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NO FUTURE FOR IT" 91
more than merely respectful attention on the part of specialists. He himself believes that, though he did not begin this new sphere of activity until he was sixty, he may yet go down in history for a discovery even more important than that of cinematography.
From Lumiere's first show in Paris sprang one of France's earliest and most important film producers — George Melies. He took the device and, from mere reportage of actual events, made it into an instrument for telling imagined and imaginative stories.
He was thirty-four, this impetuous young visionary who built up a tremendous edifice of trick and fantasy pictures from Lumiere's device. He saw the show in the basement room in the Grand Cafe and, long before the performance was over, had begged Lumiere to sell it to him, raising his offer for it from ten to fifty thousand francs in as many seconds, but Lumiere would not sell. "It is not for sale," Lumiere kept repeating, and, when Melies grew more insistent than ever, he is said to have snapped his head off with : " You should think yourself lucky that I will not sell because it would ruin you. It is just a scientific novelty of the moment ; there is no future for it."
Melies had to accept that as the final refusal but he did not bow to it and, very soon, he had a little picture show of his own in the Boulevard des Italiens. He tinkered up a machine to show the Edison kinetoscope films on a screen but, this proving unsatisfactory, he later acquired very much better apparatus from Robert W. Paul, the English manufacturer.
Melies was a curious compound of creative artist, engineer and schoolboy. He had been, in turn, a painter and caricaturist on a newspaper, a mechanic and a carpenter, a draughtsman and an electrician. As a schoolboy he had built a puppet theatre in his desk. As a young man he became manager of the Theatre Robert-Houdin in Passage de l'Opera in Paris and had given a mixed bill of magic, tableaux vivants, marionettes, and electrical wizardry.
His imagination was enormous and his aptitude for making his dreams into realities, if only lath, plaster and pasteboard realities daubed with scenic artist's paint, was tremendous. From showing films he soon developed into a producer.
Magical effects played a very large part in his film productions. Before the cinematographe of Lumiere was a year old, Georges Melies was producing films about a haunted inn, with magical ghost effects, and a one-reel picture called The Laboratory of Mephistopheles.