George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success

By Alex Ben Block, Lucy Autrey Wilson and Francis Ford Coppola

A comprehensive look at 300 of the most financially and/or critically successful motion pictures of all time—many made despite seemingly insurmountable economic, cultural, and political challenges—set against the prevailing production, distribution, exhibition, marketing, and technology trends of each decade in movie business history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9780061963452

Book preview

The Beginning to 1909

That’s it. It’s going to be the picture business for me.

—Gilbert M. Broncho Billy Anderson, after viewing The Great Train Robbery with an audience in 1903

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GENERAL U.S. STATISTICS, 1890–1910

62,979,766

U.S. Population, 1890

76,212,168

U.S. Population, 1900

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DECADE OVERVIEW

You have to understand what was happening in this country to see why movies were catching on. From 1900 to 1910, about nine or ten million immigrants poured in, and because nickelodeon movies were new, cheap, silent and set up no language difficulties, they became a popular pastime.

—ADOLPH ZUKOR

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MOTION PICTURE: A series of pictures projected on a screen in rapid succession with objects shown in successive positions slightly changed so as to produce the optical effect of a continuous picture in which the objects move.

MOVIE: A representation (as of a story) by means of motion pictures.

FILM: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, and the British Film Institute all define a feature as a film with a running time of 40 minutes or longer. The Centre national de la cinématographie in France defines it as a 35 mm film that is longer than 1,600 meters, which comes out to exactly 58 minutes and 29 seconds for sound films. The Screen Actors Guild gives a minimum running time of 80 minutes. A movie shorter than a feature film is a short film.

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Inventing an Industry and an Art Form

No one person created motion pictures. There was active invention in both Europe and the United States. Although conventional wisdom suggests that Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb and phonograph, was the father of film, that is only partially true. It was in his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, in the 1880s that movies were born, but many other players had contributed to that event.

One of the very first illusions of moving pictures was actually created in northern California by photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. In 1879, under the sponsorship of former California governor and Central Pacific Railroad president Leland Stanford, Muybridge pioneered stop-action photography and invented the zoopraxiscope, a forerunner of the modern motion picture projector. The zoopraxiscope projected images off rotating glass disks to give the impression of motion. In February 1888 Muybridge visited Thomas Edison in New Jersey and proposed that they collaborate to combine the zoopraxiscope with the Edison phonograph. Edison agreed, but after a few experiments Muybridge felt there were too many drawbacks and abandoned the project. Edison was not so quick to give up. In October 1888, he filed for a caveat (a preliminary announcement of intentions) with the U.S. Patent Office for what he called a kinetoscope—a cylinder with photographic images arranged in a spiral pattern around it. Edison then turned to his assistant Laurie Dickson to develop it. The kinetograph—the kinetoscope’s motion picture camera—was the result of Dickson’s efforts.

Dickson, whose full name was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, was born in France in 1860 to parents of English and Scottish descent. He was nineteen years of age and an amateur photographer when he first wrote to Edison asking for work. Edison said no at first, but Dickson voyaged across the ocean anyway on his own savings, hanging around and eventually winning the coveted job as Edison’s assistant. He was always talking about making movies, so Edison naturally enlisted his help on related projects. To create moving pictures, Dickson needed just the right film, so he turned first to John Carbutt and then to George Eastman.

Carbutt, an English photographer who came to America, founded the Keystone Dry Plate Works in 1879 with the intention of selling gelatin dry plates. Carbutt persuaded the Celluloid Manufacturing Company to produce a thin, almost transparent film by slicing a layer off a celluloid block and pressing it between heated polished plates to remove the slicing marks. Then, the celluloid strips were coated with a photosensitive gelatin emulsion. By 1888 Dickson was using a 15-inch-wide sheet of Carbutt’s film for early Edison motion picture experiments with the kinetograph. There remained one challenge, however: the celluloid film base produced by this means was still considered too stiff for the needs of motion picture photography.

Meanwhile, inventor and manufacturer George Eastman had become interested in photography and had set out to simplify the process so it could be accessible to all. In 1881 he founded the Eastman Dry Plate Company and started to manufacture gelatin dry plates. By 1884 he had introduced flexible, paper-based photographic film. He wanted to make the camera as convenient as the pencil. He received a patent for Kodak film in October 1884. Later, in 1888, he patented the Kodak roll-film camera.

Dickson used Eastman’s more flexible roll film in the kinetograph in November 1890 during the making of the first movie, Monkeyshines, which was 5 seconds long. Edison saw great possibilities, but felt it was still not producing a strong enough image to project on a big screen. He decided to exhibit it in a coin-operated exhibition device instead: an upright cabinet with a peephole in which a film strip, approximately 50 feet in length and consisting of several images, moved in an endless loop in front of an illuminated lens and behind a spinning wheel. The viewer got a brief look at 46 pictures per second. The spinning shutter gave the illusion of lifelike motion. After some further experiments, Dickson settled on a strip of film that was 35 mm wide with sprocket holes on both sides that matched up to pins on a projecting device. This set the standard size of most movie film for years thereafter.

While development continued on a kinetoscope that could be mass-distributed, Dickson created the first film studio in a building that had a revolving stage. The building was called the Black Maria because it reminded some of a police lockup van. There Dickson set out to create movies of all kinds, including films celebrating popular entertainers and athletes. Over the next few years, he would capture images of many of the era’s top stars, including William Frederick Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, and the dancer Annabelle Whitford Moore.

Eager to repeat the success they had with the phonograph, which attracted customers willing to pay a nickel to hear a brief recording through earphones, the Edison Company sold the kinetoscope machines for $250 each and then granted territorial rights to buyers for its use within specific areas. The first kinetoscope parlor, featuring ten machines, opened in a neo-Greco-style building at 1155 Broadway (at 27th Street) in New York City on April 14, 1894, where the franchise was held by former Edison employee Alfred Tate and brothers Andrew and George Holland of Ottawa, Canada. The Hollands had bought phonographs from Edison when they first hit the market, so they were able to get in early on this latest invention. They quickly formed the Kinetoscope Company with partners Norman Raff and Frank Gammon. In August 1894 their company was granted exclusive rights for selling kinetoscopes within the United States and Canada for a three-year period. The kinetoscope was an immediate sensation, and soon more parlors opened all over the country. That success attracted competitors such as Charles Chinnock in the United States and Robert W. Paul in London, and soon the market became saturated. Within a few years, however, the kinetoscope fad waned, as the peephole machines were replaced by projection systems that could be watched by a group.

