Misplaced Pages

#315684

209-543: Roscoe Conkling " Fatty " Arbuckle ( / ˈ ɑːr b ʌ k əl / ; March 24, 1887 – June 29, 1933) was an American silent film actor, director, and screenwriter. He started at the Selig Polyscope Company and eventually moved to Keystone Studios , where he worked with Mabel Normand and Harold Lloyd as well as with his nephew, Al St. John . He also mentored Charlie Chaplin , Monty Banks and Bob Hope , and brought vaudeville star Buster Keaton into

418-476: A MacArthur Fellow and Tony Award -winning actor, are frequently lauded as "New Vaudevillians". References to vaudeville and the use of its distinctive argot continue throughout North American popular culture. Words such as "flop" and "gag" were terms created from the vaudeville era and have entered the American idiom. Vaudevillian techniques can commonly be witnessed on television and in movies, remarkably in

627-409: A ruptured bladder . Rappe suffered from chronic urinary tract infections , a condition that liquor irritated dramatically. The day after Rappe's death, Arbuckle was arrested and arraigned on charges of murder and held without bail. A grand jury also indicted him on manslaughter of the first degree on September 13, 1921. Delmont told police that Arbuckle had raped Rappe. The police concluded that

836-445: 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

1045-584: A Broadway show. This is when she began experimenting with improvisational comedy and quickly found her unique success, even taking her performances global with acts in the U.K. Sophie Tucker , a Russian Jewish immigrant, was told by promoter Chris Brown that she was not attractive enough to succeed in show business without doing Blackface, so she performed that way for the first two years onstage, until one day she decided to go without it, and achieved much greater success being herself from that point on, especially with her song "Some of These Days." Moms Mabley

1254-637: A bathtub of cool water. Arbuckle and Fischbach then took her to room 1227 and called the hotel manager and doctor. At this point all those present believed that Rappe was just very drunk, including the hotel doctors. Assuming that Rappe's condition would improve if she slept, Arbuckle drove Taub into town. The prosecution presented medical descriptions of Rappe's bladder as evidence that she had suffered from an illness. In his testimony, Arbuckle denied that he had any knowledge of Rappe's illness. During cross-examination, assistant district attorney Leo Friedman aggressively grilled Arbuckle about Arbuckle's refusal to call

1463-738: A bottle". Keaton attempted to help Arbuckle by employing him for his films. Arbuckle wrote the story for a Keaton short titled Day Dreams (1922) and allegedly directed scenes in Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924), but it is unclear how much of Arbuckle's footage remained in the film's final cut. In 1925, Carter DeHaven 's short Character Studies , filmed before the scandal, was released, featuring Arbuckle along with Keaton, Harold Lloyd , Rudolph Valentino , Douglas Fairbanks and Jackie Coogan . The same year in Photoplay ' s August issue, James R. Quirk wrote: "I would like to see Roscoe Arbuckle make

1672-455: A break from his hectic film schedule and, despite suffering second-degree burns to both buttocks from an on-set accident, drove to San Francisco with two friends, Lowell Sherman and Fred Fishback . The three checked into three rooms at the St. Francis Hotel : 1219 for Arbuckle and Fishback to share, 1221 for Sherman, and 1220 designated as a party room. Several women were invited to the suite. During

1881-435: A cash bribe in exchange for the key to Rappe's dressing room but that Norgard refused. Norgard claimed that Arbuckle stated that he wanted the key to play a joke on Rappe. During cross-examination, Norgard's testimony was impugned when he was revealed to be an ex-convict under indictment for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl, and was seeking a sentence reduction from Brady in exchange for his testimony. In contrast to

2090-404: A closing argument to the jury. However, some jurors interpreted the refusal to permit Arbuckle to testify as a sign of guilt. After five days and more than 40 hours of deliberation, the jury returned on February 3, deadlocked with a 10–2 majority in favor of conviction, resulting in another mistrial. By the time of Arbuckle's third trial, his films had been banned and newspapers had been filled for

