The stars (1962)

PART ONE PROTOTYPES The history of American movies from 1907, when they took their first great leap toward economic power, to 1914, when the star system attained its first great flowering, cannot be told in terms of personalities — at least not in terms of star personalities. As we have already noted, there was no such thing until 1910, although a handful of people, like comedian John Bunny and an ersatz cowboy named Bronco Billy Anderson, were beginning, with no cooperation at all from .the studios, to create an audience for their screen personalities. No, the real interest of these early, almost prehistoric, days lay in the realm of economics. Thomas Edison had shown his first movie in 1896, and the history of American films is usually dated from that year, although the Lumieres in France and the Lathams here both have excellent prior claim to the invention of movies, and several almost forgotten inventors have claims as good as Edison's. Indeed, it was not Edison at all, but one of his assistants, William Kennedy Dickson, who did most of the work on the new gadget. Be that as it may, Edison was in almost complete control of the business in its early stages. Whatever the other merits of his intelligence, Edison was not culturally very astute. He kept his camera crews cranking away, making stereopticon slides that moved, and very little else. At best, these efforts reached the level of crude newsreels, and when the novelty of "moving" pictures had worn off, the movies were in danger of death through intellectual malnutrition. Two artists came to their rescue. The first was George Melies, a magician who saw in movies the potential for the greatest trick of all. In the space of a few years at the turn of the century he devised most of the camera and editing tricks that still delight the eye today. Even more important, he took to arranging scenes in a simple sequence telling a simple story. He had a wonderful gift for fantasy and bis early films are still delightful to see — and genuinely funny. An Edison cameraman, Edwin S. Porter, chanced on some of them and, because he had what others lacked — an eye to see — irecognized the tremendous advance Melies had made. Being an American, he was more interested in reality than fancy. So, when with Edison's blessing he set out to imitate Melies, he turned his attention to the everyday world around him. The first American story film, The Life of an American Fireman, was assembled mainly from film clips, and it told very, very simply the story of a woman and child imperiled by flames and of their rescue by firemen. Technically, its great advance lay in the fact that Porter broke each separate scene down into individual shots. He even essayed a closeup — of an alarm box ringing. Very little attention was paid to the film, movies at this point having been relegated to the bottom of the bill at the less fashionable vaudeville houses. Porter was apparently undismayed: he went ahead with his second feature, and it made history. The Great Train Robbery was a Western, shot in New Jersey in 1903: the simple tale it told of frontier robbery and retribution, complete with a perfectly admirable chase, lifted movies out of the vaudeville houses and created a demand for more story films. Shortly thereafter, small capitalists began to rent little stores in poor neighborhoods and install folding chairs, projectors 19