![]() ![]() In 1908 door-to-door salesman Samuel "Roxy" Rothapfel opened a nickelodeon in the backroom of a saloon in Forest City, PA. And once again Pennsylvanians were in the forefront. As the motion pictures grew in popularity, storefront nickelodeons gave way to motion picture palaces. From there they moved into film production first in New York and then Hollywood, founding one of the nation's largest and most successful motion picture companies.Ĭlosing of The Ramparts We Watch by the Pennsylvania Censor Board, Harrisburg. The Warner Brothers soon opened a 99-seat theater in the steel town of New Castle, and then moved to Pittsburgh, where they started a regional film distribution company. In Youngstown, Ohio, butcher Ben Warner sold his store horse so that his sons could buy a Kinetoscope projector to show films in western Pennsylvania coal and steel towns. Soon "nickelodeons," a term coined in Pittsburgh, were popping up across the nation. And there in 1905 John Harris and Harry Davis partitioned off part of their penny arcade and charged a nickel for entrance into what may well have been the nation's first theater devoted exclusively to the showing of motion pictures. Soon Howe's six companies were carrying films, some produced by his own film company, to towns throughout northeastern Pennsylvania.Īt the dawn of the twentieth century, Pittsburgh was a booming industrial metropolis. In the 1890s, "Professor" Lyman Howe of Wilkes-Barre moved into the new film business by offering "high-class" programs of primitive newsreels, local scenes, and travelogues that he accompanied with sound from phonograph recordings. To get its product to consumers, the new industry also required first regional and then national systems of distribution and sale. Mass production made motion pictures much cheaper than live performances. The new business of "canned drama" quickly emerged into a major international industry. ![]() One of the most successful of Edison's early competitors was Philadelphia optician turned filmmaker Siegmund Lubin, who in the early 1900s built one of the nation's largest film production companies and theater chains, making movies at his 500-acre Betzwood Studios in Valley Forge.Īrtist's Sketch of the Mastbaum Theatre, Motion Picture News, December 29. Edison's Trust, however, was soon challenged by William, Fox, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, and other independents, many of whom got their start in the motion picture industry as theater owners. Five years later, Edison created the Motion Picture Patents Company, which monopolized the production of motion pictures in the United States. ![]() In 1903 Edison cameraman Edwin Porter, of Connellsville, PA, directed the world's first "story film," splicing together more than twenty separate indoor and outdoor shots in his path-breaking films The Great Train Robbery and The Life of an American Fireman. In 1891 the indomitable Thomas Edison applied for patents on both a motion picture camera and projector, and although the Wizard of Menlo Park was at first skeptical about the commercial potential of the new technology, motion pictures soon exploded in popularity. In the 1880s Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins teamed with San Francisco photographer Eadweard Muybridge to produce rapid shots of people and horses in motion, including multiple exposures of Eakins running in the nude. In the 1800s, inventors on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean became fascinated with the idea of creating pictures that moved. Entrance to the Harris nickelodeon, Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh, PA., 1919.
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