Rolling the Credits on Cinema’s Extraordinary First Century

You might say motion pictures got started with a sneeze.

Audiences chorused “God bless you” when they saw Thomas Edison’s grainy black-and-white film of his employee, Fred Ott, sneezing.

Or was it a kiss that really got movies going?

A film short, “The Kiss Between May Irvin and John C. Rice,” intrigued many, but one writer found the first celluloid smooch loathsome, “magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated thrice.”

Some credit New York’s Latham brothers and their films of boxing matches. Others point to the basement screening room in Paris where the Lumiere brothers first showed that moving images, even silly ones of people falling off horses, could be projected on a screen to draw thousands curious enough to pay a franc.

These pioneers worked their magic in the decade before the 20th century began. But their early efforts were mostly novelties, proofs of laboratory hypotheses, technological tricks.

In 1903, Edwin S. Porter, production head for Edison’s Black Maria studio, showed what movies could be.

Porter’s 12-minute “The Great Train Robbery” carried a story from beginning to end, and filled it with exciting action and clever stunts. The most startling came when an outlaw pointed his six-shooter straight at the audience and fired.

The screen went red, and women swooned.

Fantasy as Vivid as Reality

If that scene was the progenitor of what the movies would become, we all know its descendants, all the places we’ve never been and people we’ve never met but swear we can remember:

Atlanta as a wall of flames in “Gone With the Wind.”

A shower curtain slowly ripping down in “Psycho.”

The chilling menace of “Jaws” that still keeps some out of the surf.

Smoke that choked us during Normandy beach assaults, from “The Longest Day” to “Saving Private Ryan.”

The slow-motion bullet hail that finally stopped “Bonnie and Clyde.”

The nails-in-the-dashboard car chases of “Bullitt” and “The French Connection.”

Anyone who has lived in the 20th century carries a portable library of film images, unrealities so real they sometimes crowd out actual memories.

A grapefruit in the face. A top hat and a duck-like walk. A dance around a rainy lamppost. A rider silhouetted as the sunset fades to black.

Let’s roll the credits for this art form that is called the greatest of the century. Who produced and directed this spectacle? How did we all hire on as extras?

Santa Monica Charmed Producers

In 1908, the same year that Edison and other major East Coast producers formed the Motion Picture Patents Co. to protect their inventions, the Selig company filmed “The Count of Monte Cristo” in Santa Monica, the first major production away from New Jersey and New York.

Attracted by the nearly year-round sunshine, other producers flooded into Los Angeles, many settling in a sleepy citrus-growing suburb called Hollywood.

In the early silent films, actors were not listed by name. “The Biograph Girl,” known only by her studio, became so popular that the public demanded her name, Florence Lawrence. Thus the star system was born.

What was a star? Royalty, statesmen and great authors achieved fame, but they were known only as distant figures. People saw movie stars as endearing, comic and daring characters on the screen, and the desire to know more about them became insatiable. The studios were more than pleased to respond.

Toronto-born Gladys Smith, a child actress who became known as Mary Pickford, started at Biograph in 1909 at $40 a week. By 1916, Adolph Zukor was paying her $10,000 a week, plus a $300,000 bonus.

Adjusting for inflation, Pickford was possibly the highest-paid actress ever, and she became an important force in Hollywood when she helped found United Artists.

Soon such stars as Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish and Rudolph Valentino were filling theaters and earning huge salaries. Everyone, from the ordinary to the exalted, succumbed to the movies’ spell.

“It is like writing history with lightning,” President Woodrow Wilson said after seeing D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic, “The Birth of a Nation.”

A keen storyteller, Griffith virtually invented the motion picture form with his use of close-ups, long shots, changed camera angles and intercutting. Although “Birth of a Nation,” a Civil War spectacle, became the most successful movie of its time, the Kentucky-born director was assailed as a bigot for his portrayal of blacks and his benign depiction of the Ku Klux Klan. Black activists and white racists clashed in Boston and other cities.

The movies’ power to stir deep feelings was harnessed during World War I as studios produced propaganda films such as “The Beast of Berlin” and other flag-wavers.

