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A NEW FORM OF THEATER 3 1
For several years, two hundred and fifty to four hundred feet continued to be the customary length of screen playlets and storyettes, attempts to photograph anything more extensive being confined to reproductions of the Passion Play at Oberammergau or prize fights. Looking backward, it seems strange that the use of motion photography as a complete, definite, story-telling medium did not occur until 1903-5, eight or nine years after films became a screen show. Enthusiasts, enjoying the early living pictures, often wondered why producers did not expand into forms more ambitious than storyettes, and some of the alert young manufacturers were eager to experiment with complete plays, but the industry was so new and so unorganized that years had to pass before mass production of drama was realized.
In 1903, Edwin S. Porter of the Edison Company assembled a cast of players, borrowed a railroad train in New Jersey, and produced "The Great Train Robbery," a melodramatic story seven hundred and forty feet in length. Vitagraph and Biograph reached the market at about the same time with films that told stories, and other American, English, and French makers promptly followed.
Within a year or two the length of one thousand feet became standardized as "one reel," the screen time of a reel being about fourteen minutes, sufficient to present a short story or the essentials of a stage play. Mass production of the drama was accomplished by the one-reel movies. Crude, imperfect, cheap, made quickly and at low cost, they nevertheless contained the elements of drama — a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end; the characters represented by living beings, moving in natural action amid convincing surroundings, before the eyes of the spectators.
The obstacle of price was overcome by production in large quantities. Fifty, one hundred, any number of copies of a film play could be manufactured in a laboratory, packed into cans, and shipped to all parts of the globe, and a thousand or ten thousand screens could exhibit it. The machine-made drama