Meanwhile, Dickson had engaged in dealings with an Edison competitor. When Edison found out in April 1895, he confronted his assistant, and Dickson left Edison but not the industry. Almost immediately thereafter he formed the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company with three partners and designed a new system, purposely avoiding any of the Edison patents. It was extremely successful. That company later simplified its name to the Biograph Company in 1909 and became one of the major studios to participate in the early era of filmmaking, employing directors such as D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett and movie stars such as Mary Pickford, the Gish sisters, and the Biograph Girl, Florence Lawrence.

By 1896 the Lumière brothers and others had advanced film projector technology enough to interest Edison. When his sales representative Frank Harrison first told him about the Jenkins-Armat phantascope projector, Edison was thrilled. Although Charles Francis Jenkins of Dayton, Ohio, had been a stenographer for the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., he spent his spare time inventing a motion picture projector. By 1892 he could project small images on a wall or screen, but they were too small for public exhibition. In 1895 Jenkins went into partnership with Thomas Armat, a classmate of his at the Bliss School of Electricity in Washington. They showed their projector for the first time at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, where Harrison saw it. A disagreement over ownership of the projector led to a rift between Jenkins and Armat. Eventually Jenkins sold his rights to Armat, who then sold the projector to Edison, who renamed it the Edison Vitascope and subsequently took credit for its invention. As Edison expanded his business, others were getting into the field too, including Vitagraph in New York, Sigmund Lubin in Philadelphia, and William Selig in Chicago.

Vitagraph, which was founded in New York City in 1896 by two British immigrants, J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, would be the longest-lasting of the early film studios. Vitagraph’s output was prolific, and by 1911 it had several studios in various parts of the country, including one in California. Its films were among the most popular silents produced and included stars such as Norma Talmadge and Florence Turner (the Vitagraph Girl). Rudolph Valentino began there as a bit player and went on to achieve tremendous fame later. Vitagraph was the only member of the Motion Picture Patents Company to survive the aftermath of the antitrust court decision against the Edison Trust, and continued to prosper into the 1920s; it was sold to Warner Bros. in 1925.

Sigmund Lubin, a German immigrant who had been trained as an optician, founded a film company under his own name in Philadelphia in 1882 and was selling films and his polyscope projector by 1902. Surviving a patent lawsuit by Edison in 1898, Lubin’s company prospered for twenty years producing films on a variety of subjects, including African American stereotypes, boxing matches, comedies, crime, local views, news, and religious subjects. Lubin recognized early on that moving pictures were becoming part of everyday life and predicted the time will come when…the moving picture will be delivered at home as is the morning newspaper of today.

William Selig prospered in the days of direct selling to exhibitors and exchanges as part of the General Film Company distribution system. When General Film proved inadequate to distribute features, it combined with the other major players of the day, first as part of V-L-S-E (Vitagraph-Lubin-Selig-Essanay) and later as part of K-E-S-E (Kleine-Edison-Selig-Essanay) to distribute its features. Selig established the first permanent motion picture studio in Los Angeles in October 1909. The decline of the Patent Company and General Film and the loss of European markets contributed to the cessation of his production company, Selig Polyscope, by 1918. However, William Selig kept his studio in east Los Angeles and rented it to Louis B. Mayer Productions. He continued producing sporadically into the 1930s.

Edison’s kinetographic camera patent (which was finally granted in 1897) was for the United States only. Because Edison saw motion pictures as a gimmick, he skimped on paying an extra $150 to secure a worldwide patent for motion picture technology. That would prove to be a bad mistake. The threat to Edison from abroad was very real. In many ways, the initial development of the American cinema from the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War I was entwined with the development of a film industry in Europe, primarily in France with the Lumière brothers (Louis and Auguste), the Pathé brothers (Charles and Emile), Léon Gaumont, and Georges Méliès.

In the autumn of 1894 French photographer Antoine Lumière, inspired by an Edison peep show kinetoscope, took a length of film to show his sons Louis and Auguste, encouraging them to produce a system that would produce similar living pictures that could be projected onto a screen. By 1895 the brothers Lumière had a photographic supply factory in France that employed 300 people and was capitalized for 3 million French francs, a considerable sum at the time. They also had a portable camera and were sending cameramen around the world to film 1-minute scenes. They then arranged the first film to be shown to a paying public in December 1895 at the Salon Indien, in the basement of the Grand Café, Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. The owner refused an offer of 20 percent of the receipts and charged a flat rate of 30 francs a day. There was an afternoon preview to an invited audience, including Georges Méliès. For the first showing, only 33 tickets (in a room that seated 100) were sold at a price of 1 franc each. Ten different short films were shown on film strips 17 meters in length. One, called Baby’s Dinner, featured Auguste Lumière and his wife trying to feed their baby without much success. Within three weeks, they were taking in 2,000 francs a day.

The arrival of the Lumière Cinématographe inspired Charles Pathé and his brother Emile to form the Société Pathé Frères in 1896 in Paris; a year later it became the Compagnie Générale de Cinématographes, Phonographes, et Pellicules with the two brothers as directors. The company flourished and developed both the manufacture of negative and positive film, the creation of factories and studios, and the making of cameras and projectors for sale worldwide. By 1907 two-thirds of the films shown in the United States were made in Europe. Pathé was already distributing a catalog of 1,500 films and was producing over 900,000 feet of film every day. Their films were seen that year in theaters in eighteen countries.

Léon Gaumont, a photographic equipment retailer, established the Gaumont Company in 1895. The success of its chronophotographe camera-projector, developed by Georges Demeny, allowed Gaumont to expand into film production, and by 1907 they were doing business in England, Germany, Russia, and the United States. In the late 1890s, their production facility in La Villette, France, Cité Elgé, was the largest in the world. Credited with producing the first animated movie, their British studio offshoot, Gaumont British, would later become known as the distributor and producer of Alfred Hitchcock’s British films in the 1930s.

