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D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, 1915, was the first great spectacle employing long shots of thousands of massed extras
Mary Pickford, first great star, shown with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.
William S. Hart, one of the first western stars, with Bessie Love
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prietors saw the advantage of projecting the pictures on a screen which might be viewed by a whole roomful of people at one time. Several projection machines were perfected and in April of 1896 the motion picture was given its first theatre showing in Koster and Bial's Music Hall on Broadway in New York City.
By the turn of the century the movies were ready for another lengthy stride forward in technique. It came in 1903 with the first attempt at story telling in pictures, The Great Train Robbery, eight hundred feet of thrilling action tracing a simple narrative of a train holdup, a pursuit, a rendezvous in a dance hall and an escape.
The Great Train Robbery was a sensation. Immediately other story pictures followed: The Great Bank Robbery, Raffles — The Amateur Cracksman, Trapped by Bloodhounds, or A Lynching at Cripple Creek, celluloid blood-curdlers all. They brought the movies abreast the dime novel in popular appeal.
Thousands of store shows and small theatres sprung up throughout the country as the movies attracted an ever growing interest.
The demand was for film and more film and by 1907 production had spread from Edison's studio to several other companies, among them Biograph, housed in an old brown stone mansion at 11 East Fourteenth Street, New York, a nursery from which were graduated many of the most [Continued on page 60]
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Valentino, greatest of the matinee idols, with Vilma Banky in Son of Me Shiek
Mack Swain and Gloria Swanson, backed up by the Sennett Bathing Beauties in the hey-day of shorts
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There was nothing subtle about fatal allure when Theda Bara, first great vamp, starred in Camille
Picture courtesy of Twentieth Century-Fox
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Al Jolson in the film that started all the talk, The Singing Fool
Lore Chaney, greatest of the horror boys, in make-up for The Phantom of the Opera
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Charlie Chaplin, greatest
comedian of them all, in
Shoulder Arms