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How it started
It started with a bet about a horse that eventually got the people involved to discover that when pictures are slid one after another in fast succession, an illusion occurs where it looks like a moving picture. -
Kinetiscope Parlour
People were able to go up to a booth, put their eye up to the hole, and craked a lever in order to watch a "moving picture" -
Edison Peephole
Edison made a peephole kinetiscope that he charged one person at a time to make more money, but he didn't want a lot of people to know about it so he didn't get credit for it -
Who got the credit
The Lumiere Brothers in France got credit for projection films, they called it "Cinematographe Lumiere" -
Vaudeville
They were small theaters that featured short dramatic skits, comedy routines and song and dance numbers, and as the 1900's dawned, vaudeville expanded into nickelodeons -
Nickelodeons
They were small storefront-type theaters that featured films along with one or two vaudeville acts -
The Great Train Robery
It was an employee of Thomas Edison, Edwin Porter, who in 1903, created the first U.S. narrative film, The Great Train Robery. It lasted 12 minutes, which was incredible compared to the normal 30 or so seconds. -
MPPC
Led by Thomas Edison, several companies formed a trust called the Motion Picture Patents Company which eventually became a monopoly that made it hard for independent film companies to survive -
The West
Many people headed to the west to get away from the MPPC's control to thrive in the filming industry somewhere else, which is a reson for how Hollywood became what it is today -
To tell or not to tell?
The MPPC didn't want their actors' names to show up in the film because they feared they'd want to be payed more money. The industries in the west thought differently and saw an advantage im putting the names of the actors in their films that the audience would pay time and time again to see -
Charlie Chaplin
Starting out working for $150 a week, by 1917 he was making more that a million a year. He was in many comedies, but not all of them were purly humorous. His movies had subtle messages about good and evil in society -
WW1
The first World War gained Hollywood much success due to all the films being produced for propaganda and support of our troops