Matinees On Main Street: A Movie History Podcast

Siegmund Lubin, a Philadelphia optician, starts a film company and starts making early fight films.

From the beginning, the Edison Company had a grudge against the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and over time, the Edisons set out to destroy that company through a legal war.

After the movies settled into vaudeville houses in the big cities, traveling exhibitors took the novelty into the smaller cities and towns, and even into the coutnry side.

The first person to experiment with the idea of using moving pictures to tell stories was French filmmaker and magician Georges Méliès, and that was soon followed by Gaumont filmmaker Alice Guy.

Stories and observations about the movies at the beginning ofthe Twentieth Century.

After those years where the moving picture was a novelty, the public saw the movies as a news service. Here are some of the news events of that time and the people who filmed them.

The first important movie of the twentieth century was the championship fight film between Jim Jeffries and Tom Starkey. it was a film that finally proved you could make an exciting indoor fight film with the help of a lot of lights.

We take a look at how cinema was spreading around the world in 1900.

Through Inabata Katsutaro, Japan has a connection to the Lumieres, as he brings projected moving pictures to Japan.

At the end of the 19th century, one of the most popular type of films was moving images of trains, as well as the British version, known as the Phantom Ride.

The actual war between America and Spain in 1898 was remarkably short. The fighting took place between June and September. During that time a lot of movies about the war were made, and they were all very successful. On this episode, we'll look at a number of them.

The break out of the Spanish American War in 1898 gave the American film industry a great opportunity to show the public that it was more than just a novelty. In Part One we look at the beginnings of the conflict, the explosion on the battleship Maine, and the early films of the war.

In this episode, Leon Gaumont ends up owning a company that makes movie machines, and on her down time, his secretary, Alice Guy, starts to make movies for the company.

By 1898, Thomas Edison's production manager, William Gilmore, as well as Edison's lawyers, starting sizing up the people who were exploiting the patent that the electricity wizard lay claim to, and threaten those people with lawsuits in an attempt to coerce them to shut down or to pay a percentage to Edison. This scheme was only partially successful, but it would go on for years.

We look at how two Brits living in America, and working in vaudeville, started the Vitagraph Company of America.

The novelty of seeing pictures move was no longer such a marvel to some people, so the moving picture people started making movies that created their own novelty. These films were were slices of life, now called actualities, but the movie people also started experimenting with comedy, magic tricks, and other types of novelties to get peoples' attention.

Georges Méliès now enters the picture. He will be the first person to take the idea of movies and do something creative with them. it is through the work of Melies that we get early movies about devils, witches, haunted houses, magical orchestras, fairy tales, and even a trip to the moon.

So, after the first projector appeared, and after the first movies were shown in the theaters, what was on the public's minds about this interresting new novelty?

The very first movies that attempted to expand the length at which movies could be shown were Passion Plays, which was the narrative about the last week in the earthly life of Jesus Christ. These were made by two independent groups outside of the three main New York movie companies of that time. A lot of conflict arose over the propriety of filming religious stories, especially ones involved major...

In May of 1897, a year after projectors were introduced to the public, a terrible fire alerted the public to the dangers of the cinema, even though it was not the movies themselves, but a accompanying lantern that sparked the tragedy.

In 1897, a film of the Corbett Fitzsimmons fight showed that movies could last more than forty seconds. This is story of how the fight came to be, the way the movie was filmed, and its success.

Now that the seeds of early cinema have been planted, let's take a look at the world of cinema at that time.

After the first movie projectors spread across America, A two people in Chicago, William Amet and George Spoor, develop a projector and start making movies.