Fearful of competitors from Europe, Edison pushed ahead, and on April 23, 1896, the Vitascope movie projector was used in front of a paying audience for the first time as an attraction at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York’s Herald Square. The film was projected on a screen within a gilt frame and amazed the audience. Edwin S. Porter, who had been hired by Edison as a camera and projector technician, later became one of Edison’s primary directors. His first important film was the dramatic short The Life of an American Fireman in 1903. Porter followed that with the seminal action western The Great Train Robbery the same year. He went on to make many other short movies until establishing his own independent film company with other investors, the Rex Motion Picture Masterpiece Company, in 1909.

Although a short and not a feature, The Great Train Robbery was one of the very first blockbusters. It was the first film with a narrative fictional plot that captured the public imagination. For years after, when a nickelodeon opened, it usually premiered with Train Robbery. That formula was immediately copied, launching a new era in film. As the public tired of just seeing images move, the drive to create more movies with plots and stories began. While early American films were developing a more fictional narrative, the French took a more natural approach. Early French films featured street scenes, native dances, train arrivals, and military parades. The French were really the first documentary filmmakers.

Among the most innovative filmmakers of the earliest days was Georges Méliès, a French stage magician who had attended an early Lumière screening in Paris. In 1896 he began showing films regularly as part of his theatrical magic show, and by 1897 he had built Europe’s first film studio in Montreuil, France, where he could make films indoors with the aid of artificial lighting. His most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune), was made in 1902. It was loaded with early special effects, visual tricks, camera handiwork, and what ever else it took to create illusions in one of the first science fiction and fantasy films ever. Méliès, who had become frustrated with the limits of what he could do onstage, found his calling in the wide-open possibilities of film.

Edison hated that his edge in the movie industry was getting away from him, so he decided to shut the door on his competitors. Beginning in 1908, Edison pressured ten companies to work together to monopolize the new motion picture business. Together they controlled patents and had the necessary funds to enforce those patents, sometimes in ruthless ways—such as with thugs who threatened anyone who dared to go against them. By pooling their interests, these member companies effectively cornered the market. Ultimately Kodak agreed to sell movie film stock only to them.

At first, the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), otherwise known as the Edison Trust, enforced its will primarily in the eastern United States, most notably in New York and New Jersey, where most movie companies were based. Soon, however, the patent company members began moving west, attracted by the year-round warm weather. The independents followed, driving a migration to what became Hollywood.

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Motion Picture Patents Companies, 1890–1909

American

Edison Manufacturing Company: Dissolved in 1926

Essanay: Stopped production in 1918

Biograph: Out of business by 1918

Kalem: Bought by Vitagraph in 1916

Lubin: Out of business by 1918

Selig: Out of business by 1918

Vitagraph: Sold to Warner Bros. in 1925

French

Gaumont: Part of the company absorbed by MGM in late 1920s

Méliès: Out of business by 1915 and bankrupt by 1923

Pathé: Spun off its interests to its American operation in 1914. Sold remnants of the American company to RKO in 1931

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PRODUCTION SPOTLIGHT

Piracy, Trick Camera Work, Realistic Acting, and the Emergence of Genre Films

From the very inception of the motion picture industry, films have been the target of piracy, beginning with foreign movies, such as the French science fiction picture Le voyage dans la lune, which was among the first to be widely copied, illegally distributed, and exploited in the U.S. market. Often the pirates would put their own name on the newly struck prints, as if they had produced the pictures. These, of course, were blatant violations. However, the term pirate was also used to describe those who avoided paying the royalties demanded by the Edison Trust, which held patents on the lion’s share of equipment used to make films. The offenders in this case were up-and-coming independent exhibitor-producers such as Carl Laemmle, William Fox, and Adolph Zukor who really did nothing more than make and show movies using unlicensed equipment to avoid the fees. Technically they were not pirates, just folks trying to keep costs down by filming on the sly or on locations far from the enforcers hired by the Edison Trust.

Whether stolen or original, movies throughout most of the nineteenth century consisted of simple scenes: images strung together or pictures from nature. That may have been enough for the era of coin-operated viewing machines and the first years of public exhibition, but by the turn of the century, audiences were getting bored. That is when Edwin Stanton Porter, a Pennsylvania native who had shown movies all over the world, introduced narrative to filmmaking in a way that would change the industry forever. He had at first returned home from his travels with the intent of manufacturing cameras and projectors, but instead he went to work for Thomas Edison in 1900. Using the knowledge he had gained as a touring projectionist to determine what audiences really liked, Porter became one of the most influential filmmakers of his time. His first films included comedies such as 1901’s satirical Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King, which made fun of Vice President Teddy Roosevelt. Like Méliès, Porter used illusions, tricks, and editing to create images in movies such as his 1902 Jack and the Beanstalk. His 1903 short Life of an American Fireman not only used innovative cuts and dissolves to help tell a complex story but also benefited from the use of stock footage, which Porter cut into his original footage. Porter’s greatest movie was the 1903 release The Great Train Robbery.

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Movie Censorship from the Beginning to 1909: A Brief History

Cities and states around the United States create local censorship boards to regulate the content in movies, which follow different rules and standards.

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In addition to adding story lines to their moving pictures, which many had adapted from popular literature and plays, filmmakers of this time began presenting their work in varying genres including crime (Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, 1905), animation (Fantasmagorie, 1908), and drama (The Violin Maker of Cremona, 1909).

A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune)

Distributed by Edison and others, 1902

Directed by Georges Méliès

845 feet (13 minutes)

The First Cinemagician Is French

Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was a thirty-four-year-old stage magician in Paris on December 28, 1895, when he was among the thirty-three people who attended the first showing at the Lumière brothers’ new movie theater. What he saw changed his life. From then on he was dedicated to the motion picture art, using all of his skills as a magician and all of the stagecraft he had developed to make the first fantasy and science fiction movies. He would soon be referred to as a cinemagician. As part of his cinema magic, Méliès was among the very first to use dissolves, close-ups, special effects, multiple exposures, stop-motion photography, time-lapse photography, stop tricks or substitutions, and hand-painted color in his movies. What separated Méliès from almost anyone else at the tail end of the nineteenth century was the fact that he was making movies primarily as a way to express his artistic ideas, not just as a way to further a gimmick that could capture images or take pictures of nature.