Business was booming in Hollywood--now freed from Edison’s monopoly by the Justice Department. The Roaring ‘20s brought the consolidation of the business into all-powerful major studios, most of them controlling chains of theaters. The leaders: Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures; William Fox, 20th Century Fox; Louis B. Mayer, MGM; Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner, Warner Bros.; Carl Laemmle, Universal Pictures; Harry and Jack Cohn, Columbia Pictures.

In the midst of the boom, scandals taught the sad consequences of making actors seem more than human.

The wholesome young star Wallace Reid fell victim to drugs and alcohol and died at 32.

Director William Desmond Taylor was murdered in his home, and investigators disclosed that two famous actresses were his lovers.

Comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was tried three times before being acquitted in the party death of a starlet.

The nation’s puritans raged against Hollywood as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, and alarmed film bosses hired Republican politician Will Hays to clean up the industry.

Actors were required to sign morality clauses that would trigger their firing if their behavior brought public obloquy. The Hays Office enforced a censorship code over film content. For more than 40 years, filmmakers worked within rules that prohibited anything that couldn’t be seen by the whole family.

An Academy Award Is Born

In 1927, MGM’s Mayer invited 36 industry leaders to a banquet at which he proposed forming an academy to enhance movies’ prestige. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was born.

Two years later, 270 movie notables attended a dinner where the Academy bestowed awards. Today’s broadcast of the Oscars--said to have been named by two-time winner Bette Davis because the statuette’s behind resembled that of her then-husband, producer Harmon Oscar Nelson--draws an international audience estimated by the academy to be near 1 billion.

The first Academy Awards were for silent films. But there was a special award that year too--to Warner Bros. for pioneering the use of sound in “The Jazz Singer.”

Audiences cheered when Al Jolson said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet.” Within a year, the silent film was dead. Dialogue brought a new sophistication to the screen and made musicals possible.

Theater attendance skyrocketed, and studios thrived.

Even the Depression of the 1930s couldn’t halt the industry’s prosperity. Movies with upbeat titles--”The Gay Divorcee,” “Gold Diggers of 1933” (and ’35 and ‘37), “Pennies From Heaven”--distracted Americans from their daily woes.

During World War II, Hollywood mobilized all its forces. Stars like Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Tyrone Power donned uniforms, and still other actors went on tour to entertain troops and sell war bonds. The industry made propaganda and training films.

Troops and war workers hungered for entertainment, and Hollywood produced glitzy musicals and raucous comedies, as well as films like “Wake Island” and “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” depicting Americans’ valor in battle.

“This is the people’s war. It is our war. We are the fighters,” Henry Wilcoxon says in “Mrs. Miniver” in 1942. “Fight it, then. Fight it with all that is in us, and may God defend the right.”

War’s end brought vast change in Hollywood, as in so many areas of life. The year 1948 marked the beginning of the end for the studio system.

In that year, film exhibitors began to notice that their theaters were empty on Tuesday nights. Why? People were staying home to watch Milton Berle on television. Over time, as TV assumed its dominant place in entertainment, movie theaters across the nation closed, especially the downtown palaces erected during the lush years.

Helping to speed this trend was the government’s decision that the film giants constituted a monopoly, controlling production, distribution and exhibition of movies. They were ordered to get rid of one of those functions, and chose to sell off their theater chains.

The resulting leaner times saw studios auction off real estate, costumes and props. Film libraries were sold to TV.

Striving to innovate, companies introduced wide-screen techniques such as Cinerama, CinemaScope, even 3-D movies (one movie poster gushed: “Jane Russell in 3-D--this film will knock BOTH your eyes out!”). But audiences complained that the glasses required to achieve three dimensions gave them headaches, and the fad passed.

Another Hollywood innovation--animation--flowered in the century’s middle years.

Walt Disney’s characters, starting with Mickey Mouse, who made his talkie debut in 1928’s “Steamboat Willie,” created a genre along with an entertainment empire. From classic features such as “Snow White” and “Bambi,” with their lush depictions of golden good and fiery evil, to modern fables like “The Lion King,” often carried by Oscar-winning songs, Disney introduced children by the millions to the magic of movies.

