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227-505: Film Booking Offices of America ( FBO ), registered as FBO Pictures Corp. , was an American film studio of the silent era , a midsize producer and distributor of mostly low-budget films. The business began in 1918 as Robertson-Cole , an Anglo-American import-export company. Robertson-Cole began distributing films in the United States that December and opened a Los Angeles production facility in 1920. Late that year, R-C entered into

454-407: A masked, secret, or unsuspected villain menacing an unspecific part of America. This episode traditionally has the most detailed credits at the beginning, often with pictures of the actors with their names and that of the character they play. Often there follows a montage of scenes lifted from the cliffhangers of previous serials to depict the ways in which the master criminal was a serial killer with

681-445: A 16 fps projection of the same reel would take 16 minutes and 40 seconds, or 304 millimetres (12.0 in) per second. In the 1950s, many telecine conversions of silent films at grossly incorrect frame rates for broadcast television may have alienated viewers. Film speed is often a vexed issue among scholars and film buffs in the presentation of silents today, especially when it comes to DVD releases of restored films , such as

908-532: A banner under which R-C had released more than a dozen independent productions. The West Coast studio operation continued to make films under the Robertson-Cole name for some time, but FBO ultimately became the primary identity of the business for production as well as distribution. Between May 1922 and October 1923, one of the company's new American investors, Pat Powers , was effectively in command. Powers had previously led his own filmmaking company, part of

1135-406: A bit longer than most, for its tasks were to unmask the head villain (who usually was someone completely unsuspected), wrap up the loose ends, and end with the victorious principals relieved of their perils. In 1936, Republic standardized the "economy episode" (or "recap chapter") in which the characters summarize or reminisce about their adventures, so as to introduce showing those scenes again (in

1362-493: A cliffhanger. This serial was directed by Richard Donner and featured the first African American action hero in a chapter play. The violence present in most of the episodes, though much of it was deliberately comical and would not be considered shocking today, also raised concerns at a time when violence in children's TV was at issue. On February 27, 1979, NBC broadcast the first episode of an hour-long weekly television series Cliffhangers! , which had three segments, each with

1589-500: A colleague, "Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them." In 1925, he set out to do so, forming his own group of investors led by wealthy Boston lawyer Guy Currier, Filene's department store owner Louis Kirstein, and Union Stockyards and Armour and Company owner Frederick H. Prince . In August 1925, Kennedy traveled to England with an offer to buy

1816-675: A controlling stake in Film Booking Offices for $ 1 million. The bid was initially rejected—Graham's and co-financier Lloyd's had poured no less than $ 7 million into the company—but in February 1926, FBO's owners decided to take the money. From the studio's New York City headquarters, Kennedy swiftly addressed its perennial cash-flow problems, setting up a new business, the Cinema Credits Corporation, to provide FBO with reliable financing at favorable terms. He

2043-655: A coup by licensing the comic-strip character Flash Gordon for the screen; the serial was a smash hit, and was even booked into first-run theaters that usually did not bother with chapter plays. Universal followed it up with more pop-culture icons: The Green Hornet and Ace Drummond from radio, and Smilin' Jack and Buck Rogers from newspapers. Universal was more story-conscious than the other studios, and cast its serials with "name" actors recognizable from feature films: Lon Chaney Jr. , Béla Lugosi , Dick Foran , The Dead End Kids , Kent Taylor , Robert Armstrong , Irene Hervey , and Johnny Mack Brown , among many others. In

2270-499: A different serial: a horror story ( The Curse of Dracula , starring Michael Nouri ), a science fiction/western ( The Secret Empire, (inspired by 1935's The Phantom Empire ) starring Geoffrey Scott as Marshal Jim Donner and Mark Lenard as Emperor Thorval) and a mystery ( Stop Susan Williams! , starring Susan Anton , Ray Walston as Bob Richards, and Albert Paulsen as the villain Anthony Korf). Though final episodes were shot,

2497-583: A distance—was Tom Tyler , who finished twenty-third among men in the 1927 exhibitors' poll. Born Vincent Markowski, he had been a weightlifter and bit actor before his transformation into a cowboy headliner. According to a hyperbolic June 1927 report in Moving Picture World : "With Tom Tyler rapidly taking the place recently vacated by Fred Thomson [for the Paramount sojourn from which he would never return], F.B.O.'s program of western pictures

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2724-418: A distribution deal between FBO and Thomson for half a dozen independent Westerns . An in-house series of boxing-themed shorts, Fighting Blood , starring FBO newcomer George O'Hara , grew so popular it was often billed above the accompanying feature. O'Hara would become an FBO mainstay, as would Alberta Vaughn , who specialized in shorts: most of her films were two-reelers , a measure of film length indicating

2951-504: A flat rental basis. Further, the stock market crash of 1929 and the added expense of sound equipment made it impossible for many of the smaller companies that produced serials to upgrade to sound, and they went out of business. Mascot Pictures , which specialized in serials, made the transition from silent to sound and produced the first "talking" serial, King of the Kongo (1929). Universal Pictures also kept its serial unit alive through

3178-508: A job with Warner Bros. In Hollywood, he would make such hits as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Casablanca (1942) under the name Michael Curtiz . Una Nueva y gloriosa nación (1928), the most successful film in the history of Argentine silent cinema, was shot in Hollywood and distributed in the United States by FBO as The Charge of the Gauchos . One of its two cinematographers

3405-413: A key professional in silent film and was often separate from the scenario writer who created the story. Inter-titles (or titles as they were generally called at the time) "often were graphic elements themselves, featuring illustrations or abstract decorations that commented on the action". Showings of silent films almost always featured live music starting with the first public projection of movies by

3632-519: A live performer: the Alice Comedies , of which FBO would release over two dozen, were created by two young animators, Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney . Silent film A silent film is a film without synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue ). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when necessary, be conveyed by

3859-469: A low budget salute to sentimental silent comedies, particularly Charlie Chaplin 's The Kid . The German film Tuvalu (1999) is mostly silent; the small amount of dialog is an odd mix of European languages, increasing the film's universality. Guy Maddin won awards for his homage to Soviet-era silent films with his short The Heart of the World after which he made a feature-length silent, Brand Upon

4086-600: A major studio devoted to all-sound production with the RCA Photophone sound-on-film system was the goal—or, at least, Sarnoff's goal. FBO's The Perfect Crime , starring Clive Brook and Irene Rich , opened on August 4, 1928, at the Rivoli movie palace in Manhattan's Theater District . The first film directed by admired cinematographer Bert Glennon , it was also the first feature-length " talkie " to appear from

4313-415: A motive. In the first episode, various suspects or "candidates" who may, in secret, be this villain are presented, and the viewer often hears the voice but does not see the face of this mastermind commanding his lieutenant (or "lead villain"), whom the viewer sees in just about every episode. In the succeeding weeks (usually 11 to 14), an episode of two reels (approximately 20 minutes) was presented, in which

4540-645: A much longer time for color to be adopted by the industry and an effective process to be developed. Blue represented night scenes, yellow or amber meant day. Red represented fire and green represented a mysterious atmosphere. Similarly, toning of film (such as the common silent film generalization of sepia -toning) with special solutions replaced the silver particles in the film stock with salts or dyes of various colors. A combination of tinting and toning could be used as an effect that could be striking. Some films were hand-tinted, such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1894), from Edison Studios . In it, Annabelle Whitford ,

4767-450: A music-only soundtrack in place of dialogue. The term silent film is a retronym —a term created to retroactively distinguish something from later developments. Early sound films, starting with The Jazz Singer in 1927, were variously referred to as the "talkies", "sound films", or "talking pictures" . The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is older than film (it was suggested almost immediately after Edison introduced

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4994-532: A new contract in 1925, the former Yale halfback demonstrated his range by playing a "fast riding motorcycle copper" in a May release, a "battling policeman" in September, and Breckenrdige Gamble, a bored millionaire turned international secret agent, in October. Ralph Lewis , a prolific character actor who had appeared in several D. W. Griffith films, including The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance ,

5221-527: A number of Tom Tyler/Frankie Darro Westerns. The fabled Strongheart starred in FBO's Jack London adaptation White Fang (1925). For a small role in the melodrama My Dad (1922), a three-year-old Alsatian who would become one of the greatest canine stars of all time was singled out by the New York Daily News : " Rin-Tin-Tin ...runs off with most of the histrionic honors. The dog stages one of

5448-477: A permanent position in Columbia's serial unit. Horne had been a comedy specialist in the 1930s, often working with Laurel and Hardy , and most of his Columbia serials after 1939 are played tongue-in-cheek, with exaggerated villainy and improbable heroics (the hero takes on six men in a fistfight and wins ). After Horne's death in 1942, the studio's serial output was somewhat more sober, but still aimed primarily at

5675-469: A person would even narrate the inter-title cards for the audience. Though at the time the technology to synchronize sound with the film did not exist, music was seen as an essential part of the viewing experience. "Silent film" is typically used as a historical term to describe an era of cinema prior to the invention of synchronized sound, but it also applies to such sound-era films as City Lights , Modern Times and Silent Movie which are accompanied by

5902-469: A personal hand in guiding the company creatively as well as financially. His brand, "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents", would proceed to appear on over a hundred films. Kennedy soon brought stability to FBO, making it one of the most reliably profitable outfits in the minor leagues of the Hollywood studio system . The focus was on films with Main Street appeal and minimal costs. "We are trying", he declared, "to be

6129-674: A popular form of movie entertainment dating back to Edison's What Happened to Mary of 1912. There appear to be older serials, however, such as the 1910 Deutsche Vitaskop 5 episode Arsene Lupin Contra Sherlock Holmes , based upon the Maurice LeBlanc novel, and a possible but unconfirmed Raffles serial in 1911. Europe had its own serials: in France Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset launched his series of Nick Carter films in 1908, and

6356-513: A popular radio series); from the British novelist Edgar Wallace , the first archer-superhero, The Green Archer; and even from television: Captain Video . Columbia's early serials were very well received by audiences—exhibitors voted The Spider's Web (1938) the number-one serial of the year. Former silent-serial director James W. Horne co-directed The Spider's Web , and his work secured him

6583-634: A premiere on May 29 and went into general release in July. With its move into production, Robertson-Cole needed its own filmmaking studio: in June, it acquired a lot around fifteen acres (six hectares) in size in Los Angeles's fortuitously named Colegrove district , then adjacent to but soon to be subsumed by Hollywood . For exterior shoots, the company purchased 460 acres in Santa Monica , to be known as

6810-503: A race to design, implement, and market several rival sound-on-disc and sound-on-film sound formats, such as Photokinema (1921), Phonofilm (1923), Vitaphone (1926), Fox Movietone (1927) and RCA Photophone (1928). Warner Bros. was the first studio to accept sound as an element in film production and utilize the Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc technology, to do so. The studio then released The Jazz Singer in 1927, which marked

