TEXTBOOK: Ch. 6: Film

*kinetoscope*

THOMAS EDISON: Edison built the first motion picture studio near his laboratory in New Jersey. He called it Black Maria, the common name at that time for a police paddy wagon. It had an open roof and revolved to follow the sun so the performers being filmed would always be illuminated. The completed films were not projected. Instead, they were run through a *________________*, a sort of peep show device. Often they were accompanied by music provided by another Edison invention, the phonograph. Patented in 1891 and commercially available 3 years later, the kinetoscope quickly became a popular feature in penny arcades, vaudeville halls, and big-city Kinetoscope parlors. This marked the beginning of commercial motion picture exhibition.

*movie palaces*

The Big Studios: In 1908 Thomas Edison, foreseeing the huge amounts of money that could be made from movies, founded the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), often simply called the Trust. This group of 10 companies under Edison's control, holding the patents to virtually all existing filmmaking and exhibition equipment, ran the production and distribution of film in the United States with an iron fist. Anyone who wanted to make or exhibit a movie needed Trust permission, which typically was not forthcoming. In addition, the MPPC had rules about the look of the movies it would permit: They must be one reel, approximately 12 minutes long, and must adopt a "stage perspective"; that is, the actors must fill the frame as if they were in a stage play. Many independent film companies sprang up in defiance of the Trust, including Griffith's in 1913. To avoid MPPC scrutiny and reprisal, these companies moved as far away as they could, to California. This westward migration had other benefits. Better weather meant longer shooting seasons. Free of MPPC interference, people like Griffith who wanted to explore the potential of films longer than 12 minutes and with imaginative use of the camera were free to do so. The new studio system, with its more elaborate films and big-name stars, was born, and it controlled the movie industry from California. Thomas H. Ince (maker of the William S. Hart Westerns), Griffith, and comedy genius Mack Sennett formed the Triangle Company. Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in Famous Plays— formed when Zukor was denied MPPC permission to distribute one of his films— joined with several other independents and a distribution company to become Paramount. Other independents joined to create the Fox Film Company (soon called 20th Century Fox) and Universal. Although films were still silent, by the mid-1920s there were more than 20,000 movie theaters in the United States— many of them *_______________________*, elaborately decorated, opulent, architecturally stunning theaters— and more than 350,000 people were making their living in film production. More than 1,240,000 feet of film were shot each year in Hollywood, and annual domestic U.S. box office receipts exceeded $750 million. The industry prospered not just because of its artistry, drive, and innovation but because it used these to meet the needs of a growing audience. At the beginning of the 20th century, generous immigration rules, combined with political and social unrest abroad, encouraged a flood of European immigrants who congregated in U.S. cities where the jobs were and where people like themselves who spoke their language lived. American farmers, largely illiterate, also swarmed to the cities as years of drought and farm failure left them without home or hope. Jobs in the big mills and factories, although unpleasant, were plentiful. These new city dwellers had money and the need for leisure activities. Movies were a nickel, required no ability to read or to understand English, and offered glamorous stars and wonderful stories from faraway places. Foreign political unrest proved to be a boon to the infant U.S. movie business in another way as well. In 1914 and 1915, when the California studios were remaking the industry in their own grand image, war raged in Europe. European moviemaking, most significantly the influential French, German, and Russian cinema, came to a halt. European demand for movies, however, did not. American movies, produced in huge numbers for the hungry home audience, were ideal for overseas distribution. Because so few in the domestic audience could read English, few printed titles were used in the then-silent movies. Therefore, little had to be changed to satisfy foreign moviegoers. Film was indeed a universal language, but more important, the American film industry had firmly established itself as the world leader, all within 20 years of the Lumière brothers' first screening.

production; distribution; exhibition

Three Component Systems: There are 3 component systems in the movie industry— __________________, _______________, and _______________. Each is undergoing significant change in the contemporary digital, converged media environment.

