title sets the game along the Yukon River in northwest Canada during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, although the film was shot in Edison’s Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. The 20-second, single-shot silent film ostensibly shows the aftermath of a hand gone wrong, with gun-waving players brawling with each other around a card table while a bartender tries to cool tempers by spraying them with water. It’s a suitable introduction to the topic of poker in the movies, where card playing and conflict are often two of a kind.

The Lumiere Brothers and the Cinematographe:

The innovative Lumiere brothers in France, Louis and Auguste (often called 'the founding fathers of modern film'), who worked in a Lyons factory that manufactured photographic equipment and supplies, were inspired by Edison's and Dickson's work on the Kinetoscope and Kinetograph. They created their own combo movie camera and projector - a more portable, hand-held and lightweight device (the camera could be cranked by hand) and could project movie images to several spectators. It was dubbed the Cinematographe and patented in February, 1895. The multi-purpose, all-in-one device (combining camera, printer and projecting capabilities in the same housing) was more profitable and financially-successful because more than a single spectator could watch the film on a large screen. They used a film width of 35mm, and a speed of 16 frames per second - an industry norm until the talkies. By the advent of sound film in the late 1920s, 24 fps became the standard.

A major difference between Edison's short films (mostly of stage performers) and the Lumiere's films was that the latter were factual shorts (or mini-documentaries), termed actualities, similiar to the mundane quality of home movies that documented every-day life. The first public test and demonstration of the Lumieres' camera-projector system (the Cinematographe) was made on March 22, 1895, in the Lumieres' basement. During the private screening to a scientific conference - a trial run for their public screening later at the end of the year (see below), they caused a sensation with their first film, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (La Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumiere a Lyon). It consisted of an everyday outdoor image - factory workers leaving the Lumiere factory gate for home or for a lunch break.

As generally acknowledged, cinema (a word derived from Cinematographe) was born on December 28, 1895, in Paris, France. The Lumieres presented the first commercial and public exhibition of a projected motion picture to a paying public in the world's first movie theatre - in the Salon Indien, at the Grand Cafe on Paris' Boulevard des Capucines. [In 1897, a cinema building was built in Paris, solely for the purpose of showing films.] It has often been considered 'the birth of film' or 'the First Cinema' since the Cinematographe was the first advanced projector (not experimental) and the first to be offered for sale.

The 20-minute program included ten short films with twenty showings a day. It included the following:

1. La Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895) (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory) (46 seconds)
2. La Voltige (1895) (Horse Trick Riders) (46 seconds)
3. La Pêche aux Poissons Rouges (1895) (Fishing for Goldfish) (42 seconds)
4. Le Débarquement du Congrès de Photographie à Lyon (1895) (The Disembarkment of the Congress of Photographers in Lyon) (48 seconds)
   
5. Les Forgerons (1895) (Blacksmiths) (49 seconds)
6. Le Jardinier (l'Arroseur Arrosé) (The Gardener or The Sprinkler Sprinkled) (1895) (49 seconds)
7. Le Repas (de Bébé) (1895) (Baby's Meal) (41 seconds)
8. Le Saut à la Couverture (1895) (Jumping onto the Blanket) (41 seconds)
9. La Place des Cordeliers à Lyon (1895) (Cordeliers Square in Lyon) (44 seconds)
10. La Mer (Baignade en Mer) (1895) (Bathing in the Sea) (38 seconds)
    

The ten shorts included the famous first comedy (# 6) of a gardener with a watering hose (aka The Sprinkler Sprinkled, Waterer and Watered, or L'Arrouseur Arrose), the factory worker short (# 1, see above), a sequence (# 9) of a horse-drawn carriage approaching toward the camera, and a scene (# 7) of the feeding of a baby. The Lumieres also became known for their 50-second short Arrivee d'un Train en Gare a La Ciotat (1895) (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat), which some sources reported was startling to some of its viewing audience. By 1898, the Lumiere's company had produced a short film catalog with over 1,000 titles.