7037-566: A rare "unforgettable picture of the higher caliber" put out by FBO. Reviews at the time called it "absorbing" and "vastly entertaining". Among the studio's action movies, one standout production was a 1927 Tarzan picture. Author Edgar Rice Burroughs declared, "If you want to see the personification of Tarzan of the Apes as I visualize him, see the film Tarzan and the Golden Lion with Mr. James Pierce ." The Film Daily reviewer wrote that

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7264-411: A running time of fifteen to twenty-five minutes. (Many feature films of the era were no more than five reels.) H.C.S. Thomson of Graham's, already chairman of the board, became the business's managing director with the departure of Powers. B. P. Fineman was hired as the studio's production chief in 1924; Evelyn Brent , his wife, moved over from Fox to become FBO's top dramatic star. Fred Thomson's fame

7491-611: A seat on the FBO board. At the same time, Kennedy had aligned with investment banker Elisha Walker and his firm Blair & Co., which had acquired the small Pathé Exchange studio and a stake in Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO), a vaudeville exhibition chain owning approximately one hundred theaters across the United States and affiliated with many more; KAO and Blair & Co. together controlled yet another small studio, Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC), famed director Cecil B. DeMille 's outlet and one-time fiefdom, which

7718-540: A seat on the R-C board, paying him a monthly adviser's fee, and promising a sizable commission. Though he failed to arrange the sale Graham's was looking for (and his own offer to buy 25 percent of the business was turned down), Kennedy would become deeply involved with the studio in the coming years. In 1922, Robertson-Cole underwent a major reorganization as the company's founders departed. The flagship U.S. distribution business changed its name to Film Booking Offices of America,

7945-460: A six-picture deal in hopes of filling the void. In FBO's waning months, former Fox star Olive Borden played the lead in three films. Boris Karloff appeared in six FBO pictures between 1925 and 1927; in two of his earliest major roles, he performed opposite Brent in the action-oriented Forbidden Cargo and Lady Robinhood (both 1925). In its pre-Kennedy years, the studio did not hesitate to take advantage of scandal sheet–worthy events. After

8172-498: A special effect in many of his films. His 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation used a number of colors, including amber, blue, lavender, and a striking red tint for scenes such as the "burning of Atlanta" and the ride of the Ku Klux Klan at the climax of the picture. Griffith later invented a color system in which colored lights flashed on areas of the screen to achieve a color. With the development of sound-on-film technology and

8399-621: A specialty of melodramatic pictures with a crime angle, often billed as "crook melodramas"—in Midnight Molly (1925), she played an ambitious politician's faithless wife and her look-alike, a high-end cat burglar. Talmadge, a stunt designer and double for major stars including Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd , took the lead in action pictures for FBO—"stunt dramas" such as Stepping Lively (1924) and Tearing Through (1925). He appeared in eighteen FBO releases, more than half of them produced by his own company. Talmadge's last film for

8626-503: A studio other than Warner Bros. since the epochal premiere of Warners' The Jazz Singer ten months before. The Perfect Crime had been shot silently in anticipation of a silent release. Using RCA Photophone, dialogue and "mystery sound effects" were dubbed in afterward. Savaging it as a "jabberwocky of inane incidents", the New York Times review concluded, "What it is all about can be called only an open question. A guess at

8853-423: A subsidiary of Jerry Hyams's Hygo Television Films, bought the 1936-1946 Universal serials (including all titles, rights, and interests) for $ 1,500,000. Also in 1956, Columbia's TV subsidiary Screen Gems reprinted many of its serials for broadcast syndication. Only the films' endings were changed: Screen Gems replaced the "at this theater next week" title card with its standard Screen Gems logo. Screen Gems acquired

9080-424: A substantial annual slate of two-reelers (twenty-six per year as of their last contract); twelve of those from 1924–25 starred Stan Laurel , before his famous partnership with Oliver Hardy . West of Hot Dog (1924), according to historian Simon Louvish, contains "one of [Laurel]'s finest gags," involving a level of cinematic technique that bears comparison to Buster Keaton 's classic Sherlock Jr. In 1926–27,

9307-425: A trade journal—perhaps echoing publicity copy—the tale was "a reminder that the foundation of all law and order lies in that greatest of American institutions—the home." When the biggest movie star in the world, Rudolph Valentino , split from his wife, Natacha Rambova , she was swiftly enlisted by the studio to costar with Clive Brook in the sensitively titled When Love Grows Cold (1926). Under Kennedy's control,

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9534-484: A twenty-five-year-old Jean Arthur . As 1928 began, Tyler was the most popular actor actually working at FBO, but Kennedy wanted the big gun. He bided his time as Tom Mix toured the Orpheum vaudeville theaters with a live show—boosting Kennedy's new exhibition interests—and legal machinations ensured Thomson's exile. Finally, Mix was signed to a six-film deal and began shooting in July. He ultimately made five pictures for

9761-521: A wide variety of serials and other shorts , from Supreme Comedies with Harry Depp and Teddy Sampson to a biweekly series, On the Borderland of Civilization , filmed by adventurer Martin Johnson . Late in 1919, independent motion picture producer Frank Hall acquired Exhibitors Mutual and integrated it into his new Hallmark Exchanges. In January 1920, Robertson-Cole purchased Hallmark, securing

9988-496: A working relationship with East Coast financier Joseph P. Kennedy . A business reorganization in 1922 led to its assumption of the FBO name, first for all its distribution operations and ultimately for its own productions as well. Through Kennedy, the studio contracted with Western leading man Fred Thomson , who grew by 1925 into one of Hollywood's most popular stars. Thomson was just one of several silent screen cowboys with whom FBO became identified. The studio, whose core market

10215-494: A young dancer from Broadway, is dressed in white veils that appear to change colors as she dances. This technique was designed to capture the effect of the live performances of Loie Fuller , beginning in 1891, in which stage lights with colored gels turned her white flowing dresses and sleeves into artistic movement. Hand coloring was often used in the early "trick" and fantasy films of Europe, especially those by Georges Méliès . Méliès began hand-tinting his work as early as 1897 and

10442-422: Is a motion picture form popular during the first half of the 20th century, consisting of a series of short subjects exhibited in consecutive order at one theater, generally advancing weekly, until the series is completed. Usually, each serial involves a single set of characters, protagonistic and antagonistic, involved in a single story, which has been edited into chapters after the fashion of serial fiction and

10669-542: Is our meat." Gene Stratton-Porter, then, was the gravy: according to the 1926 Exhibitors Herald survey, The Keeper of the Bees , for which shooting was completed while the novel was still being serialized in McCall's , was the number one picture in the entire country that year. The remainder of FBO's top five comprised, once again, three Fred Thomson pictures, along with another Stratton-Porter adaptation. During this period,

10896-451: Is silent during its middle third, complete with intertitles; Stanley Tucci 's The Impostors has an opening silent sequence in the style of early silent comedies. Brazilian filmmaker Renato Falcão's Margarette's Feast (2003) is silent. Writer/director Michael Pleckaitis puts his own twist on the genre with Silent (2007). While not silent, the Mr. Bean television series and movies have used

11123-509: Is similar: of 449 movies identified by the National Film Preservation Board as R-C/FBO productions, 125 are known to survive in some form—28 percent, though with only two (0.4 percent) in a legacy studio archive. The losses, moreover, were not equally distributed, and one of FBO's most successful franchises has disappeared entirely: not even a fragmentary print of any of the six Gene Stratton-Porter films put out by

11350-514: Is taking a place second to none in the industry. Tyler has made rapid strides during his two years with F.B.O. and with his horse 'Flash' and dog, 'Beans,' has become one of the leading favorites on the screen." Tyler's appeal was also enhanced by his human costars— Frankie Darro (tied for fifty-fourth in the poll) as his young sidekick on over two dozen occasions and starlets such as Doris Hill , Nora Lane , Sharon Lynn , and in Born to Battle (1926),

11577-528: Is understandable that this practice was adopted in view of their success in theaters on a Saturday matinee exhibition policy. But cliffhangers simply cannot be treated on TV as they were in theaters and still maintain the suspense so vital to their entertainment content. This suspense factor is diluted by the vast amount of other TV entertainment beamed between weekly showings." TV stations began showing serials daily, generally on weekday afternoons, as children's programming. In July 1956 TV distributor Serials Inc.,

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11804-544: The benshi , a live narrator who provided commentary and character voices. The benshi became a central element in Japanese film, as well as providing translation for foreign (mostly American) movies. The popularity of the benshi was one reason why silent films persisted well into the 1930s in Japan. Conversely, as benshi -narrated films often lacked intertitles, modern-day audiences may sometimes find it difficult to follow

12031-601: The George Eastman House . Seven more Thomson features are held by archives abroad. Sessue Hayakawa , the first star of any magnitude associated with the Robertson-Cole brand, made a total of twenty films released by the studio, from A Heart in Pawn in March 1919 to The Vermilion Pencil in March 1922. Hayakawa was regarded as one of the finest screen performers of his time, but as anti-Japanese sentiment grew on

12258-517: The Woolworth and Ford of the motion picture industry rather than the Tiffany ." Some stars were less than pleased with Kennedy's penny-pinching; Evelyn Brent, in particular, was troubled by what she saw as FBO's declining production standards and was granted her release. Westerns remained the studio's backbone, along with various action pictures and romantic scenarios; as Kennedy put it, "Melodrama

12485-421: The audience could better understand what an actor was feeling and portraying on screen. Much silent film acting is apt to strike modern-day audiences as simplistic or campy . The melodramatic acting style was in some cases a habit actors transferred from their former stage experience. Vaudeville was an especially popular origin for many American silent film actors. The pervading presence of stage actors in film

12712-565: The phonograph in 1877), and some early experiments had the projectionist manually adjusting the frame rate to fit the sound, but because of the technical challenges involved, the introduction of synchronized dialogue became practical only in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the advent of the Vitaphone system. Within a decade, the widespread production of silent films for popular entertainment had ceased, and

12939-573: The "R-C Ranch". In September, contracts were signed for the construction on the Colegrove property of an administration building with a massive neoclassical façade and eight stages, each occupying nearly a third of an acre. The first film to shoot at the facility, while it was still being built, was the independent production Kismet (1920), directed by Louis J. Gasnier . With the West Coast operation up and running, Hayakawa's production company

13166-526: The 1899 Cendrillion (Cinderella) and 1900 Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) provide early examples of hand-tinted films in which the color was a critical part of the scenography or mise-en-scène ; such precise tinting used the workshop of Elisabeth Thuillier in Paris, with teams of female artists adding layers of color to each frame by hand rather than using a more common (and less expensive) process of stenciling. A newly restored version of Méliès' A Trip to

