The stars (1962)

»f!» and screens. The nickelodeon had arrived. Nearly all of them programed The Great Train Robbery first, then demanded more of the same. Other capitalists, only slightly larger, went into the business of satisfying them and, nickel hy nickel, the business began to grow. This was not totally pleasing to Mr. Edison. He had patents, and it seemed to him that these granted the exclusive right to make movies as well as to sell the equipment to shoot and project them. Suddenly hundreds of people were infringing on his rights, and profitably, too. By 1907 there were film rental exchanges in thirty-five key cities in America, and there were about eight thousand nickelodeons. The former brought a measure of stability to both the production and distribution ends of the business, while the latter were creating a steady, mass market for movies among the poorer classes. In 1907 Edison, despairing of winning all the suits he had launched for patent infringement, created the famous movie trust, which was designed to get the exhibitor coming and going. He had to pay a pegged rental fee for his films, which he had to show on equipment leased from the trust. The exhibitors, for the most part, responded very poorly to this attempt at coercion, and those producers not included in the trust went blithely ahead, making pictures, although many of them transferred operations to a sleepy suburb of Los Angeles known as Hollywood. This was sufficiently far from New York to make it difficult for the trust to trouble them, and sufficiently close to the Mexican border so that escape would be easy in the unlikely event that it became necessary. Also, the climate was good and you could shoot outdoors almost all year round. By 1914, even before the courts struck it down, the effect of the trust on the movie business had been almost completely mitigated. Aesthetically speaking, the only thing the trust contributed to movie history was a place for D. W. Griffith to learn his craft. He came to Biograph — one of the trust studios — in 1909. part-time "serious" writer, part-time actor, and fulltime Southern gentleman of the old school. He made hun dreds of one-reelers for Biograph, experimenting with camera, shots, lighting, editing, creating the basic style of the movie as we now know it. By the time he left Biograph, irritated by the limits it placed on his talents, he was ready to complete the transformation of the movie business. He gathered the remnants of his stock company, the actors who had as yet to receive billing and large salaries from Biograph, along with such key technicians as cameraman Billy Bitzer and in 1914 made The Birth of a Nation, a film weak in philosophy, but strong in cinematic technique. His reputation, high before the arrival of the first feature-length films from abroad diminished it, now soared to new heights. The American companies had fought the introduction of features, but Griffith's smashing success now swept the industry into the production of long films — something for which Griffith had been fighting for years. Films now became a major investment, and the days when a profitable one-reeler could be turned out in less than a week, on a budget of a couple of hundred dollars, were finished. Even the last holdouts, like Biograph, saw that the best insurance for these large investments were stars. Unfortunately for the holdouts, men like Carl Laemmle, William Fox and Adolph Zukor had sensed this much earlier and the older studios, which had become household names in the first ten years of the industry, found that their most potent players had been lured away. Most of them withered, and the new empires, from which all the current Hollywood studios are direct descendants, took their place. They were empires based on stars. The first stars were, for the most part, players who went right on doing what they had been doing in their days of anonymity, only now with raised salaries and egos. Their vehicles were no longer as improvisational as the one-reelers had been, more attention was paid to accuracy and appropriateness of costume and scenery, and the scope of action and variety of locale were enormously increased. Only the basic character types of the people about whom the stories 20