100 Early Fan Magazine Additions, courtesy of Bruce Long

Published by in News on February 8th, 2012

We are pleased to add one hundred magazine issues digitized by Bruce Long to our Fan Magazine Collection. Bruce Long’s collection includes issues of some of the best known early fan magazines, such as Photoplay, as well as rarer titles that cover theatre and other forms of popular culture in addition to movies. Bruce Long utilized many of these magazines, which include Broadway Brevities, Pantomime, and Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, in the production of his own fanzine, Taylorology.

Let’s all give Bruce a Whiz Bang round of applause!

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MHDL + Friends = Inspiration

Published by in News, Uncategorized on January 27th, 2012

Although it’s only January, this is already shaping up to be a terrific year for communities collaborating to bring the histories of film and media online.

First, the wonderful news that Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema, not only reached but surpassed its $5,000 fundraising goal!! We express our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the Domitor campaign (you can see the full list of names here). We’re very excited about the additional Moving Picture World volumes and other early cinema materials that, thanks to Domitor, we’ll be able to bring you later this year.

We would also like to thank all of you who have given directly to the Media History Digital Library General Fund through this website. Your donations are keeping our servers running and our scanners burning.

Last but not least, we are pleased that we will be able to offer the web destination for the Filmack’s trailer catalogs, called Inspiration, that Walter Forsberg at NYU is currently digitizing. You can follow the progress of Walter and his team and see some gems of ephemera on the 35mm Snipe Films micro-blog.

The year 2012 will also witness some commercial ventures entering the fray and selling access to historic media trade papers. However, our collaborations with Domitor, Walter, donors, and some other very special people (whose identities will be disclosed later) gives us the hope — the inspiration! — that we can succeed with a collaborative, non-profit model that provides free access to all. Thank you!

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Film Studies for Free – Favorite Online Film Resources of 2011

Published by in Uncategorized on December 29th, 2011

We’re pleased to be prominently listed on Film Studies for Free’s end-of-the-year list of “Favorite Online Film Studies Resources in 2011.” We’re grateful to Catherine Grant for including us and running this excellent blog.

The end-of-the-year list contains links to some other terrific projects and blogs, including Luke McKernan’s blog “The Bioscope” and the impressive Colonial Film Project, led by Birkbeck and University College London. Be sure to check out these websites and the others that made the different lists.

Thank you to everyone who this year visited the Media History Digital Library, made use of the digitized publications, and turned 2011 into our breakthrough year. We’re excited to vastly expand our collection, introduce full-text search, and bring you lots of other goodies in 2012!

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The challenges facing small town exhibitors (1924)

Published by in Exhibition on December 5th, 2011

It is impossible to recreate the experience of watching a movie in a theatre back in the silent era. So many things have changed – from the technology of projection, to the challenge of recreating the music, to the audiences for whom talking films were still in the future.

One consideration is that the film prints – the specific copies – seen in small towns were at the end of their lifespan. Prints were run repeatedly as the film finished its downtown run, then to second run and then to neighborhood houses. The exchanges would cannibalize prints, pulling the best reels and then best shots from numerous copies to produce one showable print. In the exhibitor reports published in trade magazines in the 1920s there were numerous references to prints defaced by scratches and missing scenes being shown in rural towns.

The February 16, 1924 issue of Exhibitors Herald had numerous representative examples:

This letter to the editor from a theater manager in Soldier, Kansas, appeared in the Exhibitors Herald issue of January 5, 1924. It provides a good overview of how few options the small town exhibitor possessed, and includes surprising praise of Paramount. Paramount’s general approach to exhibition was that they wanted to capture all of the profit at every level of the industry. They knew how to squeeze out that revenue, and if the exhibitor didn’t receive the print they ordered, no rental would be paid.

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Special Effects Revealed! – 1923

Published by in Behind the scenes on December 3rd, 2011

The movies have always had a tangled relationship with the truth of how visual effects were created. The desire not to give away the secrets of the illusions that are so captivating on the screen conflicts with the need to give audiences what they want. Trade secrets poured out in the September 1923 issue of Photoplay, with a detailed account of glass shots, double exposure, double printing and miniature sets.

