2. Nickel madness

The sudden appearance of storefront movie theatres by the scores and even by the hundreds, in the working-class districts of American cities went unnoticed by the chroniclers of business enterprise, social life and culture. Newspapers and magazines had expended all too much credulence on the new medium back in the 1890s.

In the case of storefront movie theatres, nearly two years passed, from 1905 to 1907, before the news seeped up to the middle class. The storefront movie theatres were a shocking revelation to the middle class. The movies were not simply gathering places where, according to some reformers, sins were committed; they were centers of communication and cultural diffusion. In that atmosphere of middle-class hostility it was difficult to suggest that working-class people had been fortunate to find some good entertainment. Even one who wished to defend movies as innocent amusement described them as a form of mass delirium called ‘nickel madness.’ The root of the problems lay in the movies themselves, and the road to control over motion pictures went beyond the exhibitors to the producers who financed and made them.

In the earliest days of motion pictures the terms ‘producer’ and ‘filmmaker’ could almost have been synonymous. Only the Edison and the Biograph companies were large enough for a division of labor, and that was because they began as manufac-

turers of equipment. Otherwise the filmmakers were free-lance cameramen who

sold their films to the manufacturing companies.

This is not to say that filmmakers were not aware of the desires of the audience or interested in improving the quality of their product. They were technicians first, but they were also showmen, and many of them, like Edwin S. Porter, who made The Great Train Robbery, got their start as vaudeville or touring projectionists who had watched and listened to the reaction of urban and small-town audiences.

The first films displayed in peep-show viewers in New York included as subjects a wrestling match; a Highland dance; a trapeze act; a cock fight. Within the first year of production Dickson photographed Buffalo Bill; boxing cats; Mexican, Indian, Arab, Oriental and black vaudeville performers. When large screen projection began in 1896, Dickson started to vary his subjects. In October 1896 he made films of Niagara Falls and the Empire State Express.

In the fall of 1895 Alfred Clark took his camera out of doors and made several costume films, including one about Joan of Arc and three on American Indian and frontier themes. The most significant was The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary / played by a man / rests her head on the block, and the executioner raises his ax to strike. At this point Clark stopped the camera, put a dummy in the place of the actor and resumed cranking. The ax came down and lopped off Mary’s head.

Other filmmakers later had to repeat Clark’s discovery, but they couldn’t afford to do it for too long. The search for novelty began as early as 1897 when the enterprising company staged a religious drama, The Passion Play, before a camera on a New York rooftop. Their fifty-five-minute film ran for six months at the Eden Musee in New York.

The war with Spain in 1898 gave regular film producers their first prime opportunity for spectacle. The film medium showed itself capable of re-creating extreme moments of life and death for an audience safe in auditorium seats.

Every image on the screen possessed the element of magic, why then shouldn’t the movies become explicitly a medium for magical entertainment?

The first person to take this logical step was the French conjurer and illusionist George Melies, for whom magical motion pictures were a natural extension of his theatrical work. The mechanical properties of the motion-picture camera gave Melies the chance vastly to expand his repertoire. By stopping the camera and altering the scene before resuming / as Clark had done with Mary /, or by splicing separate films together, he created illusions of magical transformations, appearance and disappearance. Characters shrank or grew or turned into animals.

The Edison Company began making direct or very close copies of Melies films with Vanishing Lady in 1898, Strange Adventure of a New York Drummer in 1899

and Uncle Josh’s Nightmare in 1900. Trick films, as they were called, became the latest novelty and continued their popularity for nearly a decade.

Around 1900, American producers began to make risqué, bawdy, low-life films.

More often films with sexual innuendo were comic. The Typewriter / 1902 / shows an employer kissing his secretary and being discovered by his wife. Be Good and

The Girl at the window / both 1903 / show kisses and caresses without benefit of plot.

Then Edwin S. Porter was to create the first classic American work of the new medium, The Great Train Robbery. In this film Porter gave life to legend, and to audiences of 1903 it was an astounding new way to encounter the world. Porter was the first to unite motion-picture spectacle with myths and stories about America that were shared by people throughout the world. The Great Train Robbery used twenty separate shots, not counting the close-up of a bandit firing at the camera. The story unfolded over nearly a dozen different locations, indoors, in or on the train, beside the train and in hilly, wooded terrain. No movie before it contained such a variety of scene or such swift movement from place to place. For the first time, a motion picture demonstrated the speed and the spaciousness required of a storytelling medium.

In the years of his greatest success, 1903 to 1905, Porter’s principal legacy to his fellow filmmakers came from the combination of suspense and movement. Chases provided at least twice as much opportunity for more shots, locations and movement, and after 1904 they became the new fad in motion-picture spectacle.

Chases worked especially well in comedies. No one in this period made comedies better than the French company Pathe Freres, until World War 1 the world’s largest motion-picture producer.

Pathe’s success in the American market didn’t notably affect either the content of American films or opportunities for American producers. Comedy chases, trick and fantasy films, and risqué movies of women dressing and undressing made up the bulk of the programs.

The growing notoriety of nickelodeons brought movies to the attention of the middle-class men and women. From 1905 to 1907 were the years of nickelodeon expansion.

The nine principal producing companies organized a Motion Picture Patents Company with the intention of creating a complete monopoly over all phases of motion-picture production, distribution and demonstration.