When the movies were young (1925)

68 When the Movies were Young stalled there the first projection machine of American manufacture, the Eidoloscope. When the season at the Boston Museum was over, Mr. Dougherty, who had become quite fascinated with this new idea in entertainment, went to New York City. The Biograph Company along about 1897 had just finished a moving picture of Pope Leo XIII taken at the Vatican. Pictures of the late Pope Benedict XV were announced as the first pictures made of a Pope, "approved by His Holiness." While they may be the first approved ones, Captain Varges of the International News Reel, who claims the honor, brought the third motion picture camera into the Vatican grounds. The second film — Pope Pius X in the Vatican, and gardens, and the Eucharistic Congress, was released in 19 12. Well, anyhow, Mr. Dougherty took a set of Biograph's Pope Leo XIII pictures to exhibit in the towns and cities of New Jersey and Pennsylvania on the old Biograph projection machine — one vastly superior to the Eidoloscope. The company exhibiting the picture consisted of an operator on the machine and Mr. Dougherty who lectured. And when he began his little talk (there was no titling or printed matter in the picture), the small boys in the gallery would yell "spit it out, we want to see the picture." Numbers of motion picture directors to-day might well heed the sentiments of those small boys. From exhibiting Pope Leo XIIPs picture, Mr. Dougherty became stage director of One Minute Comedies for the Biograph which at this time had a stage on the roof of a building at 841 Broadway. And sometimes in the midst of a scene the weather would pick up scenery and props and deposit them in Broadway. So came about ex