In late 1896, Méliès opened his own studio on the grounds of his family’s property at Montreuil-sur-Bois. It looked a lot like a very large glass green house. There was a carpentry workshop, a costume and scenery storage area, and a laboratory where film would be processed and then hand-painted frame by frame. Even as his enterprise grew, Méliès retained creative control. He not only directed all of the movies and adapted stage material to the screen but also managed the famed Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. He was involved in editing as well as in designing costumes and sets and in creating effects. At the end of 1896, his company, Star Film, announced its motto: The whole world within reach.

From 1897 until 1914, Méliès directed 531 films that ran from 1 to 40 minutes each. Most were variations on his magic stage shows, but with each one he became more clever about what he could accomplish on film. He was constantly looking for inspiration and new ways to use the medium. For instance, in 1896, as Méliès later recalled, he was struggling with a crude camera and film that would tear easily or get stuck. One day while in the center of Paris photographing outside of the opera, the camera jammed. By the time he resumed filming, the traffic and environment had changed. When he projected the result, he saw that he could use the trick of substitution for his illusions.

The idea for his greatest work, A Trip to the Moon, was taken from the Jules Verne novel From the Earth to the Moon. Elements of the story were also borrowed from the H. G. Wells book The First Men on the Moon. The production was the most expensive completed by Méliès at the time—10,000 francs (approximately $200). It was also his longest and most complex film, with several ambitious sets, numerous costumes, and elaborate special effects throughout. Méliès himself made clay models and plaster moldings for the moon creatures. He also wrote the scenario, drew storyboards for the film, acted in it, and directed it. In Méliès’s studio, acrobats from the Folies Bergère portrayed the creatures, ballet dancers from the Châtelet were the stars in the night sky, and music hall singers were some of the space travelers. Méliès played the leader of the expedition. He couldn’t get any theater actors to work in the film, as they considered movie acting undignified. Only later, when movies consistently paid better, did actors flock to his office. Throughout the production, Méliès made use of the trick effects he’d perfected in hundreds of previous films: scenes dissolve from one to the next, the night sky is double-exposed over the moonscape, creatures disappear in a puff of smoke, and miniature and full-size objects are combined to create an illusion of reality.

A Trip to the Moon was seen across Europe and the United States, but Méliès received little recognition or money from the American market. Despite a U.S. copyright, the film was duplicated illegally in America and sold to theaters under the copier’s name. Méliès had placed his Star Film company logo, a five-pointed star, into the scenes so they would be visible throughout, but that didn’t stop the duplicators, who simply painted them out of the new negatives.

Fred Balshofer, a pioneering American producer and director, worked briefly for the Lubin Film Company, where he copied A Trip to the Moon for perhaps the most brazen of these pirates, Sigmund Lubin, and recalled showing the film to one prospective buyer in particular. When the prospective client jumped up from his chair shouting, Stop the machine, Balshofer and Lubin wondered what was wrong. They found out soon enough when the prospective buyer shouted, I made that picture. I am George Méliès from Paris. Lubin jokingly told Méliès how Balshofer had labored hard to block out the trademark Méliès had painstakingly included, then laughed as he walked out of the room, leaving Méliès utterly speechless.

Méliès continued to make films and battle with the American market, but in the end he failed, losing everything at the outbreak of World War I.

—David Kiehn and Alex Ben Block

The Great Train Robbery

Distributed by Edison, 1903

Directed by Edwin S. Porter

4 days of principal photography

740 feet (12 minutes)

1990 National Film Registry Selection

Getting on the Narrative Train

Edwin S. Porter’s greatest movie came in 1903, when he shaped the story of the American West for audiences who had grown up on stage melodrama and dime novels with his movie The Great Train Robbery. Delivered on a single reel, the innovative film used crosscut editing that allowed action to take place simultaneously in more than one place during the movie.

The film was inspired by a stage play of the same name. As Porter later recalled: "From laboratory examination of some of the popular story films of the French pioneer director Méliès—trick pictures like A Trip to the Moon—I came to the conclusion that a picture telling a story in continuity form might draw the customers back to the theaters." Porter’s biggest problem was convincing Edison executives to finance the production; they felt it would cost too much. They finally gave permission as long as the budget didn’t exceed $800.

Starring Gilbert M. Anderson, who would later become famous as Broncho Billy, The Great Train Robbery was a western that was actually shot in the East with location scenes in New Jersey. I played a chap who ran away in the pasture and got shot, and the tenderfoot who did the jigging in the dancehall room—I couldn’t dance, but that was me—then I was a robber, and after I fell off my horse. I did the train robbing part on foot; I played the man who held up the telegrapher.

Frank Hanaway, another robber hired because he could fall off a horse, performed that stunt on camera. Justus D. Barnes, the leader of the bunch, is the man who fires his gun point-blank at the camera in the final scene of the film.

The railroad car and office scenes both included a special effect; exterior shots in New Jersey matted in with a double exposure. Production was completed in four days.

At first glance Edison executives didn’t know what to make of The Great Train Robbery. Porter suggested they preview it at Huber’s Museum, the famous dime museum on East 14th Street. Anderson recalled: I’ve seen some receptions to plays, but I’ve never seen such a reception to a picture in my life. They got up and shouted and yelled, and then when it was all over they yelled, ‘Run it again! Run it again!’ You couldn’t get them out. Films were sold by the foot at that time. The price for new print was $111, but that was a bargain as the prints were played again and again until they fell apart.

The Great Train Robbery went on to be shown more times in more theaters than any film in history to date. When nickelodeons began in 1905 it was the film most likely to play on opening week, and it could still be seen in theaters as late as 1909. Even more importantly, it opened the door to a new kind of fictional and narrative filmmaking, in which story and plot were as important as location and cinematography. It proved the viability of commercial cinema and set the standard for the next decade of one-reel movies. It would be copied many times over during the century that followed, forever transporting audiences into a world of harrowing chase scenes and thrilling action adventure.

