Turn of the Century; 2; Nickel Madness

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I'm sorry I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry... Polygamist! A daring picture brought here in great expense. Thank you. Remember, five cents takes you to the picture show. You're late, Murath. Sorry. Wait a minute. I want you to read something. Everybody loves the picture show. Bring the kids.

It's the magic of the movies and they'll love it. Yes, sir, and it's all for only five cents. See your favorite illustrated songs between the reels sung by the celebrated marathon director from Chicago, Nazareth Trakeesian. Yes, sir, inside and all for only five cents. What do you think? I've already seen it, Mr. Wolf. I don't think it's so bad. You don't think it's so bad? Well, listen, if you had to pay the bills right here, you think it was bad enough? Listen to this thing. Uh, police commissioner, turn that thing off. Oh, yeah. Police commissioner says Nickelodeon's are a direct menace to you. They are demoralizing and pernick -eyes. Prinicious? Yeah, what's it mean? Well, I'm not sure. Maybe it's a compliment. Yeah, a bunch of blue nose. It must have got to hold of that cop. I'm just trying to make a living running in Nickelodeon. What do I got to do? Guard the morals of these. Hey, Seed. Huh? Do I? Just running a clean show. Oh, now wait a minute, Mr. Wolf. That's just what

the police commissioner said here. Further on down here, it says, uh, others. Friends of the people defend the Nickelodeons as offering a diversion for the poor. They are edifying education and amusing. They bring the universe to the unsophisticated. Education, Edivine. Listen, I run a store show for one reason to make money. As soon as I make a bundle, I'm going to get out, just like I did with the tent show. Matter of fact, right now I'm angling for a patent medicine deal out of Chicago. Well, do you really think the picture show is just a fad? Of course, that's just a bad one. What else could it be? The most you can give these people is 15, 20 minutes, whether or not. That's maybe a Wild West show. Any operator, they then won't sit still for one half an hour of it. Well, it's good films and bad films. Maybe the good ones will get better. Some of these directors, like that Griffith fella, they really know how to put their pictures together. Listen, the dumb plucks that come to this thing wouldn't know better pictures of this. Socks. Some of them can't even read. Some of them can't even speak English. It's not my job to lift them. I just take their nickels and give them a show. Well,

I don't know, Mr. Wolf. This may sound funny, but it's changing their lives. It's an escape for them. It takes them to the outside world. It takes them away from their own poor lives. They're going to want more pictures. Better ones. I suppose that the piano players will want more money. I wasn't going to bring that up. Oh, God, don't. Two bucks a day is top. So all you got to do is sit in there and play the piano. That ain't work. It isn't fun. Well, oughta be. It gets tiresome. I oughta enjoy yourself. It's a living. Well, get in there and start earning it. We've got to start filling up earlier these afternoons. Let's play. All right. We're still thinking about that nut with all the wives. Just just wait some time. Okay, Mr. Wolf. Oh, the inside. The new show every 20 minutes. Wonderful world. It's educational. It's edifying. Thank you, buddy. It brings a world to the poor. Best of all, it's pernicious. Just a nickel to see those wonderful moving pictures. Why else is wrong this is a little more joy so the

piano wazin' and the pretzels he need. They're illustrators. Oh, great play. It's a hundred and a half. Read yourselves to a host and picture today. What? And a nickel to see those wonderful moments. Hey! I'm going to play. I'm going to play. I'm going to play. I'm

going to play. I think while the operator changes the reels in the past, I'll push through to the reality of the present. If you'll allow your piano player to monkey with the time continuum, after all, anything can happen in the movies. Practically everything has. Since the movies were first shown in the Nickelodeons of America. It's a turn of the century story. The story of the early early shows. Run them in and run them out. That was the motto. As many quicky shows as could be crammed into a 12 -hour day or until a primitive projector blew up where the piano player fell off the stool from exhaustion. Now, our view of the early movies will be from this rather acute angle that twisted the next of 10 ,000 nameless piano players sitting in stuffy nickel shows from Maine to California, banging ragtime and bleeding heart tremoloes out of battered pianos as they played for the picture shows. Even the very early movies, you know, were never really silent. The sounds of the silent movies included the cry of a baby, the snore of a drunk, the crunching and crackling of peanuts and popcorn, all blended with the tinny piano. As the

