Film Weekly year book of the Canadian motion picture industry (1951)

WHAT was the first exhibition of movies on a screen in Canada ? Green, 85 years old and still a touring magician through the Canadian North¬ west when he died on August 28, 1951, had said that he was associated with the first showing and his claim seems to be correct. In answer to a query, Green wrote to the Canadian Film Weekly on July 26, 1944 and headed his communication: “The actual and true story of the first moving pictures ever to be shown in Canada.” Said he: “In June, 1896 was with Dr. Bailey, a medicine show playing along the Ottawa River, was reading the Ottawa Free Press about June 2 or 3, 1896 and read where O’Hearn and Soper of the Ottawa Street Railway Company were going to bring to Ottawa Tom Edison’s marvellous invention — pictures that move, also that only one other machine was in operation at that time in |New York at the Eden Musee, if my memory serves me right. “So I lost no time in writing O'Hearn and Soper and got an engagement for two weeks. I did a 30-minute magic show and described the four pictures on the screen, all 50-foot films, all fastened together at the end like a belt, so they just kept repeating as long as the machine was in operation. First four films — four colored boys eating watermelon, Black Diamond Express running 80 miles an hour, the New York Central Ry., a bathing scene at Atlantic City, and LaLoie Fuller doing the Butterfly Dance, Governor General’s Foot Guards Band furnished the music. “This all happened at West End Park, Ottawa, June 15, 1896 and kept going all summer to big crowds. I brought Jimmy Hardy, the high wire walker the week after he crossed Niagara Gorge on July 4. Then that fall I went down through New England States with my magic show and was engaged by Archie L. Sheppard as press man and advance agent. “Bought from Alf Harston, New York, an Edison [Projecting] Kinetoscope and came back to Canada. Ottawa had a new park in the way of coming to be Otta¬ wa’s Britannia on the Bay. I was engag¬ ed at $100 per week all summer and closed Labour Day and furnished moving pictures in front of the grandstand at Almonte and other fairs, wore out three copies of The Great Train Rob¬ bery, bought film from Pathe, Biograph, Geo. Kline and many others, played week stand for A. J. Small, Kingston, etc. for several years. “Just kept going until every vacant store in Canada with benches or kitchen chairs became a 5 and 10c show. Every butcher, baker and candlestick maker became a so-called exhibitor.” There is an interesting sidelight on the foregoing. Mary Pickford was being interviewed by the press in her suite in the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa, to which city she had come to present the an¬ nual Canadian Film Awards. One of the newspapermen present was Morris McDougall of Ottawa, correspondent and Press Gallery representative for the Christian Science Monitor. The original Edison letter and the enlarged copy of it for the Edison Museum were on dis¬ play. These were of special interest to Mr. McDougall because he had seen the first Kinetoscope in Ottawa in 1894 and two years later the first screen movies! The veteran newsman, born in 1882, lived a stone’s throw from West End Park. The films were shown, he said, in a rink-like building specially erected and “were terribly crude but tremendously fascinating.” * * * There is, however, a possibility that the Ottawa showing of screen movies was not the first in Canada. F. G. Edmonds, Jr., in company with his father, a theatre manager and enter¬ tainer who owned one of the first three stereopticans in Canada, saw a showing in 1895, according to an article he wrote in a Toronto newspaper in the 1920’s. Said Edmonds: “In the fall of 1895, on our way home from the London fall fair, we stopped over in Toronto, and while there met a friend of father’s who took us down to a Yonge Street store to see the wonder of the time — a pro¬ jecting moving picture machine. It was being set up by a mechanic who had come from Paris, France, with two machines for Mr. Percy Hill. This was the Lumiere Cinematograph — without a doubt the first picture machine to be used in Canada, all Canadian rights being controlled by Mr. Hill. “The machine was of the ‘Beater’ type, using 40 to 50-foot films on a spool bank. This contrivance consisted of a rack carrying a number of velvet 25