Cinema of the United States

FOREWORD Hollywood is a phenomenon that has quickly become too big to be contained within an area of the City of Angels. It has spread across the United States and around the world; it has become a colossal film factory. Everybody likes American movies. This huge industry is getting bigger and bigger each year. Hollywood has taught us how to walk and talk how to dress. It has rescued us from the rigors of the hard times – the two World Wars – and has assured us that we could topple our savage foes in battle. It has given us music and dancing, violence and sex. Movies have always been about laughing and crying, about learning how to live and how to die. That’s what movies are all about their best: reaching inside the viewer’s soul and stirring the individual to action in her or his own life. That’s where movies work their real magic: changing someone’s life. The work of Hollywood will never end. Hollywood can never disappear. America and it are a whole. 1 Introduction - Historical Background When Spanish explorers first entered the area now known as Hollywood, Native Americans were living in the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains. Before long, the Indians had been moved to missions and the land which Hollywood now occupies was divided in two by the Spanish Government. Acreage to the west became part of Rancho La Brea and settlements to the East became Rancho Los Feliz. By the 1870s an agricultural community flourished in the area and crops ranging from hay and grain to subtropical bananas and pineapples were thriving. During the 1880s, the Ranchos were sub-divided. In 1886, H. H. Wilcox bought an area of Rancho La Brea that his wife then christened "Hollywood." Within a few years, Wilcox had devised a grid plan for his new community, paved Prospect Avenue (now Hollywood Boulevard) for his main street and was selling large residential lots to wealthy Midwesterners looking to build homes so they could "winter in California." Prospect Avenue soon became a prestigious residential street populated with large Queen Anne, Victorian, and Mission Revival houses. Mrs. Daeida Wilcox raised funds to build churches, schools and a library and Hollywood quickly became a complete and prosperous community. The community incorporated in 1903, but its independence was short-lived, as the lack of water forced annexation in 1910 to the city of Los Angeles, which had a surplus supply of water. In 1911, the Nestor Company opened Hollywood's first film studio in an old tavern on the corner of Sunset and Gower. Not long thereafter Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith began making movies in the area drawn to the community for its open space and moderate climate. Christie-Nestor Studios, Hollywood, 1913 2 Chapter 1 - The Birth of Film Justus D. Barnes in Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery W.K. Laurie Dickson, a researcher at the Edison Laboratories, is credited with the invention of a practicable form of celluloid strip containing a sequence of images, the basis of a method of photographing and projecting moving images. In 1894, Thomas Edison introduced to the public two pioneering inventions based on this innovation: the Kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope. The latter was a cabinet in which a continuous loop of Dickson's celluloid film (powered by an electric motor) was projected by a lamp and lens onto a glass. The spectator viewed the image through an eye piece. Kinetoscope parlours were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets shot by Dickson, in Edison's "Black Maria" studio. These sequences recorded mundane events (such as Fred Ott's Sneeze, 1894) as well as entertainment acts like acrobats, music hall performers and boxing demonstrations. Kinetescope parlors soon spread successfully to Europe. Edison, however, never moved to patent these instruments on the other side of the Atlantic, since they relied so heavily on previous experiments and innovations from Britain and Europe. This left the field open for imitations, such as the camera devised by British electrician and scientific instrument maker Robert W. Paul and his partner Birt Acres. Paul hit upon the idea of displaying moving pictures for group audiences, rather than just to individual viewers, and invented a film projector, giving his first public showing in 1895. At about the same time, in France, Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinematograph, a portable, three-in-one camera, developer/printer, and projector. In late 1895 in Paris, the brothers began exhibitions of projected films before the 3 paying public, sparking the wholesale move of the medium to projection (Cook, 1990). They quickly became Europe's leading producers with their actualités like Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and comic vignettes like The Sprinkler Sprinkled (both 1895). Even Edison, initially dismissive of projection, joined the trend with the Vitascope within less than six months. Workers leaving the Lumière Factory, c.1895 The movies of the time were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces and traveling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. A film could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday life, a public event, a sporting event or slapstick. There was little to no cinematic technique: no editing and usually no camera movement, and flat, stagey compositions. But the novelty of realistically moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry to mushroom before the end of the century, in countries around the world. 4 The Silent Era 1923 – Silent Era Inventors and producers had tried from the very beginnings of moving pictures to marry the image with synchronous sound, but no practical method was devised until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were more or less silent, although accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects, and with dialogue and narration presented in intertitles. Marion pretends not to recognize Charlie Chaplin Projection speed Up until around 1925, most silent films were shot at slower speeds (or "frame rates") than sound films, typically at 16 to 23 frames per second depending on the year and studio, rather than 24 frames per second. Unless carefully shown at their original speeds they can appear unnaturally fast and jerky, which reinforces their alien appearance to 5 modern viewers. At the same time, some scenes were intentionally undercranked during shooting in order to accelerate the action, particularly in the case of slapstick comedies. The intended frame rate of a silent film can be ambiguous and since they were usually hand cranked there can even be variation within one film. Film speed is often a vexed issue among scholars and film buffs in the presentation of silents today, especially when it comes to DVD releases of "restored" films; the 2002 restoration of Metropolis (Germany, 1927) may be the most fiercely debated example. Projectionists frequently showed silent films at speeds which were slightly faster than the rate at which they were shot. Most films seem to have been shown at 18 fps or higher - some even faster than what would become sound film speed (24 fps). Even if shot at 16 fps (often cited as "silent speed"), the projection of a nitrate base 35mm film at such a slow speed carried a considerable risk of fire. Often projectionists would receive instructions from the distributors as to how fast particular reels or scenes should be projected on the musical director's cue sheet. Theaters also sometimes varied their projection speeds depending on the time of day or popularity of a film in order to maximize profit. Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, on top of the world in 1921. And why not? Two years earlier they and top director D.W. Griffith had formed their own studio, United Artists, for one thing because no one else could afford to pay their salaries. Unfortunately, many films of the silent era have been lost. Many of those which haven't been lost are badly damaged. The importance of archiving the silent films wasn't realized until it was too late and many classic films were lost for good. 6 Thousands of silent films were made during the years before the introduction of sound, but some historians estimate between 80 and 90 percent of them have been lost forever. Movies of the first half of the 20th century were filmed on an unstable, highly flammable nitrate film stock which required careful preservation to keep it from decomposing over time. Most of these films were considered to have no commercial value after they were shown in theaters and were carelessly preserved if at all. Over the decades their prints crumbled into dust. Many were recycled and a sizable number were destroyed in both studio fires and space-saving projects. As a result, silent film preservation has been a high priority among movie historians. Chapter 2 - Rise of Hollywood 7 Nestor Studios, Hollywood's first movie studio, 1913 In early 1910, director D.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troop consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles. Hollywood movie studios, 1922 The company decided while there to explore new territories and travelled several miles north to a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. This place was called "Hollywood". Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, In Old California, a Biography melodrama about California in the 1800s, while it belonged to Mexico.

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