Hollywood History: Pre-Hollywood ("The Dark Ages")

In 1919, designer John Jasper built three production stages on 15 acres of undeveloped land in Hollywood. The height of modernity at the time, the new Hollywood Studios Inc. was described by Moving Picture World magazine as a "studio that will contain four stages, each with a space of 70x120 feet…to be built of steel and glass. Each stage will be able to be darkened at any time, without any trouble involved. Attached to each stage will be offices, dressing rooms, and other facilities." Thus, what would eventually become Hollywood Center Studios was born.

At the time that Jasper built his three production stages (the fourth was never completed) the movie-making craze was just beginning to hit Hollywood, but the invention of motion pictures had been in development for nearly sixty years. Artists and inventors in both France and the United States were highly influential in the early days of film.

As early as the 1860s, machines were created to produce two-dimensional drawings in motion. Mechanisms such as the zoetrope and the praxinoscope were designed to display sequences of still pictures at sufficient speed for the images on the pictures to appear to be moving. These inventions were the predecessors for modern film animation.

When nitrate celluloid film was invented in the mid-1880s to capture still photography, it became possible to capture and store individual component images on a single film reel, which allowed objects in motion to be captured in real time. Early versions of the motion picture camera, including the first Kinetoscope developed by Thomas Edison in Orange, New Jersey, required the individual viewer to look through a contraption resembling a pair of binoculars that look downward into a box.

These inventions led quickly to the development of motion picture projectors, which were designed to shine light through the processed and printed film and magnify these "moving picture shows" onto a screen for an entire audience. This phenomenon came to be known as "motion pictures." Early motion pictures were composed of a series of rapidly sequenced static shots depicting an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. With a few exceptions, these first films were documentaries depicting every-day life – also known as actualités.

The first motion picture to be shown in front of a paying audience, thus ushering in the era of commercial film, was a filmed boxing match. Lasting just eight minutes, it was entitled Young Griffo vs. Battling Charles Barnett. It was filmed on the roof of Madison Square Garden, and premiered at 153 Broadway in New York City on May 20, 1895.

The first commercial film to actually be projected on to a screen was premiered on December 28, 1895, by Louis Lumiere and his brother, Auguste. Convinced that motion picture film had mass-appeal and should be viewed by large audiences, the Lumiere brothers had created what they called a Cinematographe machine, which was a combination camera and projector that could project an image up on large surfaces, thus enabling the film to be shown to a large audience. Using their photographic supplies factory as a motion picture laboratory, the two brothers had painstakingly created a 17-and-a-half-minute film entitled La Sortie des Usines Lumiere (Workers Leaving the LumiereFactory). They showed it for the first time to a paying audience at a Paris café called Salon Indien.

In 1896, using a projecting kinetoscope, Thomas Edison showed the first publicly-projected motion picture on a screen in the United Stages at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City. That same year, Edison created a 20-second short entitled The Kiss, depicting May Irwin and John Rice in a lingering smooch. Although it was the most popular film produced by Edison's Black Maria film company that year, it also became notorious as the first film to be criticized as scandalous and to bring demands for censorship.

In 1898, the idea of censorship was put into practice when curious camera operators traveled to Cuba in an attempt to capture footage of the Spanish-American War but were turned away by the U.S. Army. Unable to capture real-time battles on film, many of them went into studios to create battle scenes using models and painted backdrops, thus ushering in the start of scale-model effects for motion pictures. Taking the idea of created effects a step further, in 1899, French magician Georges Melies produced a film called Cendrillon (Cinderella). This was the first film to use artificially arranged scenes to construct and tell a narrative story. Melies went on to write, design, direct, and act in hundreds of his own fairy tale and science fiction films. He also developed techniques such as stop-motion photography, double-exposures, multiple-exposures, and fades.

Up until this point, motion pictures had been largely considered as either a visual art form or a curiosity – a popular fad that would not stand the test of time. By the turn of the century, however, as more and more public demonstrations and paid showings took place, public imagination was captured by the possibilities of this innovative form of entertainment. It was at this time that films began developing a narrative structure by juxtaposing scenes together to tell a story. Editing was born when the scenes were broken up into multiple shots of varying sizes and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were discovered and proved to be more effective ways to capture audience imagination and portray a story on film.

These critical steps in early film history laid the groundwork for motion pictures to became a household sensation in early 20th Century America. Stay tuned for the next issue of Hollywood Center Studios' newsletter to read more about the rise of the small farming community outside of Los Angeles known as Hollywood.