1910s - Part 2
Year
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Event and Significance
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1913
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"Hollywood"'s name was formally adopted. It replaced the East Coast as the center of the burgeoning movie industry.
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1913
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IMP's first feature-length film release - the first major American feature-length exploitation sex film - was the six-reel melodrama (and faux documentary) Traffic in Souls (1913) (aka While New York Sleeps). The film premiered in New York City on November 24, 1913 at Joe Weber's Theater. It was a "photo-drama" expose of white slavery (entrapment of young women into prostitution) at the turn of the century in NYC, although the film exploitatively promised steamy sex in its advertisements. This was one of the first films to understand that 'sex sells,' although its producers worried that a 'feature-length' film on any subject wouldn't be successful. It was the most expensive feature film of its time at $57,000, although its record earnings were $450,000.
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1913
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The American director D. W. Griffith, director of hundreds of short films, was credited with defining the art of motion pictures. In making his films, Griffith used filming techniques still used today. Such filming techniques included altering camera angles, using close-ups in a dramatic way, breaking scenes up into multiple shots, and more. Previously, filmmakers kept the camera in one position which was generally 12 feet away from the actors and at a right angle to the set. In 1913, Griffith finished his contract with Biograph films in NYC and left, because he wanted to make feature-length films. His production company became an autonomous production unit partner in Triangle Pictures Corporation with Keystone Studios and Thomas Ince.
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1913
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The first episode of the first cliff-hanger serial was released, for the multi-episode Selig Polyscope film The Adventures of Kathlyn, starring Kathlyn Williams as the heroine. Harold MacGrath's novel of the same name was released in early 1914, a few days after the theatrical film release (in late 1913), to be concurrently sold in bookstores. This was the first novel based on a movie, with stills taken from the film.
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1913
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The first feature-length western was Lawrence B. McGill's six-reel Arizona.
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1913
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The first film to feature an all-Native American cast was Hiawatha.
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1913
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John Randolph Bray's first animated film, The Artist's Dream (aka The Dachshund and the Sausage), the first animated cartoon made in the U.S. by modern techniques was the first to use 'cels' - transparent drawings laid over a fixed background.
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1913
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Denmark's Atlantis (1913), another ship-sinking story influenced by the Titanic tale - and filmed off the coast of New Zealand, was one of the first full-length films ever made - it had a 1 hour, 53 minute running time. This version of the story from director August Blom appeared to sink a full-scale boat for realism. It was a very realistic and naturalistic-looking Titanic film with a well-staged action scene of the ship's sinking. It was also one of the most popular films of the silent decades, and a worldwide smash hit.
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1913-1914
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French director Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas series popularized the crime serial.
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1914
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Young Cecil B. De Mille's first motion picture was The Squaw Man - it was the first feature-length film produced in Hollywood by a major film studio (it was distributed by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation). It was the first film to use an art director. However, it wasn't the first film to be made in Los Angeles.
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1914
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The start of the Great War (WWI) interrupted European motion-picture production and eventually brought it to a halt when there were signficant shortages of power and supplies. It never recovered its dominance in the marketplace. The American motion-picture industry thrived on business and viewership in the European market, using their profits to produce even bigger and better motion pictures.
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1914
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Lois Weber became the first woman to direct a feature film in the US - the Rex production of The Merchant of Venice, in which she also played the role of Portia. She co-directed with her husband Phillips Smalley (who played the part of Shylock).
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1914
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Charlie Chaplin's first film, Making a Living, was released. The silent comedian debuted his trademark mustached, baggy-pants 'Little Tramp' character in Kid Auto Races At Venice. It would become his most famous character. This was a year in which he made dozens of films and became filmdom's first great star.
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1914
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At Keystone, Mack Sennett made the first American feature-length comedy - Tillie's Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin (in his first feature film).
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1914
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Winsor McCay created Gertie the Dinosaur, the first "interactive" animated cartoon and character, and the earliest example of combined 'live action' and animation. The brontosaurus dinosaur's appearance made Gertie the first animated cartoon star.
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1914
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Serials regularly added cliffhangers as one of their features, in multi-part serial films such as The Perils of Pauline with 20 episodes, featuring Pearl White as the 'damsel in distress' title character.
