Movies

A movie is a series of images recorded on strips of film that create the illusion of live action. The word “movies” is short for “moving pictures.” Movies are also known as films, cinema, and motion pictures.

The human brain perceives motion when pictures, taken in rapid sequence, are flashed at the rate of fifteen or more frames per second. A frame is a single exposure on a roll of motion-picture film. Sequential photographs were produced as early as 1860, but the true motion picture was still in the future.

Motion

In 1872, Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was trying to prove that all four of a horse's hooves leave the ground when the animal gallops. He set

up twenty-four cameras to take sequential photographs of a galloping horse. Muybridge proved his theory and brought the illusion of motion into people's homes with his invention of the zoetrope. In a zoetrope, a strip of a series of photographs was attached to the inside of a rotating drum. The viewer looked through a series of slots that acted as shutters as the drum spun, and the illusion of a running horse was brought to life.

Before an actual motion picture could be produced, the exposure time required to take a photograph had to be dramatically reduced. When George Eastman (1854–1932) developed strips of flexible celluloid camera film with fast exposure times in 1889, a long series of pictures could be photographed in rapid sequence.

American inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931) then produced the kinetoscope, a device that a staff member, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (1860–1935), had invented. The kinetoscope advanced a strip of film frame by frame in rapid succession to produce the illusion of fluid motion. Just one person at a time could look into the kinetoscope. Only later would the images be projected onto a screen, as motion pictures are seen today.

Edison built a small motion picture studio in New Jersey , where his company created 50-foot (15-meter) film loops. They were viewed at kinetoscope parlors on individual projectors. The first motion picture showed one of Edison's assistants sneezing. Soon, they were filming variety shows.

Not realizing the potential of his invention, Edison had not taken out foreign patents on it. Soon, it was being copied elsewhere. In France, brothers Auguste Lumière (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948) were the first to combine the flashing shutter of a camera with the bright light of a projector to produce the Cinématographe in 1894. The Lumières projected their motion pictures onto a screen so that a seated audience could watch. The motion picture experience proved more popular than Edison's kinetoscope. Edison unveiled his competing projector in April 1896.

Advent of filmmaking

During the 1890s, French theater director and magician Georges Méliès (1861–1938) became the first true master of cinematic techniques. He filmed theater acts, but changed them to fit the motion-picture format, arranging objects and backgrounds for the camera. He invented special

effects, doing things such as stopping the camera, changing the scenery, and turning the camera back on. He discovered the fade in and fade out, wherein the scene gradually goes dark or comes up from darkness, and used them as a transition between scenes. Méliès used painted cutouts and backdrops in his studio to enhance the fantasy effect created by his trick photography.

Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902) became the first internationally successful motion picture. Méliès showed how much the new medium could do beyond showing real events passing in front of a camera. Following his example, others turned to telling stories with motion pictures, and movies quickly became more sophisticated.

In 1903, American director-photographer Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941) made The Great Train Robbery, the first motion picture to tell a complete story. A former cameraman for Edison, Porter incorporated a pattern of suspense in the film that later moviemakers used. He used a camera that moved with the action, rather than being fixed, and he included camera shots from a moving train. The age of the silent film had begun.

Exhibiting films

As the public began spending money to see films, motion-picture distribution networks sprang up. Middlemen bought films and rented them to theaters that did not want to buy them outright. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania , the nickelodeon (a small viewing house) was born when a firm began charging patrons five cents to watch a series of short films. The idea was successful and soon spread throughout the country.

By 1908, the motion picture industry was large and rapidly changing. A group of filmmaking studios and distributors, along with Edison, formed the Motion Pictures Patent Company to regulate copyrights, patents, and royalties. The group tried to take over the industry, but only half of the nine thousand U.S. theaters were licensed by 1910. These theaters used films by independent filmmakers and distributors.

The Patent Company kept its actors anonymous to prevent them from becoming personally important and therefore able to command higher salaries. But the Independent Moving Picture Company lured

away actress Florence Lawrence (1886–1938) and began to promote her. This started what became known as the “star system,” in which the fame of actors rivalled the film's story.