—David Kiehn and Alex Ben Block

Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman

Distributed by Vitagraph, 1905

Directed by J. Stuart Blackton

5 days of principal photography

1,050 feet (18 minutes)

Film as Social Commentary

In 1905 Vitagraph was expanding production activity to complement its film exhibition business and its reputation for producing real-life newsreels, including some of the first from actual wars. Vitagraph’s partners, Englishmen and former vaudevillians J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith and former film distributor William Pop Rock, hired Gilbert M. Anderson to produce and direct story films for the company. Anderson had begun his film career as an actor at the Edison studio in 1903 and graduated to story development and directing. It was Anderson who suggested making the movie Raffles, which was also the basis for a successful stage play touring the country at the time. Anderson knew a stage actor, J. Barney Sherry, who was ideal for the title role. Sherry was hired, and the partners began producing films as the Vitagraph Company of America.

The character of Raffles, the gentleman criminal, first appeared in Cassell’s Magazine in England in 1898. During the next six years, author Ernest William Hornung (brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle) wrote at least twenty-five more stories, which were first collected into an 1899 book called The Amateur Cracksman. The stories were social commentary and witty satire on Victorian England, and his character was the antithesis of Doyle’s Sherlock Homes. Raffles was a gentleman who played cricket and lived well but made his money as a burglar. Holmes and Raffles, however, did share an ability to use disguises. The term amateur cracksman was meant to separate Raffles from lower-class professional criminals.

Production for the film began in early August 1905. The interior scenes were shot at Vitagraph’s rooftop studio on the Morton Building at 116 Nassau Street in New York City and on location at a country house in Long Island. The open-air studio was less than ideal: a cloud of exhaust from a smokestack on the roof cast a shadow across every scene shot there. A bank robbery was staged for the film in front of the Knickerbocker Trust Company at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, holding up traffic in every direction. When editing was finished in late August the film measured 1,050 feet, Vitagraph’s longest film to date, running about 18 minutes.

Vitagraph sold prints of Raffles to any exhibitor who wished to buy them at a price of $126 each. It was still common for exhibitors to buy directly, but rental exchange agencies were soon established across the country in response to the public’s growing interest in movies as nickelodeon theaters opened in big-city storefronts everywhere. Ten years after movies were first introduced to audiences in vaudeville auditoriums, the business was now starting to take hold. By 1906 there would be hundreds of nickelodeon theaters, and by 1907 thousands. In 1913 Vitagraph co-owner Albert E. Smith looked back at Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman as a turning point for the company: On the strength of the success we had with this story and a few others that followed it, we bought a small plot of ground over in Brooklyn, and we built thereon a small studio. When Vitagraph sold itself to Warner Bros. in 1925, that two-block facility in Brooklyn was valued at more than $1 million.

—David Kiehn

Fantasmagorie

Distributed by Gaumont, 1908

Directed by Emile Cohl

118 feet (2 minutes)

The First Animated Film

Emile Cohl (January 4, 1857–January 20, 1938) was the father of the animated cartoon. Born Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet, he was a French caricaturist. Cohl worked for Gaumont, one of the first major film companies, which had been founded in 1895 by Léon Gaumont. It was there in 1908 that Cohl created the first animated movie, called Fantasmagorie. Until then animation had been nothing more than bits, tricks, and pencil drawings jumping about. Fantasmagorie elevated the whole medium, showcasing its storytelling possibilities.

Cohl created a kind of light board effect by placing each of his drawings on an illuminated glass plate. He then traced the next drawing on top of that with the necessary changes. In all, he made 700 drawings, which, when shown successfully on film, produced consistent movement and allowed a short subject to have continuity. Working this way, Cohl was able to create the entire film by himself with only one camera assistant.

The action in Fantasmagorie is rapid, with characters blowing up like balloons, jumping in and out of boxes, fighting one another, and riding horses and elephants. Cohl was an advocate for a well-known, though short-lived, artistic movement of the time known as the Incoherents. While this picture was in fact incoherent, it was ultimately very influential.

—Alex Ben Block

The Violin Maker of Cremona

Distributed by Biograph, 1909

Directed by D. W. Griffith

3 days of principal photography

963 feet (16 minutes)

Realistic Acting Makes Its Debut

In 1909 Biograph released the first film with realistic acting. It was influenced by the film d’art movement that began in France in 1908 with the Pathé Frères production of The Assassination of the Duc du Guise, released in the United States in February 1909. Film d’art represented a conscious effort to bring theatrical stagecraft to motion pictures. Because French films dominated the American market in the early nickelodeon era, this movement readily caught the attention of American filmmakers.

Following the appearance of the Film d’art pictures, wrote actress Florence Lawrence, nearly all of the Biograph [company] players asked [our director] Mr. Griffith to be allowed to do slow acting, only to be refused. He told us it was impossible since the buyers would not pay for a foot of film that did not have action in it.

The actors’ wishes ultimately prevailed in the film The Violin Maker of Cremona, which provided seventeen-year-old Mary Pickford with her first leading screen role for Biograph. Pickford came to the Biograph studio looking for work in April 1909 after ten years in the theater and a stint on Broadway for producer David Belasco in The Warrens of Virginia (1907). Pickford refused to play in the exaggerated style demanded by the Biograph company, and it is generally thought that Griffith’s decision to make The Violin Maker of Cremona in the film d’art style was influenced by Pickford’s desire to perform in a more naturalistic style.

The film was based on a short verse play that would have been familiar to patrons of vaudeville theaters in the early 1900s. Its theatrical origins were evident in this adaptation, which was produced entirely at the Biograph studio, a converted brownstone located at 11 East 14th Street in New York, with painted flats for sets. Although Griffith is noted as the father of film technique, many of his early Biograph films are surprisingly devoid of any visual or editing pyrotechnics, nor do they exhibit the strong performances from actors that would distinguish his later work at Biograph.

Cinematographer G. W. Bitzer shot the film using the proprietary Biograph camera, which utilized an unperforated wide-format negative. The camera would punch a single pair of sprocket holes at the edges of each frame. In preparation for release, the film was reduction-printed to standard 35 mm, and the main title and subtitles, which were shot separately on 35 mm film, were then spliced into each release print.

The Violin Maker of Cremona was made at a time when producers sold prints to independently owned and operated film exchanges, and trade reviews amounted to little more than reprinting a studio-prepared synopsis, so it is impossible to know how well audiences responded. When the Biograph company went bankrupt in 1916, the receivers licensed a number of films for reissue through Unicorn Film Service, but an outraged Mary Pickford stopped their efforts when she bought the negatives to most of her Biograph films, purportedly to keep them out of circulation.

