We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Talking Pictures
Then came the "store show." Usually, it was simply a store with a few folding chairs. Early theatre operators, who were certain that "movies are just a passing fad," made no effort to keep their "theatres" either clean or comfortable.
But here and there about the country were farseeing men who looked ahead. Among these was a young Canadian, Louis B. Mayer, who had purchased a store show at Haverhill, Massachusetts. He cleaned it, installed comfortable seats, and offered as his opening picture From the Manger to the Cross, a religious film made in Italy and far more ambitious than any American product of that time. From vision of this sort came the modern motion picture theatre, well lighted, well furnished, a welcome aesthetic addition to a community.
Credit belongs to D. W. Griffith for first proving that the public would accept long continued stories played by capable actors. His Birth of a Nation was a flame that set the whole cinema world ablaze.
Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille are credited with the creation of such routine photographic effects of today as the close-up, the flash back, and the backlight. These represent considerable advance over the drab, unrelieved flat lighting of the very first pictures.
DeMille tells an amusing story of his first attempt to get away from the use of "flat" lighting. He fashioned the first rude "spotlight" and, in a scene of Warrens of Virginia, he snowed for the first time an effect now familiar, a man with his face strongly lighted on one side, and heavy shadows on the other. The effect
1.8]