Silent Film era / Photo Credit: Griffith - Wikipedia
SOME HISTORY OF THE FIRST PAID
EXHIBITION OF MOTION PICTURES? (In the Entertainment industry.)
Some history of the first paid Exhibition of motion
pictures?
Paid exhibition of motion pictures began on April 14,
1894, at Andrew M. Holland's phonograph store, located at 1155 Broadway in New
York City, with the Kinetoscope. Dropping a nickel in a machine allowed a viewer
to see a short motion picture, devoid of plot. The machines were installed in
Kinetoscope parlors, hotels, department stores, bars and drugstores in large
American cities. The machines were popular from 1894 to 1896, but by the turn
of the century had almost disappeared as Americans rejected the solitary
viewing experience and boring entertainment.
Often hailed as the ‘founding fathers of modern
film’, the Lumiere Brothers, Louis and Auguste, can take credit for the first
commercial exhibition of a projected motion picture to a paying public in 1895,
in the world's first movie theatre - the Salon Indien, at the Grand Cafe on
Paris' Boulevard des Capucines. The 20-minute program included ten short films
with twenty showings a day.
Around 1900, motion pictures became a small part of
vaudeville theatres. The competitive vaudeville theatre market caused owners to
constantly look for new entertainment, and the motion picture helped create
demand, although the new form of entertainment was not the main draw for
patrons. It was often used as a "chaser"—shown as the end of the
performance to chase the audience from the theatre. These theatres were
designed much like legitimate theatres. The Beaux-Arts architecture of these
theatres was formal and ornate. They were not designed for motion pictures, but
rather live stage performances.
In 1902, the storefront theatre was born at Thomas
Lincoln Tally's Electric Theatre in Los Angeles. These soon spread throughout
the country as empty storefronts were equipped with chairs, a Vitascope
projector, a muslin sheet on which the motion picture was exhibited, darkened
windows, and a box by the door to service as a ticket office (literally, the
"box office".) Storefront theatres, supplied with motion pictures
made in Chicago and New York, spread throughout America. These theatres
exhibited a motion picture at a specific time during the day.
Air domes also became popular in warm climates and in
the summertime in northern climates. With no roof and only side walls or
fences, the air domes allowed patrons to view motion pictures in a venue that
was cooler than the stifling atmosphere of the storefront theatre.
In 1905, the Nickelodeon was born. Rather than
exhibiting one program a night, the Nickelodeon offered continuous motion
picture entertainment for five cents. They were widely popular. By 1910,
Nickelodeons grossed $91 million in the United States. The Nickelodeons were
like simple storefront theatres, but differed in the continuous showings and
the marketing to women and families.
The movie house, in a building designed specifically
for motion picture exhibition, was the last step before the movie palace.
Comfort was paramount, with upholstered seating and climate controls. One of
the first movie houses was Tally's Broadway Theater in Los Angeles.
Before 1914, motion-picture exhibitors had generally
showcased their offerings behind modest storefronts, dubbed “nickelodeons”
after the original Nickelodeon that opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. By contrast,
the Mark Strand Theatre–later known simply as the Strand–was the first of the
so-called “dream palaces,” called as such for their impressive size and
luxuriously appointed interiors. The Strand seated around 3,000 people and
boasted a second-floor viewing balcony and (in an architectural innovation at
the time) a two-story rotunda where moviegoers could socialize before and after
the presentation and during intermission.
A movie palace (or picture palace in the United
Kingdom) is any of the large, elaborately decorated movie theaters built
between 1914 and the 1940s. The late 1920s saw the peak of the movie palace, with
hundreds opened every year between 1925 and 1930. With the advent of
television, movie attendance dropped and many movie palaces were razed or
converted into multiple screen venues or performing arts centers.
There are three architectural design types of movie
palaces. First, the classical style movie palace, with its opulent, luxurious
architecture; second, the atmospheric theatre which has an auditorium ceiling
that resembles an open sky as a defining feature; and finally, the Art Deco
theaters that became popular in the 1930s.
