2/18/24
Newsletter #560
The Crack of Dawn
In about 1910 a man named Adolph Zukor (real name, Czukor Adolf; a Hungarian Jew, January 7, 1873 – June 10, 1976), who had been running penny arcades and nickelodeons for a decade – his first company in 1901 (with Marcus Loew) was the Automatic Amusement Company – decided there would be feature films, full-length movies, when everybody believed that no one would sit through anything longer than two reels, meaning 20-minutes maximum. There was no reason, by Zukor’s reckoning, that people wouldn’t pay top dollar to sit through full-length movies – if they were classy enough – just like a night at the theater. He named his company Famous Players in Famous Plays.
The most famous stage performer of her day was the French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. She was the rage in the 1860s and ‘70s. Although still extremely famous, by 1911 she was a wreck. At 68 years old she was bankrupt, and horribly had had one of her legs amputated at the hip. She had returned to the stage in The Loves of Queen Elizabeth because she desperately needed the money. Adolph Zukor paid her enough money for the movie rights to the play to pay off all of her bills. He then had several movie cameras shoot a full-length performance of the show, which was released at 53-minutes – the entire movie is available on Wikipedia – Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth - Wikipedia – and because it was a first, and a novelty, as well as Zukor making a very big deal out of it, it made a lot of money. For all intents and purposes, The Loves of Queen Elizabeth is the very first feature-length film, released in July 1912.
Other than being the very first feature length film – which nobody remembers – as well as one of the few photographic recordings of Sarah Bernhardt (admittedly, not in her prime), The Loves of Queen Elizabeth is sort of a worthless movie, meaning it’s not really a movie; it’s a play on a stage that was photographed. And it was really more of a stunt – get a glimpse of the great Sarah Bernhardt before she croaks (she actually lived for another ten years, performing up to the last minute. Several months before she died at the age of 78, she was starring in a play and went into a coma backstage for an hour. When she awoke, she said, “When do I go on?”)
In any case, Adolph Zukor had thrown down the gauntlet – there was a market for “high class” feature length films.
In 1913 the Italians took up the challenge and produced the epic, The Last Days of Pompeii, which came in at staggering 88-minutes. It too made money, so Zukor’s idea that big, spectacular feature length movies sold.
Following up on his success, Adolph Zukor was smart enough to understand that he wasn’t equipped or prepared to produce a feature length dramatic movie. Therefore, he merged Famous Players with Jesse Lasky Photoplays, which had already made many one- and two-reel films, and they became Famous Players-Lasky. In 1914 they acquired a distribution company called Paramount Pictures, which already had the mountain and stars logo, so they oddly renamed the parent company after their subsidiary. Jesse Lasky brought his extremely successful glove salesman brother-in-law, Sam Goldfish (later Goldwyn), into the company as a financier, and one-third owner.
Zukor and Lasky bought the rights to a hit Broadway play called The Squaw Man, also acquiring its star Dustin Farnum, as well as its hotshot young director, Cecil B. DeMille. This bit of the story has fallen into mythology. The myth goes that Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille and company took the train as far west as it would go, to Hollywood, and that’s true. Then in this stark little desert town where no one had ever heard of motion pictures, they shot The Squaw Man, the first feature film shot in Hollywood, in a tiny barn in the middle of nowhere. It’s all true except for the part that nobody in Hollywood had ever heard of movies. There were already several motion picture companies working in Hollywood, particularly Christie-Nestor Studios, located where Sunset Gower Studio is today. The barn “in the middle of nowhere” where they shot The Squaw Man was right across Sunset Boulevard from Christie-Nestor Studios.
It’s as stiff of an early silent film as there is, and a butt burner at 74-minues, but The Squaw Man made money, too. Feature length films were the newest, coolest thing, and here to stay.
Not to be outdone, the Italians came out with their next epic, Cabiria (1914) – originally running a massive 200-minutes – which has some of the weirdest sets ever built. It certainly has a thrilling poster. It even has a couple of camera moves.
Cabiria was not a big success. It’s very long, and though it has massive sets, the language of cinema was just being invented by D. W. Griffith and sadly they didn’t know it.
So that’s when D. W. Griffith jumped into the fray of epics with Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), and suddenly movies completely changed. Griffith had figured out how movies are made in his short Biograph films of 1909-1914, then he applied everything he knew in Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Birth of a Nation, which is as wrongheaded of a movie as has ever been made, was the most successful movie ever! It was the Jaws of 1915. It remained the high-grossing film in history for nearly 25 years, until Gone With the Wind in 1939.
It's taken me a week to write this shitty newsletter.
G’day on ya.
Thanks for the time and effort in writing this. Fascinating - the roots of the film business; I wonder what the long-gone founders would think if they time-machined forward to see a current-day A-List $400,000,000 budget film; As you have edified me, production techniques and technology have never, never stopped evolving since the First Feature forward.