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What Screenwriters Thought of “Pre-Code” Movies (1933)

Published by in Pre-Code, Screenwriters on November 29th, 2011

One of the most popular genres of classic Hollywood cinema is the Pre-Code films – movies produced before the Production Code Administration became effective in 1934. Many of these films are outstanding in their depiction of recognizable human situations and male-female interactions – in marked contrast to the inconsequential fluff that constituted so much of later Hollywood production.

This article from The Hollywood Reporter issue of February 27, 1933 shows that some screenwriters were upset at the trend toward sex and violence on the screen.

Writers War On Filth

Plan Concerted Action This Week to Prevent Depiction Of Perversion on the Screen

Aroused by the growing tendency to depict perversion on the screen, and fearing that this may have the same baneful effect on pictures that it has had on the stage, the men and women regularly employed as screen writers are organizing a campaign against it.

Both the Screen Writers’ Guild and the Writers’ Branch of the Academy are expected to take formal action this week, demanding that the production of stories based on perversion, or containing sequences showing it, be barred. They have no hope that the Hays organization will or can do anything to stop it. and feel that they must effect the cure themselves. One of the most prominent screen writers said yesterday:

“If you want to get a job today in pictures at big money, all you have to do is to write a dirty book. Look what has happened recently. One of the most revolting novels ever published as William Faulkner’s ‘Sanctuary,’ but Paramount is making it under The Shame of Temple Drake and another major company has hired the author for its writing staff. The story is so dirty that George Raft refused to play the lead in it and stands suspended as a result,

“Tiffany Thayer wrote ‘Thirteen Men’ and ‘Three Sheet’ and although neither of these has been announced for picture production, Thayer himself was hired to write for pictures.

“Take a look at the pictures produced recently. There is Sailor’s Luck, with ‘pansies’ all through it There is the Lesbian dance in Sign of the Cross. There were Our Betters and the ‘nance’ cook in Hell’s Highway. There are innumerable examples and they are increasing.

“The Hays office obviously has done nothing about it. The Hays moral code is not even a joke any more; it’s just a memory. The industry yells its head off about the terrible things that are done by censors, and then produces pictures which are a stench in the nostrils of every decent man and woman, pictures which are condemned by public opinion without the need of censor boards.

“If no one else will act, the writers will. The great majority of men and women in the Guild and in the Academy resent such cesspool stuff and will use every bit of influence they possess, both individually and as organizations, to eliminate it from the screen.”

Read the original article in context

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Thanksgiving Greetings from Movie Makers (1929)

Published by in Uncategorized on November 24th, 2011

While we’re taking a break from magazine scanning today, having our turkey dinner on Thanksgiving, enjoy the cover image from the November 1929 issue of Movie Makers.

 

Read the entire issue in the book reader below:

 

 

 

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Big Push Against Unions – 1933

Published by in Unions on November 21st, 2011

President Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated for his first term on March 4, 1933. The following day, Roosevelt called Congress in session to declare a four-day bank holiday.

The movie studios used this emergency to implement across-the-board salary reductions, which although temporary, were not well received by stars or technical staff. The mistrust that resulted was one of many reasons that unions gained hold in film production later in the decade.

Unions already had a hold in the theaters located in large American cities, as projectionists, musicians and stage hands had already organized. They did not want to submit to reductions in pay, resulting in a showdown. This was documented in The Hollywood Reporter issue of March 20, 1933.

Hundreds of Houses Close As Protest Against Unions’ Refusals To Accept Cuts

New York. — The battle is on between the motion picture theatres and the unions. All over the country houses are closing because of the attitude of the unions of musicians, stage hands and operators in refusing to consent to any concessions during the present crisis and their insistence upon keeping the salaries up to the level of the boom times.

The theatre men know that this cannot be done. In spite of the fact that grosses are increasing, the growth is so slow and the aggregate is still so far below normal, that, unless the unions will help, it is cheaper to close the houses.