*tentpole*

AUDIENCE RESEARCH: Before a movie is released, sometimes even before it is made, its script, concept, plot, and characters are subjected to market testing. Often multiple endings are produced and tested with sample audiences by companies such as National Research Group and Marketcast. Despite being "voodoo science, a spin of the roulette wheel," says Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, audience testing is "believed in like a religion at this point. It's considered part of filmmaking". This testing produced data indicating that Fight Club (1999) would be "the flop of the century"; it made more than $100 million at the box office and has become a cult favorite, earning even more on cable, DVD, VOD, and EST. If the voodoo is so unreliable, ask film purists, what is to become of the filmmaker's genius? What separates these market-tested films from any other commodity? New York Times film critic Brooks Barnes explains the dilemma facing blockbuster-driven Hollywood: "Forget zombies," he wrote, "the data crunchers are invading Hollywood.... As the stakes of making movies become ever higher, Hollywood leans ever harder on research to minimize guesswork." Research also serves as a "duck-and-cover technique— for when the inevitable argument of 'I am not going to take the blame if this movie doesn't work' comes up". -In other words, Hollywood can stand only so much creative freedom when a movie like a $300 million *_______________* (an expensive blockbuster around which a studio plans its other releases) is in the works and it knows that every year, five films typically produce 25% of all ticket sales.

*concept films*

CONCEPT MOVIES: The marketing and publicity departments of big companies love *_________________*— movies that can be described in one line. "Godzilla" is about a giant, rogue monster. Jurassic Park is about giant, rogue dinosaurs. Transformers is about good giant alien robots who fight bad giant alien robots. International ownership and international distribution contribute to this phenomenon. High-concept films that depend little on characterization, plot development, and dialogue are easier to sell to foreign exhibitors than are more sophisticated films. Fantastic Four and other Marvel Comics heroes play well everywhere. Big-name stars also have international appeal. -That's why they can command huge salaries. The importance of foreign distribution cannot be overstated. Only 2 in 10 U.S. features make a profit on U.S. box office. Much of their eventual profit comes from overseas sales. For example, 2015' s Jupiter Ascending disappointed at home ($47 million) but earned $125 million overseas. Likewise, 2016' s The Gods of Egypt earned $31 million in U.S. box office and another $113 million abroad. And it's not just domestic disappointments that do well overseas. Titanic doubled its 2009 $601 million U.S. box office, earning $1.2 billion elsewhere. Avatar did the same. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) tripled its domestic take, as did Furious 7, globally earning more than a billion dollars in 2015. Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) quadrupled its $245 million domestic box office, taking in nearly $900 million in foreign ticket sales, and Captain America: Civil War (2016) nearly doubled its domestic take, earning $1.15 billion worldwide. Overseas box office accounts for 70% of a studio movie's total ticket sales.

*blockbuster mentality*

Conglomeration and the Blockbuster Mentality: Other than MGM, each of the majors is a part of a large conglomerate. Paramount is owned by Viacom, Warner Brothers is part of the huge Time Warner family of holdings, Disney is part of the giant conglomerate formed in the 1996 Disney/ Capital Cities/ ABC union, and Universal was bought by NBC's parent company, General Electric, in 2004 and later by cable TV giant Comcast in 2013. Much of this conglomeration takes the form of international ownership. Columbia is owned by Japanese Sony, and Fox by Australia's News Corp. According to many critics, this combination of conglomeration and foreign ownership forces the industry into a *__________________________*— filmmaking characterized by reduced risk taking and more formulaic movies. Business concerns are said to dominate artistic considerations as accountants and financiers control more decisions once made by creative people. Moviemaking, says former studio CEO Amir Malin, has become "intoxicated with a 'cover my rear' mentality." "All the studio executives who make greenlighting decisions," adds Variety magazine, "have bosses higher up the corporate ladder". There are several common outcomes of this blockbuster mentality.