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1914
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The first feature-length color film, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, in Kinemacolor, premiered in London.
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1914
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Grand cinema houses were regularly replacing cheaper nickelodeons. For example, the first movie "palace", The Strand, opened at Times Square in New York with seating for 3,300.
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1914
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Bert Williams appeared as an actor in his first film Darktown Jubilee. It was one of the first movies to use an African-American actor in blackface, rather than using a white person in the same role in blackface.
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1914
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The influential three-hour Italian silent film from Giovanni Pastrone, Cabiria, was an early example of spectacular and monumental epic film-making. It laid the pattern and groundwork for future big-budget feature-length films (by the likes of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille). Its story of 3rd century BC Ancient Rome included sequences of the eruption of Mt. Etna and Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with elephants (with an early example of tracking shots). The landmark film was shot on location in North Africa, Sicily and the Italian Alps, and reportedly contained the first use of trucking shots (which became known as 'Cabiria' movements). It was also the first film to be screened at the White House.
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1914
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Paramount Pictures was founded in Los Angeles as a start-up company in order to release the films of Jesse Lasky and his Famous Players Company, and soon became the first successful nation-wide film distributor. More changes would occur involving Paramount in 1916.
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1914
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Charlie Chaplin, a silent actor and pantomimist, was recruited to Keystone Studios from an English variety act, and became Mack Sennett's most important discovery. Chaplin made 35 short Keystone films for Mack Sennett in 1914. In Chaplin's second picture, the 11-minute Kid Auto Races in Venice, he invented his immortal, trademark Little Tramp character as he attended a 'baby-cart' race in Venice, California.
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1914
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The Photo-Drama of Creation (aka the Eureka-Drama in its abbreviated version), a 1912 religious production by Charles Taze Russell through the auspices of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (representing the Bible Student Movement), was the first major screenplay which incorporated synchronized sound (recorded speech), moving film, and magic lantern color slides. Since its run-time was 8 hours (480 minutes), the b/w show (with some hand-colored slides), providing a religious survey from the time of Creation to the end of the Millenium (the 1,000 year reign of Jesus Christ), was divided into 4-part sets. Multiple copies of sets were made so that it could conceivably be shown in 80 different locations at the same time. It was introduced at a premiere in January of 1914 in New York, and was later screened that summer in Germany. By the end of the year, it was estimated that 9 million people had seen the production in North America, Europe, and Australia.
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1915
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Pioneering film-maker D. W. Griffith's technically brilliant, 3-hour Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, premiered with a phenomenal ticket price of $2 -- it was based on The Clansman, a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Griffith's film popularized the expressive close-up, naturalistic acting, the flashback and other elements (i.e., exciting cross-cutting, a last minute rescue) that endure today as the structural principles of narrative filmmaking. It introduced the historical epic and period piece as a film genre and defined the language of film. Although it was the most extravagant and expensive film up to that time (at a budget of approximately $110,000), it was also highly controversial because of its racist theme. It was the first US motion picture shown in the White House, where President Woodrow Wilson described it as "writing history with lightning."
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1915
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Producer/director Thomas H. Ince introduced a 'factory system' - a method that would be used to mass produce films. Different films in various stages of production would be systematically rotated through his movie studio. Ince appointed a group of supervisors called producers who each had control over a certain number of pictures. Sometimes, ten or more movies were being produced in his studios at one time.
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1915
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Charlie Chaplin's first masterpiece, The Tramp, produced by the Essanay Company in Chicago, showed the early development of his well-known character with baggy pants, bowler hat, walking cane, funny stride, and oversized shoes.
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1915
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The Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera allowed directors to film close-ups without physically moving the camera.
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1915
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William Fox led a successful fight against Thomas Edison's Motion Pictures Patents Company (the Edison Trust). A federal court declared the Patents Company (and its subsidiary, the General Film Company) to be an illegal restraint on trade and an illegal monopoly, and fined over $20 million. It was soon officially dissolved and disbanded in the face of anti-trust legislation. The trust's appeal was dismissed in 1918.
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1915
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In Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that states may censor films, encouraging scrutiny of movies during future decades.
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1915
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Theda Bara (an anagram for "Arab Death", but born as Theodosia Goodman) starred in A Fool There Was, personifying the "vamp," the female temptress and sex symbol, and became an overnight sensation. She was one of the first "sex symbols" or stars.
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1915
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Writer Louis Feuillade directed the epic, nightmarish crime serial The Vampires (aka Les Vampires, Fr.), an almost seven-hour silent film masterpiece (in 10 episodes of varying lengths) that told about an exotic, cross-dressing Parisian gang leader and temptress named Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire) played by Musidora, whose group of gangsters terrorized the city. It was shot on location in Paris during the war years, and was banned from showings because of its depictions of crime.
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1915
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Prolific American film director Lois Weber released her feature-length lyrical parable The Hypocrites. She played multiple roles in the production of the film - as actress, director, writer, and producer. The film was controversial for its depiction of full female nudity. The character of the Naked Truth (literally a nude woman), reminded people of their hypocritical greed for money, sex and power. The film was also praised for its use of multiple exposures and complex film editing.
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1915
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The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was founded in Boston, Massachusetts. The company pioneered the development of color film processes known as Technicolor, beginning to be regularly seen in Hollywood films in the 1920s and continuing for many decades.
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1916
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D.W. Griffith's expensive follow-up film to The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the monumental historical and dramatic epic Intolerance, told with parallel cross-cutting between its four stories, symbolically linked by the image of Lillian Gish rocking a child. Each story told of intolerance and injustice in four different historical periods -- a Modern Story, a French story, a Babylonian story (with the largest set in film history up to its time), and a Biblical story. Its film-making techniques would be adopted and displayed in the works of future film-makers, such as Eisenstein and Coppola. With a budget of almost $2 million (the most expensive film of all time), it became the first multi-million dollar box-office 'bomb' in film history.
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1916
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The Jesse L. Lasky Company merged with its friendly rival, Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Company, to form the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. The corporation consolidated its production and distribution divisions with Paramount, and audiences began seeing "Paramount Pictures".
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1916
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Samuel Goldfish (later renamed Samuel Goldwyn) and Edgar Selwyn established Goldwyn Company.
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1916
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The salary of Charlie Chaplin, filmdom's first major star, went from $125 to $10,000 weekly, when he signed on with the Mutual Film Corporation.
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1916
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The first autobiography of a movie star was silent screen star Pearl White's Just Me, published in 1916..
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1916
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The earliest vampire feature film was director Arthur Robison's German silent film Nachte des Grauens (1916), aka Night of Terror, with strange, vampire-like people.
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1916
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Lois Weber's controversial drama Where Are My Children? was about the subject of abortion, in a story about a district attorney (Tyrone Power in an early role) who discovered that his wife had used illegal abortion services.
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1916
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The first film to feature an African-American actor was the short comedy film A Natural Born Gambler (1916), starring Biograph's Bert Williams, a vaudeville comedian who had become known by appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies (joining it in 1911). It was the first time that an African-American produced, wrote, directed, and starred in a film. [Note: Williams was actually born in the Bahamas, and was of mixed descent.]
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1917
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The first African-American owned studio, the pioneering The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, was founded.
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1917
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Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope to streamline the frame-by-frame copying process. It was a device used to overlay drawings on live-action film.
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1917
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The first feature-length motion picture produced in two-strip Technicolor in the US was The Gulf Between. It was also the third feature-length color movie. It is considered a lost film, with only a few frames surviving.
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1917
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Famed westerns director John Ford made his first film, the two or three-reel The Tornado, now considered a lost film.
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1918
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The independent African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux formed the Micheaux Film and Book Corporation. His first feature films were released the following year.
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1918
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The four Warner brothers, Jack, Albert, Harry and Samuel, opened their first West Coast studio.
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1918
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The first Tarzan film, the black and white Tarzan of the Apes, premiered at the Broadway Theater in New York, with the first actor to portray Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Lord of the Jungle', Elmo Lincoln, as an adult. Technically, the 'first' Tarzan, a 10-year old youthful Tarzan in the same film, was portrayed by Gordon Griffith. It was the first film adaptation with the Tarzan character, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' original novel Tarzan of the Apes.
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1918
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The US Supreme Court ordered the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), known as the "Edison Trust", to disband.
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1918
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Early cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay's 12-minute propagandistic, documentary-style The Sinking of the Lusitania, an animation landmark, was the first serious re-enactment of an historical event - the torpedoing of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, resulting in the loss of almost 2,000 passengers. It was one of the earliest films to utilize cel animation.
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1919
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Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford established United Artists in an attempt to control their own work. UA would distribute and produce their own films. Pickford starred in Daddy-Long-Legs, her first film as an independent producer.
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1919
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The technique of test screenings of films to obtain audience feedback was pioneered by Harold Lloyd.
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1919
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Producer/director Oscar Micheaux released his first film The Homesteader, starring pioneering African-American actress Evelyn Preer, thereby becoming the first African-American to produce and direct a motion picture feature film. He also directed the feature-length Within Our Gates (1920) the following year, his earliest surviving directorial effort.
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1919
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Walt Disney teamed with Ub Iwerks to form Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists (later known as Ub Iwerks), to create cartoon animations.
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1919
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Germany's silent expressionistic landmark classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was released - by director Robert Wiene. It told about a ghost-like hypnotist-therapist in a carnival named Dr. Caligari (Werner Kraus) who called from a state of sleep his performing somnabulist (and haunted murderer) -- a pale-skinned, lanky, black leotard-wearing Cesare (Conrad Veidt). The shadowy, disturbing, distorted, and dream-nightmarish quality of the macabre and stylistic 'Caligari,' with twisted alleyways, lopsided doors, cramped rooms, overhanging buildings, and skewed cityscapes, was shot in a studio. It was brought to Hollywood in the 1920s, and later influenced the classic period of horror films in the 1930s - introducing many standard horror film conventions.
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1919
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Max and Dave Fleischer's "Out of the Inkwell" series premiered, introducing KoKo the Clown, one of the first animated characters.
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1919
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Felix the Cat first appeared. Originated by young animator Otto Messmer, the (unnamed Felix) cat's first two cartoons were the five-minute Feline Follies (1919) and Musical Mews (1919), when Felix was known only as "Master Tom." Feline Follies was a segment of the Paramount Magazine, a semi-weekly compilation of short film segments that included animated cartoons. By the third Felix cartoon, The Adventures of Felix (1919), Felix took his permanent name.
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1919
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1920s - Part 1
Year
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Event and Significance
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1920
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The movement of German film Expressionism was established with Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmed in 1919 and released in 1920. Its bizarre sets, angular camera angles and make-up influenced future literary and cinematic styles, notably the cycle of Universal's horror films in the 30s, and film noir in the 40s.
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1920
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Producer John Randolph Bray's (and Bray Picture Corporation's) The Debut of Thomas Cat was the first color (2-color process) cartoon, using the expensive Brewster Natural Color Process (a 2-emulsion color process), an unsuccessful precursor of Technicolor. This was the first animated short genuinely made in color using color film. However, some sources have claimed that the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company's In Gollywog Land (1912, UK) was the earliest, using Kinemacolor.
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1920
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It was the "marriage of the century" when stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks married in late March, after divorcing their spouses. He bought a lodge for his new bride -- named Pickfair, which soon became the social center of movieland, and served as a gathering place for politicians, journalists, artists, and foreign diplomats.
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1920
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Douglas Fairbanks starred in the popular swashbuckler adventure film, The Mark of Zorro as the masked hero - the first of many film versions of the 1919 story "The Curse of Capistrano" by Johnston McCulley. It was the first film released through United Artists, recently formed in 1919 by Fairbanks, Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford.
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1920
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Alice Guy, the world's first female filmmaker and a key figure in the development of narrative film, directed her final film, the feature-length Tarnished Reputations.
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1921
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Director George Melford's and Famous Players-Lasky's melodramatic The Sheik debuted and established star Rudolph Valentino as cinema's best-known lover. It was one of the first of numerous exotic and erotic (at least for the day) romance/adventure films for men and women alike, designed to stimulate box office success. Valentino reached the peak of his stardom in this year, and also starred in Metro Pictures' The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
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1921
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Silent comic star/director Charlie Chaplin's first feature-length film (a six-reeler) and first film as producer, The Kid, was released, with a star-making role for young Jackie Coogan. Both a slapstick comedy and a soap opera tearjerker, it inspired future films such as The Champ (1931) (teaming another popular child star Jackie Cooper with Wallace Beery) and Three Men and a Baby (1987). Chaplin's young 13-year old co-star Lita Grey, who portrayed a tempting angel in the film, became his second wife from 1924-1927.
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1921
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Heavyweight silent-screen comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle signed a $3 million contract with Paramount and celebrated with a wild party in a San Francisco hotel. There, he was arrested for the alleged rape and murder of 25 year-old bit-player/actress Virginia Rappe. Tabloids sensationalized the crime and made up stories about Arbuckle's 'bottle party.' The multiple manslaughter trials against the innocent actor always ended with the finding of 'not guilty,' but Arbuckle's career was over after two hung juries and a subsequent acquittal. As a result, the public conceived of Hollywood as wild and scandalous -- and pressures were brought to bear on the industry.
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1921
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Famous Players-Lasky for violating anti-trust laws by refusing to allow independent films to play in its theaters.
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1921
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D.W. Griffith's film Dream Street, with experimental sound (in its introductory prologue) using inventor Orland E. Kellum's Photokinema, has been regarded as the first feature film to use sound.
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1921
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Writer/director Lois Weber's The Blot was released, a tale of class struggle, with a plea for social tolerance and consciousness toward the working class (clergy and teachers) struggling to survive and make a living.
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1922
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Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, a record of Inuit Eskimo life, was the first feature film documentary or non-fictional narrative feature film. [The word "documentary" was reportedly first used in February, 1926, by John Grierson in his review of Flaherty's Moana (1926) for the New York Sun. The term may also have been used 12 years earlier by famed photographer Edward Curtis in a prospectus for his Seattle-based Continental Film Company, referring to his film In the Land of the Headhunters (1914).] Flaherty's film helped to usher in the documentary film movement, although it raised some controversy because it 're-created' or staged some of its hunting scenes, rather than being truly non-fictional.
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1922
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Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov experimented with montage, a new editing technique pioneered by Russian filmmakers.
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1922
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Nervous Hollywood censored itself by creating the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) - later renamed as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), to be headed by former postmaster General Will H. Hays. The Hays Office (as it would be called), a film review board (censorship division), was created to serve as Hollywood's public relations organization, and to clean up the motion picture industry.
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1922
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A New York York State Court ruled that actors cannot prevent the re-editing or re-release of a film in which they appeared.
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1922
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The Toll of the Sea debuted as the first general release (widely-distributed or commercial) Hollywood feature film (five-reels, approx. 54 minutes) to use the improved two-tone Technicolor process. It also starred Anna May Wong (as Lotus Flower), the first prominent Asian-American leading lady.
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1922
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The Power of Love was the first 3-D feature film shown to a paying film audience, at the Ambassador Hotel's 'theater' in Los Angeles. The stereoscopic film was projected dual-strip in the red/green anaglyph format, making it both the earliest known film that utilized dual strip projection and the earliest known film in which anaglyph glasses were used. The film utilized and may have been the only commercial film produced in the dual-camera, dual-projector system developed by Harry K. Fairhall and Robert F. Elder.
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1922
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German director F. W. Murnau's influential, expressionistic vampire film Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (aka Nosferatu eine Symphonie des Grauens, Germ.) initiated a trend for Gothic tales of horror. It was considered the first genuine vampire picture. It starred Max Schreck as Count Orlok - a rat-faced vampire. Without authorized rights to the Bram Stoker novel, Murnau had to rename his vampire Nosferatu, Count Dracula was named Count Orlock, and the action was changed from Transylvania to Bremen.
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1922
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45 year-old director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered in Los Angeles with a bullet in his back. There were over a dozen potential suspects in the mysterious scandal, including Keystone Kops heroine Mabel Normand, 19 year-old blonde starlet Mary Miles Minter who starred in Anne of Green Gables, Minter's protective mother, and houseman Henry Peavey. Eventually, nobody was ever arrested or tried for this sensationalistic and fascinating crime, although combined with the Fatty Arbuckle case in 1921 and Wallace Reid's drug-related death in early 1923, a new age of censorship would soon be dawning for Hollywood.
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1922
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German Shepherd Rin Tin Tin became cinema's first canine star - and helped save its studio (Warner Bros.) from bankruptcy during the silent era. Rin Tin Tin made almost 30 films for the studio, beginning with The Man From Hell's River.
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1922
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The first Walt Disney cartoon was Little Red Riding Hood, one of his Laugh O Grams studio productions that he made at his own animation studio in Kansas City before relocating to Los Angeles shortly thereafter.
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1922
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Impresario Sid Grauman opened the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood -- the first 'movie palace' outside of downtown Los Angeles. It had Hollywood's first film premiere on October 18, 1922 - showing UA's silent swashbuckler Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks.
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1923
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The four Warner brothers' film distribution and production business was incorporated and called Warner Brothers Pictures Inc. - one of the first large film studios. They released the 6-reel comedy-drama The Gold Diggers.
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1923
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At the Rivoli Theatre in New York, Lee de Forest demonstrated a sound-on-film method for recording sound on the edge of the film strip, called Phonofilm. He projected a series of short musical films featuring vaudeville performers. It would become the industry standard.
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1923
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One of the highest-grossing films of the year was Paramount's and James Cruze's feature-length western The Covered Wagon. It was an expensive effort which cost $800,000 yet brought $4 million at the box-office. The film was the historical drama of a wagon train in the mid-1800s moving westward, encountering harsh environmental and weather conditions (a river crossing and prairie fire), and of course, hostile Indians. Hollywood was encouraged to produce many more westerns in subsequent years.
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1923
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Handsome silent era actor Wallace Reid was appearing, on average (over a seven-year period) in as many as one feature film every seven weeks, when he died of influenza at the age of 32. The real cause of his death was a weakened immune system due to his addiction to morphine (allegedly often supplied by the studio to keep him working) and his alcoholism. This was one of many scandals that would rock Hollywood and eventually lead to attempts to clamp down and prompt the implementation of the motion picture production code in the early 1930s.
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1923
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Director Cecil B. DeMille's first version of The Ten Commandments was the most expensive film ever made and featured the largest set ever constructed in movie history to that time - the 'City of the Pharoah' (120 feet tall, 720 feet wide, and with massive Egyptian statuary weighing 1,000,000 pounds). Its 'parting of the Red Sea' scene featured state-of-the-art special effects, and some segments were filmed in early Technicolor. After the film, the director ordered the set in San Luis Obispo County (California) buried -- 60 years later, archeologists uncovered it. DeMille remade his silent epic in 1956.
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1923
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The Hollywood (originally HOLLYWOODLAND) sign was built for $21,000.
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1923
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The Fleischer Brothers (Dave and Max) produced the first feature-length animation (a documentary), titled The Einstein Theory of Relativity.
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1924
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Animator Walt Disney, for Laugh-Gram Studios, directed his first cartoon (his first unfinished pilot film), the 12-minute short Alice's Wonderland (aka Alice in Slumberland). It was never released theatrically. The Alice comedies of the mid-20s, as they were later known, were a major stepping stone in Disney's career.
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1924-1927
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The Fleischer Brothers made the first animated films (cartoons) that featured a soundtrack, in a series of 36 films released in the mid-1920s called Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes (1924-1927) - the precursors to karaoke. The first sound cartoon was one of the Song Car-Tunes -- Mother Pin a Rose on Me. They were also the first audience participation films, with sing-along lyrics and a 'bouncing-ball' helper. They included Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (1926), When The Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves For Alabam' (1926), Comin' Tho' The Rye (1926), Margie (1926), My Old Kentucky Home (1926), Tramp, Tramp, Tramp-The Boys Are Marching (1927), By The Light Of The Silvery Moon (1927). In My Old Kentucky Home, Bimbo said to the audience: “Follow the ball and join in everybody.”
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1924
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Erich von Stroheim directed the influential Greed, a 10-hour epic based on Frank Norris' novel McTeague. The movie was brutally edited down into a 2-hour length before theatrical release - an early example of directorial vs. studio conflict, and one of cinedom's 'lost films'.
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1924
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Theaters showed the first double features.
