On October 6th, 1889 American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847- 1931) showed his first motion picture, Monkeyshines, which was produced using a kinetograph, an early motion picture camera that was developed by his lab assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson.
The earliest surviving film, known today as the Roundhay Garden Scene (1888), was captured by Louis Le Prince and briefly depicted members of his family in motion.
The inventor and industrialist George Eastman, who had earlier experimented with sensitized paper rolls for still photography, began manufacturing celluloid roll film in 1889 at his plant in Rochester, New York.
Roundhay Garden Scene is a short silent motion picture filmed by French inventor Louis Le Prince at Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, Leeds, in Northern England on 14 October 1888. It is believed to be the oldest surviving film.
The longest movie ever made is titled "Logistics" and was first released in 2012. This experimental film was conceived and directed by two Swedish artists, Erika Magnusson, and Daniel Andersson.
The first commercially produced film in natural color was A Visit to the Seaside (1908). The eight-minute British short film used the Kinemacolor process to capture a series of shots of the Brighton Southern England seafront.
Just a few years after the first filmmakers emerged in the mid-1890s, Mellies created “Le Manoir du Diable,” sometimes known in English as “The Haunted Castle” or “ The House of the Devil,” in 1896, and it is widely believed to be the first horror movie.
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.
Hollywood was laid out as a subdivision in 1887 by Harvey Wilcox, who was a prohibitionist from Kansas. However, real-estate magnate H.J. Whitley transformed Hollywood into a wealthy and popular residential area. Hollywood became a municipality in 1903 and was incorporated into Los Angeles in 1910.
On October 6, 1927, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film to incorporate synchronized sound for sequences of dialogue. Though these sequences were limited and brief, hearing the voices of the film's stars was a revelation for audiences.
In 1997, Hollywood released "Twister" and "Mars Attacks!" as the first movies on DVD. Here's a look at how CNN covered the breakthrough technology that sought to replace VHS tapes.
One of the very first feature-length films to feature a “monster” dates back to the silent era. Soon after the development of motion pictures, filmmakers began exploring ways to bring traditional folklore to life on the big screen, beginning with Der Golem, a German silent film made in 1915.
The intrigue of the zombie myth made it an increasingly popular device in American horror at the beginning of the 20th century, culminating in the first time they were featured in a film. That film was White Zombie. Released in 1932, it's the archetypal early horror film.
The genre was invented by Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto (1765) may be said to have founded the horror story as a legitimate literary form.
Frank Baum novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first being shot entirely in black and white. The much more famous 1939 adaptation directed by Victor Fleming and featuring Judy Garland as Dorothy was shot mostly in Technicolor but with certain sequences in sepia-toned (brownish) black and white.
The Wizard of Oz was not the first movie in color, but it revolutionized the use of color in film and set a precedent for future movies. The first color movie in film history was "The World, The Flesh, and the Devil," a feature-length work of fiction filmed using the Kinemacolor process.
The first color television show in history was "The World Is Yours," which aired on June 25, 1953, on NBC. It starred Arlene Francis and was broadcast in color as an experiment using the new technology.
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was Walt Disney's first break-out cartoon star. Walt unfortunately discovered on a trip to New York to renew his contract for Oswald that the character was the property of Universal.
Pete is the oldest continuing Disney character, having debuted in the cartoon Alice Solves the Puzzle in 1925. He originally bore the appearance of an anthropomorphic bear, but with the advent of Mickey in 1928, he was defined as a cat.
