When was film industry started

Today, just like one hundred years ago when silent movies were popular, films are enable us to dream little more and strive to be better. History of cinema has went through many changes that enabled transformation of the movie industry from the modest beginning with black and white silent films to the point that we can enjoy it today. Producing a film from the ground up has always be a daunting job, and evolution of technology, tastes and film industry enabled creation of much more ambitious projects.

Find out how films are made today here. Here you can find out more about them and their impact on film. History of movies started in late 19th century with the era of movie pioneers who worked on initial efforts of establishing movie business. The Cold War with the Soviet Union began in , and with it came the widespread fear of communism, not only from the outside, but equally from within. To undermine this perceived threat, the House Un-American Activities Committee HUAC commenced investigations to locate communist sympathizers in America, who were suspected of conducting espionage for the Soviet Union.

In the highly conservative and paranoid atmosphere of the time, Hollywood, the source of a mass-cultural medium, came under fire in response to fears that subversive, communist messages were being embedded in films.

These 10, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were fired from their jobs and sentenced to serve up to a year in prison. The studios, already slipping in influence and profit, were eager to cooperate in order to save themselves, and a number of producers signed an agreement stating that no communists would work in Hollywood. Over individuals lost their jobs in the film industry as a result of blacklisting the denial of work in a certain field or industry and HUAC investigations. These four films in particular grossed so much money at the box offices that producers began churning out low-budget copycats to draw in a new, profitable market.

While this led to a rise in youth-culture films, few of them saw great success. New York: McGraw-Hill, , —2 In the s, with the rise of work by Coppola, Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and others, a new breed of director emerged. These directors were young and film-school educated, and they contributed a sense of professionalism, sophistication, and technical mastery to their work, leading to a wave of blockbuster productions, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Star Wars , Raiders of the Lost Ark , and E.

The computer-generated special effects that were available at this time also contributed to the success of a number of large-budget productions. In response to these and several earlier blockbusters, movie production and marketing techniques also began to shift, with studios investing more money in fewer films in the hopes of producing more big successes. With the opening of Jaws , one of the five top-grossing films of the decade and the highest grossing film of all time until the release of Star Wars in , Hollywood embraced the wide-release method of movie distribution, abandoning the release methods of earlier decades, in which a film would debut in only a handful of select theaters in major cities before it became gradually available to mass audiences.

Jaws was released in theaters simultaneously, and the big-budget films that followed came out in anywhere from to 2, theaters nationwide on their opening weekends. Additionally, corporations sought revenue sources beyond the movie theater, looking to the video and cable releases of their films.

Introduced in , the VCR became nearly ubiquitous in American homes by with And the newly introduced concept of film-based merchandise toys, games, books, etc. The s saw the rise of two divergent strands of cinema: the technically spectacular blockbuster with special, computer-generated effects and the independent, low-budget film. The capabilities of special effects were enhanced when studios began manipulating film digitally. Early examples of this technology can be seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park Films with an epic scope— Independence Day , Titanic , and The Matrix —also employed a range of computer-animation techniques and special effects to wow audiences and to draw more viewers to the big screen.

At the same time, independent directors and producers, such as the Coen brothers and Spike Jonze, experienced an increased popularity, often for lower-budget films that audiences were more likely to watch on video at home.

Only one movie from a big film studio was nominated— Jerry Maguire —and the rest were independent films. The growth of both independent movies and special-effects-laden blockbusters continues to the present day. You will read more about current issues and trends and the future of the movie industry later on in this chapter.

Identify four films that you would consider to be representative of major developments in the industry and in film as a medium that were outlined in this section. Imagine you are using these films to explain movie history to a friend. Consider the following questions:. Previous Section. Table of Contents. Next Section. Identify key developments of the motion picture industry and technology. Identify influential films in movie history. Figure 8. The Rise of the Feature In these early years, theaters were still running single-reel films, which came at a standard length of 1, feet, allowing for about 16 minutes of playing time.

Hollywood As moviegoing increased in popularity among the middle class, and as the feature films began keeping audiences in their seats for longer periods of time, exhibitors found a need to create more comfortable and richly decorated theater spaces to attract their audiences. The Art of Silent Film While the development of narrative film was largely driven by commercial factors, it is also important to acknowledge the role of individual artists who turned it into a medium of personal expression.

Rise and Fall of the Hollywood Studio The spike in theater attendance that followed the introduction of talking films changed the economic structure of the motion picture industry, bringing about some of the largest mergers in industry history.

Post—World War II: Television Presents a Threat While economic factors and antitrust legislation played key roles in the decline of the studio system, perhaps the most important factor in that decline was the advent of the television. Blockbusters, Knockoffs, and Sequels In the s, with the rise of work by Coppola, Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and others, a new breed of director emerged.

The s and Beyond The s saw the rise of two divergent strands of cinema: the technically spectacular blockbuster with special, computer-generated effects and the independent, low-budget film. In the United States, film established itself as a popular form of entertainment with the nickelodeon theater in the s. The release of The Jazz Singer in marked the birth of the talking film, and by silent film was a thing of the past.