—Robert S. Birchard

DISTRIBUTION OVERVIEW

I did not invent the cinema, but I industrialised it.

—CHARLES PATHÉ

Foreign Movie Distributors Dominate

In 1905, the same year the nickelodeon craze hit America, the only weakness, if any, in the burgeoning film business was its distribution. There were films but no dependable, regularly scheduled sources for movies. Films were sold outright by the foot. Orders were usually made by mail from a catalog published by the Montgomery Ward Company, Sears, Roebuck and Company, and others. The showman who ran the vaudeville theater would spend approximately $50 on a really popular movie and run it until patrons lost interest or until the celluloid print was in such tatters that it could no longer be run. The films that did survive were moved to newly formed exchanges, where they were rented to other area exhibitors. The way most people saw movies by Biograph, Vitagraph, Lumière, or Lubin was in vaudeville theaters. Service companies (usually not the film’s producers) would provide the projector operator and the film. Although a number of different film gauges were used by some camera and projection systems, by 1909 35 mm film with four holes per frame on each side of the film strip was recognized as the international standard for motion pictures.

It was in 1903 that Harry and Herbert Miles of San Francisco created the first of these movie exchanges. They bought films from exhibitors and rented them out for one-fifth of what they paid, fueling the Nickelodeon boom. By 1905 projectors could hold up to 1,000 feet of film, which ran at 60 feet per minute, providing a program that lasted fifteen or twenty minutes, just right for a turn in vaudeville. By 1907 there were as many as 150 exchanges operating across the United States, serving the entire country.

The exhibitors liked the new system of renting movies because it cut their costs and allowed them to change the program more frequently, which was very important by 1907, as consumers became easily bored by films they had seen before. It worked for the Miles brothers and others because they could send out the same print again and again to different theaters and make a profit.

Then came dating—not the boy-girl kind, but rather the very serious game of determining when to open a film. In the beginning, distributors released pictures as they became available. However, it soon became apparent that theaters would pay more for new films than they would for the right to repeat older films. That led the studios to create release schedules, which in turn allowed them to charge more for new films based on their drawing power. New releases were shipped in advance to exchanges across the country so they could open on the same date in all markets. Promotions could be launched around these dates and consumer anticipation built accordingly.

The power of the exchanges was also used to institute block booking, meaning that if a nickelodeon wanted a certain film, it also had to take other movies to help balance distribution of all the producer’s films. The contract required the theater to take at least one print of every movie the producer made, sight unseen. It ensured that films were released soon after they were made.

This was to be the only era in U.S. film history in which movie distributors from a foreign country, predominately France, were dominant in the American market. During trial testimony in 1908, an Edison executive estimated that Pathé films represented 60 percent of all movies in circulation at that time. It wasn’t because of cost that their films enjoyed such widespread distribution here; rather, it was because their movies were well made and often in color.

Brothers Charles and Emile Pathé had founded the company in 1897 with significant capital from industrialist investors. They made their first profits selling phonographs and cylinders that played on these machines. Soon they moved into movies. Emile oversaw the manufacturing, while Charles was concerned with production. They opened their first studio in 1898 in Vincennes, France. By 1904 Pathé had expanded operations into America as well. A sales office was set up in New York City and a manufacturing plant in New Jersey. By then they offered a catalog of more than 1,000 films for sale or rent. By 1905 Lumière had sold out to Pathé. In 1908, around the same time that it was working with Edison, Pathé created what later would be called a branch distribution system. It contracted for concessions, meaning that different entities had exclusive distribution rights for Pathé films in defined areas. In 1909 Pathé pioneered newsreels that gathered news, images, events, and sensations from all over the world. The newsreels were designed to allow contemporary audiences to view historic events.

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

The word nickelodeon, coined by a Pittsburgh theater owner, comes from combining the price of admission (five cents, or a nickel) with the Greek word for theater.

Major Film Studios Get Their Start in Exhibition

Beginning in 1905 there was a rapid expansion of nickelodeon movie theaters across the United States that would grow into a frenzy by the end of the decade. Most of these nickel theaters, however, were not created out of new or dedicated facilities. Instead, they sprang up in unoccupied storefronts, converted houses, restaurants, amusement parlors, and all sorts of auditoriums ranging in size from tiny to huge. By 1908 there were 123 theaters in New York City alone, all quickly becoming a vital part of their communities. These theaters not only offered movies but also hosted community events and special evenings with prizes and activities so they could effectively compete with other live stage entertainment.

But competition wasn’t their only concern. Early theaters had to be very careful with the handling and storage of flammable nitrate film, and by the middle of the decade they also had the matter of censorship to contend with, as local theater owners could be held responsible for any immoral material shown. At first this wasn’t an issue, since movies were just a series of images, a travelogue, or a reflection of nature. After 1905, however, as films became more narrative and sophisticated, there was a great deal more responsibility associated with showing them to the public.

Between 1900 and 1906, the Biograph company produced 1,035 Mutoscope attractions and 774 films made for theatrical distribution. By 1908 that trend had reversed. By 1920 the shift to narrative films ushered out the era of the nickelodeons and ushered in the era of new theaters designed and built specifically to show longer movies. Up until that time nickelodeons had been viewed as unsavory places, frequented by immigrants and the lower classes. As pictures became more popular, the middle and upper classes became interested too, and they demanded a better setting. From 1907 on, movie theaters responded by expanding into larger venues and offering more diverse films. These theaters would not only attract new audiences but also allow for an increase in ticket prices. By 1909 the price of admission would rise to a dime. These vaudeville and film hybrids, seen in auditoriums of 500 to 1,000 seats, opened the way for bigger business.

An exhibitor whose business flourished in the New York area during that time was Marcus Loew, the self-made son of Austrian Jewish immigrants who lived on the teeming Lower East Side. Max, as he was called, began his career selling newspapers before working in a mapmaking plant, selling gentlemen’s clothing, and laboring in a fur factory. Finally, in 1905, he and Adolph Zukor formed a partnership to purchase penny arcades in Manhattan and Cincinnati. Loew went on to found Loew’s, Inc., which would become the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in the 1920s. Zukor would eventually take over Paramount.