Other Developments in Projecting Machines:

1. Two brothers in Berlin, Germany - inventors Emil and Max Skladanowsky - created their own film device for projecting films in November, 1895.
2. Also in 1895, American inventor Major Woodville Latham (who had been working with Eugene Lauste and W.K.L. Dickson) developed an unpopular projector called an Eidoloscope (or Panoptikon projector). In New York on Frankfort Street, it was demonstrated by Latham for the NY press on April 21, 1895. It was one of the first public exhibitions of motion pictures in the world. Latham's most innovative and long-lasting was his Latham Loop invention - a feature of movie projectors. It involved the addition of a slack-forming loop to the film path (above and below the projector's lens) to restrain the inertia of the take-up reel, and prevent the tearing of sprocket holes due to tension. It also allowed for films longer than three minutes. (This showing preceded the landmark exhibition of the Lumieres in Paris by about eight months. See above.) On June 1, 1895, Latham applied for a patent for his 'Projecting-Kinetoscope' with the 'Latham Loop.' It was granted and lasted until its expiration in 1913. By 1905, virtually all movie projectors used the Latham Loop. (The loop is still used in virtually all film cameras and projectors almost to this day.)
3. And American inventors Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins developed the Phantascope in 1893, an improved device (with intermittent-motion mechanisms) for projecting films on a screen. In September-October, 1895, they debuted their projection device (projecting Kinetoscope films, but not using a Kinetoscope) at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, and then patented it.
4. In London in January of 1896, Birt Acres also developed a machine to project films, called a Kinetic Lantern.
5. In the same year of 1896, another Englishman Robert William Paul also developed and manufactured a popular projector which he called a Theatrograph. He became a pioneering film producer in Britain through his The Northern Photographic Works company.

In 1896, Edison's Company (because it was unable to produce a workable projector on its own) purchased an improved version of Thomas Armat's movie projection machine (the Phantascope, originally invented by C. Francis Jenkins in 1893), and renamed it the Vitascope. It was hailed as Edison's latest invention, although he had only commercialized the Phantascope. The Vitascope was the first commercially-successful celluloid motion picture projector in the US. On April 23, 1896, Thomas Edison presented the first publically-projected Vitascope motion picture (with hand-tinting) in the US to a paying American audience on a screen, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City (at 34th Street and Broadway), with his latest invention - the projecting kinetoscope or Vitascope. Customers watched the Edison Company's Vitascope project a ballet sequence in an amusement arcade during a vaudeville act. At the time, the Vitascope was showing films in only one location, this one in NYC, but that wouldn't last for long.

Poker At Dawson City 1899

The 'Pathé-Frères' Company was founded in 1896 in Paris by Charles and Emile Pathè. By the next decade, it would become the largest producer of films in the world. Around 1906-7, only one-third of the films released in the US were American-made. Pathé-Frères was responsible for over one-third of the films shown on US screens.

By 1897, the 35 mm film gauge became widely accepted as the standard gauge for motion pictures, although American Mutoscope and other film companies continued to use other gauges. In 1909, the 35 mm width with 4 perforations per frame became accepted as the international standard film gauge.

More Notable Films and Developments:

• The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897), another filmed boxing match, reported to be 100 minutes in length (the longest film ever to be released by that date), and shown by the Veriscope Company, had its debut on May 22, 1897 at the Academy of Music in New York City. Some consider it the world's first feature film. It included all fourteen 3-minute rounds of the bout, in addition to a 5-minute introduction, and non-stop filming during the one-minute rest period between rounds. Running commentary was provided by an expert sports announcer from the side of the ring - the first of its kind.
• One of the earliest projects the Edison Studios created (probably in July of 1897) was the advertising film Admiral Cigarette (1897), promoting the slogan 'We All Smoke.' The 28 second-long silent film was the first prototype commercial for the Admiral Cigarette company. Edison's film was the first advertising film, or commercial, to be submitted for copyright, on August 5, 1897.
• The Spanish-American War in 1898 drew camera operators to Cuba, but they were shut out by the US Army. Since they could not capture the battles on film, many went into studios and created them using models and painted backdrops -- the start of scale-model effects.

Films were increasingly being shown as part of vaudeville shows, variety shows, and at fairgrounds or carnivals. Audiences would soon need larger theaters to watch screens with projected images from Vitascopes after the turn of the century, using stage and opera houses and music halls. The earliest 'movie theatres' were converted churches or halls, showing one-reelers (a 10-12 minute reel of film - the projector's reel capacity at the time). The primitive films were usually more actualities and comedies.

