Matinees On Main Street: A Movie History Podcast

While California was already starting to take on movie people in 1910, Americans saw the start as someting much more exotic than that. Well look around at tht California on this episode.

I just want to let everyone who listens to this podcast to know that we have reached milestones. One hundred episodes are now available, and I'm about to achieve 2500 downloads on those episodes. So, I'll jabber on about myself for about ten minutes and then you can move on to the latest episode: THE WAY PEOPLE LOOKED AT CALIFORNIA IN 1910. Thank you!

The early movies were moving out of the studios and into the outlying areas. This includes the development of westerns, movies had in foregn lands, and comapnies starting to eye California as a place to work.

When President Theodore Roosevelt retired from the Presidency, he immediately traveled to Africa to hunt big game in the name of the Smithsonian Institute. In the wake of this expedition, movies were made both with his permission and without it.

In the middle of the Trust War, and the indie rebellion, The French eye the American market and start establishing branch companies in the US.

Theater operator Roxy Rothephal started a drive to create a better movie watching experience by promoting better looking and larger movie theaters with the kind of amenities found in theater and high class department stores.

The moralist attitudes of Victorians was starting to focus its attention on the movies, and the Trust was responding in kind.

As the movie companies become interested in making western themed movies, a shift takes place as some ofthe companies start making westerns in the west.

The Edison Company was one of the few early movie companies to leave some historical record about how it made movies. We'll take a bit of a look at the work process.

A look at D.W. Griffith's early work at Biograph Studios.

In the shadow of Florence Lawrence's success at Biograph, another young actress appeared - MAry Pickford. This is her early story.

Not very long after the studios started hiring actors on a permanent basis, on of those actors suddenly became popular - The Biograph Girl.

The attempt to organize the founding fathers of the movie industry into a Patent Trust soon led to the appearance of the first independent film companies that would have nothing to do with the Trust companies. This was the beginning of the Patent War.

The Do-Gooders start to leverage their power over the movies taking advantage of the political chaos in the movie industry.

The growing atraction of the movies grabbed the attention of America's power structure, not just the money men, but the moralists who were of two minds concerning the movies. On this episode we look at who they were.

The Patent Trust was now completely organized, so they set out to force the film distributors and movie exhibitors to operate according to rules devised by the Trust. Good luck!

After a year of political gamesmanship, the two different patent groups, one headed by Edison Company, and the other headed by the Biograph Company, merged to create the official Patent Trust.

A glance at some of the movies from 1908.

At the bginning of 1908, Biograph Company was on hard times. Then they hired D. W. Griffith, and everything changed.

In 1908, Kalem was a brand new film company focused on making quality films. One of ther first projects was to make a movie from the best selling novel Ben Hur.

The two Chicago movie companies, Essay and Selig, were making westerns by the end of 1907, and started to explore the American West as a backdrop to those movies.

It's 1907, and the movie business is growing rapidly. In an attempt to control it, the Edison Company attempts to organized a patent trust with the other old guard movie companies.

Did the Panic of 1907 affect the movie business?

By 1907, NIckelodeon movie theaters were spreading across America. There were problems with the concept as it existed at the time, and there were people who were not going to let those theaters get away with those problems.