By Kenneth Hoard Smith
IFS Writer
WOODLAND CA (IFS) -- Between 1915 to 1962 there were over Ten Thousand Independent Commercial Films Made in the name of Hollywood. The movie business lost all of its power around 1895. The majority of commercial films (the Nickelodeon) were only one minute film loops that repeated itself when another coin was deposited into the machine and the handle pulled.
All of the projection tricks with mechanical means and composites which sent the cave men and women to the walls and draw what they had experienced that day or within that week. Cave drawings are done by the young people with climbing skills and love to create scenes of the day.
They projected hand signs from wooden lanterns they had fashioned from long bones and wood while chewing the fat and drinking nod from sprouted wheat seeds.
Of course, the most famous cave movie was found in France, with a single hunter placed in over twenty constructive drawing down to the last battle killing the strangers. A very smart computer tech, place those, drawing into a movie which showed the murders frame by frame. The drawings are over 20,000 years old.
Film that magical stuff created for very short subject matter needed a major work over. So enter the Lumiere Brothers from France.
In 1895, the Lumiere created the first camera with its own portable lab, editor and projector that was 35MM. Each photo cartridge was three (3) minutes of film, instead of 60 seconds. When this camera came to the United States via Sears, a young film producer by the name of George Selig created an "American Version or copy" of this camera by reworking the sockets and timing gears and established a real 35 MM frame system that Kodak and Bell and Howell enhanced and created the American Standard for cinema projectors and cameras.
This invention was sold all over the world including here in the United States Sears and Roebuck. They sold tens of thousand of these camera/projectors. However, by the year 1912, a young company by the name of Kodak along with Bell and Howell re -invented the motion picture camera to look like this:
The business was slow in advancing ahead. The majority of cameras sold was for commercial business companies following their products around the country and testing them with customers in general.
D.W. Griffith's "A Birth Of A Nation" in 1915, created a spark of creativity that did not recede until the middle of the 1950's when television came into the home.
Sears had invented a new product that was called "credit". It was elastic money and Sears let you have a camera and projector system for time payments. They real boom came from the Afro Americans in the cinema business with their own cameras and many many others citizens who wanted into the motion picture game. When Sears unveiled their first talking motion picture camera in 1927 for the masses, in only took Hollywood two years to catch up with the public.
John Wayne's pictures from 1929 to 1936 were filmed in five (5) days or less. All motion pictures under 69 Minutes were considered as "B" Movies or Films. Every John Wayne movie under 69 minutes was pared with a major film as a double feature, giving Wayne the high value actor on most screens in America every week.