Technicolor emerged for film around the same time and found early success with movies like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. However, people would continue to make films in black and white until the late s. By most of the major film studios had moved to Hollywood. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, these major studios controlled every aspect of the movie industry, and the films they produced drew crowds to theaters in numbers that have still not been surpassed.

After World War II, the studio system declined as a result of antitrust legislation that took power away from studios and of the invention of the television.

During the s and s, there was a rise in films—including Bonnie and Clyde , The Wild Bunch , A Space Odyssey , and Easy Rider —that celebrated the emerging youth culture and a rejection of the conservatism of the previous decades.

This also led to looser attitudes toward depictions of sexuality and violence in film. The adoption of the VCR by most households in the s reduced audiences at movie theaters but opened a new mass market of home movie viewers. At this moment, in a second stage, cinema emerged and in its turn destroyed this world, by industrializing it into the modern world of automated, standardized, tradable mass-entertainment, integrating the national entertainment markets into an international one.

In the early s, Thomas Edison introduced the kinematograph, which enabled the shooting of films and their play-back in slot-coin machines for individual viewing. After the preconditions for motion pictures had been established, cinema technology itself was invented. The scientist Jean Marey completed the first working model of a film camera in in Paris.

Edison visited Georges Demeney in and saw his films. In , he filed an American patent for a film camera, which had a different moving mechanism than the Marey camera. In , the Englishman Friese Green presented a working camera to a group of enthusiasts.

In the Frenchman Demeney filed a patent for a camera. In December of that year they gave the first projection for a paying audience. They were followed in February by the Englishman Robert W.

It is instrumental in the smooth rolling of the film, and in the correcting of the lens for the space between the exposures Michaelis ; Musser ; Low and Manvell Three characteristics stand out in this innovation process. Second, it was what Mokyr calls a typical nineteenth century invention, in that it was a smart combination of many existing technologies.

Many different innovations in the technologies which it combined had been necessary to make possible the innovation of cinema. Third, cinema was a major innovation in the sense that it was quickly and universally adopted throughout the western world, quicker than the steam engine, the railroad or the steamship. For about the first ten years of its existence, cinema in the United States and elsewhere was mainly a trick and a gadget.

Before the coin-operated Kinematograph of Edison was present at fairs and in entertainment venues. Spectators had to throw a coin in the machine and peek through glasses to see the film. The first projections, from onwards, attracted large audiences. After a few years films became a part of the program in vaudeville and sometimes in theater as well. At the same time traveling cinema emerged: cinemas which traveled around with a tent or mobile theater and set up shop for a short time in towns and villages.

This whole era, which in the U. This changed when Nickelodeons, fixed cinemas with a few hundred seats, emerged and quickly spread all over the country between and From this time onwards cinema changed into an industry in its own right, which was distinct from other entertainments, since it had its own buildings and its own advertising.

The emergence of fixed cinemas coincided which a huge growth phase in the business in general; film production increased greatly, and film distribution developed into a special activity, often managed by large film producers. However, until about , besides the cinemas, films also continued to be combined with live entertainment in vaudeville and other theaters Musser ; Allen Figure 1 shows the total length of negatives released on the U.

In the U. Clearly, the initial U. Between and , far less growth took place, and in this period it may well have looked like the cinematograph would remain a niche product, a gimmick shown at fairs and used to be interspersed with live entertainment. From , however, a new, sharp sustained growth phase starts: The market increased further again by two orders of magnitude — and from a far higher base this time. At the same time, the average film length increased considerably, from eighty feet in to seven hundred feet in to three thousand feet in One reel of film held about 1, feet and had a playing time of about fifteen minutes.

Between the mids and the British and French markets were growing at roughly the same rates as the U. World War I constituted a discontinuity: from onwards European growth rates are far lower those in the U. The prices the Nickelodeons charged were between five and ten cents, for which spectators could stay as long as they liked.

Around , when larger cinemas emerged in hot city center locations, more closely resembling theaters than the small and shabby Nickelodeons, prices increased. Note: The length refers to the total length of original negatives that were released commercially. Once Nickelodeons and other types of cinemas were established, the industry entered a new stage with the emergence of the feature film.

After the mids, going to the cinema meant watching a feature film, a heavily promoted dramatic film with a length that came closer to that of a theater play, based on a famous story and featuring famous stars. Shorts remained only as side dishes. The feature film emerged when cinema owners discovered that films with a far higher quality and length, enabled them to ask far higher ticket prices and get far more people into their cinemas, resulting in far higher profits, even if cinemas needed to pay far more for the film rental.

The discovery that consumers would turn their back on packages of shorts newsreels, sports, cartoons and the likes as the quality of features increased set in motion a quality race between film producers Bakker They all started investing heavily in portfolios of feature films, spending large sums on well-known stars, rights to famous novels and theater plays, extravagant sets, star directors, etc. A contributing factor in the U.

Between about and the Edison-backed MPPC had restricted quality artificially by setting limits on film length and film rental prices. When companies put the word motion pictures in their IPO investors would flock to it. Many of these companies went bankrupt, were dissolved or were taken over. A necessary condition for the quality race was some form of vertical integration.