The future titans of the Warner Bros. studio also had their start in the exhibition business when Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack L. Warner opened a small nickelodeon business in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, in 1903.

Similarly, the growing exhibition business attracted Hungarian immigrant William Fox, who, like Max Loew, had worked as a newsboy and then in the fur and garment trade in New York. In 1904 Fox bought a failing penny arcade in Brooklyn and soon developed it into a chain of fifteen motion picture theaters throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. He would go on to head the Fox Film Corporation.

In 1906 Carl Laemmle, the tenth of thirteen children in a middle-class Jewish family from Germany, invested his life savings in a nickelodeon in Chicago and launched another within two months. He would go on to co-found Universal Pictures.

The pattern continued in 1907 when Louis B. Mayer, who emigrated with his parents to New York from Russia as a child, bought a small, run-down motion picture theater in Haverhill, Massachusetts. He would go on to become head of production at MGM.

These career paths were very telling. While the profits from theaters throughout this time were substantial, exhibitors were still dependent on a steady supply of movies. But demands from the Edison Trust to pay royalties for every movie projector in every theater, among other rules, appeared very arbitrary, and expensive. That’s when Loew, Fox, and others responded by expanding their operations into the production of movies as well, creating more vertical integration. Fox would later take a lead role in the litigation that brought down the Edison Trust, but by then he had shifted operations to the West Coast, setting the pattern for the next half century, in which business was conducted in New York while movie production was done in Los Angeles.

Soon it became clear that forming circuits of these vaudeville-style theaters provided a distinct advantage. One could book popular acts for a period of time long enough to play in all the theaters, providing them with greater leverage when they bought films from the producers. The competition among the circuits, of course, drove up the price of talent and film, so the largest operators banded together to form the Vaudeville Managers Association. The association then divided up the geographic territories among its members and set up a booking office through which all performers had to go. Five percent of the performers’ pay was taken by the theaters as a fee for booking the talent in multiple venues. The ability to control the entire process served as a model for the new movie moguls, who saw that they too could control production, distribution, and exhibition. Thus the spadework was complete for what would become the Hollywood studio system, which lasted until the 1950s.

The 1910s

The Birth of a Nation was cinematic revolution—it was responsible for revolutions in every field affected by motion pictures.

—Kevin Brownlow from his book The Parade’s Gone By about D. W. Griffith’s breakthrough film.

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TOP 10 ALL-RELEASE MOVIES DOMESTIC BOX OFFICE

By Initial Year of Release, 1910–1919

1

The Birth of a Nation

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $522.0

2

Daddy Long Legs

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $208.3

3

The Spoilers

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $183.1

4

The Miracle Man

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $160.3

5

Stella Maris

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $102.6

6

Male and Female

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $100.4

7

Intolerance

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $98.3

8

Broken Blossoms

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $96.8

9

Traffic in Souls

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $88.8

10

Cleopatra

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: $85.5

Equivalent 2005 $s in Millions of $s: Total: $1,646.1

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GENERAL U.S. STATISTICS, 1910

92,228,496

U.S. Population

26 Million

Average Weekly

U.S. Movie Attendance

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DECADE OVERVIEW

A Tale of Two Wars

The seminal event of the decade, of course, was World War I, which began in Europe in 1914, disrupting global production and distribution of silent films and shuttering the innovative European film industry. America joined the fight in 1917, leading to some shortages of domestic film supplies as well. Pioneering camera maker Bell and Howell turned resources toward developing military technology, while Kodak supplied film to the war efforts. But for much of the decade, it was a different fight that split the movie industry, a nasty legal and business battle—a patent war.

In 1910 the General Film Company was incorporated to bring order to the chaos of marketing films. Its stock was controlled by the Edison Manufacturing Company. Essentially, the General Film Company established a system of film exchanges and acted as sole distributor for the pictures of producers affiliated with the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). Their monopolistic plan was to force unaffiliated independent exchanges to sell their businesses. If any independent exchange refused to do so, their supply of films would be cut off, forcing them to close. General Film would guarantee the sale of sixty-five prints of each film they produced at 11 cents a foot. Rather than simply selling prints outright, they would rent them using their new orderly tracking system. The income from these rentals would be divided with the producers after distribution expenses were deducted. Since the average one-reel dramatic film cost between $500 and $800 to produce, and the initial print sale through General Film guaranteed an income of approximately $7,000 with a percentage of film rentals to follow, it suddenly appeared as if the MPPC’s producers had a license to mint money! In theory, this guaranteed return should have provided producers with more money to improve their motion pictures—and certainly some improvements in production values were made under the new arrangement—but as it turned out, the licensed producers opted instead to contain production costs in order to beat their competition.

Independent film exchange owners who refused to sell out to General Film, or who never even received offers to buy their businesses, were stuck. Unable to obtain films from MPPC, they had to rely on European movies to keep their exchanges operating. At the same time, U.S. audiences were showing a decided preference for American-made films, and there simply wasn’t enough product coming from the few upstart independent producers such as the Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), founded by Carl Laemmle, to satisfy their needs.

If MPPC hoped to stifle competition, it failed miserably. Forced by necessity to find new sources for films, several independent exchange operators set up their own production companies or encouraged others to jump into production. The years from 1910 to 1912 saw the formation of a number of new independents, including the American Film Manufacturing Company, controlled by exchange owner S. S. Hutchinson and silent partner John R. Freuler; the Rex Motion Picture Masterpiece Company, with former Edison director Edwin S. Porter at the helm; the New York Motion Picture Company, founded by exchange owners Adam Kessel and Charles O. Baumann; the Reliance Film Company, formed in association with the Carleton Motion Picture Laboratory; the Majestic Film Company, established by exchange owner Harry Aitken; Powers Picture Plays, headed by Pat Powers; the Than houser Film Company, formed by theatrical producer Edwin Than houser; Champion, Pilot, Monopol, Comet, and dozens of others.

