Reel Time

Robert M. Seiler, Tamara P. Seiler

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781927356012
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In this authoritative work, Seiler and Seiler argues that the establishment and development of moviegoing and movie exhibition in Prairie Canada is best understood in the context of changing late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century social, economic, and technological developments. From the first entrepreneurs who attempted to lure customers in to movie exhibition halls, to the digital revolution and its impact on moviegoing, Reel Time highlights the pivotal role of amusement venues in shaping the leisure activities of working- and middle-class people across North America.As marketing efforts, the lavish interiors of the movie palace and the romantic view of the local movie theatre concealed a competitive environment in which producers, exhibitors, and distributors tried to monopolize the industry and drive their rivals out of business. The pitched battles and power struggles between national movie theatre chains took place at the same time that movie exhibitors launched campaigns to reassure moviegoers that theatres were no longer the "unclean and immoral places of amusement" of yesteryear. Under the leadership of impresarios, the movie theatre rose up from these attacks to become an important social and cultural centre – one deemed "suitable for women and children."An innovative examination of moviegoing as a social practice and movie exhibition as a commercial enterprise, Reel Time depicts how the industry shaped the development of the Canadian Prairie West and propelled the region into the modern era.

1

PIONEERS

A system of inventions — all patented by Thomas A. Edison — made the screening of motion pictures possible: the Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope, and the Vitascope.¹ Encountering the work of Eadweard Muybridge, the English-born, San Francisco–based photographer who focused on capturing animal and human locomotion, may have intensified Edison’s resolve to develop his own motion picture system. On 25 February 1888, Muybridge gave a lecture in West Orange, New Jersey, very likely demonstrating his Zoopraxiscope, an apparatus that projected stop-motion images in a sequence (affixed to a glass disc) in rapid succession onto a screen, thus producing the illusion of motion. Edison’s laboratory was located in West Orange, and Edison and one of his most talented employees, W. K. L. Dickson, a French-born Anglo-Scots photographer and inventor, may well have attended the lecture. Two days later, Muybridge and Edison met at the laboratory, where Muybridge proposed that they collaborate, combining the Zoopraxiscope and the Phonograph, thereby creating a mechanism that would produce sounds and images concurrently.² This collaboration never materialized. In an attempt to protect his future inventions, Edison filed a preliminary claim (known as a caveat) with the United States Patent Office in October 1888 outlining his plan to create a device that would do “for the eye what the Phonograph does for the ear” — that is, record and reproduce objects in motion. What Edison had in mind was an audiovisual system that would enable one to see and to hear (say) “a whole opera as perfectly as if [he or she were] actually present.”³ He filed another caveat in March 1889, proposing to develop a motion picture viewing device called the Kinetoscope, taking the name from the Greek words kineto, meaning “movement,” and scopos, meaning “to view.”⁴

Edison ran his laboratory on a collaborative basis, initiating experiments and involving himself in projects when he thought it necessary; ultimately, employees did much of the work, and in the end he claimed the credit for the products they created. In June 1889, he asked Dickson to take on the task of turning his concept into reality. The researchers progressed haltingly. Taking their cue from Edison’s conception of the Phonograph cylinder, they tried to record tiny photographic images onto a specially treated cylinder, with the idea that, when rotated, the images would generate the illusion of motion.⁵ The plan was to record images onto one cylinder and sounds onto another, and to replay the cylinders synchronously.

Meanwhile, Edison went to Europe to assess the progress that was being made in the field of chronophotography.⁶ A number of innovations on exhibition at the 1889 World’s Fair, held in Paris from 6 May to 31 October, piqued his interest. These included the Chronophoto-graphic Gun, a portable camera developed by Étienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist, which used a strip of flexible film and employed the principle of intermittent movement, capable of capturing images in sequence at a rate of twelve frames per second.⁷ Edison was also intrigued by the Tachyscope, a device developed by Prussian photographer Ottomar Anchütz, capable of projecting moving images by means of an intermittent electrical flash, and by the Praxinoscope, a mechanism developed by Charles-Émile Reynaud, a French inventor, that employed a strip of flexible, perforated film and was capable of projecting animated drawings onto a screen.⁸

Edison corresponded with the laboratory, and Dickson and his colleagues revised their approach on the basis of the reports he provided. They experimented with sheets of emulsion-coated celluloid.⁹ Wrapping a sheet of this material around a cylinder provided a superior base for recording photographs. Taking his cue from Muybridge, Dickson also experimented with recording photographs onto a disc. In due course, they abandoned the attempt to synchronize recordings of sounds and images. During August, the researchers experimented with strips of celluloid (Dickson had cut sheets into strips) in a prototype viewing machine.¹⁰

