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Photoplay Magazine
TheRheumatic History
of the
Motion Picture
By Perry Damsay
A moment that was of vast import to the motion picture. Napoleon Bonaparte outlines Ms first crude sketch of the motion picture camera to a lady friend on the bench at South Haven, Mich.
Chapter MCVXXVIII
AT ABOUT this stage in the litigation be
A-X tween Joe Bellby and Local 318 over the / rights to a folding toothbrush, an event
came about which was destined to shake the industry to the depths of its pocketbooks.
Until the Spring of 1878, the motion picture companies had been getting along without a camera and doing pretty well, at that.
But, one fine May day, a little Frenchman named Napoleon Bonaparte presented a letter of introduction to Jackie Coogan's father and announced that he had come to interest him in a camera.
The camera which Bonaparte, who had formerly kept a saloon in Decatur, Illinois, showed to the elder Coogan was an odd contrivance. It was more nearly
like a cuckoo clock than the movie camera of today; every time a foot of him was ground, the cuckoo came forth from its cage and registered the footage.
The elder Coogan was interested in the plaything and decided to give it a test. So he formed a producing company and made a onereel drama entitled "The Shiek's Kiss." The company worked in an old barn on the present site of the Hotel Plaza.
"The Shiek's Kiss" was the first movie and also the first sex drama to reach the screen. In the cast of this primitive feature were the elder Mr. Coogan, Peg Talmadge, Glenn Hunter, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Craig Biddle.
The elder Coogan and Napoleon made a fortune. In Katonah, N. Y. alone the picture grossed $5,635. At this moment, the Napoleon wars broke out and Bonaparte was j called to the colors.
Coogan was left with a mass of lawsuits on his hands. A Swiss clock company sued him for using the cuckoo and the Audubon Society for the Protection of Birdsfiled papers at [continued on page 100]
/COMPRESSED into this ^-^ glowing chapter are many of the secrets of the motion picture's most significant early history. The details ot the Great Cuckoo Clock Litigation are among the most colorful annals of the cinema's development. Never before has the deep inner history of the screen's development been brought to light with such vividness. Here is an amazing insight into the buried and forgotten romance of the films.
James E. Burke, Edito?
An interesting comparison of the vast strides of the motion picture. Above, the early form of cuckoo camera and, left, a modem scenario machine.
(Thirty-sever.)