After showing films in a lakefront park, William 'Pop' Rock and Walter Wainwright transformed a converted vacant store (at 623 Canal St.) in New Orleans, Louisiana into Vitascope Hall. On July 26, 1896, it became the first 'storefront theater' in the US dedicated exclusively to showing motion pictures, although it screened films for only two months. The theatre accommodated 400 people, and had two shows per day, with admission 10 cents.

The world's first permanent movie theatre exclusively designed for showing motion pictures was the Edisonia Vitascope Hall, a 72 seat theatre which opened in downtown Buffalo, New York on Monday, October 19, 1896 in the Ellicott Square Building on Main Street. It was created by Buffalo-based entrepreneur Mitchell H. Mark, a supreme visionary of the future of motion picture theaters. It was likely that the opening night's showing including US premieres of the Lumiere films (see above), since Mark had contracted with the Lumieres (and Pathe Freres) in France to exhibit their films in the US. The Vitascope Theater in Buffalo remained open for nearly two years. With his brother Moe, Mitchell Mark would open other theaters in Buffalo, as well as New York City, Boston and elsewhere. They were responsible for one of history's earliest 'movie palaces,' the 2800-seat Mark Strand Theater in NYC.

Early Jewish film pioneer Sigmund Lubin (aka Siegmund Lubszynski) constructed the first purposely-built movie theater in West Philadelphia, PA for the National Export Exposition, in 1899. Lubin's Cineograph Theatre was a small, modest portable theatre built on the esplanade or midway of the fair. It was possibly the world's first structure erected expressly for the presentation of motion pictures. For ten cents, patrons could view 'continuous shows' of the Spanish-American War, reproductions of boxing matches, and several of Lubin's own home-made productions. The film billed as 'The Sensation of the Hour' was The Dreyfus Court Martial Scene. It was evidence of Lubin's early work as a motion picture distributor and exhibitor, to showcase his projectors, cameras, and films.

Later on in 1902 in downtown Los Angeles, Thomas L. Talley's storefront, 200-seat Electric Theater was another of the first permanent US theaters to exclusively exhibit movies - it charged patrons a dime, up from a nickel at the nickelodeons.

Alice Guy (Blaché): The First Female Movie Director

French-born Alice Guy (Blaché) started in the film business as a secretary for Léon Gaumont in 1894. In 1896, she joined Gaumont in his new company founded in Paris in 1895, the Gaumont Film Company, and began making primitive sound films when she was promoted to be the head of motion picture production at the studio. She is generally acknowledged as the world's first female director in the motion picture industry (with France's Gaumont Film Company). Her first film made in April of 1896 was the one-minute in length fictional film La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy). Some historians consider it the first ever narrative fiction film. She became one of the key figures in the systematic development of the narrative film.

Georges Melies:French Cinematic Magician

Aside from technological achievements, another Frenchman who was a member of the Lumiere's viewing audience, Georges Melies, expanded development of film cinema with his own imaginative fantasy films. When the Lumiere brothers wouldn't sell him a Cinematographe, he developed his own camera (a version of the Kinetograph), and then set up Europe's first film studio in 1897. It was the first movie studio that used artificial illumination, a greenhouse-like structure that featured both a glazed roof and walls and a series of retractable blinds. It was an influential model on the development of future studios.

Parisian French film-maker Georges Méliès wrote, designed, directed, and acted in hundreds of his own fairy tales and science fiction films, and developed dazzling techniques such as stop-motion photography, double and multiple-exposures, time-lapse photography, 'special effects' such as disappearing objects (using stop-trick or substitution photography), and dissolves/fades. His main goal was to entertain audiences with surprising illusions. He created about 500 films (one-reelers usually) over the next 15 years (few of which survived), and screened his own productions in his theatre.

His first film based on a trick of substitution (one of the earliest instances of trick photography with stop-action - an early special effect) was Escamotage d'une Dame au théâtre Robert Houdin (1896) (aka The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin). The roots of horror films (and vampire films in particular) may also be traced back to Georges Méliès' two-minute short film Le Manoir du Diable (1896) (aka Manor/House of the Devil, or The Devil's Castle, or The Haunted Castle), although it was meant to be an amusing, entertaining film.