*theatrical films* *microcinema*

Convergence Reshapes the Movie Business: So intertwined are today's movie and television industries that it is often meaningless to discuss them separately. As much as 70% of the production undertaken by the 8 largest studios is for smaller screens, and the percentage of their revenues from that source ranges between 35% and 45%. But the growing relationship between *____________________*— those produced originally for theater exhibition— and television is the result of technological changes in the latter. The convergence of film with satellite, cable, VOD, pay-per-view, DVD, and Internet streaming has provided immense distribution and exhibition opportunities for the movies. For example, in 1947 box office receipts accounted for 95% of the studios' film revenues. Now they make up just 20%. Today's distributors make 3x as much from domestic home entertainment (DVD, network and cable television, EST, and streaming) as they do from rentals to movie theaters. DVD sales remain a lucrative but declining source of income, a trend likely to continue for 2 reasons. -First, in 2012, for the first time, Americans spent more money downloading and streaming movies than they did buying discs, a trend that has since accelerated. -Second, because there is nothing to physically manufacture and ship, the profit margin for digital distribution of their movies is much higher than can be realized with DVDs, so studios are increasingly prioritizing digital over disc. Where a solid box office performer— The Hangover (2009), for example— could once sell 10 million discs in its first 6 months of release, today's movies are far more likely to be downloaded for a few dollars on VOD, bought on EST, or streamed from a subscription service rather than purchased as a disc for $15. The convenience of digital movies has encouraged this digital distribution and exhibition. In 2014 Paramount announced that it would no longer release movies on film in the United States, with the other majors quickly following suit. As a result, almost all American movie screens have been converted to digital exhibition. Digital exhibition's savings in money and labor to both exhibitor and distributor are dramatic. Rather than making several thousand film prints to be physically transported to individual theaters in metal cans, the electronic distribution of digital movies costs under $100 per screen for the entire process. Although slowed by fears of piracy, the online distribution of feature films to homes is now routine. An American home with Internet and cable access has tens of thousands of full-length movies and television shows to choose from on any given day. Netflix, which originally delivered DVDs to people's homes by mail, has discontinued that service in every country other than the United States. -Now focusing on streaming movies, it operates in 45 countries, bringing its subscriber total to nearly 87 million, with 47 million in the United States alone. -In fact, Netflix-streamed content is the single largest component of American Internet traffic, accounting for more than 1/3 of all the data traveling the Internet at night. -And Netflix is not the only source for streamed movies; Internet giants Google Play, Amazon Video and Amazon Prime, and the Comcast cable operation are only 4 of the scores of sites offering fans everything from classic and niche films to the latest box office hits. And not to be outdone, studios like Disney, Sony, Universal, Warner Brothers, and Lionsgate stream their films via YouTube. You read in the chapter on convergence and the reshaping of mass communication that there are multiple companies offering day-and-date digital home delivery of feature films, and Apple is negotiating with studios to make their movies available in its iTunes stores 2 weeks after release rather than the standard 90 days. There are industry analysts, however, who say direct-to-home digital distribution of movies is even more robust than described here because of new technologies that free downloads from the computer screen. For example, Netflix, LG Electronics, Amazon, and TiVo all sell devices that allow downloads directly to TV set-top boxes, avoiding the computer altogether; and with Apple Airplay, you can even send content from your iPhone or iPad to play through an Apple TV on the same WiFi network. Digital production has had an additional effect beyond encouraging digital distribution and exhibition. The surprise 1999 hit The Blair Witch Project is considered the start of the growing *___________________* movement through which filmmakers using digital video cameras and desktop digital editing programs are finding audiences, both in theaters and online, for their low-budget (sometimes as little as $10,000) features. The 2009 success of Paranormal Activity reinforced interest in microcinema, leading the major studios to create their own in-house microcinema divisions— for example, Paramount's Insurge Pictures. Microcinema has also been boosted by the willingness of A-list talent to get involved with these "small" pictures; for example, Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation), Andy Samberg (Saturday Night Live), and Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings) teamed up on Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012).

