In the 1900s, movies would become a very popular pastime, being shown at places like amusement parks, music halls, wax museums and other main attractions for people to enjoy. 1902 was when Thomas Tally's, one of the earliest movie houses designed for showing motion pictures, was created in Los Angeles.
What were early films like? At first, films were very short, sometimes only a few minutes or less. They were shown at fairgrounds, music halls, or anywhere a screen could be set up and a room darkened.
As the popularity of “moving pictures” grew in the early part of the decade, movie "palaces" capable of seating thousands sprang up in major cities. A ticket for a double feature and a live show cost 25 cents.
The first movie houses were dubbed "nickelodeons," combining the price of admission with the Greek word for theater. By 1908, there were nearly 8,000 nickelodeon theaters in the U.S. and in two years the number had grown to 10,000.
These opulently appointed theaters were constructed in the exotic styles of French Baroque, Italian Renaissance, Egyptian Revival, as well as Aztec and Oriental imagery. The majority of these theaters could seat audiences of 1,000 to 3,000 people. Others, like the Roxy in New York City, could seat over 6,000 people.
The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window.
Drive-ins gained immense popularity 20 years later during the 1950s and '60s with the Baby Boomer generation. There were over 4,000 drive-ins throughout the U.S., and most were in rural areas.
They would sometimes show movies on TV. Also, some old movies would come back and make the rounds of theaters again. Clubs could rent out movies and show them if they were willing to sign the appropriate agreements and pay the fees and had a theater to show it.
The VCR was still a popular appliance in most households (about three quarters of them in 1991) and rentals and purchase of videotapes were big business - much larger than sales of movie theater tickets.
How did people watch old movies before home video?
There were only three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Each had a version of showing old movies, sometimes as matinees, most times as late-night entertainment. At first, they were shown late at night: The Late Movie was shown on CBS tv. While in high school, there was a program called Million Dollar Movie.
The thing about movies up until 1972 was that someone else dictated where and when you could watch them. You either had to go to the movie theater or wait for the film to show on TV. That was a major bummer, so production studios decided to do something revolutionary: they released films on VHS.
In the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a typical home cinema in the United States would have a LaserDisc or VHS player playing a movie, with the signal fed to a large rear-projection television set, with the audio output through a stereo system. Some people used expensive front projectors in a darkened viewing room.
“When the movie production companies started selling movies on tape, we could buy them to watch at home, on our VCRs. We could also rent movies at Blockbuster (yes, they went out of business) to watch at home. It was a little bit like borrowing a book from the library, but we had to pay to borrow them.
The first color cinematography was by additive color systems such as the one patented by Edward Raymond Turner in 1899 and tested in 1902. A simplified additive system was successfully commercialized in 1909 as Kinemacolor.
The cinema has evolved from black-and-white silent films edited by physically cutting film strips to 3D digital content spliced together on computers. The digital age has allowed for better quality, color, sound, and even computer-generated imagery (CGI).
It is said that viewers of the first movies were frightened by what they saw, such as moving images of an incoming train. Newman's blog also demolishes several other fondly held beliefs, some of them passed along as facts by such as me.
In the mid-1970s, videotape became the first truly practical home-video format with the development of videocassettes, which were far easier to use than tape reels.
Towards the end of the 70s then, watching films at home got two big boosts. The first was that you could record stuff from the TV (albeit 13 years late…) and rewatch it whenever you felt like it, the other was that you could go to a shop, rent a film and bring it home on a Friday night to watch with the family.
Movies were fun. They provided a change from the day-to-day troubles of life. They also were an important social force. Young Americans tried to copy what they saw in the movies.
How were movies first displayed for the public in America?
The first Kinetoscope parlor, owned by the Holland Brothers, opened on April 14, 1894, in New York. Five machines were placed in a row, and a customer could view the films in each for a total of 25 cents. Kinetoscope parlors soon opened around the United States.
The first feature film originally presented as a talkie (although it had only limited sound sequences) was The Jazz Singer, which premiered on October 6, 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology.