projector flicked on the screen, the astonishing sights from the great big world outside. The very early movie fan was happy just to see motion. 20 years before, people had paid money to hear the primitive phonographs say hello and goodbye and now they paid to see motion. Trains were favorites, just to see a train rushing across the country was lyrical to the eye. It was one of the most one... Hey, wait a minute! Anything that moved was photographed. Always from one stationary position of the camera. Nobody thought you had a moving the camera. The people flocked to see things move in neutoscopes and photographs and etagraphs, vitoscopes and cinematics. Horse cars, trolleys, cable cars, and elevators, they were all great stuff. America was on the move anyway. The great turn of the century, transportation revolution was underway, trolleys,

electric trains, all sorts... That's funny, I could have sworn one of those curries didn't have a horse away. I'm betting our turn of the century movie fan got just as big a kick out of taking this wild curve as any patron of cinema at mid -century. I bet you think a train is going to come along right after those men say that girl, don't you? Nah, you've been seeing too many movies. And here was a real thrill. Hey, don't point that, it might go off. He got me. We got that turn of the century type at Bad Guy shooting up audiences. In the great train robbery, a one -reeler that marked the beginning of the Nickel movie madness and was the seed of the movie colossus to come. Why? Because it told a story. Over in France, at the turn of the century, they'd been experimenting with taking movies of stage plays, which was interesting, but got kind of boring after a while. Then an American by the name of Edwin Porter took the first bold steps in telling a story with film, a new way. Move the camera, Porter said, set it up in five, ten, a dozen different places.

Take the camera, anywhere the action wants to go. Then splice the pieces of film together later. Well, in 193, Porter tried it. He put together the great train robbery and it made history. Seen from the great train robbery, I'm sure it won't seem remarkable to mid -century eyes, sophisticated by years of movie going, but in these clips from that famous one -reeler, you'll see a whole flock of famous firsts in the film business. Story opens, the scene, a telegraph office, and a railway depot. But now where are we? Well, Director Porter depends on the mind and imagination of the spectator. We know the bandits slugged the telegraph operator, and now we see them sneaking on the train. Not, we feel sure, the petal box lunches. Meanwhile back at the depot, wait a minute, Mr. Porter, you can't do that, they said. But audiences accepted easily the idea that the camera could be anywhere at any time and follow several lines of action that are happening simultaneously. Trade term, parallel editing. Next step,

while the little girl is reviving her dad, the bandits are about to do in the mail clerk on the train. No footage wasted on a drawn -out death scene. On to the crying. Of course, these are just quick snips from Porter's great train robbery, but you're looking at the birth of the cinema technique, joining scenes to tell a story. Porter not only learned to make film tell a story by cutting back and forth, he also experimented with new and daring positions for the camera. Once the camera was planted though, it never moved in or out. We never see close -ups of the bandits or of the last moments of this foolhardy gentleman. Close -up technique was well in the future. Here's another innovation, a couple of times Porter followed action with his camera. Down the hill. Oops, don't lose him. There we are. And in this scene, the camera arcs or pans across the terrain after the bandits watch. Nobody'd

ever done that before. Until now, if the action didn't fit the rectangle the camera could see, he changed the action. The bandits don't escape. By the way, they're properly dispatched in a fine -gun battle of which one amazed reporter has said you can actually see the smoke of battle. The resulting excitement is great. Said the Edison film catalog of 1904 and apparently the public agreed. Ball worked by the success of the great train robbery, the first Nickelodeon's opened in 1905. And the public demanded stories. No more films of locomotives or ocean surf. The novelty of motion captured was gone and the infant art moved on to motion organized this new and exciting way to tell a story at home now in the Nickelodeons of America. Listen about that word Nickelodeon. There's been a lot of misunderstanding about that word. I think to most people today, Nickelodeon means a coin -operated

