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The silent era
In Hollywood, the silent era featured forceful directors and motion picture studios needed to come up with the amount of money necessary to create movies — to pay for props and people and film and developing and technicians and set designers and the entire industry that we still know today. -
First motion picture cinema
Thomas Edison creates the kinetograph, a camera that takes a sequence of pictures to create a sense of motion. Accompanied with his invention of the kinetoscope, a type of film viewer, Edison receives a patent for his film device. -
First use of color in film
Located merely years ago, the first use of color on film was produced by Edward Raymond Turner from London who caputred colored productions of his children at his home in Hounslow. Found by the National Museum in Bradford, the film had been forgotten for 110 years. -
The rebellion of the silent film stars
In 1919, some of Hollywood’s biggest names, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks rebelled against the studios and started United Artists, promising to give actors more control of their own careers. -
The release of the Jazz Singer
In 1927 “The Jazz Singer” released, synchronizing sound and images for the first time. The 1952 comedy “Singin’ in the Rain” is a depiction of the difficult shift to talking pictures that had taken place just 25 years before with a number of silent stars finding themselves unemployable as films began to rely more on voice acting than body language and facial expression. -
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The studio system
Studio’s like MGM, Paramount, RKO, Columbia and Warner Brothers made careers with the snap of a finger and controlled almost the entire film industry. In the late 1940s, antitrust lawsuits broke up much of the centralized power. -
The rise of the horror movie
Horror movies existed very early on in film history, but they had a renaissance in the 1930s where “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “The Mummy,” “The Invisible Man,” “King Kong,” “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “The Werewolf of London” were all produced within four years of one another. -
The rise of television
We can’t discuss film history without including television. In the 1950s, American homes began to include television sets. By that time, broadcast TV stations were widespread According to Steve Wiegand’s “U.S. History for Dummies” there were about three million TV owners in the beginning of the 1950’s and 55 million by the end. -
Invention of the wide screen
With the invention of television, film needed to up its game. New widescreen processes to produce bigger and more exciting films were the answer. -
The first 3D movie
April 1953 saw two groundbreaking features in 3D: Columbia's Man in the Dark and Warner Bros. House of Wax, the first 3D feature with stereophonic sound. -
Motion Picture Ratings
Motion picture ratings were introduced in 1968, with G, PG, R and X. PG-13 came significantly later. The X rating will later be replaced by NC-17. -
Black filmmakers step on the scene
Born in 1932, Melvin Van Peebles swiftly became tired of the everyday racism that kept Hollywood from even entertaining his ideas. 1968’s “Story of a Three Day Pass” got the attention of Hollywood and he received a deal from Columbia Pictures to make Watermelon Man, a movie about a bigoted white man who wakes up one morning and finds that, inexplicably, he’s Black. -
Indie cinema steps into the light
In 1989, 26-year-old indie filmmaker Steven Soderbergh broke out of the gate with his indie drama “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” which came in at 1.2 million dollars and shot in 30 days. In the years that followed, filmmakers using consumer and prosumer video equipment. -
The first computer-animated feature film
Released in 1995, Toy Story was the first computer-animated feature film and the debut feature release from Pixar Animation Studios, released by Walt Disney Pictures. -
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Cable TV comes of age
It used to be that every writer dreamed of having a Hollywood movie made of their novel. But after HBO spent seventy-three hours telling the story of George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” books in their blockbuster 7 season epic “Game of Thrones” everybody realized that properly handled, Cable TV was more capable of doing justice to long, complex stories.