In the early film industry, films were sold. This meant that the cinema-owner who bought a film, would receive all the marginal revenues the film generated. In the film industry, these revenues were largely marginal profits, as most costs were fixed, so an additional film ticket sold was pure gross profit. Because the producer did not get any of these revenues, at the margin there was little incentive to increase quality.

This further increased when percentage contracts were introduced for large city center cinemas, and when producers-distributors actually started to buy large cinemas. The changing contractual relationship between cinemas and producers was paralleled between producers and distributors. Because the quality race happened when Europe was at war, European companies could not participate in the escalation of quality and production costs discussed above.

This does not mean all of them were in crisis. Many made high profits during the war from newsreels, other short films, propaganda films and distribution. They also were able to participate in the shift towards the feature film, substantially increasing output in the new genre during the war Figure 2.

However, it was difficult for them to secure the massive amount of venture capital necessary to participate in the quality race while their countries were at war. Even if they would have managed it may have been difficult to justify these lavish expenditures when people were dying in the trenches.

Yet a few European companies did participate in the escalation phase. The Danish Nordisk company invested heavily in long feature-type films, and bought cinema chains and distributors in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Its strategy ended when the German government forced it to sell its German assets to the newly founded UFA company, in return for a 33 percent minority stake. It set up its own U. Yet it eventually switched to features and remained a significant company. In the early s, its U. Because it could not participate in the quality race, the European film industry started to decline in relative terms.

Its market share at home and abroad diminished substantially Figure 3. In the s European companies supplied at least half of the films shown in the U. In the early s this dropped to about twenty percent.

In the mids, when the feature film emerged, the European market share declined to nearly undetectable levels. By the s, most large European companies gave up film production altogether.

Nordisk continued as an insignificant Danish film company, and eventually collapsed into receivership. The eleven largest Italian film producers formed a trust, which terribly failed and one by one they fell into financial disaster. The famous British producer, Cecil Hepworth, went bankrupt.

By late , hardly any films were being made in Britain. American films were shown everywhere. For further details see Bakker Once they had lost out, it was difficult for European companies to catch up.

First of all, since the sharply rising film production costs were fixed and sunk, market size was becoming of essential importance as it affected the amount of money that could be spent on a film. Exactly at this crucial moment, the European film market disintegrated, first because of war, later because of protectionism. The market size was further diminished by heavy taxes on cinema tickets that sharply increased the price of cinema compared to live entertainment.

Second, the emerging Hollywood studios benefited from first mover advantages in feature film production: they owned international distribution networks, they could offer cinemas large portfolios of films at a discount block-booking , sometimes before they were even made blind-bidding , the quality gap with European features was so large it would be difficult to close in one go, and, finally, the American origin of the feature films in the s had established U.

It would be extremely costly for European companies to re-enter international distribution, produce large portfolios, jump-start film quality, and establish a new brand of films — all at the same time Bakker A third factor was the rise of Hollywood as production location. The large existing American Northeast coast film industry and the newly emerging film industry in Florida declined as U.

The studios lowered costs because creative inputs had less down-time, needed to travel less, could participate in many try-outs to achieve optimal casting and could be rented out easily to competitors when not immediately wanted. Hollywood also attracted new creative inputs through non-monetary means: even more than money creative inputs wanted to maximize fame and professional recognition.

Second, a thick market for specialized supply and demand existed. Companies could easily rent out excess studio capacity for example, during the nighttime B-films were made , and a producer was quite likely to find the highly specific products or services needed somewhere in Hollywood Christopherson and Storper , If entry did happen, the Hollywood studios could and would buy successful creative inputs away, since they could realize higher returns on these inputs, which resulted in American films with even a higher perceived quality, thus perpetuating the situation.

Sunlight, climate and the variety of landscape in California were of course favorable to film production, but were not unique.

In , sound films were introduced. The main innovator was Warner Brothers, backed by the bank Goldman, Sachs, which actually parachuted a vice-president to Warner. Although many other sound systems had been tried and marketed from the s onwards, the electrical microphone, invented at Bell labs in the mids, sharply increased the quality of sound films and made possible the change of the industry.

Sound increased the interests in the film industry of large industrial companies such as General Electric, Western Electric and RCA, as well as those of the banks who were eager the finance the new innovation, such as the Bank of America and Goldman, Sachs.

What it did do was industrialize away most of the musicians and entertainers that had complemented the silent films with sound and entertainment, especially those working in the smaller cinemas. This led to massive unemployment among musicians see, for example, Gomery ; Kraft The effect of sound film in Europe was to increase the domestic revenues of European films, because they became more culture-specific as they were in the local language, but at the same time it decreased the foreign revenues European films received Bakker b.

It is difficult to completely assess the impact of sound film, as it coincided with increased protection; many European countries set quotas for the amount of foreign films that could be shown shortly before the coming of sound. In France, for example, where sound became widely adopted from onwards, the U. During the s, the share temporarily declined to about forty percent, and then hovered to between fifty and sixty percent.