13393-456: The 1940s Universal's serials employed urban and/or wartime themes, incorporating newsreel footage of actual disasters. The 1942 serial Gang Busters is perhaps the best of Universal's urban serials; Universal often cannibalized it for future cliffhangers. Don Winslow of the Navy may exemplify Universal's best war-themed chapterplay. The studio's reliance on stock footage for the big action scenes

13620-642: The 1940s and completed in 1966. The plot involved a masked villain named The Master Duper, one of three members of a Film Commission who attempts to steal the only known prints of priceless antique films, and the heroic Captain Celluloid, who wears a costume reminiscent of that of the Black Commando in the Columbia serial The Secret Code and is determined to uncover him. Roles in the serial are played by, among others, film historians and serial fans Alan G. Barbour , Al Kilgore , and William K. Everson . In

13847-544: The 1980s, serial fan Blackie Seymour shot a complete 15-chapter serial called The Return of the Copperhead. Seymour's only daughter, who operated the camera at the age of 8, attests that as of 2008 the serial was indeed filmed but the raw footage remains in cans, unedited. In 2001, King of the Park Rangers, a one-chapter sound serial was released by Cliffhanger Productions on VHS video tape in sepia. It concerned

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14074-503: The Bees , first released in October 1925 and making its fourth appearance in the annual balloting; the others were the Austrian import Moon of Israel and The Great Mail Robbery . During the transitional period, the first RKO feature release, Syncopation in March 1929, was packaged to exhibitors with two FBO low-budget " programmers ". Movies that Film Booking Offices had either produced or arranged to distribute were released under

14301-467: The Black Dragon , and Panther Girl of the Kongo . With the rise in popularity of Super 8 sound-film equipment in the late 1970s, Columbia issued home-movie prints of entire 15-chapter serials, including Batman and Robin , Congo Bill , and Hop Harrigan . These were in print only briefly, until the studios turned away from home-movie films in favor of home video. Film serials released to

14528-519: The Brain! (2006), incorporating live Foley artists , narration and orchestra at select showings. Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is a highly fictionalized depiction of the filming of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau 's classic silent vampire movie Nosferatu (1922). Werner Herzog honored the same film in his own version, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). Some films draw a direct contrast between

14755-646: The Devil (1927). Israel has worked mainly in silent comedy, scoring the films of Harold Lloyd , Buster Keaton , Charley Chase , and others. Timothy Brock has restored many of Charlie Chaplin 's scores, in addition to composing new scores. Contemporary music ensembles are helping to introduce classic silent films to a wider audience through a broad range of musical styles and approaches. Some performers create new compositions using traditional musical instruments, while others add electronic sounds, modern harmonies, rhythms, improvisation, and sound design elements to enhance

14982-620: The Doctor ", the BBC character introduced in 1963. Doctor Who serials would run anywhere from one to twelve episodes and were shown in weekly segments, as had been the original theatrical cliffhangers. Doctor Who was syndicated in the US as early as 1974, but did not gain a following in America until the mid-1980s when episodes featuring Tom Baker reached its shores. Although the series ended in 1989, it

15209-826: The FBO banner through the end of the year. The last official FBO production to reach American theaters was Pals of the Prairie , directed by Louis King and starring Buzz Barton and Frank Rice , released July 7, 1929. A large majority of FBO/Robertson-Cole pictures, produced during the silent era and the transitional period of the conversion to sound cinema, are considered to be lost films , with no copies known to exist. Much of FBO's cinematic legacy thus endures only in still images, other publicity materials, and written accounts. All told, just 30 percent of American silent feature films have been preserved (25 percent more or less complete, plus another 5 percent in incomplete versions). The overall survival rate of features produced by R-C/FBO

15436-533: The Highland Rogue ; and The Fighting Prince of Donegal ) edited into segments for television presentation often had a cliffhanger-serial-like feel. In England, in the 1950s and 60s, low-budget six-chapter serials such as Dusty Bates and Masters of Venus were released theatrically, but these were not particularly well-regarded or remembered. The greatest number of serialized television programs to feature any single character were those made featuring "

15663-658: The Hygo company in December 1956, and packaged both Columbia and Universal serials for broadcast. Republic's TV division, Hollywood Television Service, issued serials for television in their unedited theatrical form, as well as in specially edited six-chapter, half-hour editions ready made for TV time slots. In the late 1970s and 1980s, serials were often revived on BBC television in the United Kingdom. Both Republic and Columbia issued "highlights" versions of serials for

15890-587: The Lash . Tod Browning directed two Gothic Pictures specials in 1924 starring Evelyn Brent: The Dangerous Flirt and Silk Stocking Sal . In 1921 and 1922 alone, William Seiter directed eight R-C/FBO releases, some produced directly for the studio, others independently; in 1924 he made two additional FBO releases for Palmer Photoplay, both featuring Madge Bellamy . Between 1922 and 1926, Emory Johnson produced and directed eight films for FBO. Historian William K. Everson has pointed to Seiter and Johnson as two of

16117-635: The Lumière brothers on December 28, 1895, in Paris. This was furthered in 1896 by the first motion-picture exhibition in the United States at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City. At this event, Edison set the precedent that all exhibitions should be accompanied by an orchestra. From the beginning, music was recognized as essential, contributing atmosphere, and giving the audience vital emotional cues. Musicians sometimes played on film sets during shooting for similar reasons. However, depending on

16344-540: The Moon , originally released in 1902, shows an exuberant use of color designed to add texture and interest to the image. Comments by an American distributor in a 1908 film-supply catalog further underscore France's continuing dominance in the field of hand-coloring films during the early silent era. The distributor offers for sale at varying prices "High-Class" motion pictures by Pathé , Urban-Eclipse , Gaumont , Kalem , Itala Film , Ambrosio Film , and Selig . Several of

16571-591: The Pirates , Mandrake the Magician , The Phantom , and Brenda Starr, Reporter ; from the comic books, Blackhawk , Congo Bill , time traveler Brick Bradford , and Batman and Superman (although this last owed more to its radio incarnation , which the credits acknowledged); from radio, Jack Armstrong and Hop Harrigan ; from the hero pulp characters like The Spider (two serials: The Spider's Web and The Spider Returns ) and The Shadow (despite also being

16798-456: The Sahara desert and a British cricket pitch. War scenes were shot on the plains of Grasmere, Staten Island . The Perils of Pauline and its even more popular sequel The Exploits of Elaine were filmed largely on the island. So was the 1906 blockbuster Life of a Cowboy , by Edwin S. Porter Company , and filming moved to the West Coast around 1912. The following are American films from

17025-426: The US have been lost, though these estimates are inaccurate due to a lack of numerical data. Film projection mostly evolved from magic lantern shows, in which images from handpainted glass slides were projected onto a wall or screen. After the advent of photography in the 19th century, still photographs were sometimes used. Narration of the showman was important in spectacular entertainment screenings and vital in

17252-455: The United States. In view of the enormous amount of labor involved which calls for individual hand painting of every one of sixteen pictures to the foot or 16,000 separate pictures for each 1,000 feet of film very few American colorists will undertake the work at any price. As film coloring has progressed much more rapidly in France than in any other country, all of our coloring is done for us by

17479-618: The Universe (Hearst), Adventures of Captain Marvel (Republic Pictures), Batman and Batman and Robin (Sony), Superman and Atom Man vs. Superman (Warner). The Universal serials had been controlled by Serials Inc. until it closed in 1970. The company now known as VCI Entertainment obtained the rights. VCI is offering new Blu-Ray and DVD restorations of many Universal serials, including Gang Busters , Jungle Queen , Pirate Treasure , and three Buck Jones adventures. All of

17706-477: The Weisses essentially disappeared from the serial scene. Mascot Pictures was absorbed by Republic Pictures , so that by 1937, serial production was now in the hands of three companies – Universal, Columbia, and Republic, with Republic quickly becoming the acknowledged leader in quality serial product. Each company turned out four to five serials per year, of 12 to 15 episodes each, a pace they all kept up until

17933-528: The West Coast, R-C terminated its relationship with the Chiba -born actor. Two months after The Vermilion Pencil opened, he sued the studio for breach of contract. Pauline Frederick , celebrated for her performance in the September 1920 Goldwyn Pictures tear-jerker Madame X , immediately cashed in with a top-tier contract from Robertson-Cole, for whom she starred in more than half a dozen melodramas, beginning with A Slave of Vanity just two months later. She

18160-613: The Western Sea", "The Secret of Mystery Lake", "The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of Ghost Farm", and The Adventures of Clint and Mac . Other Disney programs shown on Walt Disney Presents in segments (such as The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh , The Swamp Fox , The Secret of Boyne Castle , The Mooncussers , and The Prince and the Pauper ) and Disney feature films (including Treasure Island ; The Three Lives of Thomasina ; The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men ; Rob Roy,

18387-585: The Wind (1925) and The Tough Guy (1926), she used the pseudonym Frank M. Clifton (the "patronymic" was Thomson's middle name). Editor Pandro S. Berman , son of a major FBO stockholder, cut his first film for the studio at the age of twenty-one; in the 1930s, he would earn renown as an RKO producer and production chief. Famed RKO costume designer Walter Plunkett was also an FBO graduate. Both George O'Hara 's and Alberta Vaughn 's initial short series for FBO—each directed by Malcolm St. Clair —were hits, so in

18614-414: The action, and staging more elaborate stunts. Republic was one of Hollywood's smaller studios, but its serials have been hailed as some of the best, especially those directed by John English and William Witney . In addition to solid screenwriting that many critics thought was quite accomplished, the firm also introduced choreographed fistfights, which often included the stuntmen (usually the ones portraying

18841-547: The action—particularly for comedies and action films. Slow projection of a cellulose nitrate base film carried a risk of fire, as each frame was exposed for a longer time to the intense heat of the projection lamp; but there were other reasons to project a film at a greater pace. Often projectionists received general instructions from the distributors on the musical director's cue sheet as to how fast particular reels or scenes should be projected. In rare instances, usually for larger productions, cue sheets produced specifically for

19068-471: The actor's production unit stayed on the FBO lot. Given the lag time between production and exhibition, of the four Thomson features that reached theaters in 1927, three were FBO releases. The studio put out fifty-one features in total that year; for the twelve-month period ending November 15, theater owners judged FBO's top three films to all be Gene Stratton-Porter adaptations, with two Thomson oaters following. The advent of sound film would drastically alter

19295-687: The actual song being performed. Films in this category include Griffith's Lady of the Pavements with Lupe Vélez , Edwin Carewe 's Evangeline with Dolores del Río , and Rupert Julian 's The Phantom of the Opera with Mary Philbin and Virginia Pearson . The Silent Film Sound and Music Archive digitizes music and cue sheets written for silent films and makes them available for use by performers, scholars, and enthusiasts. Silent-film actors emphasized body language and facial expression so that

19522-412: The adoption of sound-on-film technology. Traditional film colorization, all of which involved the use of dyes in some form, interfered with the high resolution required for built-in recorded sound, and were therefore abandoned. The innovative three-strip technicolor process introduced in the mid-1930s was costly and fraught with limitations, and color would not have the same prevalence in film as it did in

19749-515: The adventures of a Park Ranger named Patricia King and an FBI Agent who track down a trio of killers out to find buried treasure in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. A second ten-chapter serial, The Dangers of Deborah, in which a female reporter and a criminologist fight to uncover the identity of a mysterious villain named The Terror, was released by Cliffhanger Productions in 2008. In 2006, Lamb4 Productions created its own homage to

19976-425: The average production cost of FBO features was around $ 50,000, and few were budgeted at anything more than $ 75,000. By comparison, in 1927–28 the average cost at Fox was $ 190,000; at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , $ 275,000. In a broad economization move, in 1927, FBO ended the long-term contracts with writers that were an industry norm, shifting story assignments to a freelance basis. One major expense Kennedy didn't spare: with

20203-562: The beginning of film and 1928. The following list includes only films produced in the sound era with the specific artistic intention of being silent. Several filmmakers have paid homage to the comedies of the silent era, including Charlie Chaplin , with Modern Times (1936), Orson Welles with Too Much Johnson (1938), Jacques Tati with Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Pierre Etaix with The Suitor (1962), and Mel Brooks with Silent Movie (1976). Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien 's acclaimed drama Three Times (2005)

20430-458: The best coloring establishment in Paris and we have found that we obtain better quality, cheaper prices and quicker deliveries, even in coloring American made films, than if the work were done elsewhere. By the beginning of the 1910s, with the onset of feature-length films, tinting was used as another mood setter, just as commonplace as music. The director D. W. Griffith displayed a constant interest and concern about color, and used tinting as

20657-476: The biggest-budgeted films to arrive at the exhibiting theater with original, specially composed scores. However, the first designated full-blown scores had in fact been composed in 1908, by Camille Saint-Saëns for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise , and by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov for Stenka Razin . When organists or pianists used sheet music, they still might add improvisational flourishes to heighten

20884-414: The blockbuster 1914 serial The Perils of Pauline , directed several films for the company—from Good Women (1921) to The Call of Home (1922)—during its Robertson-Cole days. The best-known director to work regularly under the FBO brand was Ralph Ince , younger brother of celebrated filmmaker Thomas H. Ince . Pulling double duty on occasion, Ralph Ince starred in five of the sixteen films he made for

21111-425: The business's films in an area where he had a controlling interest in a regional theater chain (though it was locked out of Massachusetts by the leading exhibitors). In February 1921, the movie heralded as Robertson-Cole's first "official" production came out: The Mistress of Shenstone , directed by Henry King and starring Pauline Frederick , a former headliner with Famous Players–Lasky and Goldwyn Pictures . At

21338-799: The capacity to directly distribute the films to which it owned rights, including the in-house productions then being planned. In March, the inaugural "convention of the branch managers and field supervisors of the Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation" was announced. The company currently boasted a slate of twenty-five movies in theaters around the country, with its top films co-branded "Superior Pictures". The first R-C feature productions began to appear, including The Third Woman that same month, directed by Charles Swickard and starring Carlyle Blackwell and Louise Lovely , and The Wonder Man , directed by John G. Adolfi and starring boxer Georges Carpentier , which had

21565-461: The case of the 2002 restoration of Metropolis . With the lack of natural color processing available, films of the silent era were frequently dipped in dyestuffs and dyed various shades and hues to signal a mood or represent a time of day. Hand tinting dates back to 1895 in the United States with Edison's release of selected hand-tinted prints of Butterfly Dance . Additionally, experiments in color film started as early as in 1909, although it took

21792-513: The comedic series The Adventures of Mazie (1925–26) and the baseball-themed serial Fighting Hearts (1926). In May 1928, with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain under his control, Joseph Kennedy announced a forthcoming slate with not only more than the usual number of (relatively) high-budget films but a "Mammoth Program of Short Features". No less than four different series came from independent producer Larry Darmour , including

22019-484: The company released more than a dozen shorts by innovative comedian/animator Charles Bowers , whose work imaginatively mixed live action and three-dimensional model animation. FBO also distributed the output of significant creators of purely animated films. Between 1924 and 1926, FBO released the work of John Randolph Bray 's cartoon studio, including the Dinky Doodle series created by Walter Lantz . In 1925–26,

22246-498: The crucial differences between stage and screen acting. Directors such as Albert Capellani and Maurice Tourneur began to insist on naturalism in their films. By the mid-1920s many American silent films had adopted a more naturalistic acting style, though not all actors and directors accepted naturalistic, low-key acting straight away; as late as 1927, films featuring expressionistic acting styles, such as Metropolis , were still being released. Greta Garbo , whose first American film

22473-704: The deal (plus a straight $ 150,000 payout for "facilitating" it). Ranking FBO vice-president Joseph I. Schnitzer replaced Kennedy as president, a position he would retain with RKO Productions when it formally replaced FBO after the turn of the year. William LeBaron , the last FBO production chief, likewise retained his position after the merger, but the new studio, dedicated to full sound production, cut ties with FBO's roster of silent screen performers. In its final year of operation, of FBO's top five box office films according to theater owners, three were again Gene Stratton-Porter adaptations, including The Keeper of

22700-406: The death of celebrated actor Wallace Reid , brought on by morphine addiction, his widow, Dorothy Davenport , signed on as producer and star of a cinematic examination of the sins of substance abuse: Human Wreckage , released by FBO in June 1923, five months after Reid's death, in which Davenport (billed as Mrs. Wallace Reid) plays the wife of a noble attorney turned dope fiend. A few months later,

22927-459: The development of motion picture cameras, projectors and transparent celluloid film. Although Thomas Edison was keen to develop a film system that would be synchronised with his phonograph , he eventually introduced the kinetoscope as a silent motion picture viewer in 1893 and later "kinetophone" versions remained unsuccessful. The art of motion pictures grew into full maturity in the "silent era" ( 1894 in film – 1929 in film ). The height of

23154-583: The dire consequences of not spanking naughty children, and three Fred Thomson " oaters ": The Bandit's Baby , The Wild Bull's Lair , and Thundering Hoofs . As a distributor, Film Booking Offices focused on marketing its films to small-town exhibitors and independent theater chains (that is, those not owned by one of the major Hollywood studios ). As a production company, it concentrated on low-budget movies, with an emphasis on Westerns, action films, romantic melodramas, and comedy shorts. From its first productions in early 1920 through late 1928, just before it

23381-401: The drama on screen. Even when special effects were not indicated in the score, if an organist was playing a theater organ capable of an unusual sound effect such as "galloping horses", it would be used during scenes of dramatic horseback chases. At the height of the silent era, movies were the single largest source of employment for instrumental musicians, at least in the United States. However,

23608-427: The early days of television. Veteran producers Louis Weiss and Nat Levine were among the first to offer their serials for broadcast. The traditional week-to-week format of viewing serials was soon abandoned. As Republic executive David Bloom explained, "Attempts to program serials with full week intervals between chapters during the earlier days of television just about killed them off as effective sales product. It

23835-435: The end of World War II when, in 1946, Universal dropped its serial unit along with its B-picture unit and renamed its production department Universal-International Pictures. Republic and Columbia continued unchallenged, with three serials per year each. Republic's serials ran for 12, 13, 14, or 15 chapters; Columbia's ran a standard 15 episodes (with the single exception of Mandrake the Magician , which ran 12 episodes). By

24062-477: The episodes cannot be shown out of order or as a single or a random collection of short subjects. Each chapter was screened at a movie theater for one week, and typically ended with a cliffhanger , in which characters found themselves in perilous situations with little apparent chance of escape. Viewers had to return each week to see the cliffhangers resolved and to follow the continuing story. Movie serials were especially popular with children, and for many youths in

24289-555: The famous " Mighty Wurlitzer " could simulate some orchestral sounds along with a number of percussion effects such as bass drums and cymbals, and sound effects ranging from "train and boat whistles [to] car horns and bird whistles; ... some could even simulate pistol shots, ringing phones, the sound of surf, horses' hooves, smashing pottery, [and] thunder and rain". Musical scores for early silent films were either improvised or compiled of classical or theatrical repertory music. Once full features became commonplace, however, music

24516-572: The film debut of football great "Red" Grange . Tennis stars Suzanne Lenglen and Mary Browne were signed for a series of "Racquet Girls" pictures that never made it to screen. Central to the FBO identity were Westerns and the studio's major cowboy star, Fred Thomson . In both 1926 and 1927, he ranked number two among all male performers in the Exhibitors Herald poll, right behind Tom Mix . When one of Thomson's "oaters", The Two-Gun Man (1926), made it to New York's Warners' Theatre ,

24743-456: The film serials of the 1940s with its own serial titled "Wildcat." The story revolves around a super hero named Wildcat and his attempts to save the fictional Rite City from a masked villain known as the Roach. This eight-chapter serial was based heavily on popular super hero serials such as "Batman and Robin," "Captain America," and "The Adventures of Captain Marvel." After its premiere, "Wildcat"

24970-495: The film trade and Wall Street's faith in its prospects. As renowned journalist Terry Ramsaye wrote in Photoplay the following year, Hays had been seeking "to endow the febrile motion picture industry with an atmosphere of Americanism and substantiality. Kennedy is a valuable personality from this point of view. He is exceedingly American" (historian Cari Beauchamp explains the connotation: "not Jewish", in contrast to most of

25197-481: The first film serial , The Million Dollar Mystery , released in 1914. The first westerns were filmed at Fred Scott 's Movie Ranch in South Beach, Staten Island. Actors costumed as cowboys and Native Americans galloped across Scott's movie ranch set, which had a frontier main street, a wide selection of stagecoaches and a 56-foot stockade. The island provided a serviceable stand-in for locations as varied as

25424-411: The first commercially successful sound film , but silent films were still the majority of features released in both 1927 and 1928, along with so-called goat-glanded films: silents with a subsection of sound film inserted. Thus the modern sound film era may be regarded as coming to dominance beginning in 1929. For a listing of notable silent era films, see List of years in film for the years between

25651-402: The first half of the 20th century a typical Saturday matinee at the movies included at least one chapter of a serial, along with animated cartoons , newsreels , and two feature films. There were films covering many genres, including crime fiction , espionage , comic book or comic strip characters, science fiction , and jungle adventures . Many serials were Westerns , since those were

25878-484: The first serial to be released on Blu-ray. An early attempt at a low-budget Western serial, filmed in color, was entitled The Silver Avenger. One or two chapters exist of this effort on 16mm film but it is not known whether the serial was ever completed. The best-known fan-made chapter play is the four-chapter, silent 16mm Captain Celluloid vs. the Film Pirates, made to resemble Republic and Columbia serials of

26105-401: The following month. For its top-of-the-line "product", it purchased the movies of star actor Sessue Hayakawa , whose films were produced by his own company, Haworth Pictures Corporation . Other companies also made films expressly for R-C distribution: B.B. Features , Jesse D. Hampton Productions , National Film Corporation, Winsome Stars. To accompany its features, Robertson-Cole also acquired

26332-648: The formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in an attempt to control the industry and shut out smaller producers. The "Edison Trust", as it was nicknamed, was made up of Edison , Biograph , Essanay Studios , Kalem Company , George Kleine Productions , Lubin Studios , Georges Méliès , Pathé , Selig Studios , and Vitagraph Studios , and dominated distribution through the General Film Company . This company dominated

26559-431: The growing studio's Times Square showcase, it demonstrated that a Western, even one without Mix, could draw audiences to a first-run house in the most cosmopolitan of markets. Along with trusty Silver King, Thomson brought in millions to FBO, and Kennedy personally made almost half a million dollars from the "super western" loanout to Paramount. But when Kennedy learned early in 1928 that Mix, whose decade-old Fox contract

26786-481: The hat would stay on during fight scenes. Exposition of what led up to the previous episode's cliffhanger was usually displayed on placards with a photograph of one of the characters on it. In 1938, Universal brought the first "scrolling text" exposition to the serial, which George Lucas first used in Star Wars in 1977 and then in all of the following Star Wars films. As this would have required subcontracting

27013-399: The heroine would be placed into a deathtrap and the hero would come to her rescue. The hero and heroine would face one trap after another, battling countless thugs and lackeys, before finally defeating the villain. Notable American serials of the silent era include The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine made by Pathé Frères and starring Pearl White . Another popular serial

27240-474: The home video market from original masters include most Republic titles (with a few exceptions, such as Ghost of Zorro )—which were released by Republic Pictures Home Video on VHS and sometimes laserdisc (sometimes under their re-release titles) mostly from transfers made from the original negatives, The Shadow , and Blackhawk , both released by Sony only on VHS, and DVD versions of Flash Gordon , Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars , and Flash Gordon Conquers

27467-514: The home-movie market. These were printed on 8mm silent film (and later Super 8 film) and sold directly to owners of home-movie projectors. Columbia was first to market, with three abbreviated chapters from its 1938 serial The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok . When Batman became a national craze in 1965, Columbia issued a six-chapter silent version of its 1943 Batman . Republic followed suit with condensed silent versions of its own serials, including Adventures of Captain Marvel , G-Men vs.

27694-662: The idea of the episodic crime adventure was developed particularly by Louis Feuillade in Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915), and Judex (1916); in Germany, Homunculus (1916), directed by Otto Rippert , was a six-part horror serial about an artificial creature. Years after their first release, serials gained new life at "Saturday Matinees", theatrical showings on Saturday mornings aimed directly at children. The arrival of sound technology made it costlier to produce serials, so that they were no longer as profitable on

27921-465: The image to flicker , and images with low rates of flicker are very unpleasant to watch. Early studies by Thomas Edison for his Kinetoscope machine determined that any rate below 46 images per second "will strain the eye". and this holds true for projected images under normal cinema conditions also. The solution adopted for the Kinetoscope was to run the film at over 40 frames/sec, but this

28148-660: The industry as both a vertical and horizontal monopoly and is a contributing factor in studios' migration to the West Coast. The Motion Picture Patents Co. and the General Film Co. were found guilty of antitrust violation in October 1915, and were dissolved. The Thanhouser film studio was founded in New Rochelle, New York , in 1909 by American theatrical impresario Edwin Thanhouser . The company produced and released 1,086 films between 1910 and 1917, including

28375-535: The industry had moved fully into the sound era , in which movies were accompanied by synchronized sound recordings of spoken dialogue, music and sound effects . Most early motion pictures are considered lost owing to their physical decay, as the nitrate filmstock used in that era was extremely unstable and flammable. Additionally, many films were deliberately destroyed, because they had negligible remaining immediate financial value in that era. It has often been claimed that around 75 percent of silent films produced in

28602-804: The industry's acceptance of it, tinting was abandoned altogether, because the dyes used in the tinting process interfered with the soundtracks present on film strips. The early studios were located in the New York City area . Edison Studios were first in West Orange, New Jersey (1892), they were moved to the Bronx, New York (1907). Fox (1909) and Biograph (1906) started in Manhattan , with studios in St George, Staten Island . Other films were shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey . In December 1908, Edison led

28829-532: The introduction of sound with its 24 frame/sec standard speed 2-bladed shutters have become the norm for 35 mm cinema projectors, though three-bladed shutters have remained standard on 16 mm and 8 mm projectors, which are frequently used to project amateur footage shot at 16 or 18 frames/sec. A 35 mm film frame rate of 24 fps translates to a film speed of 456 millimetres (18.0 in) per second. One 1,000-foot (300 m) reel requires 11 minutes and 7 seconds to be projected at 24 fps, while

29056-478: The introduction of talkies, coupled with the roughly simultaneous onset of the Great Depression , was devastating to many musicians. A number of countries devised other ways of bringing sound to silent films. The early cinema of Brazil , for example, featured fitas cantatas (singing films), filmed operettas with singers performing behind the screen. In Japan , films had not only live music but also

29283-630: The juvenile audience. Batman (1943) was quite popular, and Superman (1948) was phenomenally successful despite using cartoon animation for the flying sequences instead of more expensive special effects. Spencer Gordon Bennet , veteran director of silent serials, left Republic for Columbia in 1947. He directed or co-directed the studio's later serials. In 1954 producer Sam Katzman, whose budgets were already low, slashed them even further on serials. The last four Columbia serials were very-low-budget affairs, consisting mostly of action scenes and cliffhanger endings from older productions, and even employing

29510-467: The label of Gothic Pictures or Gothic Productions. With neither the backing of large corporate interests nor the daily money generator of its own theater chain and far from its London owners, the company faced persistent cash-flow difficulties. The significant financial drain of its reliance on short-term, high-interest loans continued. While still at the Hayden, Stone investment firm, Kennedy had boasted to

29737-407: The late 1940s. Although Republic discontinued new serial production in 1955, the studio continued making older ones available to theaters through 1959. Columbia, which canceled new serials in 1956, kept older ones in circulation until 1966. Columbia still offers a handful of serials to today's theaters. Serials, with their short running times and episodic format, were very attractive to programmers in

29964-432: The least expensive to film. Although most serials were filmed economically, some were made at significant expense. The Flash Gordon serial and its sequels, for instance, were major productions in their times. Serials were action-packed stories that usually involved a hero (or heroes) battling an evil villain and rescuing a damsel in distress . The villain would continually place the hero into inescapable deathtraps, or

30191-615: The lecturing circuit. The principle of stroboscopic animation was well-known since the introduction of the phenakistiscope in 1833, a popular optical toy , but the development of cinematography was hampered by long exposure times for photographic emulsions , until Eadweard Muybridge managed to record a chronophotographic sequence in 1878. After others had animated his pictures in zoetropes , Muybridge started lecturing with his own zoopraxiscope animation projector in 1880. The work of other pioneering chronophotographers, including Étienne-Jules Marey and Ottomar Anschütz , furthered

30418-426: The longer, more prestigious films in the catalog are offered in both standard black-and-white "plain stock" as well as in "hand-painted" color. A plain-stock copy, for example, of the 1907 release Ben Hur is offered for $ 120 ($ 4,069 USD today), while a colored version of the same 1000-foot, 15-minute film costs $ 270 ($ 9,156) including the extra $ 150 coloring charge, which amounted to 15 cents more per foot. Although

30645-412: The manner of a clip show in modern television). Serials had been including older scenes for years, as flashbacks during later parts of the narrative, but the wholesale insertion of entire sequences was introduced in the 1936 outdoor serial Robinson Crusoe of Clipper Island . It was scheduled as a standard 12-chapter adventure, but when bad weather on location delayed the filming, writer Barry Shipman

30872-401: The mid-1910s, as the differences between stage and screen became apparent. Due to the work of directors such as D. W. Griffith , cinematography became less stage-like, and the development of the close up allowed for understated and realistic acting. Lillian Gish has been called film's "first true actress" for her work in the period, as she pioneered new film performing techniques, recognizing

31099-442: The mid-1950s, however, episodic television series and the sale of older serials to TV syndicators by all the current and past major sound serial producers, together with the loss of audience attendance at Saturday matinees in general, made serial-making a losing proposition. The classic sound serial, particularly in its Republic format, has a first episode of three reels (approximately 30 minutes in length) and begins with reports of

31326-543: The most realistic and blood curdling fights we have seen recently." Kennedy had no illusions about his studio's place in the realm of cinematic art. A journalist once complimented him on FBO's recent output: "You have had some good pictures this year." Kennedy jocularly inquired, "What the hell were they?" From the pre-Kennedy era, RKO historian Betty Lasky identifies the Dorothy Davenport "problem" picture Broken Laws (1924), directed by Roy William Neill , as

31553-507: The most sweeping act of destruction, Kennedy associates scrapped more than one hundred cans of the actor's movies—over a ton's worth of film—during the RKO transition. According to the Library of Congress's American Silent Feature Film Database, to the tiny remaining corpus of Thomson's work for FBO may now be added complete prints of The Dangerous Coward (1924) and A Regular Scout (1926) at

31780-399: The movie "has a rather new order of thrills and atmosphere that might prove distinctly attractive." Two of the studio's most impressive releases were foreign productions. In 1927, FBO picked up for U.S. distribution an acclaimed Austrian biblical spectacular made three years earlier: Die Sklavenkönigin ( The Slave Queen , aka Moon of Israel ) had already won its director, Michael Kertész,

32007-451: The movie business as FBO signed the premier silent Western star, Tom Mix . That August, using RCA Photophone technology, FBO became the second Hollywood studio to release a feature -length " talkie ". Two months later, Kennedy and RCA executive David Sarnoff arranged the merger between FBO and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater circuit that created RKO , one of the major studios of Hollywood's Golden Age . FBO's assets were folded into

32234-589: The multiple mergers that created the large Universal studio in 1912. During his time in charge at FBO, his brand was added to many of its films: "P. A. Powers Presents". Among its outside suppliers of the period were Chester Bennett Productions , Hunt Stromberg Productions , and Tiffany Productions . While Kennedy left the board in July 1923 (and sold back his New England franchise for a sizable profit), he leveraged his friendship with top screenwriter Frances Marion and her husband, accomplished athlete, ordained minister, and neophyte actor Fred Thomson , to help arrange

32461-520: The new "talkies" around the mid-1930s. The visual quality of silent movies—especially those produced in the 1920s—was often high, but there remains a widely held misconception that these films were primitive, or are barely watchable by modern standards. This misconception comes from the general public's unfamiliarity with the medium, as well as from carelessness on the part of the industry. Most silent films are poorly preserved, leading to their deterioration, and well-preserved films are often played back at

32688-797: The new VCI releases derive from Universal's 35mm vault elements. Notable restorations of partially lost or forgotten serials such as The Adventures of Tarzan , Beatrice Fairfax , The Lone Ranger Rides Again , Daredevils of the West and King of the Mounties have been developed and made available to fans by The Serial Squadron. A gray market for DVDs also exists consisting of DVD companies releasing titles from privately owned 16mm prints or even copies of previously released VHS or laserdisc editions, and various websites and internet auctions. These DVDs vary between good and poor quality, depending on their source. In 2017, Adventures of Captain Marvel became

32915-497: The new company, and it was dissolved in early 1929. The company that would become FBO began as Robertson-Cole, an importer, exporter, and motion picture distributor with headquarters in London and New York, founded in 1918 by Englishman Harry F. Robertson and American Rufus S. Cole. The company handled American-made trucks, cars, automobile accessories, and Bell & Howell motion picture equipment; its initial film distribution focus

33142-642: The new serials. Most of the studio's serials of the 1950s were written by only one man, Ronald Davidson —Davidson had co-written and produced many Republic serials, and was familiar enough with the film library to write new scenes based on the older action footage. Republic's last serial was King of the Carnival (1955), a reworking of 1939's Daredevils of the Red Circle using some of its footage. Columbia made several serials using its own staff and facilities (1938–1939 and 1943–1945), and these are among

33369-596: The noble but clueless Dudley. The Hanna–Barbera Perils of Penelope Pitstop was a takeoff on the silent serials The Perils of Pauline and The Iron Claw, which featured Paul Lynde as the voice of the villain Sylvester Sneakley, alias "The Hooded Claw". Danger Island , a multi-part story in under-10-minute episodes, was shown on the Saturday morning Banana Splits program in the late 1960s. Episodes were short, full of wild action and usually ended on

33596-553: The optical effects, Republic saved money by not using it. Columbia used printed recaps until 1941, replaced by spoken recaps by offscreen announcer Knox Manning . Universal had been making serials since the 1910s, and continued to service its loyal neighborhood-theater customers with four serials annually. The studio made news in 1929 by hiring Tim McCoy to star in its first all-talking serial, The Indians Are Coming! Epic footage from this western serial turned up again and again in later serials and features. In 1936 Universal scored

33823-470: The overlooked directorial talents of the silent era. Author and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter set up her own production company to film screen adaptations of her work, a perhaps unprecedented venture for a writer. FBO handled four releases from Gene Stratton-Porter Productions— A Girl of the Limberlost (1924), The Keeper of the Bees (1925), Laddie (1926), and The Magic Garden (1927)—and

34050-444: The plan, which would involve his divestiture from both the theater circuit and his own studio. On October 23, 1928, RCA announced it was merging Film Booking Offices and Keith-Albee-Orpheum to form the new motion picture business Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), with Sarnoff as chairman. Kennedy, who retained management of Pathé and its former PDC assets, made over $ 4 million in profit from converting and selling off his FBO and KAO stock in

34277-450: The plots without specialised subtitling or additional commentary. Few film scores survived intact from the silent period, and musicologists are still confronted by questions when they attempt to precisely reconstruct those that remain. Scores used in current reissues or screenings of silent films may be complete reconstructions of compositions, newly composed for the occasion, assembled from already existing music libraries, or improvised on

34504-488: The powerful United Artists and Paramount studios circling Fred Thomson, Kennedy kept him at FBO for $ 15,000 a week (assigning the contract to a newly created corporation, Fred Thomson Productions, "for tax purposes"). The actor now had the second-highest straight salary in the entire industry, surpassed only by Tom Mix again, whose new arrangement with Fox paid $ 17,500. Thomson's were among those few FBO films budgeted at or above $ 75,000, but they could be relied on to gross in

34731-438: The projectionist provided a detailed guide to presenting the film. Theaters also—to maximize profit—sometimes varied projection speeds depending on the time of day or popularity of a film, or to fit a film into a prescribed time slot. All motion-picture film projectors require a moving shutter to block the light whilst the film is moving, otherwise the image is smeared in the direction of the movement. However this shutter causes

34958-402: The quarter-million-dollar range. And Kennedy found an angle to make himself even more money. Under the new contract, Kennedy struck a deal in early 1927 with Paramount for the major studio to produce and distribute a series of four Thomson "super westerns". Kennedy participated in the films' financing, recouping his stake plus $ 100,000 in profits each; Paramount covered Thomson's weekly salary; and

35185-424: The reasons for the cited extra charge were likely obvious to customers, the distributor explains why his catalog's colored films command such significantly higher prices and require more time for delivery. His explanation also provides insight into the general state of film-coloring services in the United States by 1908: The coloring of moving picture films is a line of work which cannot be satisfactorily performed in

35412-491: The release of D. W. Griffith 's epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). In 1999, the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki produced Juha in black and white, which captures the style of a silent film, using intertitles in place of spoken dialogue. Special release prints with titles in several different languages were produced for international distribution. In India, the film Pushpak (1988), starring Kamal Haasan ,

35639-403: The reprised scene would add an element not seen in the previous episode, but unless it contradicted something shown previously, audiences accepted the explanation. On rare occasions the filmmakers would depend on the audience not remembering details of the previous week's chapter, using alternate outcomes that did not exactly match the previous episode's cliffhanger. The last episode was sometimes

35866-576: The rights to the newspaper comic character Dick Tracy , the radio character The Lone Ranger , and the comic book characters Captain America , Captain Marvel , and Spy Smasher . Republic's serial scripts were written by teams, usually from three to seven writers. From 1950 Republic economized on serial production. The studio was no longer licensing expensive radio and comic-strip characters, and no longer staging spectacular action sequences. To save money, Republic turned instead to its impressive backlog of action highlights, which were cleverly re-edited into

36093-655: The same actors for new scenes tying the old footage together. The new footage was so threadbare that it would often show the new hero watching the action from a distance, rather than actually participating in it. Columbia outlasted the other serial producers, its last being Blazing the Overland Trail (1956). There was always a market for action subjects in theaters, so as far back as 1935 independent film companies reissued older serials for new audiences. Universal brought back its Flash Gordon serials, and both Republic and Columbia began re-releasing its older serials in

36320-476: The same cliffhangers, stunt and special-effects sequences over the years. Mines or tunnels flooded often, even in Flash Gordon (reusing spectacular flood footage from Universal's 1927 silent drama Perch of the Devil ) and the same model cars and trains went off the same cliffs and bridges. Republic had a Packard limousine and a Ford Woodie station wagon used in serial after serial so they could match

36547-460: The same time, the business was $ 5 million in debt from the L.A. studio purchase and draining money—banks were reluctant to issue lines of credit to any but the biggest film companies, and R-C was forced to pay interest rates as high as 18 percent to so-called bonus sharks to access working capital. The company's primary investor, the Graham's of London firm, turned to Kennedy to find a buyer, giving him

36774-548: The second half of 1924 the studio made a bid at teaming them in the twelve-part The Go-Getters , spoofing popular films and classic stories with chapters such A Kick for Cinderella . It was so successful that they were reunited the next year for a similar twelve-parter, The Pacemakers , with episodes such as Merton of the Goofies ( Merton of the Movies ) and Madam Sans Gin ( Madame Sans-Gêne ). Vaughn had solo top billing in

37001-446: The second half of the 1910s, he was still a bankable name when he made several FBO Westerns in 1922–23. The other cowboy stars of FBO included Bob Custer (tied for thirty-seventh in the 1927 poll), Bob Steele (tied for sixty-sixth with, among others, Silver King), and teenager Buzz Barton . One of the studio's most reliable Western headliners was a dog: Ranger (all alone at sixty-fifth among male performers). Beans had featured roles in

37228-435: The second twelve chapters of Mickey McGuire , starring seven-year-old Mickey Rooney . Amedee Van Beuren provided Walter Futter 's Curiosities , a Ripley's -inspired "Movie Side Show" of "freaks and queer odds and ends from all corners of the world". Of particular historical interest are two independently produced series of slapstick comedies released by the studio: Between 1924 and 1927, Joe Rock provided FBO with

37455-426: The serial, often given different signage, or none at all, just being referred to differently. There would often be a female love interest of the male hero, or a female hero herself, but as the audience was mainly children, there was no romance. The beginning of each chapter would bring the story up to date by repeating the last few minutes of the previous chapter, and then revealing how the main character escaped. Often

37682-485: The series was canceled and the last program aired on May 1, 1979 before all of the serials could conclude; only The Curse of Dracula was resolved. In 2006, Dark Horse Indie films, through Image Entertainment, released a 6-chapter serial parody called Monarch of the Moon, detailing the adventures of a hero named the Yellow Jacket, who could control Yellow Jackets with his voice, battled "Japbots", and traveled to

37909-465: The shots with the stock footage from the model or previous stunt driving. Three different serials had them chasing the Art Deco sound truck, required for location shooting, for various reasons. Male fistfighters usually wore hats so that the change from actor to stunt double would not be caught so easily. A rubber liner on the hatband of the stuntman's fedora would fit snugly on the stuntman's head, so

38136-440: The silent era (from the early 1910s in film to the late 1920s) was a particularly fruitful period, full of artistic innovation. The film movements of Classical Hollywood as well as French Impressionism , German Expressionism , and Soviet Montage began in this period. Silent filmmakers pioneered the art form to the extent that virtually every style and genre of film-making of the 20th and 21st centuries has its artistic roots in

38363-470: The silent era. The silent era was also a pioneering one from a technical point of view. Three-point lighting, the close-up , long shot , panning , and continuity editing all became prevalent long before silent films were replaced by " talking pictures " or "talkies" in the late 1920s. Some scholars claim that the artistic quality of cinema decreased for several years, during the early 1930s, until film directors , actors, and production staff adapted fully to

38590-467: The silent film era and the era of talkies. Sunset Boulevard shows the disconnect between the two eras in the character of Norma Desmond , played by silent film star Gloria Swanson , and Singin' in the Rain deals with Hollywood artists adjusting to the talkies. Peter Bogdanovich 's 1976 film Nickelodeon deals with the turmoil of silent filmmaking in Hollywood during the early 1910s, leading up to

38817-483: The silent film era that had earned the highest gross income as of 1932. The amounts given are gross rentals (the distributor's share of the box-office) as opposed to exhibition gross. Although attempts to create sync-sound motion pictures go back to the Edison lab in 1896, only from the early 1920s were the basic technologies such as vacuum tube amplifiers and high-quality loudspeakers available. The next few years saw