player piano, to which it did later become attached. But the Greek word Odian means theater. And from there on it's easy. Nickelodeon. 5 -cent theater. Theaters they were. 5 -cent they were rather theaters they were not. They were built anyplace. In big cities they were hastily improvised in tenements or warehouses, lunchrooms, arcades. So many were built in old store buildings that the term store shows came into use along with Nickelodeon. Not the cleanest places in the world, nor the most attractive, but their growth and popularity were astonishing. To the poor classes, to the immigrants in the large cities, the Nickelodeon was a vital theater, as one writer put it, in the fetid darkness tired men and women forgot the hardships of poverty. For this was happiness. This was the promised land. In 1999 exhibitors grossed $60 million dollars all in nickels. By 1910 Chicago had 300 Nickelodeon, St. Louis at 150, New York, 450. Audiences reached two and a half million a day, and as attendance climbed critics

clamored. In 1910 one of the leading magazines denounced the movies as the crown and summit of all influences leading to the demoralization of the young, not even a saloon being an exception. Another critic said that all movies were made for the 12 -year -old mind. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? I wonder why those guys always pick on the 12 -year -olds. Well, on the other hand, Social Worker Jane Adams defended the Nickelodeons, that it was the academy of the working man, his newspaper, his club. Owners and operators of Nickelodeons included the fast buck boys, the arcade carnival and peep show operators at one extreme, and hardworking families at the other, where mother and daughter sold the tickets. Dad took him at the door and Junior ran the sputtering projector, and there was one other member of that hardworking team at the Anna Player. Playing piano in the Old Nickelodeons must have been a grim business. One old timer, who played Kansas City in the solid days, tells of actually going to sleep

at the keyboard, without missing a cue. No wonder he went to work at 11 in the morning, and didn't get off till almost midnight. What did they play? Well, one on the scene observer put it beautifully, and it was obviously made up as the tired fingers went along. One felled of twins of sympathy, said for the pianist, condemned to the digital treadmill, bound to deliver, like bricks from a hod, his tired little assortment of arpeggios, runs played as with a porter's whisk broom, insensate modulations, and cords mere sound and fury. In other words, they faked it. Well, once I see the pants piano player, and picked up a few tricks, where he could fake his way through any picture, combining classics by memory, ragtime by ear, descriptive piano pieces, pop tunes, improvised runs and fills. Happy scenes, major chords. Sad scenes, minor chords.

Scenes you weren't too sure about, uh, Dm7th chords. The complete pianist always had it already, a couple of love themes, Rubenstein's melody and F. Blumonly, the flower song. Mendelssohn was also a pushover, even when played by ear. ... Always helped to add little tremolo to the right hand on these love scenes. Maybe that's why some of those old -timers drank so much that they could just put their right hand up there and let it

shake. Now for villainy, plenty of heavy minor chords here, and when it came to heavy dramatic action by the bad guy, you stayed in a minor key and played this fast and as loud as you could, to cover up your mistakes. The piano player was faced with playing the same one reeler for the 99th time. It must have been quite a chore, for instance, to play the death scene with restraint and good taste.

But the jaded piano player could always recover from his lethargy by playing a little fast rag time to cover the chase scenes, and there was always one at the end of every one time. Well from these shaky

Nickelodeon beginnings, Groovy, they highly developed movie mood music in the palatial theaters of the 1920s. And of course in those days, the golden age of the silence orchestras or organs, usually described as mighty or majestic, accompanied the fabled stars with carefully planned and time mood music. The better pictures carried full scores for complete orchestra, to play the ones that didn't, the pianist or organist or orchestra leaders simply reached into his file and pulled forth the proper mood pieces, specially composed, titled and labeled for his convenience, and went ahead and put together his own score. But of course in playing the very early movies, there was a lot more to do than just playing a mood in the background, as the movies had started life hitchhiking in Baudville, Baudville acts now followed the movies into the Nickelodeon's. Most Nickelodeon's just had one projector, had to do something while a projection has changed the reels, or a mended broken film, audiences got restless, and everything from dog acts to amateur dancers

