We were honored last month to receive the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s Award for Best Electronic Reference. Thank you to the PCA/ACA’s awards committee for giving our team this recognition (and four very nice plaques!).
Online Access to the Histories of Cinema, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound
Presenting the Government & Law Collection
Inspired by the richness of the U.S. vs. M.P.P.C., we have launched the Government & Law Collection, which charts the interplay between Hollywood, politics, and law. Most of the items in this collection were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office and digitized and sponsored by the Internet Archive. The Government & Law Collection includes extensive documentation relating to the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ infamous investigations into communists in Hollywood. You can also find documents concerning economic regulation, censorship, and juvenile delinquency.
U.S. vs. Motion Picture Patents Company (1912-1913) — Now Online!
We are pleased to announce the availability of the first batch of publications sponsored by Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema. Thanks to funding from Domitor and materials generously loaned by the Museum of Modern Art, our Early Cinema Collection now includes seven volumes of testimonies and supporting documents from the U.S. District Court’s 1912-1913 lawsuit against the Motion Picture Patents Company.
Inside the U.S. vs. M.P.P.C. volumes, you will find the testimonies of M.P.P.C. members, such as Siegmund Lubin, as well as the testimonies of “Independents” who later became Hollywood moguls (e.g. William Fox). These first-person accounts offer one of the best windows you will find into the workings of the early American film industry. We extend our thanks to all of the Domitor members who contributed to the fundraising drive (the full list of names is here) and to Domitor’s President, Scott Curtis, for initiating the campaign. The funds are paying for the scanning of more Moving Picture World volumes and other remarkable publications.
Drawing of the Latham Loop, one of the most important technologies in the M.P.P.C.’s patent pool.
Are you memorizing jokes from Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang? Well, ya got trouble!
It’s come to our attention that the access to Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang provided by Bruce Long and the Media History Digital Library has caused Trouble (with a capital T) in some Communities (with a capital C). You can click here to watch footage from the town hall meeting that was held last night about the matter.
100 Early Fan Magazine Additions, courtesy of Bruce Long
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!
MHDL + Friends = Inspiration
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!
Film Studies for Free – Favorite Online Film Resources of 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!
The challenges facing small town exhibitors (1924)
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.
Special Effects Revealed! – 1923
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.
What Screenwriters Thought of “Pre-Code” Movies (1933)
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