That wasn’t all, folks. If Disney’s cartoons could be strait-laced, Warner Bros. offered saucier and often more sophisticated fare from that “qwazy wabbit” Bugs Bunny and his pals, many given voice by Mel Blanc. Later animators didn’t even aim first at young children: Witness features like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and TV series like “The Simpsons.”

Cold War Chilled Hollywood

Mid-century brought a darker time, too, as a Cold War chill swept through 1950s Hollywood.

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Those words uttered by Red-hunting congressmen still haunt American filmmaking.

Dozens of writers, directors and actors had joined the Communist Party, some briefly, in the radical 1930s.

Some refused to testify before Congress and went to prison. Others acknowledged their membership and named names. Anti-communist film leaders, such as Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan, helped supply the FBI with names of suspected party members.

The studios blacklisted suspects, denying them work. The blacklist lasted for 15 years, ruining many lives, and bitterness remains today. Many protested when a special Oscar was given this year to director Elia Kazan (“On the Waterfront,” “A Streetcar Named Desire”), who had long been shunned by the Hollywood establishment for naming names.

Postwar American filmmakers began to feel creative competition from abroad. The neorealism of Rossellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Fellini and other Italians electrified audiences and critics with its raw studies of the human condition.

Truffaut, Vadim, Godard, Chabrol and other French directors in the late 1950s brought forth the New Wave. Their films were intensely personal and could deal explicitly with nudity and sex.

In 1968, Jack Valenti, new head of the producers association, persuaded the company heads to dump the Hays Production Code--which had frowned on Mae West’s wiggle, outlawed words like “virgin” and initially held up “Gone With the Wind” because of Gable’s line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Instead, the producers adopted a rating system. A flood of sexy movies ensued. The X-rated “Midnight Cowboy” even won an Academy Award.

Many consider a period of about two decades starting in the early 1960s to be a golden age for American and British moviemaking. Among highlights:

“Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Tom Jones,” “Mary Poppins,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “The Pawnbroker,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “The Graduate,” “A Man for All Seasons,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Sting,” “Two for the Road,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “The Lion in Winter,” “Planet of the Apes,” “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” “M-A-S-H,” “Patton,” “The Last Picture Show,” “The Godfather,” “Sounder,” “Deliverance,” “American Graffiti,” “Nashville,” “Taxi Driver,” “Star Wars,” “Alien,” “Raging Bull,” “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now.”

In 1969, as teenage Baby Boomers experimented with drugs and sexual liberation and staged campus protests against the war in Vietnam, “Easy Rider” portrayed the counterculture--through a pair of hippie bikers on the road--and showed it could be profitable. The movie, directed by Dennis Hopper and produced by Peter Fonda, cost less than $400,000 and grossed $40 million worldwide.

Studio bosses decided there was a youth market out there, and a new generation of actors, writers and directors emerged to revitalize movies for this audience.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas stood out. With “Jaws” (1975), Spielberg began his string of blockbusters. “Star Wars” (1977) established Lucas’ genius for applying special effects to adventure. Together they created the hugely successful Indiana Jones trilogy.

Studios Struggle, Merge to Survive

As Hollywood’s century wound down, industry economics shifted again.

Some major studios struggled. MGM, which once boasted “more stars than there are in the heavens,” sold its historic Culver City lot as it tried to survive. Nearly defunct, United Artists folded into the newly diminished MGM.

Other studios were snapped up by international corporations. Japan’s Matsushita bought MCA/Universal and later sold it to the Seagram Co. Sony acquired Columbia and Tri-Star Pictures. Viacom absorbed Paramount, and Warner Bros. merged with Time Inc. Publisher Rupert Murdoch took over 20th Century Fox.

Expenses keep climbing. The average production cost of a movie today is $52 million. On the revenue side, videocassette sales now add millions, along with ticket sales abroad. “Titanic” alone earned $1 billion, though that box office reflected some adolescent girls’ dozen or more trips to see Leonardo DiCaprio.

Whether in a love story like “Titanic” or an adventure like the latest installment of the “Star Wars” epic, a “prequel” that uses cutting-edge technology to recast the cliffhangers of early filmmaking, Hollywood still relies on its time-tested alchemy: turning bright flickers of light and imagination into gold.