Matinees On Main Street: A Movie History Podcast

The very first movies that attempted to expand the length at which movies could be shown were Passion Plays, which was the narrative about the last week in the earthly life of Jesus Christ. These were made by two independent groups outside of the three main New York movie companies of that time. A lot of conflict arose over the propriety of filming religious stories, especially ones involved major religious figures.

In May of 1897, a year after projectors were introduced to the public, a terrible fire alerted the public to the dangers of the cinema, even though it was not the movies themselves, but a accompanying lantern that sparked the tragedy.

In 1897, a film of the Corbett Fitzsimmons fight showed that movies could last more than forty seconds. This is story of how the fight came to be, the way the movie was filmed, and its success.

Now that the seeds of early cinema have been planted, let's take a look at the world of cinema at that time.

After the first movie projectors spread across America, A two people in Chicago, William Amet and George Spoor, develop a projector and start making movies.

So why did New York City become the first home of the movies? This episode will explain why that happened.

The arrival of the Edison and Lumiere projectors in New York vaudeville houses proves to be and introduction of these movie machines into America. Investors start buying and promoting Edison films, while itinerant mechanics attempt to build their own projectors. Through this mishmash of mechanical creativity, the American public gets it first taste of movies.

Once William Kennedy Laurie Dickson left the Edison Company, he joined friends who had been developing a desktop viewing machine known as the Mutoscope, and the foursome organized a company known as American Mutoscope and Biograph, a company that attempted to avoid confrontations with the Edison Group, but at the came time directly challenged them in a number of ways.

The very first stars in the projector era were two young ladies whose film shorts proved to be quite popular: May Irwin and Cissy Fitzgerald.

Louis and Auguste Lumiere are ready to sell their cinematographe worldwide. Lumiere cameramen and salesmen take the machine to the various cities of the world and promote the idea of moving images to places that never saw them before, including Russia, China, Japan, India, South America, Mexico and Australia.