The Film Industry

Thomas Edison usually gets the credit for inventing the movie camera, however, his work was based on experiments by others.

1. Eadweard Muybridge started the process with sequential photographs of a running horse. In order to do this, he ran several wires across a racetrack to still cameras. As the horse passed each camera, it tripped the wires and caused the camera to take a still picture. Muybridge then placed the pictures on a disc and had it rotated in front of a projector to give the image of the running horse.**






2. Edison then received patents for the Kinetograph (movie camera) and the Kinetoscope (allowed the viewer to look through a peep-hole at the moving film).

3. Auguste and Louis Lumiere developed a portable camera and projector combined in one unit. Their films were very basic - everyday scenes of life, but viewers of their films were so lost in the majesty of film that they could care less what they were watching; just that they were watching something was enough**

The first "movie theaters" were called "blacktops," which were tents with the tops died black to keep out sunlight. At the turn of the century, Nickelodeons were established. Nickelodeons got their name because most shows only cost a nickel ("nickel") and "odeon" is the French word for theater. So it literally meant Five-Cent Theater. The first movies had no sound. Producers designed them so that the action on the screen told most of the story; however, a pianist or organist usually accompanied films with music to fit the mood. Interesting enough, most of the basic film techniques were developed during the silent era: editing, close-ups, multiple exposures, slow-and fast-motion shots and moving cameras.

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks (featured to the left) were some of the first movie stars to come from Hollywood. They, along with other stars such as Charlie Chaplin, recorded short "trailers" for the Liberty Loans program in support of World War I. This war had a favorable effect for American filmmakers. Before the war, London was the center of the world film trade. However, as the war dragged on, American producers capitalized on Europe's misfortune, and landed Hollywood as the world's film leader. Hollywood has not lost its title since.