Edison returned to West Orange, believing that the development of a motion picture camera, as well as a mechanism for viewing the products of that machine, depended upon the production of flexible film of sufficient length and durability and the creation of a stop-and-go mechanism.¹¹ On 2 November 1889, he filed a caveat describing a device (the Kinetoscope) that utilized a strip of flexible (perforated) film and a sprocket-based mechanism that advanced the film smoothly and reliably.¹²

By early 1891, Dickson and his colleagues had developed a functional film-strip-based viewing system. The mechanism, housed in a wooden cabinet, included a loop of horizontally configured 19 mm film perforated on one side and running around a series of spindles; an electrically powered sprocket wheel moved the film beneath a magnifying glass, and an electric lamp illuminated the films from below. To the viewer, the series of still frames appeared to move. As well, Edison’s researchers developed a motor-powered motion picture camera, the Kinetograph, capable of shooting with the new perforated film.¹³

On 24 August 1891, Edison filed three patent applications, two for a motor-powered camera, the Kinetograph, capable of shooting the new 35 mm perforated film, and one for an apparatus for exhibiting moving pictures, the Kinetoscope, allowing for the possible use of a cylinder.¹⁴ During the spring of 1892, the researchers made coin operation, via a slot at the top, an essential part of the mechanics of the viewing system.

By the autumn of 1892, the peephole viewing machine, measuring 18 inches by 27 inches by 48 inches, was complete.¹⁵ One inserted a coin into the slot, put one’s eye to the eye piece, and watched (through a magnifying glass) a strip of perforated (on both sides) 35 mm film about fifty feet in length that moved along a bank of spools. An electrically driven sprocket at the top of the box moved the film between an electric light and a revolving shutter with a narrow slit. As each frame passed under the lens, the shutter permitted a flash of light so brief that the frame appeared to be frozen. The viewer looking into a peephole at the top of the cabinet would see the image move. On 21 February 1893, Edison secured a patent for the system that governed the intermittent movement of the film.¹⁶

During the winter of 1892–93, Edison built a studio (designed by Dickson) behind his laboratory in West Orange, knowing that a steady supply of new films would be needed to make his invention popular. The Black Maria, as it was called, resembled a police patrol wagon.¹⁷ Mounted on a pivot and black inside and out, it could be positioned (the roof could be opened) in order to take advantage of the sun. The camera was mounted on steel tracks inside the studio. Dickson began making short non-fiction films in January 1893 (historians call the films produced by European and American filmmakers during the first ten years of the moving picture industry “actualities” because they focused on noteworthy persons, places, and events that would interest a general audience), taking as his subjects vaudeville performers who demonstrated their special talents. These films fell into two groups: the world of masculine sports, including cock fighting, boxing, and jousting, and visual excerpts of American performance culture, including serpentine and skirt dancers, Annie Oakley and bronco busters from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, scenes of Broadway shows, and trained animals. Over the course of 1894, Dickson (the director) and William Heise (the camera operator) made more than seventy-five films at the Black Maria studio, each running about twenty seconds.¹⁸

For a variety of reasons, the plan to introduce the Kinetoscope at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 was abandoned. The first “official” demonstration of the machine was held on 9 May 1893 at the annual meeting of the Department of Physics at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.¹⁹ Some reports suggest (erroneously) that “one machine made its way to the fair, and before the season closed was installed on the second floor of the Electricity Building for all and sundry to see.”²⁰

Normally, Edison hired independently financed entrepreneurs to market his inventions. In this case, he contracted with the Kinetoscope Company, a consortium that included Norman C. Raff and Frank R. Gammon, who served as the managers, together with Andrew M. Holland and Alfred O. Tate, Edison’s former business manager, to market the Kinetoscope as well as movies for the peephole viewing system. Raff and Gammon planned to sell the territorial rights to exhibiting the Kinetoscope, again following the pattern Edison had designed for merchandising the Phonograph.

Figure 1. A Phonograph and Kinetoscope parlour, San Francisco, ca. 1895. Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey (National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior). Edison and Motion Pictures, photo no. 6.

Meanwhile, Andrew M. Holland and his brother, George C. Holland, Ottawa-based entrepreneurs, opened the first Kinetoscope parlour at 1155 Broadway, New York City, on 14 April 1894.²¹ The sons of William L. Holland, an Irish-born merchant who had immigrated to Canada with his family in 1827, eventually settling in the Ottawa Valley, the Holland brothers succeeded at a variety of enterprises. They trained as reporters, learning Pitman shorthand: Andrew wrote for newspapers in Ottawa and George wrote for newspapers in Ottawa and Toronto and then in several American cities, including Chicago. From 1872 to 1875, they also served as joint owners and managers of the Ottawa Citizen. In 1875, George secured a contract to report and to publish the debates in the House of Commons, introducing the innovation of making typewritten transcripts from shorthand notes, and two years later he and Andrew secured a contract to report and to publish the debates in the Senate, again making typewritten transcripts from shorthand notes. From their offices on Elgin Street, the brothers championed a range of new technologies which would, they believed, propel Ottawa, and Canada, into the twentieth century, marketing, for example, the (Charles) Sorley storage battery, introduced in 1884, and the Smith Premier (later the Smith-Corona) typewriter, introduced in 1889. Their entrepreneurial vision was truly international: for example, in 1892, Andrew helped establish the Canadian-Australian Steamship Company, which offered service from Vancouver to Sydney. Importantly, the Holland brothers recognized the commercial potential of Edison’s inventions, and from 1891 served as agents for the Phonograph, the Kinetoscope, and the Vitascope, selling territorial rights and equipment to potential exhibitors and opening parlours themselves.