Designers
Eberson specialized in the subgenre of
"atmospheric" theatres. His first, of the five hundred in his career,
was the 1923 Majestic in Houston, Texas. The atmospherics usually conveyed the
impression of sitting in an outdoor courtyard, surrounded by highly ornamented
asymmetrical facades and exotic flora and fauna, underneath a dark blue canopy;
when the lights went out, a specially designed projector, the Brenograph, was
used to project clouds, and special celestial effects on the ceiling.
Lamb's style was initially based on the more
traditional, "hardtop" form patterned on opera houses, but was no
less ornate. His theaters evolved from relatively restrained neo-classic
designs in the 1910s to those with elaborate baroque and Asian motifs in the
late 1920s.
The movie palace's signature look was one of
extravagant ornamentation. The theaters were often designed with an eclectic
exoticism where a variety of referenced visual styles collided wildly with one
another. French Baroque, High Gothic, Moroccan, Mediterranean, Spanish Gothic,
Hindu, Babylonian, Aztec, Mayan, Orientalist, Italian Renaissance, and (after
the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922) Egyptian Revival were all variously
mixed and matched. This wealth of ornament was not merely for aesthetic effect.
It was meant to create a fantasy environment to attract moviegoers and involved
a type of social engineering, distraction, and traffic management, meant to
work on human bodies and minds in a specific way. Today, most of the surviving
movie palaces operate as regular theaters, showcasing concerts, plays and
operas.
On the night before it debuted to the public, the
Mark Strand Theatre held its opening-night gala, which the next day’s
newspapers called “a sensation” (according to a 1938 retrospective on the
Strand published in the New York Times) In addition to the feature presentation
that night–The Spoilers, a drama starring William Farnum–the audience was
treated to a performance by the Strand’s concert orchestra; The Neapolitan
Incident, which the program called “a collaboration of the motion picture and
song”; songs by the Strand Quartet; and a Keystone comedy short.
By 1916, the number of movie palaces in the United
States had topped 21,000. Instead of a program of short films, these theaters
would show a full-length feature presentation in order to charge patrons
premium prices. The movie-palace boom (and the corresponding demise of the
nickelodeons) marked the beginning of the rise of the studio system, which
would dominate Hollywood from the 1920s into the 1950s.
Decline
Following World War II movie ticket sales began to
rapidly decline due to the widespread adoption of television and mass migration
of the population from the cities, where all the movie palaces had been built,
and into the suburbs. The closing of most movie palaces occurred after United
States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. in 1948, which ordered all of the major film
studios to sell their theaters. Most of the newly independent theaters could
not continue to operate on the low admissions sales of the time without the
financial support of the major studios and were forced to close.
References & Credits: Google, Wikipedia, Wikihow, WikiBooks,
Pinterest, IMDB, Linked In, Indie Wire, Film Making Stuff, Hiive, History
Channel, Film Daily, New York Film Academy, The Balance, Careers Hub, The
Numbers, Film Maker, TV Guide Magazine, Blurb, Media Match, Quora, Creative
Skill Set, Chron, Investopedia, Variety, No Film School, WGA, BBC, Daily
Variety, The Film Agency, Best Sample Resume, How Stuff Works, Studio Binder, Career
Trend, Producer's Code of Credits, Truity, Production Hub, Producers Guild of
America, Film Connection, Variety, Wolf Crow, Get In Media, Production Beast, Sony
Pictures, Warner Bros, UCAS, Frankenbite, Realty 101, Careers Hub, Screen Play Scripts,
Elements of Cinema, Script Doctor, ASCAP, Film Independent, Any Possibility, CTLsites,
NYFA, Future Learn, VOM Productions, Mad Studios, Rewire, DP School, Film
Reference, DGA, IATSE, ASC, MPAA, HFPA, MPSE, CDG, AFI, Box Office Mojo, Rotten
Tomatoes, Indie Film Hustle, The Numbers, Netflix, Vimeo, Instagram, Pinterest,
Metacritic, Hulu, Reddit, NATO, Mental Floss, Slate, Locations Hub, Film
Industry Statistics, Guinness World Records,
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Silent Film era / Photo Credit: Griffith - Wikipedia