*green light process* *platform rollout*

DISTRIBUTION: Distribution was once as simple as making prints of films and shipping them to theaters. Now it means supplying these movies to television networks, cable and satellite networks, makers of DVDs, and Internet streaming companies. In all, a distributor must be able to offer a single movie in as many as 250 different digital formats worldwide to accommodate the specific needs of the many digital retailers it must serve. The sheer scope of the distribution business ensures that large companies (most typically the big studios themselves) will dominate. In addition to making copies and guaranteeing their delivery, distributors now finance production and take responsibility for advertising and promotion and for setting and adjusting release dates. The advertising and promotion budget for a Hollywood feature usually equals 50% of the production costs. Sometimes, the ratio of promotion to production costs is even higher. Avatar may have cost $300 million to produce, but its studio, Fox, spent another $200 million in marketing and promotion, bringing the total to half a billion dollars, the most expensive movie ever made. Was it worth it? Avatar took only 39 days from the day of its release to become the highest-grossing movie of all time ($1.86 billion), accounting for 56 million tickets in the United States alone. Within another month, it had increased that take to $2.36 billion. So spending more to market a film than make it is now standard practice, and the investment is seen as worthwhile, if not necessary. In fact, so important has promotion become to the financial success of a movie that studios such as Universal and MGM include their advertising and marketing people in the *____________________*, that is, the decision to make a picture in the first place. These promotion professionals can say yes or no to a film's production, and they must also declare how much money and effort they will put behind the film if they do vote yes. Another important factor in a film's promotion and eventual financial success is the distributor's decision to release it to a certain number of screens. One strategy, called the *____________________*, is to open a movie on a few screens and hope that critical response, film festival success, and good word-of-mouth reviews from those who do see it will propel it to success. Naturally, the advantage of this approach for the distributor is that it can greatly reduce the cost of promotion. Warner Bros. opened American Sniper on 4 screens on Christmas Day, 2014. It went into wide release— 3,555 screens— 3 weeks later on Martin Luther King Day weekend after strong word of mouth and several film festival awards. Its $110 million weekend box office is the all-time best for a January or February weekend. Films likely to suffer at the hands of critics or from poor word of mouth— for example, Pan (2015, 11,000 screens) and Jupiter Ascending (2015, 2,500 screens)— typically open in thousands of theaters simultaneously. However, it is not uncommon for a potential hit to open on many screens, as Avatar did in 2009— on more than 18,300 worldwide— and as did Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, opening on 4,100 North American screens in 2016.

*double feature*; *B-movie* *vertical integration*

NEW GENRES, NEW PROBLEMS: By 1932 weekly movie attendance had dropped to 60 million. The Great Depression was having its effect. Yet the industry was able to weather the crisis for two reasons. The first was its creativity. New genres held people's interest. Feature documentaries such as The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) spoke to audience needs to understand a world in seeming disorder. Musicals such as 42nd Street (1933) and screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938) provided easy escapism. Gangster movies like Little Caesar (1930) reflected the grimy reality of Depression city streets and daily newspaper headlines. Horror films such as Frankenstein (1931) articulated audience feelings of alienation and powerlessness in a seemingly uncontrollable time. Socially conscious comedies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) reminded moviegoers that good could still prevail, and the *______________* with a *____________*— typically a less expensive movie— was a welcome relief to penny-pinching working people. The second reason the movie business survived the Depression was because of its size and power, both residing in a system of operation called *______________________*. Using this system, studios produced their own films, distributed them through their own outlets, and exhibited them in their own theaters. In effect, the big studios controlled a movie from shooting to screening, guaranteeing distribution and an audience regardless of quality. When the 1930s ended, weekly attendance was again over 80 million, and Hollywood was churning out 500 pictures a year. Moviegoing had become a central family and community activity for most people. Yet the end of that decade also brought bad news for the studios. In 1938 the Justice Department challenged vertical integration, suing the big five studios— Warner Brothers, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and 20th Century Fox— for restraint of trade; that is, they accused the studios of illegal monopolistic practices. The case would take 10 years to decide, but the movie industry, basking in the middle of its golden age, was under attack. Its fate was sealed in 1939 when the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) made the first public broadcast of television from atop the Empire State Building. The impact of these two events was profound, and the medium would have to develop a new relationship with its audience to survive.