The Holland brothers acquired ten machines from the Kinetoscope Company at a cost of $250 apiece and the films at $10 apiece; they set the machines up in rows of five in the centre of the space and erected an office at the back and a box office at the front, near the entrance.²² Staff running the enterprise included a manager, a technician, who installed and later repaired the films, and a female ticket taker. The machines exhibited different movies, spliced end to end to form a continuous band and each running from twenty to thirty seconds. For twenty-five cents (the price of admission to a vaudeville house), a customer could view the movies in one row; for fifty cents, a customer could view the movies in both rows. The Holland brothers opened the doors at one o’clock that Saturday afternoon and ran until one in the morning, taking in $120.

The Kinetoscope parlour was a huge success. The Holland brothers opened a parlour with ten machines in Chicago in May and one with five machines in San Francisco in June. Later, they opened one in Atlantic City and one in Ottawa on 3 November 1894. They opened another Kinetoscope parlour in Ottawa on 2 November 1895.²³ Soon, entrepreneurs around the country were operating Kinetoscope parlours and arcades.

Over fifty weeks of operation, the Holland brothers’ New York City Kinetoscope parlour generated, on average, a weekly revenue of $1,400.²⁴ The demand for the machine then dropped. Clearly, the peephole machine had a serious limitation: only one person at a time could view the film.²⁵ Accordingly, in April 1895, Edison introduced the Kinetophone, which proposed to make talking motion pictures a reality: the customer looked through a peephole viewer of the Kinetoscope and listened to a soundtrack conveyed through ear tubes that were attached to a Phonograph in the cabinet. The device did not provide exact synchronization, and ultimately faded into oblivion.

EXHIBITING MOTION PICTURES FOR A LARGE AUDIENCE

Entrepreneurs as well as machinists vied for the honour of being the first to take motion pictures out of the peephole machine and put them on the screen. Shortly after visiting the Kinetoscope parlour in the summer of 1894, Otway Latham and his brother, Grey Latham, formed the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company (which included Samuel L. Tilden, Jr., and Enoch Rector) with a view to exhibiting fight pictures (in large-capacity machines built by Edison) at their own parlour, at 83 Nassau Street, New York City.²⁶ They soon realized that exhibitors could generate more revenue by projecting images onto a wall. With his sons, Otway and Grey, Woodville Latham formed the Lambda Company for the express purpose of developing their own motion picture system. Eugène Lauste, who had worked on the Edison Phonograph, served as their machinist, and W. K. L. Dickson, key to the development of the Kinetoscope, served as their consultant. By March 1895, the Lathams had developed a movie camera and a movie projector, the Eidoloscope. Utilizing a band of 51 mm film that moved continuously and employing the “Latham Loop,” which prevented the tearing of the film, the camera could photograph four rounds of a contest or eight minutes of action. The Lathams demonstrated their system prematurely on 21 April 1895 with mixed success (the pictures flickered). The Eidoloscope never achieved the success anticipated, thanks to underfinancing and to competition from technically superior machines. Business collapsed in 1898, and the Latham patents passed into the hands of others.

Meanwhile, two Washington-based inventors, C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas J. Armat, joined forces with a view to developing a machine that would project motion pictures onto a screen.²⁷ Jenkins focused on creating a camera and Armat focused on creating a projector. The latter introduced a mechanism similar to the “Latham Loop” so that the stop-and-go motion would not tear the unwinding film. Armat funded the project. In due course, they created an efficient, portable machine, the Phantoscope, that projected moving pictures onto a screen, and demonstrated it for a paying audience at the Cotton States Exposition, Atlanta, in September 1895. Attendance was poor. They subsequently ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Pioneers
• 2 Introducing Cinema to Prairie Canada: Movie Exhibition, 1896 to 1904
• 3 Movie Exhibition During the Nickelodeon Era, 1905 to 1913
• 4 Reforms and Regulations: Movie Censorship in the Prairie West
• 5 Grand Entertainment: Movie Exhibition During the Picture Palace Era, 1914 to 1932
• 6 Famous Players Canadian Corporation Limited
• 7 The Struggle for Control: Odeon Theatres (Canada) Limited
• 8 Consolidation
• Conclusion: From Peephole Parlour to Multiplex and Beyond
• Notes
• Index