Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1927)

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83 The Movies Thirty Years Ago Amusing reminiscences of motion pictures even before they were in their infancy. By Philip Hamlin Illustrations by Lui Trugo IT seems incredible that thirty years ago there was not a solitary theater devoted to the exhibition of motion pictures. Probably some old-timer will come forward and prove me technically wrong but, with a possible rare exception or two, that is a correct statement of conditions. I toured the Middle West in 1897 with a motion-picture outfit, so what I say is founded chiefly on personal observation. I got into the picture business rather peculiarly, not with malice aforethought. An acquaintance of mine was an acrobat. He fell and hurt himself, so that his professional activities were halted for a season. I had seen a movie or two, and conceived the idea of staking him to an outfit to tour small towns, in many of which no moving picture had ever been shown. My first step was to find a projection machine. There were only three makes on the market — the imported Cinematograph, the Edison Kinetoscope, and a machine made by Lubin in Philadelphia. In looking around, I ran across a chap who had bought an Edison outfit, had used it a short time, and was willing to sell because he couldn't make a success of films in his town. I paid him three hundred dollars for his outfit, which included a hand-fed electric arc lamp, an oxy-acetylene gas lamp, and a few one-reel films. A reel then consisted of about four hundred or five hundred feet. About this time the Corbett Fitzsimmons fight took place, and the recent invention of motion pictures made possible the first photographic record of boxers in action. I decided that if I could show these fight films in conjunction with those I had obtained with the projection machine, I'd have a real "draw" — a show appealing to all classes. The fight had been a fourteen-round affair, and the films cost fifteen dollars per round, which was more than I cared to invest, but after experimenting a bit, I found a way to economize. This was my discovery : Projection machines had no rewinders in those days. As the film ran through a machine it was allowed to fall on the floor, later to be rewound by hand.. Accidentally putting a film in reversed— that is, with its end instead of the beginning toward the condensingdens — I discovered that all the objects were transferred to the opposite side of the screen. Here was our chance ! We could buy half the total number of rounds, run them through first frontward, then backward, and defy any one not in the know to realize that we were repeating the same film. George Siler, a famous referee of those days, -had reported the match for one of the sporting papers, and so I carefully studied his account of it. But here was a difficulty. In round one the men shook hands — that prevented the 4— repetition of that section of In s i x octhe knockexcept Showing films in some communities was risky business in the earlv days, requiring the hardihood of a true pioneer. the film, round there curred only down the final knock-out in the fourteenth, when the crowd swarmed into the ring. That prevented the repetition of those two rounds. So, it finally worked out that wf Cont'd on page 100