Matinees On Main Street: A Movie History Podcast

Otway and Gray Latham join with a few friends to convince the Edison Company to make a boxing film.  The film will be show in their kinetoscope parlor set up in lower Manhattan, and would prove to be a success, at least for a time.  This would be the first of a number of successes for the movies and boxing as they ally with each other for the mutual success of both.  This episode includes a brief history of boxing up to this time.

The Edison Company starts to sell kinetoscopes through a outside distribution group formed by the Holland Brothers of Toronto, Ontario, and Norman Raff and Frank Gammon.  The foursome establish a kinetoscope parlor on Broadway in the old theater district and are surprised by their immediate success.  

Thomas Edison's lab is readying the kinetoscope for the world to watch.  But before it's ready, test films have to be made, as well as films that will become available to customers once the kinetoscopes are available.  On this episode, we'll take a look at the Edison lab's readying process, the bugs they have to work out, and these first Edison films, including DICKSON GREETING and FRED OTT'S SNEEZE.

Thomas Edison, with a lot of help from his assistant manager, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, starts to explore the idea of making pictures that move.  He'll investigate the idea of linking the moving images to sound by designing a machine that will work with a phonograph, before finally making a peephole machine that shows moving pictures but doesn't have any sound.  

This is an episode dedicated to some of those people not considered when discussing the the line of influence that leads to the movies.  Some of them were just too early to count.  Some of them, like Ottomar Anschultz and Auguste Le Prince, should be at least considered.  In all five cases, more efforts should be made to research the lives and potential influence of these men.  

This is how one idea, the idea of moving images traveled from Eadweard Muybridge to both Etienne Jules Marey, who would develop a moving picture camera,  and Thomas Edison, who would pursue Muybridge's idea of creating a machine to produce both moving images and sound at once.  Edison would then discover the machine that could capture those images, when he visited Marey in Paris.  These  are the meetings that would bring together the idea of moving pictures.  

George Eastman, and frustrated amateur photographer looks for a way to simplify the photographic process and ends up developing a camera film that would finally allow the first inventors of movie making machines to progress in their ideas.  

We follow the trials and tribulations of Eadweard Muybridge and Gov. Leland Stanford after their first horse photograph sessions in Sacramento.  Muybridge faces a murder trial and Stanford leaves Sacramento for San Francisco, and the two men eventually spend two years shooting pictures of racehorses at Stanford's horse farm at Palo Alto.  

In this episode, we follow young Thomas Edison as he develops his interest in telegraphy, and uses it to develop his career in inventing communications systems.  We see how telegraphy eventually leads to the telephone, how the early telephone led to Edison's experiment with the phonograph, and how all of this effects the way he views his investigations into moving images.  

A British emigrée to America attempts to make a career out of selling books and artwork during the Gold Rush, before heading back to Europe just as the civil War breaks out.  Once there, he discovers the joys of photography.  He turning to America after the war, he makes a name for himself in the West as a landscape photographer, before being approached by one of America's richest men to make a glamour photograph of his prize horse.