The Movies Before Hollywood

New York and the Birth of the Film Industry

When most people think of the movies, they instantly think of Hollywood—aka Tinseltown, The City of Angels, La La Land (err, I mean Moonlight ?). While it’s true that Hollywood is certainly the film and entertainment capital of the world today, this wasn’t always the case. From the late 1880s to the early 1920s, the film industry put down its very first roots on the East Coast in New York and the surrounding areas.

While photography had been around since the 1820s, the concept of moving photography didn’t come to fruition until 1878. The story goes that English photographer Eadweard Muybridge was hired by California industrial magnate and racehorse enthusiast Leland Stanford to help settle a bet. Stanford wanted to find out whether there was ever a point during a horse’s gallop when all four hooves were off the ground. To settle the question, Muybridge set up multiple cameras along a racetrack and rigged them to take consecutive photos of a running horse. When the series of snapshots was shown in quick succession, it gave the illusion of movement—a similar effect that a cartoon flipbook would have. With the creation of the first moving image, Muybridge had not only discovered that horses do in fact completely leave the ground when galloping, but had also inadvertently launched the start of the film industry.

Enter Thomas Edison. The lightbulb guy. In 1888, Muybridge visited Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. Muybridge’s technological breakthrough inspired Edison to pursue further projects related to moving images. Between 1889 and 1892, Edison and his employee William Dickson developed a novel device called the Kinetoscope, a large cabinet with a peephole where viewers could watch short films. The invention made its official public debut at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1893, becoming a sensation almost overnight. The success of the Kinetoscope led to the creation of Kinetoscope parlors, where the general public could pay a quarter to watch short videos on a running loop. The first of these parlors opened in 1894 and was located at 27th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.

Many of the short films viewed through the Kinetoscope were filmed in the studio behind Edison’s lab, where members of the New York theater scene, celebrities, dancers, stunt performers, and even lab technicians acted in short scenes that were captured by a Kinetograph camera. These early mini films were predominately conceptual, relying on imagery over plot and narrative. However, the new fad had soon run its course as its novelty began to wane in the eyes of the public. Moreover, Kinetoscopes presented a practical problem for parlor owners: only one customer could use any single machine at a time. Inventors soon began looking for ways to project their moving images so that multiple viewers could watch a film simultaneously.

Two Kinetoscope parlor owners, Grey and Otway Latham, were some of the first to make movie projection a reality. With the help of a few of Edison’s disgruntled employees, the Lathams introduced a device called the Panopticon in 1895. This invention was used to project the first American film shown to a paying audience: a boxing match reenactment shot atop Madison Square Garden. This short film was also one of the first ever to be shot in New York.

Projected motion pictures soon became all the rage. Around this same time in France, the Lumière brothers had also managed to create their own projection device, which they dubbed the Cinématographe and showcased in their own theater in New York. Not one to be behind the times, Edison also purchased the rights to another projector model called the Vitascope, which he debuted at the famous Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in 1896.

The advent of projected motion pictures not only changed how films were watched, but also where they were watched. Projected films were originally shown at vaudeville theater shows as a filler between acts. However, in 1905, Pittsburgh opened the country’s very first nickelodeon. Named for the price of admission (a nickel) and the Greek word odeon (a building used for performances), nickelodeons were typically small storefront theaters that showed short films playing continuously throughout the day. More significantly, these were also the first venues dedicated specifically to the screening of films and would become the forerunner to the modern movie theater. By 1908, New York had the most nickelodeons of any city in the world, with an estimated 300,000400,000 people attending them daily.

The popularity of nickelodeons increased the demand for longer and more complex films. This translated into the need for more production and filming sites. Studios began popping up in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx—Vitagraph Studios, Biograph Studios, Fox Film Studios, Edison Studios, and Kaufman Astoria Studios (which is still active today and sits next to the Museum of the Moving

Image). For films shot on-location, filmmakers often took to the streets of New York or the various landscapes of Fort Lee, New Jersey.

However, by the early 1910s, the exodus to the West Coast had begun as actors, filmmakers, and studio moguls alike packed their bags for California. The West Coast’s scenic landscapes, year-round sunlight, and open, inexpensive land proved ideal for filming on-location or building outdoor sets and sound stages. Another reason for the cross-country shift was an industry-wide effort to escape Edison’s notoriously litigious trust, the Motion Picture Patents Company. Having aggregated a large number of patents pertaining to film technology, the Company routinely and relentlessly sued competitors for patent infringement, effectively creating a monopoly on the East Coast’s motion picture industry. The migration to California put some much-needed distance between filmmakers and the trust’s ruthless oversight.

By the 1930s, the majority of the film business had moved to Hollywood. Included in this group was a handful of ambitious first and secondgeneration European immigrants from New York that would make their individual ways out West to strike it big in the fledgling industry. These men would go on to build entertainment empires that would bear names such as Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros., and Universal Pictures. But while California certainly remains the seat of the film industry today, New York will always be where the movies started, will always be where the history of filmmaking began. Every time you queue up a new release on Netflix or buy midnight tickets to the latest summer blockbuster, remember that it all had to start somewhere. It’s safe to say that the motion picture industry wouldn’t be what it is today without those first ambitious inventors, those first makeshift studios, those first neighborhood nickelodeons, and—most of all— those first curious New Yorkers that wandered in to see the movies one day and never stopped going. ♦