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1924
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The future MGM studio was formed out of the merger of three US film production companies: Marcus Loew's Metro Pictures Corporation (1916), Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (1917) (known as Metro-Goldwyn), and the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Company (1918). MGM was destined to become the dominant studio of Hollywood's Golden Age during the 30s, under Louis B. Mayer's direction.
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1924
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The first film produced by the newly-formed studio MGM was He Who Gets Slapped (1924), starring Lon Chaney, although it wasn't their first released film - its release was postponed until the end-of-year holiday season to bring in more profits with increased audiences. He Who Gets Slapped also featured the first appearance of the MGM lion (a lion named Slats). The famous MGM lion roar (from a lion named Jackie) in the studio's opening logo, however, was first recorded and viewed in White Shadows of the South Seas (1928) - via a Gramophone record.
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1924
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The silent, propagandistic, Soviet sci-fi epic Aelita (1924) (aka Aelita: Queen of Mars), at 120 minutes, was both the first big-budget film made in Russia, and the first feature-length science-fiction film (about space travel). Other early sci-fi silent films included Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Woman in the Moon (1929), and Britain's futuristic High Treason (1929).
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1924
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F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, with revolutionary camera work by the celebrated German cinematographer Karl Freund, virtually invented a host of new techniques for a mobile camera ("unchained camera").
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1924
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C.B.C. Film Sales Company (founded by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn, and Joseph Brandt) officially changed its name to Columbia Pictures Corporation.
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Mid-to late 1920s
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Most of the major Hollywood motion-picture studios had been established by this time, including the Big Five (Warner Brothers, Fox (later 20th Century Fox), RKO, Loew's Inc. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)), Paramount (from Famous Players-Lasky)), and the Little Three (United Artists, Universal, and Columbia). All of these studios used Thomas H. Ince's efficient and profitable filmmaking "factory system".
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1925
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The great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein directed Battleship Potemkin, a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of an unsuccessful Russian Revolution in 1905 and a portrait of mutiny aboard a battleship named Potemkin. His influential film, considered one of the greatest of all time, effectively established the dialectic film montage technique, especially in the Odessa Steps sequence (copied later - in tribute - in films such as Brazil (1985), The Untouchables (1987), and comically in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)), as an important structural method to evoke a dramatic response from the juxtaposition of two clashing film shots. Non-linear editing in future films, such as Pulp Fiction (1994) owe their stylistic techniques to this film.
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1925
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The epic silent film Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was released - it cost a record-setting $3.95 million to produce, but the blockbuster for MGM grossed $9 million on its first release. It was notable for its use of a hanging miniature - to fill in the upper tier portion of the coliseum (with fake spectators) for the famed chariot race sequence. It also contained some two-color Technicolor sequences (e.g., the triumphant processional sequence).
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1925
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One of silent film genius Charlie Chaplin's classic masterpieces featuring the Tramp character was released -- The Gold Rush. Chaplin directed, produced, starred in, and scripted the film. It became the highest grossing silent comedy film of all time.
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1925
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Universal foreshadowed their success in the horror genre with Rupert Julian's expressionistic The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, Sr. ("The Man of a Thousand Faces") in his most notable role as the partially-disfigured "Phantom" in the Paris Opera House. It set the prototypical style for the studio's cycle of classic horror films in the early 30s - the decade of Universal's monster movies (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc).
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1925
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The first feature-length dinosaur-oriented science-fiction film to be released was The Lost World. It was also the first feature length film made in the US with the pioneering first major use (primitive) of stop-motion animation with models for its special effects.
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1925
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The first in-flight movie, a black & white silent film from First National titled The Lost World, was shown in a WWI converted Handley-Page bomber during a 30-minute flight from London to Paris in April for Imperial Airways. It featured pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien. [Some sources claim that the first aerial 'movie' was four years earlier in August of 1921 - a short film called Howdy Chicago that was shown aboard an 11-seat Aeromarine Airways hydroplane, named the Santa Maria, which circled Chicago during the Pageant of Progress exposition.]
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1925
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Western Electric and Warner Bros. agreed to develop a system to make movies with sound.
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1925
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A title card in the silent epic war film The Big Parade demonstrated one of the earliest uses of a curse word in a US film: "March and sweat the whole damned day..."
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