Cinema

Century of discovery

Mark Steyn looks back

over the past 100 years

1900: Will motion pictures be a 19th-centu- ry novelty, forgotten in the 20th? It looks that way. Despite the improved projection quality arising from the invention of the three-bladed shutter, and despite the Span- ish-American War — the first movie war — which proved so popular that, after the cessation of hostilities, film-makers refused to accept it had all ended and stayed on staging fictional battles, despite all this, the public seems bored by the jerky peep- shows of the new medium. Armand D'Ary `the graceful French chanteuse', Bertoldi `the marvellous lady contortionist' and Car- mencita who 'suggests the Spain of old nov- els, she is impossible and admirable' are harmless enough, but audiences want something more. The vaudeville houses have taken to relegating the 'flickers' to the end of the programme, scheduling them as `chasers' to clear the customers out.

1901: First presidential assassination film: after President McKinley is shot, Thomas Edison rushes out a film about his killer, The Execution of Czolgosz. Unlike Oliver Stone, he doesn't pin the murder on the CIA, FBI, LBJ and organised crime.

1902: In Los Angeles, the 200-seat Electric Theater opens — the first purpose-built theatre designed exclusively for the presen- tation of 'flickers'. Admission costs a dime. 1903: The first successful fictional 'narra- tive' film, The Great Train Robbery (it runs for 12 minutes). The year before, Edison had made the sensational disaster movie Firemen Fighting the Flames at Paterson, but his supposed footage of the spectacular New Jersey conflagration was, in reality, some New York firemen putting out a sta- ble fire on Central Park West. Having fig- ured out how easy it was to fake news events, Edison then hit upon a further innovation: you might as well make the story up in the first place. The fellows who create the stories come low in the pecking order: story writers are paid $5 per idea. (By 1999, writers get at least thrice that.) 1906: The first colour film system, Kinema- color.

1908: Fifteen years after opening the world's first movie studio in East Orange, New Jersey, Thomas Edison builds a new studio in the Bronx — the first sign that New Jersey's reign as the home of motion pictures is coming to an end and that East Orange will be highly unlikely ever to be known as Tinseltown.

1911: The first studio opens in Hollywood, Nestor on Sunset Boulevard.

1914: Star salaries spiral out of control: America's Sweetheart (though, in fact, Canadian) Mary Pickford signs deal for $104,000 per year.

1916: Star salaries spiral further out of con- trol: Charlie Chaplin signs $675,000-per- year deal with Mutual.

1922: Hollywood is slumped in sex, drugs and murder scandals, but only off-screen. 1927: Al Jolson opens in The Jazz Singer, and brings to a close the silent era.

1928: David Wallerstein, a manager at Chicago's Balaban & Katz Theaters, intro- duces a new snack for picture-goers, but- tered popcorn. During the silent era, people were too rapt to chow down. As director King Vidor said, 'Popcorn and necking only came into pictures with the talkies.'

1929: First in-flight movie: Transcontinen- tal Air Transport shows a newsreel and two cartoons.

1930: Wide-screen action comes to the movies with The Big Trail, starring an up- and-corner called John Wayne in a new big-screen process called Grandeur. Grandeur bombs, and nearly takes John Wayne with it.

1933: The Gaumont Palace is no longer the world's biggest movie house. With 6,200 seats, New York's Radio City Music Hall trumps it. And they have Rockettes.

1934: 'First, sit in your car,' instructs the announcer at the first drive-in, at Pico and Westwood Boulevards in Los Angeles. 1939: James Edwards Sr annexes the gro- cery store next to his movie house, installs a second screen, and invents the Multiplex. 1952: First 3-D feature, Bwana Devil (directed by a one-eyed man, Arch Oboler). 1974: First `Sensurround' feature, Earth- quake. The seats shake.

1975: In 1896, Thomas Edison realised that the single-viewer Kinetoscope would never be more than a peep-show novelty and that the future of the movie business lay in the- atrical presentations for large audiences. Seventy-nine years later, Sony figures the future lies in single-viewer Kinetoscopes after all and manufactures the first video- cassette player, the Betamax.

1999: As the New York Times noted on 24 April 1996:

The new thing at Koster and Bial's last night was Edison's Vitascope, exhibited for the first time. When the hall was darkened last night a buzzing and roaring were heard in the turret, and an unusually bright light fell upon the screen. Then came into view two precious blonde young persons of the variety stage, in pink and blue dresses, doing the umbrella dance with commendable celerity.

Much has changed since then. Films have added sound and Technicolor and Dolby stereo and computer-generated space aliens. And, sadly, you'd be hard put to find two precious young blonde movie stars of today who could do the umbrella dance, with or without celerity. But one thing has stayed more or less exactly the same: the film — the thin strip of celluloid pulled across a projector through holes punched in the sides. That's barely altered since the invention of the three-bladed shutter back in 1900. But in June 1999, Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace premieres at a few select theatres in digital form: the biggest film of the day without any film in sight. Instead of celluloid, George Lucas compresses his story into zeros and ones and beams it onto the screen through a digital projector. The future of the film industry seems likely to involve less and less film.

A pity that the story of The Phantom Menace is state-of-the-art lousy. But, even after a century, they haven't figured that one out.