*cloud computing*

PRODUCTION: Production is the making of movies. About 700 feature-length films are produced annually in the United States, a large increase over the early 1980s, when, for example, in 1985, 288 features were produced. As we'll see later in this chapter, significant revenues from home video are one reason for the increase, as is growing conglomerate ownership that demands more product for more markets. Technology, too, has affected production. Almost all American feature films are shot digitally. The industry had been slow to make the change from film, citing the "coldness" of digital's look and digital's roots in technology rather than art. But the success of digitally shot movies big (all-time box office champ, 2009' s Avatar) and small (1999' s Blair Witch Project, made for $35,000, earning $220 million worldwide) has moved filmmakers to greater use of digital capture as a primary shooting format. In fact, even though film is sometimes favored for titles requiring a specific look or feel, the Western The Hateful Eight (2015), Forties-style musical La La Land (2016), and historical docudrama Jackie (2016) for example, film shooting has become sufficiently rare that major providers like Fugifilm and Kodak have ceased production of motion picture stock. Another influence of technology can be seen in most of the top-grossing movies of the last few years. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), Jurassic World (2015), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Deadpool (2016), and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) are all marvels of digital effects. Digital filmmaking has made grand special effects not only possible but expected. Stunning special effects, of which Titanic (1997) and Avatar are fine examples, can make a good movie an excellent one. The downside of computer-generated special effects is that they can greatly increase production costs. Titanic cost more than $200 million to make, and Avatar more than $300 million. The average cost of producing and marketing a Hollywood feature is $140 million, a figure inflated, in large part, by the demands of audience-expected digital spectacles. Many observers see this increase in production costs as a major reason Hollywood studios are less willing to take creative chances in a big-budget film. But another technology, *___________________*, is helping moderate production costs. Cloud computing is the storage of system-operating software, including sophisticated and expensive digital and special-effects programs, on off-site, third-party servers hosted on the Internet that offer on-demand, for-lease access. Access to the cloud frees moviemakers, particularly smaller independent producers, from financial and technical limitations that might otherwise have stymied their productions.

*franchise films*

SEQUELS, REMAKES, AND FRANCHISES: How many Batmans have there been? Jurassic Parks? American Pies and Terminators? RoboCop kept the peace in 1987 and again in 2014. The surf at Point Break was just as gnarly in 2015 as it was in 1991. Godzilla flattened cities in 1954 and 1998, as well as in 2014. Hollywood is making increasing use of *____________________*, movies that are produced with the full intention of producing several more sequels. Classic film franchises like James Bond (beginning in 1962) and Star Wars (beginning in 1977) continue to churn out sequels over several decades with new casts, and film series based on book series like Harry Potter (beginning in 2001) are begun before all of the books are even written. 5 of the 10 top-grossing movies in 2016 were continuations of familiar franchises: Finding Dory, Captain America: Civil War, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The year before, the top-3 grossers were franchise films: Furious 7, Jurassic World, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Summer 2017 saw 15 sequels, including reboots of Guardians of the Galaxy, Transformers, Despicable Me, and War of the Planet of the Apes, giving credence to the old industry saying, "Nobody ever got fired for green-lighting a sequel." But franchises may be losing their luster, as half of all franchises over the last 15 years have seen steady downward box office from the first installment to the last.

*block booking*

THE PARAMOUNT DECISION: In 1948, 10 years after the case had begun, the Supreme Court issued its Paramount Decision, effectively destroying the studios' hold over moviemaking. Vertical integration was ruled illegal, as was *__________________*, the practice of requiring exhibitors to rent groups of movies, often inferior, to secure a better one. The studios were forced to sell off their exhibition businesses (the theaters). Before the Paramount Decision, the five major studios owned 75% of the first-run movie houses in the United States; after it, they owned none. Not only did they no longer have guaranteed exhibition, but other filmmakers now had access to the theaters, producing even greater competition for the dwindling number of movie patrons.

