Silent Film era / Photo Credit: Griffith - Wikipedia
SOME HISTORY OF THE FIRST PAID EXHIBITION OF MOTION PICTURES? (In the Entertainment industry.)
Some history of the first paid Exhibition of motion pictures?
Paid exhibition of motion pictures began on April 14, 1894, at Andrew M. Holland's phonograph store, located at 1155 Broadway in New York City, with the Kinetoscope. Dropping a nickel in a machine allowed a viewer to see a short motion picture, devoid of plot. The machines were installed in Kinetoscope parlors, hotels, department stores, bars and drugstores in large American cities. The machines were popular from 1894 to 1896, but by the turn of the century had almost disappeared as Americans rejected the solitary viewing experience and boring entertainment.
Often hailed as the ‘founding fathers of modern film’, the Lumiere Brothers, Louis and Auguste, can take credit for the first commercial exhibition of a projected motion picture to a paying public in 1895, in the world's first movie theatre - the Salon Indien, at the Grand Cafe on Paris' Boulevard des Capucines. The 20-minute program included ten short films with twenty showings a day.
Around 1900, motion pictures became a small part of vaudeville theatres. The competitive vaudeville theatre market caused owners to constantly look for new entertainment, and the motion picture helped create demand, although the new form of entertainment was not the main draw for patrons. It was often used as a "chaser"—shown as the end of the performance to chase the audience from the theatre. These theatres were designed much like legitimate theatres. The Beaux-Arts architecture of these theatres was formal and ornate. They were not designed for motion pictures, but rather live stage performances.
In 1902, the storefront theatre was born at Thomas Lincoln Tally's Electric Theatre in Los Angeles. These soon spread throughout the country as empty storefronts were equipped with chairs, a Vitascope projector, a muslin sheet on which the motion picture was exhibited, darkened windows, and a box by the door to service as a ticket office (literally, the "box office".) Storefront theatres, supplied with motion pictures made in Chicago and New York, spread throughout America. These theatres exhibited a motion picture at a specific time during the day.
Air domes also became popular in warm climates and in the summertime in northern climates. With no roof and only side walls or fences, the air domes allowed patrons to view motion pictures in a venue that was cooler than the stifling atmosphere of the storefront theatre.
In 1905, the Nickelodeon was born. Rather than exhibiting one program a night, the Nickelodeon offered continuous motion picture entertainment for five cents. They were widely popular. By 1910, Nickelodeons grossed $91 million in the United States. The Nickelodeons were like simple storefront theatres, but differed in the continuous showings and the marketing to women and families.
The movie house, in a building designed specifically for motion picture exhibition, was the last step before the movie palace. Comfort was paramount, with upholstered seating and climate controls. One of the first movie houses was Tally's Broadway Theater in Los Angeles.
Before 1914, motion-picture exhibitors had generally showcased their offerings behind modest storefronts, dubbed “nickelodeons” after the original Nickelodeon that opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. By contrast, the Mark Strand Theatre–later known simply as the Strand–was the first of the so-called “dream palaces,” called as such for their impressive size and luxuriously appointed interiors. The Strand seated around 3,000 people and boasted a second-floor viewing balcony and (in an architectural innovation at the time) a two-story rotunda where moviegoers could socialize before and after the presentation and during intermission.
A movie palace (or picture palace in the United Kingdom) is any of the large, elaborately decorated movie theaters built between 1914 and the 1940s. The late 1920s saw the peak of the movie palace, with hundreds opened every year between 1925 and 1930. With the advent of television, movie attendance dropped and many movie palaces were razed or converted into multiple screen venues or performing arts centers.
There are three architectural design types of movie palaces. First, the classical style movie palace, with its opulent, luxurious architecture; second, the atmospheric theatre which has an auditorium ceiling that resembles an open sky as a defining feature; and finally, the Art Deco theaters that became popular in the 1930s.
Designers
Eberson specialized in the subgenre of "atmospheric" theatres. His first, of the five hundred in his career, was the 1923 Majestic in Houston, Texas. The atmospherics usually conveyed the impression of sitting in an outdoor courtyard, surrounded by highly ornamented asymmetrical facades and exotic flora and fauna, underneath a dark blue canopy; when the lights went out, a specially designed projector, the Brenograph, was used to project clouds, and special celestial effects on the ceiling.
Lamb's style was initially based on the more traditional, "hardtop" form patterned on opera houses, but was no less ornate. His theaters evolved from relatively restrained neo-classic designs in the 1910s to those with elaborate baroque and Asian motifs in the late 1920s.
The movie palace's signature look was one of extravagant ornamentation. The theaters were often designed with an eclectic exoticism where a variety of referenced visual styles collided wildly with one another. French Baroque, High Gothic, Moroccan, Mediterranean, Spanish Gothic, Hindu, Babylonian, Aztec, Mayan, Orientalist, Italian Renaissance, and (after the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922) Egyptian Revival were all variously mixed and matched. This wealth of ornament was not merely for aesthetic effect. It was meant to create a fantasy environment to attract moviegoers and involved a type of social engineering, distraction, and traffic management, meant to work on human bodies and minds in a specific way. Today, most of the surviving movie palaces operate as regular theaters, showcasing concerts, plays and operas.
On the night before it debuted to the public, the Mark Strand Theatre held its opening-night gala, which the next day’s newspapers called “a sensation” (according to a 1938 retrospective on the Strand published in the New York Times) In addition to the feature presentation that night–The Spoilers, a drama starring William Farnum–the audience was treated to a performance by the Strand’s concert orchestra; The Neapolitan Incident, which the program called “a collaboration of the motion picture and song”; songs by the Strand Quartet; and a Keystone comedy short.
By 1916, the number of movie palaces in the United States had topped 21,000. Instead of a program of short films, these theaters would show a full-length feature presentation in order to charge patrons premium prices. The movie-palace boom (and the corresponding demise of the nickelodeons) marked the beginning of the rise of the studio system, which would dominate Hollywood from the 1920s into the 1950s.
Decline
Following World War II movie ticket sales began to rapidly decline due to the widespread adoption of television and mass migration of the population from the cities, where all the movie palaces had been built, and into the suburbs. The closing of most movie palaces occurred after United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. in 1948, which ordered all of the major film studios to sell their theaters. Most of the newly independent theaters could not continue to operate on the low admissions sales of the time without the financial support of the major studios and were forced to close.
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Silent Film era / Photo Credit: Griffith - Wikipedia