filled in between reels. But the greatest filler of all was the illustrated song, for a time almost as much a part of Nickelodeon fare as the film itself. Ladies and gentlemen, now a special added attraction to this great film, which we'll have fixed here in just a jiffy, of course we always have the latest illustrated songs for you, and here is one of the city's best illustrators to sing it. He sings a

solo in the concerts in every summer at Jefferson Park, and he leads the men's quartet at Everly's funeral parlor. Mr. Max Mariah, the company to the piano by Mr. Mabel Zellico. Somebody's coming to my house, somebody's coming to stay. Father is so happy, he's jumping with joy, all he can say is I hope it's a boy, welcome his waiting a stranger, who come to bright in our lives. You can hear Mother Prune, and he'll be present that soon, when the cute little stranger arrives. Everyone's excited, down in our house,

everyone's delighted there, soon you'll be invited down to my house, down to a joyous affair. Can't you see I'm happy, happy and gay, well see to look a joy in her eye, but you'll never guess why I'm feeling so gay, so I'm going to tell you the reason why, are some bodies coming to my house, somebody's coming to stay. Father is so happy, he's jumping with joy, all he can say is I hope it's a boy, welcome his waiting a stranger, who come to bright in our lives, I can hear Mother Prune, he'll be present and soon, when the cute little stranger arrives. That film that broke, demanding the quick rendering of an illustrated song,

was an early effort by the legendary DW Griffith, it was Griffith who brought the film technique to maturity in America. In 1915 he would direct one of the great film classics of all time, the controversial birth of a nation. But in late Nickelodeon days, Griffith was still sharpening the tools of film storytelling, perfecting the editing process and experimenting with long shots and close -ups and changing camera positions within the scenes for dramatic effects. Griffith practically wrote the book on film technique after the crude beginnings handed to him by Edwin Porter and others. Here we are in a one reader by Griffith from 1911 called the Lone Dale Operator. At this point we're about halfway through the 14 minute film, but I think you can get the idea, lonely railroad station brave girl, her sweetheart's the engineer on the old number nine. And the bad guys are trying to steal money pods there. Now we're ready for some suspense, and Griffith was a master at building it with rapid cutting

from one scene to another. What was that object in the girl's hand there? We can't tell. But we know it isn't a gun because earlier in the show we saw her dad take the only real gun away with him. Well the bandits think it's a gun, but as far as we know it's a tinker toy. Now back to Lone Dale. And as the hero and his sidekick hold these vicious killers at bay we're dying for a look at that secret weapon and with the close -up of film technique first used by DW Griffith we find out it was oh come on! Well

after 1912, 1913 the Nickelodeon started to disappear as fast as they had sprouted a few years before, but certainly not because the public was tired of the movies, that's the opposite. Movies were moving uptown into the beautiful palatial movie theaters, the star system arrived, the ballet who began and the movies were here to stay. Wasn't until then that the songwriters by the way paid much attention to movies. Usually you could count on the tin fan alley boys to come through with all kinds of songs about such social revolutions, but I don't know the Nickelodeons didn't seem to interest them very much. Maybe it was because their songs were being illustrated in the Nickelodeons that they didn't write much about the Nickelodeons, but after 1915 they came through with plenty of songs that did Yolman service and providing a topical material about the movies and the movie stars. Mary Ann was a picture fan, she worked hard all day,

washing dishes she still had wishes to star in a photo play. One night Mary went to sleep at scenes, Mary had some very pretty dreams, she dreamt an angel came to her one day and she thought she heard it say, come out of the kitchen Mary darling, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, why waste your time cooking Irish stew? My Mary Pickford and Theta Barrow was step aside for you, how would you like to be started with Charlie Chaplin, your picture pasted on each garbage can, now it's a since there's nothing to do just let him kick your black and blue, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, come out of the kitchen Mary darling, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, girls like you were never meant to work, by all you need is a different face and you'll

look like Billy Bird, how would you like to be kissed by Douglas Fairbanks, and Francis Bushman loved you as he can, dressed up like Valeska Sirat, to mansion getting paid for that, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, oh yes, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann,

come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, come out of the kitchen Mary Ann, this is NET National Educational Television.