Melies became the film industry's first film-maker to use artificially-arranged scenes to construct and tell a narrative story, with his most popular and influential film to date, Cendrillon (1899) (aka Cinderella). In late 1911, he contracted with French film company Pathe to finance and distribute his films, and then went out of business by 1913.

An illusionist and stage magician, and a wizard at special effects, Melies exploited the new medium with a pioneering, 14-minute science fiction work, Le Voyage Dans la Lune - A Trip to the Moon (1902). It was his most popular and best-known work, with about 30 scenes called tableaux. He incorporated surrealistic special effects, including the memorable image of a rocketship landing and gouging out the eye of the 'man in the moon.' Melies also introduced the idea of narrative storylines, plots, character development, illusion, and fantasy into film, including trick photography (early special effects), hand-tinting, dissolves, wipes, 'magical' super-impositions and double exposures, the use of mirrors, trick sets, stop motion, slow-motion and fade-outs/fade-ins. Although his use of the camera was innovative, the camera remained stationary and recorded the staged production from one position only.

Further US Development:

Poker At Dawson City 1899 Indian Head

The key years in the development of the cinema in the U.S. were in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the Edison Company was competing with a few other burgeoning movie companies. The major pioneering movie production companies, mostly on the East Coast, that controlled most of the industry were these rivals:

• the Edison Manufacturing Company - began producing films for the Kinetoscope in 1891, with headquarters and production facilities in West Orange, NJ (see above); formally became a company in 1894. Afterwards, Edison intensely fought for control of 'his' movie industry by harrassing, sue-ing, or buying patents from anyone he thought was threatening his company.
  
• the Selig Polyscope Company (originally called The W.N. Selig Company), was founded in 1896, in Chicago, Illinois by 'Colonel' William Selig. Initially, the company specialized in slapstick comedies, 'jungle' films, historical subjects, serials, travel films, and the early westerns starring Tom Mix.
  
• the American Vitagraph Company, formed by British-born Americans J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith in 1896. The company's first fictional film was The Burglar on the Roof, filmed and released in 1897. It soon became the largest film company, turning out 200 films a year.
  
• American Mutoscope Company, founded in 1895 in New York City, NY by disenchanted Edison worker William K. L. Dickson, Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and pocket lighter inventor Elias Koopman. Their first motion picture machine was the Mutoscope - a peephole, flip-card device similar in size to a Kinetoscope. Instead of using film, a spinning set of photographs mounted on a drum inside the cabinet gave the impression of motion. This was followed by a projector - the Biograph Projector, that was first demonstrated in New York City in 1896. It was the first time projected images from an American film company were shown to an American movie theatre audience. They also devised a hand-cranked camera called the Mutograph (originally called the Biograph) that didn't use sprocket holes or perforations in the motion-picture film. The company released its first film in 1896, titled Empire State Express.

Soon, the American Mutoscope Company became the most popular film company in America. They were formally renamed the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1899 (and simply Biograph by 1909). They marketed their own films and their new Biograph projector, thus becoming the foremost motion picture company in the US. The American Mutoscope Company's The Haverstraw Tunnel (1897) became its most popular film - it was the first 'phantom ride' film in which a camera was mounted on the front of a train, and recorded its passage into a tunnel.

They were also known for many firsts:

• the early documentary Divers at Work on the Wreck of the Maine (1898) - the first film shot in Havana, Cuba at the location of the sunken warship
• W.L.K. Dickson's filming of Pope Leo XIII in Rome, M.H. Pope Leo in a Chair (1898) - Leo XIII was the first Pope captured on film at the Vatican
• the first production company to be contracted by the White House, in 1899, and the first studio to record films of a living president, William McKinley
• in 1903, establishment of the first movie studio in the world (in NYC) to rely exclusively on artificial light
• makers of the first western film shot and produced in the West, A California Hold Up (1906)
• in 1906, Biograph's Florence Lawrence was the world's first 'movie star' -- dubbed: 'The Biograph Girl'
• the first major motion picture company in southern California to make an actual film in Los Angeles -- A Daring Hold-Up in Southern California (1906)
• makers of the first film shot specifically in the village north of LA known as 'Hollywood' - a 'Latino' melodrama titled In Old California (1910)
• makers of one of the first full-length feature films, D. W. Griffith's epic Judith of Bethulia (1914)

