Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1922)

m^lk o(Wk oi m%}k m*Wk m <w . #* tr *** &$%> «r^ ] /-Ver/ OH, a mechanic in Edison's laboratory, the first actor of the films, sneezing in the first film close-up, around which the first embryonic plot was built to pad the picture to fifty feet in length project pictures from film, and the first to be commercially offered in the amusement world. Following an ultimately more important line of development, we found Thomas Armat closing the year with the attainment of the machine that is the legitimate ancestor of all the machines whereby we see the motion picture in the theater of today. Measured in terms of scientific result the inquiry into the labors of the period might be ended there, completed. But human factors, the elements of rivalry, greed, ambition, glamor and hope, make it important to look about otherwhere at well near simultaneous efforts. From April to August in 1895, inventions of pict u r e projection &4J ivV**v machines came fast. Priority became a matter of weeks and days, and when in later years rival claimants came to do battle in the courts and in controversies in the press it narrowed down almost to a matter of hours. Hence it has been with the utmost difficulty and the most tedious attention to contemporary records of corroboration that the facts of this history have been established. As pointing to the condition of motion picture annals and their coloring by the ardent partisanship of contestants for glory, it may be remarked that most of the records of past years are strewn with conscious and unconscious falsehood. An example of vivid significance is afforded among the archives of picture patent litigation in a drawing sworn to have been made in 1890, on a piece of paper manufactured in 1894, as shown by the watermark. ""THE most ingenious devices have been used for the purpose * of misleading courts and of deceiving committees of award in matters of medals and diplomas. Intricately fabricated evidence of the sort has for years puzzled and often deceived writers on screen subjects, until the whole superficial record is a mass of disputed allegations. But happily telltale traces always survive as long as fabrications themselves. There is always somewhere a check whereby the claim may be measured alongside the fact. We are here concerned only with demonstrable facts. While the other inventors were busy working on projection devices, Edison was going ahead in totally different fields of research, apparently content and satisfied that the motion picture was a transient toy and that his kinetoscope peep show was sufficient unto the day. His little "Black Maria" studio at West Orange was in a desultory sort of way making films for the peep shows — the same films that the projection inventors were using in their embryo experimental machines. As has been pointed out in a previous chapter, from within the narrow confines of this "Black Maria," first of all motion picture studios, the world for a number of years — from 1889 until well on in 1896 — obtained its supply of cinema films. The motion picture acting of the period, therefore, aside from the five subjects made by the Lathams, previously described, was all staged before the kinetograph, as Edison called the camera that made the negatives for the kinetoscope films. The actors were from the music halls, the prize ring and the variety theater stages of the day. LOOKING into an old Edison catalogue one finds among the picture players of 1895 some famous names. There was Dolorita, "the passion dancer," they called her, and Annie Oakley, the celebrated trap shooter, whose skill and grace with the shotgun thrilled a decade and a half of audiences at the Wild West shows, Professor Batty with his famous trained bears, Layman, "the man of a thousand faces," and the Englehart Sisters, broadsword performers. All of them appeared in little pictures of from thirty-five to fifty feet in length — less than one two-hundredth part as long as the typical motion picture feature drama of 1922. None of these pictures will ever be seen again. The negatives were utterly worn out in the making of kinetoscope prints. Annie Oakley, famous circus star known as "Little Sure Shot," who appeared in the first series of kinetoscope films made at Edison's "Black Maria" studio in West Orange U