*dynamic pricing*

Smartphones, Tablets, and Social Networking Sites: As they have with all media, smartphones, tablets, and social media are reshaping the relationship between audiences and the movies. Although director David Lynch is skeptical of small-screen viewing, stating, "If you're playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film", people are indeed starting to warm to movies on their mobile devices. In late 2016, for the first time, mobile devices accounted for more than 50% of all Internet video views, with half of all that consumption longer than 5 minutes, and 1/4 of all mobile device owners daily watch movies or television shows. Exhibitors are also benefiting from mobile technology. There are ticket-buying apps like Fandango (embedded in Facebook and Snapchat feeds and serving 28,000 screens) and those of virtually all the major theater chains. Another app, Atom, offers more than movie times and ticket buying. -It provides recommendations based not only on previous theater visits but also on the commentary on linked social network accounts; group discounts for linked purchases, which can be charged to individuals; exclusive merchandise sales to featured movies; concession pre-orders; and *__________________*, selling seats at varying prices depending on availability and demand. Major and independent studios are also making use of social networking for the promotion of their films. Fans not only can visit the Miramax, Paramount, Universal Studios, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and Focus Features official pages on Facebook, they can also use the sites' many features to "like" and share quotations, clips, trailers, and other features of the movies they enjoy with their friends. This use of social networking taps into an audience that is comfortable with the Internet and is more likely to stream movies through their smartphones and tablets with apps like Netflix and Hulu. Of course, with everyone linked by social media, reaction time is instantaneous, so if fans think a movie is a bomb, it will surely be. The industry sees this migration of movies to mobile screens as a mixed blessing. Yes, studios and distributors have many more ways to get content to audiences, but as fans, especially young people already comfortable with relatively small, mobile screens, increasingly watch movies in places other than theaters, what happens to what we have called "the movies" for more than a century?

*Daguerreotype* *Calotype*

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHY: The process of photography was first developed by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1816. Although there had been much experimentation in the realm of image making at the time, Niépce was the first person to make practical use of a camera and film. He photographed natural objects and produced color prints. Unfortunately, his images would last only a short time. Niépce's success, however, attracted the attention of countryman Louis Daguerre, who joined with him to perfect the process. Niépce died before the 1839 introduction of the *_________________*, a process of recording images on polished metal plates, usually copper, covered with a thin layer of silver iodide emulsion. When light reflected from an object passed through a lens and struck the emulsion, the emulsion would etch the image on the plate. The plate was then washed with a cleaning solvent, leaving a positive or replica image. In the same year as Daguerre's first public display of the daguerreotype, British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot introduced a paper film process. This process was more important to the development of photography than the metal film system, but the daguerreotype received widespread attention and acclaim and made the public enthusiastic about photography. The *________________* (Talbot's system) used translucent paper, what we now call the negative, from which several prints could be made. In addition, his film was much more sensitive than Daguerre's metal plate, allowing for exposure times of only a few seconds as opposed to the daguerreotype's 30 minutes. Until calotype, virtually all daguerreotype images were still lives and portraits, a necessity with long exposure times. The final steps in the development of the photographic process necessary for true motion pictures were taken, as we've just seen, by Goodwin in 1887 and Eastman in 1889 and were adapted to motion pictures by Edison scientist Dickson.

*cinématographe*

THE LUMIÈRE BROTHERS: The Lumière brothers made the next advance. Their initial screenings demonstrated that people would sit in a darkened room to watch motion pictures projected on a screen. The brothers from Lyon envisioned great wealth in their ability to increase the number of people who could simultaneously watch a movie. In 1895 they patented their *_______________________*, a device that both photographed and projected action. Within weeks of their Christmastime showing, long lines of enthusiastic moviegoers were waiting for their makeshift theater to open. Edison recognized the advantage of the cinématographe over his kinetoscope, so he acquired the patent for an advanced projector developed by U.S. inventor Thomas Armat. On April 23, 1896, the Edison Vitascope premiered in New York City, and the American movie business was born.

