A key move for the film business

A century ago movie audiences didn’t see the latest feature in the comfort of a big-screen, stadium-seating theater replete with all the latest amenities. Nickelodeons wouldn’t really start to catch on until the following year. So in 1904, movies were generally shown as the final “act” in vaudeville houses or in the tents of traveling shows.

The way audiences view movies has changed radically, but much else hasn’t. A hundred years ago, moviegoers were flocking to fantasies, dramas, stories ripped from the headlines, westerns, biographies, action-adventures and even documentaries. Competition among the handful of studios for audiences was fierce. There were even major problems with piracy.

Last December, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science presented a program of films from 1903, a milestone year in motion picture history that saw a new complexity in narrative films -- thanks to the influence of Georges Melies’ innovative 1902 French fantasy “A Trip to the Moon” -- culminating with Edison’s “The Great Train Robbery,” as well as the introduction of a copyright production law.

The academy takes up the timeline again on Friday, exploring the films of 1904 at its Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood, with prints from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the George Eastman House, the Modern Museum of Art and the academy archive.

The year wasn’t distinguished by great technical or creative inroads, but the new copyright law affected production in 1904. Before the law, says academy programmer Randy Haberkamp, “what was happening was that Georges Melies would send the print of ‘Trip to the Moon’ over [to America], and anybody who got hold of it could make a dupe of it and sell it as their own. There was no protection.”

But the copyright law wasn’t perfect, Haberkamp says. Though it stated that people could not dupe somebody else’s work, “that didn’t include any kind of intellectual protection. So if you wrote a story called ‘The Great Train Robbery,’ somebody else could film it. Things like that were considered in the public domain.”

Thus, many faux “Great Train Robbery” films were released in 1904, copying the original scene by scene and featuring actors who resembled those in the Edison production. Unsuspecting audiences didn’t know the difference.

Haberkamp will be showing a “Great Train Robbery” ripoff made by Siegmund Lubin of the Lubin Co. “His version is only 600 feet,” says Haberkamp. “He cranked his at slower speeds so they wouldn’t use as much film. Siegmund Lubin was the ultimate pirate.”

Another much-copied popular film of the year was “Personal.” Released in June 1904 by the Biograph Co., “it is one of those ripped from the headlines -- a guy advertised in the personal columns in the New York newspaper for a wife and [requested] that she would meet him at Grant’s Tomb,” says Haberkamp. “The guy was practically mobbed.”

A few months after Biograph’s take on the true story, Edison and Lubin released their own versions, Lubin’s with an original title: “Meet Me at the Fountain.” “We are showing all three of them,” says Haberkamp. “It’s so interesting to see the way the different companies approached [the story].”

A highlight of Friday’s program is the newly restored print of the 1904 Melies fantasy “The Impossible Voyage,” which, says Haberkamp, shows the filmmaker at the peak of his powers.

“It is all about these scientists who, instead of traveling to the moon, travel to the sun. It is kind of a sequel to ‘Trip to the Moon,’ but it is so much more elaborate and has hand tinting.”

Haberkamp acknowledges that Melies’ films are often incomprehensible to modern audiences because they have no title cards to explain the narrative. Instead, they were intended to be presented with a live narrator. For the Friday screening, “we have re-created the live narration that goes with the piece -- basically a storyteller. When you hear the narration,” he says, “you’ll understand who these characters are and they are they doing.”

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A Century Ago: The Films of 1904

Where: Linwood Dunn Theater, Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, 1313 N. Vine St., Hollywood

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Price: $5 for general admission: $3 for students, seniors and academy members.

Contact: (310) 247-3600, www.oscars.org