V. Read chapters I and II again for more detailed information and find

In the text words and word combinations which mean:

1) достаточно, чтобы понять; 2) широкоэкранный; 3) социальное явление;

4) изобретение фотографии; 5) технический эксперт; 6) дешёвый кинотеатр;

7) сочетание напряжения и движения; 8) волшебное превращение;

9) первый человек, предпринявший логическое решение; 10) поразительный;

11) культурное сознание; 12) костюмированные фильмы; 13) массовый психоз; 14) пятнадцатиминутный фильм; 15) боксирующие коты;

VI. Use word combinations from exercise V to make up your own sentences.

VII. Find in the text the names of these films:

1) «Странное приключение барабанщика в Нью-Йорке» 2) «Исчезающая»

3) «Большое ограбление поезда» 4) «Девушка у окна» 5) «Казнь Марии,

королевы шотландской» 6) «Рождение нации» 7) «Нетерпимость»

8) «Броненосец Потёмкин» 9) «Зарабатывая на жизнь» 10) «Золотая

лихорадка» 11) «Четыре всадника апокалипсиса»

3. Edison’s trust and how it got busted

The men who ran the motion-picture industry in its first decade closely resembled the average American businessman at the beginning of the twentieth century. The largest American company, Vitagraph, was headed by two men who had been born in England and raised in the United States, Albert E. Smith and J. Steward Blackton. Biograph was taken over in 1908 by a New York banker D. W. Griffith. There were also companies in Chicago and Philadelphia.

The most famous name in the industry was Thomas Alva Edison. After the turn of the century, Edison inexorably consolidated the control over the products and personnel in the field. Edison’s entrepreneurial efforts came to fruition in December 1908 with the creation of the Motion Picture Patents Company. The rise and the fall of this company is a fascinating episode in the history of American business enterprise, but the full story has never been told.

Edison wanted complete domination of the motion-picture field. But instead of driving his competitors out of business, he tried to force them to use only his cameras under license, and to sell or rent films only to the exchanges and exhibitors who agreed to use licensed products exclusively. By 1907 all the American producers, Melies and Pathe Freres were under license to Edison, with one exception – Biograph.

Biograph could stay out because it had a patent for a camera of its own. Only in 1908 Biograph agreed to negotiate a truce. The Motion Picture Patents Company was the result. The Patents combine consisted of nine producing companies – Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Selig, Lubin, Pathe Freres and Melies – and one importer of films, George Kleine. They pooled some sixteen patents: one for film, two for cameras and thirteen for projectors. The company was designed to fulfill the goal Edison had been working toward, a complete monopoly of motion-picture activity in the United States. It entered into agreement with Eastman Kodak, the sole American manufacturer of raw film stock, limiting sales to licensed producers.

In the Progressive era, business combinations like the Patents Company, which monopolized the industry, were called trusts, and they were deplored by a great majority of the American people. But the Patents Company appears to have accepted the name of ‘trust’ / The Trust, in the motion-picture trade papers / with

equanimity and even with pride. In 1910 it made itself a more perfect trust by establishing its own rental exchange, the General Film Company, which by 1912 had taken over nearly sixty licensed distributors and virtually cornered the market in the rental of licensed films. By 1912, the fourth year of the Patents Company, its share of total film production and importation had fallen from virtually 100 percent at the end of 1908 to slightly more than half. The so-called independent firms, outside the orbit of the Trust, accounted for the remainder.

For a variety of reasons, the Trust decided not to swallow the industry whole but to control only selected parts, expecting the remainder to collapse from lack market or supply. On the filmmaking side the Trust planned to stand part; it continued to produce inexpensive one-reel films, moving to two reels only sometimes.

Motion-picture distribution and exhibition could hardly have been more chaotic

than they were in 1909. Nickelodeons showed a half-hour program of three one-reel films and changed their program every day. Each of the six thousand theatres required twenty-one films a week, and the exchangers didn’t always give satisfactory service. Where the major producers hadn’t had significant competition before they organized the Trust, within a year perhaps a dozen new producing companies entered the field, knowing they had an open market in independent exchanges and non licensed theatres. Year by year the independents grew stronger. In 1912, the year the independents nearly equaled the Trust in total film production, they split into two rival camps. Harry E. Aitken with ten independent producers organized the Mutual Film Corporation. Seven others formed their own corporation, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company.

The independents consistently demonstrated the initiative and innovative energy that the Trust producers lacked.

The first titans to emerge were two New York showmen, William Fox and Adolph Zukor. Fox made the first breakthrough into middle-class audiences. He not only made vaudeville accessible to the working classes, his use of larger and more comfortable theatres attracted the vaudeville-going middle classes to movies. Zukor observed Fox’s success in combining inexpensive movies and vaudeville. He believed that the best way to make movies appealing to the middle classes would be to produce longer and more expensive films modeled after familiar middle-class forms of entertainment. Even better than spectacle films would be films of plays starring well-known stage actors and actresses. His slogan was: “Famous Players in Famous Plays.” Zukor proved to be right: features began to attract the middle class to movies.

World War 1 completed the process of making American motion pictures a giant business. In the prewar years, French and Italian filmmakers had been acknowledged as the best in the world. The war cut their production, as well as that of England and Germany. American companies took over the Japanese market from the Italians and the Latin American from the French, not to speak of doing better on their own theatres.