Motion pictures became longer and more ambitious as new film companies such as Fox, Universal, Paramount, and MGM sprang up. As motion pictures became more popular, large theaters replaced the small nickelodeons

Silent movies

In the earliest days of motion pictures, color film had not yet been invented, so films were black and white. The 1920s were the golden age of silent films (or flickers), which flickered on the screen as a pianist, organist, or orchestra played to enhance the mood.

Because silent films had no synchronized sound for dialogue, onscreen intertitles (also known as dialogue cards or titles) were used to narrate story points, present key dialogue, and sometimes provide commentary. Intertitles often were graphic elements themselves, featuring illustrations or abstract decorations that commented on the action.

There were rumors that a marriage might be arranged between the flickers and the phonograph. Edison had been working on the problem since 1888 and had produced only the 1895 and 1913 Kinetophones, which were long-term failures. The problem of synchronizing sound and picture seemed insurmountable, and other early twentieth-century attempts, such as the Synchroscope, the Cinematophone, and the Cameraphone, also failed.

Films remained silent because the sound fidelity of available audio systems was not good. In addition, actors were selected for their ability to perform roles physically, not for their speaking voices. Stage actors tended to overproject their voices, a style that would spoil the intimate effect created by the close-in cameras. Producers had another reason to oppose sound: It would cost them most of their lucrative foreign market. The printed intertitles could easily be translated into any language, but a talking picture would have to be “dubbed” (have sound inserted), an expensive and difficult process.

Sound

A workable system to join sound and motion pictures proved complex and required a great deal of research money. A 1924 sound-on-a-disc system was at first rejected by the motion-picture studios as too expensive. But movie studio Warner Bros. decided to forge ahead and accepted the system, investing millions of dollars in theaters and sound equipment. The new system was named Vitaphone (meaning “life sound”).

With the advent of Vitaphone, the old, hand-cranked movie camera was abandoned because the human arm could not synchronize picture and sound accurately. But the early power-driven cameras had noisy motors whose sound was recorded along with the actors’ voices. Cameras with silent motors were eventually developed. Another problem was that traffic noises from outside the studio could be heard on film. Warner Bros., as well as other movie studios, moved from New York City to Hollywood, California, where they set up a studio lot that was easier to soundproof than its studio in New York.

Warner Bros. made the first sound movie, Don Juan (1926), in New York City before its move to Hollywood. It was not a feature-length motion picture, and the actors did not talk. The only sound was a synchronized musical score and sound effects.

In 1927, Warner Bros. produced a commercially successful blockbuster, The Jazz Singer, the first motion picture with synchronized dialogue and singing. Filmed in Hollywood for $500,000, a colossal sum of money at the time, the movie starred Al Jolson (1886–1950), a nationally known stage actor and singer who was eager to explore the new medium of sound pictures.

The movie made Warner Bros. one of the biggest forces in the motion-picture industry. Its success forced competing studios to adopt sound. A rival sound system developed by General Electric and the Radio Corporation of America put the soundtrack on the film itself, running it in a track next to the images. Because the pictures and their soundtrack were linked on the film, they could never get out of synchronization. This system was also easier to set up. After intense competition and many lawsuits over patent rights, this sound-on-film system beat the sound-on-a-disc system.

Film gains in popularity

By 1930, movie houses attracted 100 million viewers a week at a time when the total population of the United States was only 120 million and weekly church attendance was less than 60 million. By 1932, all movies were “talkies” (film with sound), and by the end of the decade all movies used technicolor, a trademarked method for making motion pictures in color.

World War II and the Paramount decision

U.S. involvement in World War II (1939–41) brought a proliferation of war movies that served as both patriotism and propaganda, including Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), starring James Cagney (1899–1986), and Casablanca (1942), with Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957). In 1941, RKO Pictures released Citizen Kane, often considered one of the greatest films of all time.

