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In January 1995, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of cinema, Fernando Fernán Gómez wrote a Third for ABC. In the article, the well-known Spanish actor and director spoke of the inventions that made it possible at the end of the 19th century and, in relation to the commercial exploitation in France of Thomas Alva Edison’s kinetoscope by Charles Pathé, he commented: «In the In the business world, the fundamental condition for making a good one is to prevent that business from being done by another businessman, even, if you are powerful enough, resorting to murder.
And he was right. Edison already was, and was cited in ‘Black and White’ and ABC, shortly after the two publications were founded 132 and 119 years ago, respectively, as the “illustrious inventor” or the “remarkable man.”
But he was never cited until relatively recently as the main person responsible for the birth of Hollywood as a mecca of cinema, as a result of violence and extortion by hired thugs, so that all those early producers and directors of the ‘seventh art’ in New York and New Jersey they paid the obligatory tax for using their inventions when shooting their films.
The famous inventor of the light bulb or the phonograph, born in the small town of Milan (Ohio) in 1847, had developed the aforementioned kinetoscope in the last decade of the 19th century, consisting of a wooden box with a hole through which, applying the eye, primitive moving images were seen. Edison, who was also a patent genius, quickly registered his invention and, when the Lumiere cinematographer arrived in the United States, he began to sue the famous French brothers, claiming that he invented the cinema.
The ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’, as he was also known at the time because of the land in New Jersey where his laboratory was located, was not going to allow anyone to make a single movie in his state without him putting in a significant amount of dollars . It does not matter that even today it is not clear who was the true inventor of the cinema. In fact, there are those who defend that he was William Friese-Greene a few years earlier, by inventing a projector that could reproduce up to seven images per second.
Assistant Dickson
After becoming famous with the phonograph (1877) and the light bulb (1879), Edison confessed that his intention was to build a machine that “was to the eye what the phonograph is to the ear”, and that by combining them could simultaneously record and reproduce image and sound. But it was not him, but his assistant, the English William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, who combined the aforementioned phonograph with chronophotography to create the kinetoscope. There are still, although deteriorated, some images of an experimental film in which Dickson can be seen playing the violin in front of the phonograph while two of his assistants dance in the foreground.
“We’ve done it, guys!” he yelled at his employees. And he went on to add: “The time is drawing near when the moving picture and the phonograph will blend so naturally, that we will be able to play a grand opera on that screen. And the result will be so realistic that critics themselves will be fooled.” But Edison’s real success was patenting it in 1891 and later allying himself with the Eastman house that manufactured celluloid to impress images.
That was how he took over the monopoly of that incipient film industry in the United States, which led him to demand that any filming had a certificate issued by his office which, after having disbursed considerable amounts of money, allowed producers to project his films in public. It was in April 1894 when the first public kinetoscope salon was opened at 1155 Broadway in New York, followed by many others in the area.
Those who did not pay this kind of revolutionary tax were threatened and extorted by thugs under Edison’s orders, but the young producers were not willing to pay for the patent. Then a trade war broke out very similar to the one that our protagonist had, years ago, with George Westinghouse for the supply of electricity to homes in the United States. They knew that whoever got that monopoly would become one of the richest men in the country. And the same would happen with the cinema.
detective army
It was the time of the ‘trust’, the American business monopolies, but there was also an antitrust law, the Sherman Act, which gave certain legal cover to the ‘outlaws’, as Edison called them for not paying their ‘taxes’. Even so, the inventor became the owner of the main film companies, including French ones such as Georges Méliès, and hired a gigantic army of detectives to inspect the filming that took place along the East Coast. Especially in New York, Boston and New Jersey.
Since 1910, a series of producers and directors decided to go far from the clutches of Edison to make their films and show them without the famous inventor’s thugs lying in wait. They chose the West Coast, thousands of miles away, somewhere as close to the Mexican border as possible, where they could take refuge in case the genius patent detectives found them. However, in the first three years they did not shoot anything.
The first to do so were the director Cecil B. DeMille and the producers Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn –the latter future creator of MGM– in December 1913. On the 27th they arrived by train to Flagstaff, a small town in Arizona, convinced that that that arid place was perfect for shooting his Western movie: ‘El mestizo’. As soon as they set foot on the platform, however, the universal deluge fell on them and they changed their minds. They continued to Los Angeles, California, which had 300,000 inhabitants at the time. A neighbor advised them to go to the neighborhood of Hollywood, built a decade and a half earlier. Seeing the sun, the desert areas and the price of rents, they did not think twice.
+ infoThe first film
Cecil, Lasky and Goldwyn took over a farm and shot their film, which was released in 1914, considered today as the first Hollywood film. Edison didn’t show up demanding his money, and the team breathed a sigh of relief. They had achieved their goal and were able to think of new projects as well as inspire other filmmakers and producers. In fact, the great promoter of Hollywood as the great mecca of world cinema was David Wark Griffith, who arrived shortly after with the idea of making a great blockbuster, after the more than four hundred 15-minute shorts he had shot. The result was the controversial ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915), 187 minutes long, which would mark a before and after in that new industry.
Hollywood grew and attracted new filmmakers from the East Coast until, in 1923, HJ Whitley, a powerful Los Angeles real estate developer, put the famous letters on the adjacent hill, ‘Hollywoodland’, which many years later became ‘Hollywood’. ‘. Edison died at the age of 84, in West Orange, New Jersey, on October 18, 1931. ABC dedicated its cover to him with a huge photograph of the inventor, reproducing President Hoover’s words of tribute: “A few men like him are given to become benefactors of all mankind.
www.abc.es
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism