So by this point between the 1890s and early 1900s, the film industry was still in its early steps. We still had people just trying to figure how can we run a filming business, how are we going to distribute these films and more importantly, who are these films for.
At the beginning of the 1900s we start to see more theaters, more films being shown in vaudeville houses, amusement arcades. However, people were starting to sick of news sources or films that were just simple things that anyone can do, like feeding a baby or doing their garden and there were still some people that thought that film was just another form of a fad that was going to fade away pretty soon.
Well we have two films that proved those people wrong and these films help set the standard on how films should be made if we're going to make them last longer.
The first film was released on September 1, 1902 called A Trip to the Moon, released by good old Georges Melies.
I've wrote about Georges Melies before and how much of an influence this man was in the movie industry, but this film was something unlike any other films at the time. This was the film that set the standard on how a film showed be made and what movies actually mean.
Georges Melies put all of the work and all of the effects he has learned into this film. This was one of the biggest projects he'd ever worked on. When asked how he came up with the idea, he gave credit to Jules Verne's novels, From the Earth to the Moon, and Around the Moon, for his inspiration for the film. Other film historians also believe that he may have gotten the idea for the film from H.G. Wells's novel, The First Men in the Moon. As well as Jacques Offenbach's own opera version of A Trip to the Moon, and an attraction ride at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York that's also call A Trip to the Moon.
A Trip to the Moon is often credited as being an early example of sci-fi films as this was the first movie to take place at space which was something no one has ever seen before, and the movie does show it's age in terms of how this movie portrays what space life is like. There's no gravity and all of the people can somehow breathe in space, but it was still a cool concept and I think Melies pick a great subject for this movie.
The film took about 3 months in production and it cost a lot of money for Melies, the budget for the film costed about 10,000 French franc. He used the money to buy the costumes, make the props and sets, and to pay the actors working on the film, which he paid them one Louis d'or per day. According to Melies much of the cost was due to the mechanically operated scenery and the costumes, which Melies himself made sculpted prototypes for the heads, feet, and knee cap pieces, and then he created plaster molds for them.
For the effects, Melies used the ones that he's been using during his days as a director, such as the stop trick I've mentioned before, he also used a tracking shot which he used previously for a short film called The Man with the Rubber Head.
After Melies was done with the production of the film, he began to show his film in a fairground in May of 1902. When the film was shown, audiences went crazy for the film, there were so many encores and enthusiasm from them that the person that Melies allowed him to show his film for free, purchase the film immediately.
From September through December of 1902, hand-color prints of the film were also made and shown at Melies's Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris. Later Melies began selling both black and white and color versions of the film from between 560 and 1000 French franc. He also sold it through Charles Urban's Warwick Trading Company in London, but the main country he was aiming for to sell his films was America, but the film was pirated from many American film companies like Edison Manufacturing company. So to solve the piracy problem, Georges had his brother Gaston Melies to set up an American branch of the Star Film company in New York and to make sure that the people only purchase the original films from Melies himself and not some pirated company.
Although the pirated films would later play a part in Melies's bankruptcy, the film was still very popular and it's still popular to this day. The movie itself was use in a song by the Smashing Pumpkins called, Tonight, Tonight. And this movie was undeniably the film that set a lot of grounds for how a movie should be made.
But A Trip to the Moon wasn't the only popular film from the 1900s, Director Edwin S. Porter also knew from watching A Trip to the Moon that people wanted some form of fictional story so he made a film that also innovated a couple of new techniques. The film he made, called The Great Train Robbery, was the first film were the film was shot from a real railroad, it was filmed at the Lackawanna railroad in New Jersey which is where most film studios were located at the time. So this was one of first films to use a new way of filming called location shooting.
This was also the first film to use a new technique called cross-cutting. Cross-cutting is basically when something is happening in a one scene and then we see another thing happening in another scene happening at the same time. For instance, in this film we start off the film of a group of bandits forcing a telegraph operator to write a false report and telling the engineer to take in water at this station instead of the station they usually stop at, after that they tie the operator up and leave him behind to rob the train. Later while the bandits are robbing the train and getting away, we see the operator's daughter finding her father and helping him break free from the rope and the father goes to a dance hall and alerts the sheriff at there's been a robbery and they go after the bandits. It was also the first film to have the camera panning to the characters in this case it's the bandits.
When the film was released on December 1st, 1903. It was met with the same praise and applause that A Trip to the Moon received, this film had story, it had characters, it had actions, it was the film that people were looking for. It's considered to be an early Western and Action film and it had many remakes after it was premiere. In fact, the same director for this movie, Porter, had made a parody of the film known as The Little Train Robbery, and in this film it's actually a bunch of kids that are robbing children on a miniature train and they steal their candy and dolls, must be a slow day for the kids.
Anyway after A Trip to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery directors now finally have the answer on how to make filming a business, and of courses like any business, it'll include some business deals, rivals, and locations.