*montage* *nickelodeons* *factory studios*

The Coming of Narrative: The Edison and Lumière movies were typically only a few minutes long and showed little more than filmed reproductions of reality— celebrities, weight lifters, jugglers, and babies. They were shot in fixed frame (the camera did not move), and there was no editing. For the earliest audiences, this was enough. But soon the novelty wore thin. People wanted more for their money. French filmmaker Georges Méliès began making narrative motion pictures, that is, movies that told a story. At the end of the 1890s he was shooting and exhibiting one-scene, one-shot movies, but soon he began making stories based on sequential shots in different places. He simply took one shot, stopped the camera, moved it, took another shot, and so on. Méliès is often called the "first artist of the cinema" because he brought narrative to the medium in the form of imaginative tales such as A Trip to the Moon (1902). Méliès had been a magician and caricaturist before he became a filmmaker, and his inventive movies showed his dramatic flair. They were extravagant stage plays in which people disappeared and reappeared and other wonders occurred. A Trip to the Moon came to America in 1903, and U.S. moviemakers were quick not only to borrow the idea of using film to tell stories but also to improve on it. Edwin S. Porter, an Edison Company camera operator, saw that film could be an even better storyteller with more artistic use of camera placement and editing. His 12-minute The Great Train Robbery (1903) was the first movie to use editing, intercutting of scenes, and a mobile camera to tell a relatively sophisticated tale. It was also the first Western. This new narrative form using *_____________*— tying together two separate but related shots in such a way that they take on a new, unified meaning— was an instant hit with audiences. Almost immediately hundreds of *__________________*, some having as many as 100 seats, were opened in converted stores, banks, and halls across the United States. The price of admission was one nickel, hence the name. By 1905 cities such as New York were opening a new nickelodeon every day. From 1907 to 1908, the first year in which there were more narrative than documentary films, the number of nickelodeons in the United States increased tenfold. With so many exhibition halls in so many towns serving such an extremely enthusiastic public, many movies were needed. To create more films, hundreds of new *___________________*, or production companies, were started.

*zoopraxiscope*

The Early Entrepreneurs: In 1873 former California governor Leland Stanford needed help winning a bet he had made with a friend. Convinced that a horse in full gallop had all 4 feet off the ground, he had to prove it. He turned to well-known photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who worked on the problem for 4 years before finding a solution. in 1877 Muybridge arranged a series of still cameras along a stretch of racetrack. As the horse sprinted by, each camera took its picture. The resulting photographs won Stanford his bet, but more important, they sparked an idea in their photographer. Muybridge was intrigued by the appearance of motion created when photos are viewed sequentially. He began taking pictures of numerous kinds of human and animal action. To display his work, Muybridge invented the *______________________*, a machine for projecting slides onto a distant surface.

