Audiences were watching projected images as early as the 18th century. But the pictures were drawings, and they didn't move. That would come in the 1880s. The first movie pioneers were self-taught engineers and tinkerers, itinerant entertainers and street-smart showmen. The first film producer was probably the man known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park, " Thomas Edison. He perfected a machine that created pictures that moved, although much of the credit belongs to his assistant, W.K.L. Dickson, the industry's first director. From the beginning, American movies were special...
California was quickly recognized as the ideal setting for the American film industry, with its relative freedom from patent problems, constant sunshine and varied geography. As early as 1909, movie makers were hard at work in Hollywood, including William Selig, who had founded one of the country's first movie studios in Chicago. In California, he would develop such performing talent as Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Tom Mix. In 1913 Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn and Cecil B. DeMille formed a filmmaking company and established themselves among the first generation of ...
The American movie business started as peepshows and grew into a near-mythical art form that used an exciting new technology to create drama, laughter and adventure bigger than life.