39044-427: The silents for nearly four decades. As motion pictures gradually increased in running time, a replacement was needed for the in-house interpreter who would explain parts of the film to the audience. Because silent films had no synchronized sound for dialogue, onscreen inter-titles were used to narrate story points, present key dialogue and sometimes even comment on the action for the audience. The title writer became

39271-484: The silver screen. The animated film Fantasia (1940), which is eight different animation sequences set to music, can be considered a silent film, with only one short scene involving dialogue. The espionage film The Thief (1952) has music and sound effects, but no dialogue, as do Thierry Zéno 's 1974 Vase de Noces and Patrick Bokanowski 's 1982 The Angel . Serial film A serial film, film serial (or just serial ), movie serial , or chapter play ,

39498-438: The size of the exhibition site, musical accompaniment could drastically change in scale. Small-town and neighborhood movie theatres usually had a pianist . Beginning in the mid-1910s, large city theaters tended to have organists or ensembles of musicians. Massive theatre organs , which were designed to fill a gap between a simple piano soloist and a larger orchestra, had a wide range of special effects. Theatrical organs such as

39725-486: The solution, however, would be that FBO had a mystery story, and in an effort to keep up with the times had synchronized it.... The synchronization is faulty in many, many places, and several vocal selections are added in curious out-of-the-way scenes." A trade paper report described the studio's plans to add "synchronized music, sound effects and dialogue" to five other silently shot films. To date, FBO's experiments with sound had all been funded by RCA; on August 22, as Kennedy

39952-438: The spot in the manner of the silent-era theater musician. Interest in the scoring of silent films fell somewhat out of fashion during the 1960s and 1970s. There was a belief in many college film programs and repertory cinemas that audiences should experience silent film as a pure visual medium, undistracted by music. This belief may have been encouraged by the poor quality of the music tracks found on many silent film reprints of

40179-467: The standardization of the projection speed of 24 frames per second (fps) for sound films between 1926 and 1930, silent films were shot at variable speeds (or " frame rates ") anywhere from 12 to 40 fps, depending on the year and studio. "Standard silent film speed" is often said to be 16 fps as a result of the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe , but industry practice varied considerably; there

40406-543: The studio (two released after it had ceased to exist), and stayed near the top of the exhibitors' poll, his 112 votes good enough for second among the men, if well behind the 171 of MGM 's Lon Chaney (no other FBO regular made it into even double digits). But the spread of the talkies was swiftly making the silent sagebrush superstar less of a sure thing. Variety derided Mix's last FBO film, The Big Diamond Robbery , released in May 1929, as "cowboy burlesque". His brief tenure at

40633-467: The studio between 1925 and 1928. One production in which he served in both capacities was particularly well received: Chicago After Midnight (1928) was described by the New York Times as an "unusually well-acted and adroitly directed underworld story". After The Mistress of Shenstone , Henry King directed two more R-C films with Pauline Frederick, also in 1921: Salvage and The Sting of

40860-493: The studio featured a celebrity of a very different sort: magician Harry Houdini , directing and starring in his last feature film, Haldane of the Secret Service . In November 1924, FBO put out Davenport's next "social problem" picture, Broken Laws . Here Davenport (again billed as Mrs. Wallace Reid) plays the overindulgent mother of an unruly boy destined, as a reckless teen, to commit a terrible misdeed. According to

41087-483: The studio focused on marketing its roster of films as suitable for the "average American" and the entire family: "We can't make pictures and label them 'For Children,' or 'For Women' or 'For Stout People' or 'For Thin Ones.' We must make pictures that have appeal to all." Though Kennedy ended the scandal-sheet specials, FBO still found occasion for celebrity casting: One Minute to Play (1926), directed by Sam Wood , marked

41314-406: The studio has been found. Due to its zeal for cost cutting, FBO was reputed to be especially meticulous in the execution of a practice then common among distributors: rounding up its release prints at the end of a picture's run and melting them down to recover the silver in the film emulsion . As for FBO's biggest star, among America's biggest at the time, of the twenty films Fred Thomson made for

41541-536: The studio heads). Ramsaye went on to celebrate Kennedy's "background of lofty and conservative financial connections, an atmosphere of much home and family life and all those fireside virtues of which the public never hears in the current news from Hollywood." Studio chief Fineman departed around the time of Kennedy's purchase to work at the larger First National Pictures . The new owner hired Edwin King away from Famous Players–Lasky's New York studio to replace him, but took

41768-515: The studio put out twenty-six cartoons by animator William Nolan based on George Herriman 's now famed Krazy Kat newspaper comic strip, licensed by the wife-husband distribution team of Margaret Winkler and Charles Mintz . While the Winkler–Mintz operation took Krazy Kat away from FBO the following season for a Paramount contract, they struck a deal with the studio for another series, one that, like Bowers's shorts, involved both animation and

41995-409: The studio was marked by salary grievances—he was now making only $ 10,000 a week—and dismay at FBO's inferior production values, from its worndown sets to the cut-rate film stock it used. Subsequently asked about his experience working with Kennedy, Mix described him as a "tight-assed, money-crazy son-of-a-bitch." In addition to these major draws, there was also Harry Carey ; a top star for Universal in

42222-484: The studio was released in June 1926. By August, Brent was on her way to starring roles at Paramount. In October, Talmadge was judged to have been FBO's biggest non-Western draw of the year; in the first annual Exhibitors Herald theater owners' poll of top box office names, he placed thirtieth out of sixty. Beginning in late 1924, Maurice "Lefty" Flynn starred in over a dozen action-filled "comedy dramas" released by FBO, all produced and directed by Harry Garson . Signing

42449-602: The studio's best efforts: The Spider's Web , The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok , Batman , The Secret Code , and The Phantom maintained Columbia's own high standard. However, Columbia's serials often have a reputation for cheapness, because the studio usually subcontracted its serial production to outside producers: the Weiss Brothers (1937–1938), Larry Darmour (1939–1942), and finally Sam Katzman (1945–1956). Columbia built many serials around name-brand heroes. From newspaper comics, they got Terry and

42676-604: The studio's course: Negotiations that began in late 1927 with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) on a deal for sound conversion led to the January 1928 announcement that RCA, parent company General Electric , and allied shareholder Westinghouse had purchased a major interest in FBO—the $ 24 price per share was quadruple what it had been just two years earlier. David Sarnoff , RCA general manager and driving force, took

42903-428: The studio, for years just a single one was known to remain intact in a US archive: Thundering Hoofs . About three reels' worth of the five-reel Galloping Gallagher (1924) were also known to survive. In 1982, film scholar Bruce Firestone wrote that "the disappearance, through loss or destruction, of virtually all of his films [has] turned Thomson into one of the least-known cowboys in the history of American movies." In

43130-514: The studio. In December 1925, the Exhibitors Herald published its first annual list of the biggest box office films of the year (ending November 15) based on a national survey of theater owners. FBO's top five attractions were led by A Girl of the Limberlost , an adaptation of a novel by bestselling author Gene Stratton-Porter , who had died the previous December; this was followed by Broken Laws , an issue-driven melodrama detailing

43357-489: The time. Since around 1980, there has been a revival of interest in presenting silent films with quality musical scores (either reworkings of period scores or cue sheets, or the composition of appropriate original scores). An early effort of this kind was Kevin Brownlow 's 1980 restoration of Abel Gance 's Napoléon (1927), featuring a score by Carl Davis . A slightly re-edited and sped-up version of Brownlow's restoration

43584-562: The title character's non-talkative nature to create a similar style of humor. A lesser-known example is Jérôme Savary 's La fille du garde-barrière (1975), an homage to silent-era films that uses intertitles and blends comedy, drama, and explicit sex scenes (which led to it being refused a cinema certificate by the British Board of Film Classification ). In 1990, Charles Lane directed and starred in Sidewalk Stories ,

43811-629: The traditional approach include organists such as Dennis James and pianists such as Neil Brand , Günter Buchwald, Philip C. Carli, Ben Model , and William P. Perry . Other contemporary pianists, such as Stephen Horne and Gabriel Thibaudeau, have often taken a more modern approach to scoring. Orchestral conductors such as Carl Davis and Robert Israel have written and compiled scores for numerous silent films; many of these have been featured in showings on Turner Classic Movies or have been released on DVD. Davis has composed new scores for classic silent dramas such as The Big Parade (1925) and Flesh and

44038-566: The transition. In the early 1930s a handful of independent companies tried their hand at making serials. The Weiss Brothers had been making serials in 1935 and 1936. In 1937 Columbia Pictures , inspired by the previous year's serial blockbuster success at Universal, Flash Gordon , decided to enter the serial field and contracted with the Weiss Brothers (as Adventure Serials Inc.) to make three chapterplays. They were successful enough that Columbia then established its own serial unit and

44265-427: The use of inter- title cards . The term "silent film" is something of a misnomer, as these films were almost always accompanied by live sounds. During the silent era, which existed from the mid-1890s to the late 1920s, a pianist , theater organist —or even, in larger cities, an orchestra —would play music to accompany the films. Pianists and organists would play either from sheet music , or improvisation . Sometimes

44492-475: The viewing experience. Among the contemporary ensembles in this category are Un Drame Musical Instantané , Alloy Orchestra , Club Foot Orchestra , Silent Orchestra , Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, Minima and the Caspervek Trio, RPM Orchestra . Donald Sosin and his wife Joanna Seaton specialize in adding vocals to silent films, particularly where there is onscreen singing that benefits from hearing

44719-427: The villain and his henchmen commit crimes in various places, fight the hero, and trap someone to make the ending a cliffhanger. Many of the episodes have clues, dialogue, and events leading the viewer to think that any of the candidates were the mastermind. As serials were made by writing the whole script first and then slicing it into portions filmed at various sites, often the same location would be used several times in

44946-402: The villains, never the heroes) throwing things in desperation at one another in every fight to heighten the action. Republic serials are noted for outstanding special effects, such as large-scale explosions and demolitions, and the more fantastic visuals like Captain Marvel and Rocketman flying. Most of the trick scenes were engineered by Howard and Theodore Lydecker . Republic was able to get

45173-407: The works of Gene Stratton-Porter were consistently among its top box office attractions. In 1926, Kennedy led an investment group that acquired the company, and he ran it hands-on—traveling frequently to California—with considerable success. Exhibitors cited The Keeper of the Bees , based on a Stratton-Porter novel, as the year's most popular film. In early 1928, Kennedy froze Fred Thomson out of

45400-409: The wrong speed or suffer from censorship cuts and missing frames and scenes, giving the appearance of poor editing. Many silent films exist only in second- or third-generation copies, often made from already damaged and neglected film stock. Many early screening were plagued by flicker on the screen, when the stroboscopic interruptions between frames lay below the critical flicker frequency . This