Between 1945 and 1948, the film industry produced more than four hundred movies a year. In 1948, however, the studios’ grip on all aspects of the film business, from production through exhibition, was ended by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures. The Court ruled that studios must sell their exhibition divisions, which showed movies to the public. This ended guaranteed exhibition of films that were produced by the major studios and allowed independent filmmakers to show their work to the public.

Competition from television

By 1950, broadcast television was rapidly becoming the dominant entertainment medium in the United States and its increasing popularity caused some movie theatres to go out of business. Distressed by the trend, studios and exhibitors dreamed up several new big-screen formats. This led to such epic films as The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and Spartacus (1960).

European production

During the 1960s, “Hollywood” movies were still largely aimed at family audiences. Such films as Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Sound of Music (1965) were among the biggest moneymakers of the decade. The growth in independent producers and production companies and the increase in the power of individual actors also contributed to the decline of traditional Hollywood studio production.

There was also increasing awareness of foreign language cinema during this period. French New Wave directors such as François Truffaut (1932–1984) and Jean-Luc Godard (1930–) garnered attention as did Federico Fellini's (1920–1993) La Dolce Vita (1960) and the stark dramas of Sweden's Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007). In Britain, the popular James Bond series of films began in 1962.

By the late 1960s, Hollywood filmmakers were creating innovative and groundbreaking films that reflected the social revolution happening in America. Films like Stanley Kubrick's (1928–1999) Dr. Strangelove (1964) were produced in Hollywood as a reaction to the nuclear paranoia of the age felt during the Cuban missile crisis . Many consider Bonnie and Clyde to be the beginning of the so-called New Hollywood.

New Hollywood

During the 1970s, a new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as Martin Scorsese (1942–), Francis Ford Coppola (1939–), Steven Spielberg (1946–), and George Lucas (1944–). Their style of filmmak-ing gave directors far greater control over their projects than in earlier eras. This led to such critical and commercial successes as Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), Coppola's The Godfather (1972 and 1974) films, Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Lucas's Star Wars (1977).

Rise of the blockbuster and home video

The phenomenal success in the 1970s of Jaws and Star Wars led to the rise of the modern “blockbuster.” Hollywood studios increasingly focused on producing a smaller number of very large budget films with massive marketing and promotional campaigns. This type of marketing permeated society as a whole. Movie T-shirts, school folders, and lunch-boxes made millions for studios and made movies a part of everyday life. Later the influence of marketing would become even more extreme as companies, such as Burger King, Ford Motor Company, and Pepsi, would pay studios for the placement of their products in movies, hoping that movie viewers will see their favorite characters using those products and they will want to use them too.

During the 1980s, audiences began watching movies on their home videocassette recorders (VCRs). Early in the decade, studios unsuccessfully tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyrights. Eventually, the sale and rental of movies on home video became a source of additional revenue for the movie companies.

Rise of independent film and animation

The early 1990s saw the rise of commercially successful independent film in the United States. Although the decade was dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Titanic (1997), independent films like Quentin Tarantino's (1963–) Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success.

In 1979, Miramax Films was founded to distribute independent films deemed commercially unfeasible by the major studios. Miramax's position as one of the most successful independents of the 1990s caused it to be bought by Disney. Other major studios followed suit and began to create their own “independent” production companies to finance and produce nonmainstream fare. The same year marked the beginning of film and video distribution online.

Animated films aimed at family audiences regained their popularity in the 1990s, with Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994). These three movies, together, made a total of $1.6 billion dollars worldwide. During 1995, the first feature length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney.

During the late 1990s, another cinematic transition began, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile digital video discs (DVDs) became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS videotapes.

Documentaries and digital advances

The documentary film rose as a commercial genre for perhaps the first time with the success of films such as Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004); and the National Geographic Society-produced March of the Penguins (2005).

In the twenty-first century, computer generated images (CGIs) dominated the big screen, causing movies to become more expensive to make and ticket prices to skyrocket. CGI has also led to major advances in film-making and a much higher quality of special effect. The role of the movie star also continues to grow. Some stars make $20 million or more a picture, and many are more recognizable to the public than some of the most influential politicians in the country. Over 650 movies were released in the United States in 2007, grossing more than $9.6 billion at the box office.