Blog Archives

William Wyler, American cinema producer and  director, born on this day in 1902.

Alice Guy-Blache, the first cinema director, is born in France on this day in 1873.  She started as secretary to  Léon Gaumont, owner of a photographic and then major motion picture company. When the Lumier Brothers  demonstration a system for projected cinema in Paris, on March 22, 1895, Blache pitched a short story to Gaumont — the Cabbage Fairy. It was completed in April 1896, just a month before the film usually considered the first narrative — George Méliès L’Arroseur arrosé.  After the success of the Cabbage Fairy,  Blache worked on hundreds of short and feature films for Gaumont and in 1907, established a Gaumont film studio in New York. In 1910, she went on to create her own Solax studio in New York with her husband, Herbert Blache. She directed her last film in 1920, and Solax collapsed in bankruptcy in 1922.  She lived in obscurity for the next 46 years and died in 1968 in New Jersey. Overall, she directed over 1,000 films, about 350 of which survive today.   Guy-Blache was  neglected by film historians for many decades, and her lead role in pioneering film narrative has only recently been recognized and appreciated.

Gone with the Wind, a novel about the American South during the Civil War, is published on this day in 1936 and becomes a major motion picture by 1939.  The book and movie became leading symbols of a mythically gracious Southern culture. The myth has been strongly criticized for denying any acknowledgement of African American suffering under the pre-war slave and post-war Jim Crow systems. Like all big historical myths, the “GWTW myth” has a negative impact for those attempting to come to grips with modern realities.

 Eadweard Muybridge takes a series of photographs on this day in 1878 to prove that all four feet of a horse leave the ground when it runs. The photos win a bet for California governor Leland Stanford, who hired   Muybridge,  a photographic pioneer, to do the study.

Limelight department of the Salvation Army establishes a lantern-slide studio to illustrate talks by Christian missionaries on this day in 1892 in Melbourne, Australia.

Carl Laemmle incorporates Universal Pictures on this day in 1912.

The first drive-in theater opens in Camden, New Jersey on this day in 1933.

Orson Welles, theater, radio and director and producer, most famous for  the 1941 movie Citizen Kane, is born on this day in 1915. Welles was the enfant terrible of American media in the mid-20th century. His Mercury Theater on CBS was responsible for the “War of the Worlds” broadcast that panicked millions of people Oct. 31, 1938.  In 2002, Welles was voted the greatest film director of all time in two British Film Institute polls, and Citizen Kane is often considered the best film, for example, ranking #1 by the American Film Institute.

Hair, the musical, opens at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway.  The production depicts the anti-war counter-culture of the 1960s.

Frankenstein’s monster first appears in a silent short film produced by Thomas Edison’s movie studio in New York.