45627-469: Was Nicholas Musuraca , who established his career at Film Booking Offices. With RKO, Musuraca would become one of Hollywood's most respected cinematographers. At the age of twenty-five, King Vidor insisted on casting then little-known ZaSu Pitts as the lead in Better Times ; he directed two more of her R-C/Brentwood films, both starring his wife, Florence Vidor . Louis J. Gasnier , responsible for

45854-534: Was America's small towns, also put out many romantic melodramas, action pictures, and comedic shorts . Pauline Frederick and Sessue Hayakawa were the major stars of its R-C period. Subsequently, Evelyn Brent and Richard Talmadge were FBO's biggest non-Western stars. Tom Tyler played the lead in twenty-nine cowboy pictures for the studio. Alberta Vaughn headlined five FBO short series. The studio's most prolific directors included Ralph Ince , William Seiter , and Emory Johnson . From 1925 forward, adaptations of

46081-688: Was a black comedy entirely devoid of dialog. The Australian film Doctor Plonk (2007), was a silent comedy directed by Rolf de Heer . Stage plays have drawn upon silent film styles and sources. Actor/writers Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore staged their Off-Broadway slapstick comedy Silent Laughter as a live action tribute to the silent screen era. Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford created and starred in All Wear Bowlers (2004), which started as an homage to Laurel and Hardy then evolved to incorporate life-sized silent film sequences of Sobelle and Lyford who jump back and forth between live action and

46308-456: Was absorbed into Robertson-Cole. Rufus Cole also entered into a working relationship with Hallmark investor Joseph P. Kennedy , father of future U.S. president John F. Kennedy and then a broker at the New York banking firm of Hayden, Stone . In December, after lengthy negotiations, Kennedy set up his own wholly owned company, Robertson-Cole Distributing Corporation of New England, to handle

46535-469: Was certainly economical, but it often hurt the overall quality of the films. When the studio reorganized as Universal-International, it shut down most of the production units, including the serial crew. Universal's last serial was The Mysterious Mr. M (1946). Republic was the successor to Mascot Pictures , a serial specialist. Writers and directors were already geared to staging exciting films, and Republic improved on Mascot, adding music to underscore

46762-415: Was compiled from photoplay music by the pianist, organist, orchestra conductor or the movie studio itself, which included a cue sheet with the film. These sheets were often lengthy, with detailed notes about effects and moods to watch for. Starting with the mostly original score composed by Joseph Carl Breil for D. W. Griffith 's epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), it became relatively common for

46989-478: Was controversial, the door had been opened for a new approach to the presentation of classic silent films. Today, a large number of soloists, music ensembles, and orchestras perform traditional and contemporary scores for silent films internationally. The legendary theater organist Gaylord Carter continued to perform and record his original silent film scores until shortly before his death in 2000; some of those scores are available on DVD reissues. Other purveyors of

47216-462: Was crossing the Atlantic for a European vacation, Variety announced that he had finally signed a formal licensing agreement to pay for his studio's use of Photophone recording. While Kennedy traveled, RCA launched a bid to acquire control of and combine the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain with FBO, as talks began between Sarnoff and Walker. After his return in late September, Kennedy ultimately agreed to

47443-431: Was dissolved in a merger, the company, as either Robertson-Cole Pictures or FBO Pictures, produced more than 400 features. The studio's top-of-the-line movies—"specials", in industry parlance—aimed at major exhibition venues beyond the reach of most FBO films, were sometimes marketed as FBO "Gold Bond" pictures. Between 1924 and 1926, seven of Evelyn Brent's star vehicles as well as two other high-end films were produced under

47670-482: Was elected FBO chairman in March and was soon traveling to Hollywood, where one of his first steps was to cut loose the various independent producers resident at the studio. The president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association , Will Hays —the industry's future censor in chief —was delighted by the new face on the scene; in his eyes, Kennedy signified both a desirable image for

47897-451: Was expensive for film. However, by using projectors with dual- and triple-blade shutters the flicker rate is multiplied two or three times higher than the number of film frames — each frame being flashed two or three times on screen. A three-blade shutter projecting a 16 fps film will slightly surpass Edison's figure, giving the audience 48 images per second. During the silent era projectors were commonly fitted with 3-bladed shutters. Since

48124-403: Was expiring, might become available, he used his control of Fred Thomson Productions, the supposed tax shelter , to freeze Thomson out of motion pictures entirely. That December, Thomson died—the immediate cause of death was tetanus ; his widow, screenwriter Frances Marion , said that he had lost his will to live. Among Western stars under long-term contract, FBO's next most important—though by

48351-788: Was forced to come up with two extra chapters to justify the added expense. This was an emergency measure at the time, but Republic recognized that it did save money, so the recap chapter became standard practice in almost all of its ensuing serials. Recap chapters had lower budgets, so rather than staging an elaborate cliffhanger (a runaway vehicle, a stampede, a flooding chamber, etc.), a cheaper, simpler cliffhanger would be employed (an explosion, someone knocked unconscious, etc.). The major studios had their own retinues of actors and writers, their own prop departments, existing sets, stock footage, and music libraries. The early independent studios had none of these, but could rent sets from independent producers of western features. The firms saved money by reusing

48578-408: Was itself producer of record for The Harvester (1927) and Freckles (1928). All six were directed by Stratton-Porter's son-in-law, James Leo Meehan . All six were hits. All are considered lost. In-house, Frances Marion, who would win two writing Oscars in the 1930s, created the stories for seven of the FBO pictures starring her husband, Fred Thomson—for these brawny cowboy tales, such as Ridin'

48805-403: Was later distributed in the United States by Francis Ford Coppola , with a live orchestral score composed by his father Carmine Coppola . In 1984, an edited restoration of Metropolis (1927) was released with a new rock music score by producer-composer Giorgio Moroder . Although the contemporary score, which included pop songs by Freddie Mercury , Pat Benatar , and Jon Anderson of Yes ,

49032-514: Was no actual standard. William Kennedy Laury Dickson , an Edison employee, settled on the astonishingly fast 40 frames per second. Additionally, cameramen of the era insisted that their cranking technique was exactly 16 fps, but modern examination of the films shows this to be in error, and that they often cranked faster. Unless carefully shown at their intended speeds silent films can appear unnaturally fast or slow. However, some scenes were intentionally undercranked during shooting to accelerate

49259-568: Was now in effect a Pathé subsidiary. In March, nominally acting as an unpaid "special advisor" to Pathé (he would eventually receive 100,000 shares of stock and thousands of dollars in retroactive salary), Kennedy took effective charge of PDC operations, beginning the process of edging DeMille out. Pursuing a vertical integration strategy he had discussed separately with both Sarnoff and Walker, Kennedy and his circle of investors, including Blair & Co., soon acquired working control of KAO and its film production/distribution assets. The establishment of

49486-661: Was on the Northern European, South Asian, and Latin American markets. From its U.S. office, R-C Pictures, as it was often branded, started American motion picture distribution late in 1918, purchasing film rights from independent production companies and selling them on to Exhibitors Mutual Distributing, a corporate successor of the Mutual Film studio. In November, R-C contracted to serve as the sole provider to Exhibitors Mutual, and its first acquisitions were released

49713-486: Was posted on the official Lamb4 Productions YouTube channel for public viewing. The serial format was used with stories on the original run of The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–58), with each chapter running about six to ten minutes. The longer-running dramatic serials included "Corky and White Shadow", "The Adventures of Spin and Marty ", " The Hardy Boys : The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure", "The Boys of

49940-686: Was released in 1926, would become known for her naturalistic acting. According to Anton Kaes, a silent film scholar from the University of California, Berkeley, American silent cinema began to see a shift in acting techniques between 1913 and 1921, influenced by techniques found in German silent film. This is mainly attributed to the influx of emigrants from the Weimar Republic , "including film directors, producers, cameramen, lighting and stage technicians, as well as actors and actresses". Until

50167-570: Was revived in 2005, now following a more standard episode format. The 1960s cartoon show Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle included two serial-style episodes per program. These spoofed the cliffhanger serial form. Within the Rocky and Bullwinke show, the recurring but non-serialized Dudley Do-Right , specifically parodied the damsel in distress (Nell Fenwick) being tied to railroad tracks by arch villain Snidely Whiplash and rescued by

50394-501: Was said to have been paid an extravagant $ 7,000 or $ 7,500 a week under her R-C deal. Early in her career, ZaSu Pitts acted in six R-C releases— Better Times (1919) gave Pitts her first ever top billing—from the Brentwood Film Corporation , founded by a group of doctors. In the years after the studio's rebranding, Evelyn Brent and Richard Talmadge were FBO's most prominent non-Western headliners. Brent made

50621-575: Was solved with the introduction of a three-bladed shutter (since 1902), causing two more interruptions per frame. Another widely held misconception is that silent films lacked color. In fact, color was far more prevalent in silent films than in the first few decades of sound films. By the early 1920s, 80 percent of movies could be seen in some sort of color, usually in the form of film tinting or toning or even hand coloring, but also with fairly natural two-color processes such as Kinemacolor and Technicolor . Traditional colorization processes ceased with

50848-473: Was surging, and in April 1925, FBO vice-president Joseph I. Schnitzer signed him to a studio contract paying $ 6,000 a week—roughly $ 104,243 in 2023 dollars. Behind only the enormously popular Tom Mix , Thomson was now the second-highest paid of all cowboy actors; his horse, Silver King , beloved by audiences, was covered by a $ 100,000 insurance policy. The deal also gave Thomson his own dedicated production unit at

51075-600: Was the 119-episode The Hazards of Helen made by Kalem Studios and starring Helen Holmes for the first forty-eight episodes then Helen Gibson for the remainder. Ruth Roland , Marin Sais , and Ann Little were also early leading serial queens. Other major studios of the silent era, such as Vitagraph and Essanay Studios , produced serials, as did Warner Bros. , Fox , and Universal . Several independent companies (for example, Mascot Pictures ) made Western serials. Four silent Tarzan serials were also made. Serials were

51302-454: Was the cause of this outburst from director Marshall Neilan in 1917: "The sooner the stage people who have come into pictures get out, the better for the pictures." In other cases, directors such as John Griffith Wray required their actors to deliver larger-than-life expressions for emphasis. As early as 1914, American viewers had begun to make known their preference for greater naturalness on screen. Silent films became less vaudevillian in

51529-576: Was top billed in at least eight FBO releases between 1922 and 1928. George O'Hara headlined multiple features as well as short series. Warner Baxter and Joe E. Brown were among the other popular FBO players. Anna Q. Nilsson starred in two of the studio's more notable productions, as did Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Pauline Frederick returned in 1926 for the title role in Her Honor, the Governor . When Evelyn Brent departed, Kennedy signed Viola Dana to

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