Seeking to cash in on the moving picture craze, the independents attempted to form their own umbrella distributor in 1911, the Motion Picture Distribution and Sales Company, but that entity soon collapsed due to the constant bickering of its member producers. In 1912 two new independent distributing companies emerged based on different organization al models. The Mutual Film Corporation, headed by Harry Aitken, was structured very much like General Film, acting as a distributor for independent companies, while the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, led by Carl Laemmle, Pat Powers, and Robert Cochrane, absorbed the interests of a number of independents in exchange for stock in Universal. While brand names such as Victor, Powers, and 101 Bison survived under the Universal banner, the individual companies ceased to exist. The producers releasing through Mutual maintained their own separate studios, while Universal created Universal City, the strangest city in the world, to consolidate production facilities into one location near Los Angeles. Faced with growing competition, MPPC fought back on several fronts, raising budgets, improving production values, and filing lawsuits against its upstart rivals.

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A Typical Prepatents Feature Film Sale

Region: New England States

Number of Prints Sold: 2

Total Sale Price: $3,000

Region: City and State of New York

Number of Prints Sold: 3

Total Sale Price: $6,000

Region: New Jersey

Number of Prints Sold: 1

Total Sale Price: $1,200

Region: Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, D.C.

Number of Prints Sold: 2

Total Sale Price: $3,000

Region: Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia

Number of Prints Sold: 2

Total Sale Price: $2,750

Region: Illinois and Indiana

Number of Prints Sold: 2

Total Sale Price: $3,500

Region: Kansas, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma

Number of Prints Sold: 2

Total Sale Price: $2,200

Region: Texas

Number of Prints Sold: 2

Total Sale Price: $3,000

Region: Oregon, Washington, Nevada

Number of Prints Sold: 1

Total Sale Price: $2,000

Region: California, Arizona, New Mexico

Number of Prints Sold: 1

Total Sale Price: $3,000

Region: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah

Number of Prints Sold: 1

Total Sale Price: $1,750

Region: Minnesota and Wisconsin

Number of Prints Sold: 2

Total Sale Price: $2,500

Region: Michigan

Number of Prints Sold: 1

Total Sale Price: $2,000

Region: Dominion of Canada

Number of Prints Sold: 2

Total Sale Price: $2,000

Region: Southern States not included above

Number of Prints Sold: 3

Total Sale Price: $3,500

Region: Total

Number of Prints Sold: 27

Total Sale Price: $41,400

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One important exchange owner was William Fox, whose Greater New York Film Rental Company was in MPPC’s sights. Fox also owned a circuit of theaters around New York City. Not only did Fox refuse to sell his exchange, but in 1912 he also filed an antitrust suit in federal court against both MPPC and General Film. This legal action resulted in a clear victory. First, the U.S. Supreme Court canceled the patent on raw film stock, allowing the Eastman Kodak Company to break its exclusive license with MPPC and permitting it to sell to independent producers. That important ruling was followed by a cancellation of the trust’s patents in 1915 and, under the Sherman Antitrust Act, the end of the oligopoly in 1917. The breakup of the trust would energize the formation of the major Hollywood studios. William Fox, naturally, was a major beneficiary of the trust’s demise. In 1913 he had set up his own releasing company, Box Office Attractions, and later created a company to produce feature films. By the middle of the decade he would combine the production, leasing, and exhibition operations of these two companies under one roof as the Fox Film Corporation.

In the early half of the decade before the antitrust case was decided, production and distribution were generally geared toward one-reel films with a running time of approximately 15 minutes, but audiences and filmmakers were beginning to show an interest in longer forms. Vitagraph produced a five-reel version of The Life of Moses in 1909, but because there was no mechanism for renting multireel films, the reels were released individually as five separate films. Early two-reel films such as D. W. Griffith’s Enoch Arden (Biograph, 1911) and The Danites (Selig Polyscope, 1911), directed by Francis Boggs, were also released over two weeks as separate single-reel subjects. Some enterprising exhibitors, however, opted to combine these reels and show them as multireel attractions. When MPPC attempted to restrict films to the one-reel length, some filmmakers (notably D. W. Griffith at Biograph and G. M. Anderson at Essanay) began cranking their cameras at a much slower rate, 10 to 12 frames per second rather than the standard 16 fps, allowing them to cram more story into a single reel—but causing the action to race by on-screen if theater projectionists didn’t slow their cranking speeds accordingly.

European producers, unhampered by the restrictions imposed by MPPC, were quicker to respond to the public’s interest in longer films, and spectacles such as the Italian films Quo Vadis? (1912) and Cabiria (1914) found eager American audiences when they were imported into the United States. Penny arcade and nickelodeon operator Adolph Zukor established the Famous Players Film Company in 1912 with the release of one such long-length feature, Queen Elizabeth. Imported from France, this film starred famed stage actor Sarah Bernhardt. Zukor has often been cited as an independent rebel in the vein of Carl Laemmle or William Fox, but in fact he bought his way out of problems with the MPPC by agreeing to pay a $10,000 fee. Like so many others who first relied on foreign product, Adolph Zukor soon began producing his own films. Other newly organized independent producers who saw the artistic possibilities in feature-length films were Bosworth, Inc., headed by financier Frank A. Garbutt and actor-director Hobart Bosworth, and the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, with Lasky, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), and director Cecil B. DeMille among its principals.

Although these were profitable years for foreign producers, all of that would change as World War I escalated. Not only did production shut down throughout Europe, but the American satellite operations of companies such as Pathé, Gaumont, Méliès, Star Film, and Eclair were also closed, sold off, or spun off into separate U.S. companies unrelated to their European founders, leaving the way open for U.S. filmmakers to dominate world markets, a situation that continues today.

The transition of power, however, wasn’t always easy. Longer films required higher production budgets, especially since many of the early features were based on popular theatrical plays and had cast well-known stage stars. Since established American distribution companies were not set up to handle longer films, feature producers were forced to return to the model that existed prior to the formation of MPPC, selling their pictures

Reviews for George Lucas's Blockbusting

[5hrdrive · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

George Lucas's name is featured prominently on the cover, but he only wrote a one page intro and apparently selected the films. Kind of a quirky list of films in my opinion. Discovered quite a few egregious errors as well, so can't recommend. There must be better movie books out there, but for now I'm sticking with IMDB.

[simonlarsen_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent and very detailed overview of the 300+ movies from the last 100 years of so and their financial and critical succeses.One bad thing about the book is that it is ridden with typos.Another thing is the strange fact that it stop in 2005, no movies from 2006-2010 are included even thought the book just came out.