The situation is nation-wide. Cleveland is without a motion picture show, every house, both first runs and neighborhods being dark. All the downtown houses in Syracuse are closed and it is anticipated that the neighborhoods will not open today.

The Indianapolis managers announced Saturday that, unless the unions accepted a radical cut, they would not open this week. Some Buffalo houses have closed and others are expected to follow suit.

The Kansas City theatres have demanded a reduction of 25 per cent from all union help and announce they will close March 30 unless they get it. St. Louis, Minneapolis, Youngstown and many more key spots are in the same fix and, unless something is done to remedy the condition, none of them can afford to stay open.

Meanwhile the unions, in most places, are standing solidly behind their present scales and refusing to recede a step. There are isolated spots where some relief has been given. In New York the musicians accepted a reduction, and in the Los Angeles district the operators cut their scale for two weeks.

The only hope for remedial action over any great area lies in the meetings that are expected to start in New York this week between the labor committee of the producers and the heads of the Big Four internationals.

The presidents of three of the four are now in New York, and William Elliott, president of the IATSE, is expected to arrive from the coast Thursday. No inkling of their attitude has been given out, nor is it known how long the conferences will last. In the meantime it is extremely probable that, until some decision is reached by these conferrees, theatres in many other sections will be obliged to close their doors.

Read the original article in context below:

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Ernst Lubitsch Reviews the New Movies (1929)

Published by in Directors on November 20th, 2011

Ernst Lubitsch was a top director in Germany before he was brought to Hollywood by Mary Pickford in 1922. He remained European in his lifestyle and outlook, while his films took on a Hollywood gloss, as he worked with the industry’s top stars, first at Warner Bros., and then mostly at Paramount.

One of Lubitsch’s biggest fans was critic Herman G. Weinberg. The author, critic and columnist carried the torch for the director’s greatness for fifty years, even when the director’s films were out of fashion and could not easily be seen.  Weinberg’s final word on Lubitsch was his The Lubitsch Touch: a Critical Study, published in 1968.

Weinberg interviewed Lubitsch in 1929 when the director was in New York, working on the screenplay for what became his first talkie, The Love Parade. Of all the things they discussed, Weinberg documented Lubitsch’s astute commentary on several films he had recently seen.

The Passion of Joan of Arc, directed by Carl-Theodor Dreyer, played art houses in New York.

“Very interesting,” he said, “but Dreyer seemed to me a little too much obsessed by form. He seemed more concerned with the mechanics of the photography, with the composition of the individual scenes, than with the context of the piece, which, after all, should be a director’s first problem.

“Dreyer’s method of telling the film-story in closeups is too studied, too deliberate and obvious and becomes, after a fashion, wearying. Of course, the film shows occasional flashes of
absolute genius and a knowledge of cinematics but, as a whole, it left me cold.

After a discussion of Soviet filmmaking, and some scenes in Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia, Lubitsch discussed King Vidor’s The Crowd.

He has great admiration for Chaplin and admires A Woman of Paris very much. He thinks that The Crowd is a great picture and deserved much more critical attention than it got.

“But the trouble with The Crowd in America was this,” he said, “Americans don’t understand its theme of futility, or what is still worse, don’t want to understand it. Europeans are not quite attuned to the system here and are equally in the dark. It is only the European in America, who knows Americans and midde-class American life, who can understand The Crowd.”

Read the entire interview in the September 1929 issue of Movie Makers.

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The Blu-Ray Player of 1929

Published by in Kodascope on November 19th, 2011

While Black Friday advertisements are offering BluRay players at knock-down prices this autumn, it’s instructive to see that watching movies at home was once the province not only of movie insiders, but also the rich.

This Kodascope ad from the back cover of the July 1929 issue of Movie Makers shows that for a mere $300 – in 1929 dollars – you could watch 16mm rental prints in the comfort of the drawing room in your mansion. Since the prints were silent, one can only presume that the piano player was positioned just outside the photo.

 

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