Edison Vs. Mutoscope:

In May of 1898, Edison filed a patent-infringement suit against the American Mutoscope Company, claiming that the studio had infringed on his patent for the Kinetograph movie camera. [Note: Edison’s competitors had developed other motion-picture devices, which became the Biograph and the Mutoscope.] After years of legal battles, in July of 1901, a U.S. Circuit Court in New York ruled that Biograph had infringed on Edison's patent claims. Biograph appealed the ruling, claiming it had a different camera design. The decision was reversed in March 1902 by a U.S. Court of Appeals. It ruled that Edison did not invent the motion-picture camera, but allowed that he had invented the sprocket system that moved perforated film through the camera. The new ruling essentially disallowed Edison from establishing a monopoly on motion picture apparatus - and ultimately on the making of films. By 1903, most studios made films using the 35mm format. (See more about the development of Biograph further below)

'Moving pictures' were increasing in length, taking on fluid narrative forms, and being edited for the first time. Two of the earliest westerns (or cowboy-related) films were both Edison Manufacturing Company films made at Black Maria:

• the one-shot (less than one minute short) Thomas Edison's Cripple Creek Bar Room Scene (1899) - with the 'first' western saloon setting
• Poker at Dawson City (1899)

Breakthrough Films of Edwin S. Porter - the 'Father of the Story Film':

Poker At Dawson City 1899 Silver Dollar

Inventor and former projectionist Edwin S. Porter (1869-1941), who in 1898 had patented an improved Beadnell projector with a steadier and brighter image, was also using film cameras to record news events. Porter was one of the resident Kinetoscope camera operators, producers, editors and directors at the Edison Company Studios in the early 1900s, who worked in different film genres. Porter was hired at Edison's Company in late 1900 and began making short narrative films, such as the 10-minute long Jack and the Beanstalk (1902). Edison was actually uncomfortable with Porter's innovative editing techniques, including his use of close-ups to tell an entertaining and engaging storyline.

The Life of an American Fireman (1903)

Edwin S. Porter was responsible for directing this six-minute long narrative film - often alleged to be the first American documentary, docudrama, fictionalized biopic or realistic narrative film, with non-linear continuity. It combined re-enacted scenes, the dreamy thoughts of a sleeping fireman seen in a round iris or 'thought balloon', and documentary stock footage of actual fire scenes. It was the first film to be dramatically edited with parallel action and inter-cutting (aka cross-cutting or jump-cutting) between two or more events occurring simultaneously in two different locations -- the exterior and interior of a burning house.

Poker At Dawson City 1899 Georgia

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

With the combination of film editing and the telling of narrative stories, Porter produced one of the most important and influential films of the time to reveal the possibility of fictional stories on film. The film was the one-reel, 14-scene, approximately 10-minute long The Great Train Robbery (1903) - it was based on a real-life train heist and was a loose adaptation of a popular stage production. His visual film, made in New Jersey and not particularly artistic by today's standards - set many significant milestones (tools and techniques) at the time that shaped narrative film grammar:

• it was the first narrative Western film with a storyline, and included various western cliches (a shoot-out, a robbery, a chase, etc.) that would be used by all future westerns [Note: the same claim was made for the earlier 21-minute Kit Carson (1903)]
• it was a ground-breaking film - and one of the earliest films to be shot out of chronological sequence (and not in a strictly linear fashion), again using revolutionary parallel cross-cutting (or parallel action) between two simultaneous events or scenes; it did not use fades or dissolves between scenes or shots
• it dispensed with a static camera, and used shots known as a pan (for example, the escaping bandits fleeing through the trees to their horses) and a tilt
• it effectively used rear projection in an early scene (the image of a train seen through a window), and two impressive panning shots
• it was the first 'true' western, but not the first actual western [Note: Edison's Cripple Creek Bar-Room Scene(1899) was probably the first western.]
• it was the first real motion picture smash hit, establishing the notion that film could be a commercially-viable medium
• it featured a future western film hero/star, Gilbert M. Anderson (aka 'Broncho Billy')