*corporate independent studios*

The Studios: Studios are at the heart of the movie business, and it's the studios that come to mind when we talk about Hollywood. There are major studios, corporate independents, and independent studios. The majors, who finance their films primarily through the profits of their own business, include Warner Brothers, Columbia, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, MGM/ UA, and Disney. The *____________________________* (so named because they produce movies that have the look and feel of independent films) include Sony Pictures Classics, New Line Cinema (Warner), Fox Searchlight, and Focus Features (Universal). -These companies are in fact specialty or niche divisions of the majors, designed to produce more sophisticated— but less costly— fare to (1) gain prestige for their parent studios and (2) earn significant cable, EST, and DVD income after their critically lauded and good word-of-mouth runs in the theaters. Focus Features, for example, is responsible for 2005 Best Picture Oscar-winner Brokeback Mountain and 2014 nominee The Theory of Everything; Fox Searchlight is home to 2013 Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave and 2014' s winner Birdman; New Line Cinema released the three Lord of the Rings films and all the Rush Hour movies; Sony Pictures Classics brought to the screen Best Picture nominees Whiplash (2014) and Midnight in Paris (2011). Despite the majors' and their specialty houses' big names and notoriety, they produce only about 1/5 of each year's feature films. -The remainder come from independent studios, companies that raise money outside the studio system to produce their films. -Lionsgate and Weinstein Company are two of the few remaining true independents in Hollywood, producing films like Silver Linings Playbook, The Hateful Eight, The Imitation Game, and the Halloween movies (Weinstein), as well as The Hunger Games trilogy, the Twilight Saga, the Saw and Tyler Perry movies, and the Divergent series (Lionsgate). 3 of the 9 Best Picture Academy Award nominations in 2017 were from Lionsgate: Hacksaw Ridge, La La Land, and Hell or High Water. But countless other independents continue to churn out films, often with the hope of winning a distribution deal with one of the Hollywood studios. For example, Paranormal Activity was distributed by Paramount, which paid $300,000 for the rights; 2005 Oscar-winner for Best Picture, Crash, from Stratus Films, was distributed by Lionsgate; and the 2004- 2005 $100 million box office hit Million Dollar Baby, from independent Lakeshore, was distributed by Warner Brothers. Independent films tend to have smaller budgets. -Often this leads to much more imaginative filmmaking and more risk taking than the big studios are willing to undertake. -The 1969 independent film Easy Rider, which cost $370,000 to produce and made over $50 million in theater rentals, began the modern independent film boom. -My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) cost $5 million to make and earned over $300 million in global box office receipts. -Some independent films with which you might be familiar are Claire in Motion (2017), Magic Mike (2012), Before Midnight (2013), Oscar-winners for Best Screenplay Pulp Fiction (1994) and The Pianist (2002), 2015 Best Picture nominees Brooklyn and Room, Boyhood (2014), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), 2017 Best Picture nominee Moonlight, and Best Picture Oscar-winner The Hurt Locker (2009). A greater number of independents are now reaching audiences because of several factors, including a dramatic drop in what it costs to shoot and edit a movie on digital equipment (2015' s film-festival favorite Tangerine was shot entirely on iPhones and edited on Apple's commercially available Final Cut Pro) and a drop in the cost of promoting a movie because of social media and websites like YouTube. A third factor is filmmakers' ability to distribute a movie using the Internet, either independently— as was the case with 2011' s Louis C.K.: Live at the Beacon Theater— or through established operations like Netflix and iTunes— as did the producers of Snowpiercer (2014). This low-cost-of-entry/ reasonable-chance-of-success state of affairs has seen entry into the indie movie market from an increasingly wider array of sources. For example, The Canyons (2013), starring Lindsay Lohan; Zach Braff's Wish I Was Here (2014); Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014); and the Veronica Mars movie (2013) are all independent films financed through online crowdfunding on Kickstarter, as is 2015' s Kung Fury. In 2015 Netflix began producing features and Amazon announced plans to produce 12 films a year, screen them in theaters for a month or two, and then make them available to its Amazon Prime subscribers. In 2017 Amazon's Manchester by the Sea was the first movie from a streaming service to ever be nominated for an Academy Award. These "new indies" were joined in 2017 by Apple, which began producing feature-length movies for distribution on its Apple Music and Apple TV streaming services.

*Persistence of Vision Theory* *kinetograph*

When people watched the rapidly projected sequential slides, they saw the pictures as if they were in motion. This perception is the result of a physiological phenomenon known as *___________________________*, in which the images our eyes gather are retained in the brain for about 1/ 24 of a second. Therefore, if photographic frames are moved at 24 frames a second, people perceive them as actually in motion absent any flicker or other interruption. Muybridge eventually met the prolific inventor Thomas Edison in 1888. Edison quickly saw the scientific and economic potential of the zoopraxiscope and set his top scientist, William Dickson, to the task of developing a better projector. But Dickson correctly saw the need to develop a better system of filming. He understood that shooting numerous still photos, then putting them in sequential order, then redrawing the images onto slides was inherently limiting. Dickson combined Hannibal Goodwin's newly invented celluloid roll film with George Eastman's easy-to-use Kodak camera to make a motion picture camera that took 40 photographs a second. He used his *__________________* to film all types of theatrical performances, some by unknowns and others by famous entertainers such as Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill Cody. Of course, none of this would have been possible had it not been for photography itself.