In an effective, scary, full-screen closeup (placed at either the beginning or at the end of the film at the discretion of the exhibitor), a bandit shot his gun directly into the audience. The film also included exterior scenes, chases on horseback, actors that moved toward (and away from) the camera, a camera pan with the escaping bandits, and a camera mounted on a moving train. Porter also developed the process of film editing - a crucial film technique that would further the cinematic art. Most early films were not much more than short, filmed stage productions or records of live events shot with a static camera. In the early days of film-making, actors were usually unidentified and not even trained actors. The earliest actors in movies, that were dubbed 'flickers,' supplemented their stage incomes by acting in moving pictures.

Nickelodeons:Expanded Film Exhibition

In the early 1900s, motion pictures ('flickers') were no longer innovative experiments. They soon became an escapist entertainment medium for the working-class masses, and one could spend an evening at the cinema for a cheap entry fee. Kinetoscope parlors, lecture halls, and storefronts were often converted into nickelodeons, the first real movie theatres. The normal admission charge was a nickel (sometimes a dime). Nickel- was attached to the Greek word for theater -- 'odeon.' Hence the name nickelodeon. They usually remained open from early morning to midnight.

The first nickelodeon, a small storefront theater or dance hall converted to view films, was opened in Pittsburgh by Harry Davis and John Harris in June of 1905, showing The Great Train Robbery. Urban, foreign-born, working-class, immigrant audiences loved the cheap form of entertainment and were the predominent cinema-goers.

Most of the earliest films were known as 'one-reelers' - about 10-16 minutes in length (equivalent to one reel of film). One-reel shorts, silent films, melodramas, comedies, or novelty pieces were usually accompanied with piano playing, sing-along songs, illustrated lectures, other kinds of 'magic lantern' slide shows, skits, penny arcades, or vaudeville-type acts. Standing-room only shows lasted between ten minutes and an hour. The demand for more and more films increased the volume of films being produced and raised profits for their producers.

But newspaper critics soon denounced their sensational programs (involving seduction, crime, sex and infidelity) as morally objectionable and as the cause of social unrest and criminal behavior - and they called for censorship. They also criticized the unsanitary and unsafe conditions in the often makeshift nickelodeons. By the early 20th century, nickelodeons were being transformed into more lavish movie palaces (see more below) in metropolitan areas. By 1908, there were approximately 8,000 neighborhood theatres.

The Growing Film Industry:

Businessmen soon became interested in the burgeoning movie industry. Studios began to form when entertainment companies became large enough to create their own production facilities (offices, sound stages, props, costumes, and editing rooms). Some of the biggest names in the film business first got their start as proprietors, investors, exhibitors, or distributors in nickelodeons. For example, future movie mogul Carl Laemmle opened his first nickelodeon in Chicago in 1906. But then, early film pioneers realized that further profits could be derived by creating new systems of distribution (to market the films and deliver them to the theater exhibitors), and by expanding the film audience to the middle-class, women, and children. In the earliest days of the US film industry, New York (and the East Coast) was the epi-center of film-making, not Los Angeles (Hollywood) on the West Coast.

Poker At Dawson City 1899 1902

In the first few decades of US film production, many of the early film companies became vertically-integrated, bringing together all components of the industry. All of the steps in film-making were controlled by a single company-studio or entity, in order to maximize profits and wield tremendous power. The earliest studios owned the three tiers of the entire system: the production (or manufacturing) company (the actors, directors, and the production studio), the marketing and distribution (or supplier) network, and the exhibition company (the theater chains). At first, the defining objective of the earliest studios was to complete as many films as possible on the production-assembly line (like Henry Ford in the auto industry), regardless of quality. Films (and the necessary projection machinery and equipment) were sold, not rented, to exhibitors, but then, as film production increased, cinema owner William Fox was one of the first (in 1904) to form a distribution company (a regional rental exchange) that bought shorts and then rented them to exhibitors at lower rates.

Others entrepreneurial independents included the Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, Jesse Lasky, Sam Goldwyn (originally named Goldfish), and Louis B. Mayer.