2299-420: A comeback to the screen. ... The American nation prides itself upon its spirit of fair play. We like the whole world to look upon America as the place where every man gets a square deal. Are you sure Roscoe Arbuckle is getting one today? I'm not." Eventually, Arbuckle worked as a director under the pseudonym of William Goodrich, his father's first and middle name. Keaton, a frequent punster , later claimed that

SECTION 10

#1732791317316

2508-463: A commitment to entertainment equally inoffensive to men, women and children. Acts that violated this ethos (e.g., those that used words such as "hell") were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the week's remaining performances or were canceled altogether. In spite of such threats, performers routinely flouted this censorship , often to the delight of the very audience members whose sensibilities were supposedly endangered. He eventually instituted

2717-425: A competent local attorney. The principal witness was Prevon. At the beginning of the trial, Arbuckle told his estranged wife Minta Durfee that he had not harmed Rappe. Durfee believed him and appeared regularly in the courtroom to support him. Public feeling was so negative that shots were fired at Durfee as she entered the courthouse. Brady's first witnesses during the trial included model Betty Campbell, who attended

2926-758: A contract with Warner Bros. to star under his own name in a series of six two-reel comedies to be filmed at the Vitaphone studios in Brooklyn, New York . These six short films constitute the only samples of Arbuckle's voice, which recorded in a pleasant second-tenor range. Silent-film comedian Al St. John (Arbuckle's nephew) and actors Lionel Stander and Shemp Howard appeared with Arbuckle. The film How've You Bean? features grocery-store gags reminiscent of Arbuckle's 1917 short The Butcher Boy , with vaudeville comic Fritz Hubert as his assistant, dressed like Buster Keaton. The Vitaphone shorts were very successful in

3135-428: A dead man. He had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career. But it was such an amazing thing for me to come in to make this broken-down picture, and to find my director was the great Roscoe Arbuckle. Oh, I thought he was magnificent in films. He was a wonderful dancer—a wonderful ballroom dancer, in his heyday. It was like floating in the arms of a huge doughnut—really delightful. Among

3344-507: A doctor when he found Rappe sick and argued that Arbuckle had refused because he knew of Rappe's illness and saw a perfect opportunity to rape and kill her. Arbuckle calmly maintained that he did not physically hurt or sexually assault Rappe during the party, and he also stated that he had never made any inappropriate sexual advances against any woman in his life. After more than two weeks of testimony with 60 prosecution and defense witnesses, including 18 doctors who testified about Rappe's illness,

3553-484: A feature film. Roscoe Arbuckle was born on March 24, 1887, in Smith Center, Kansas , one of nine children of Mary E. Gordon and William Goodrich Arbuckle. He weighed in excess of 13 pounds (5.9 kg) at birth and his father believed that he was illegitimate, as both parents had slim builds. Consequently, he named him after Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York , a notorious philanderer whom he despised. The birth

3762-412: A feature-length film. That night, he met with friends to celebrate his first wedding anniversary and the new contract when he reportedly said: "This is the best day of my life." He suffered a heart attack later that night and died in his sleep at the age of 46. His widow Addie requested that his body be cremated according to Arbuckle's wish. Many of Arbuckle's films, including the feature The Life of

3971-480: A form of entertainment. He incorporated them in his shows as early as 1902. Later, he entered into a partnership with the Famous Players–Lasky , a major Hollywood production company and an affiliate of Paramount Pictures . By the late 1920s, most vaudeville shows included a healthy selection of cinema. Earlier in the century, many vaudevillians, cognizant of the threat represented by cinema, held out hope that

4180-399: A hotel. He was in the habit of singing while he worked, and a professional singer heard him and invited him to perform in an amateur talent show. The show consisted of the audience judging acts by clapping or jeering, with bad acts pulled off the stage by a shepherd's crook . Arbuckle sang, danced, and did some clowning around, but he did not impress the audience. He saw the crook emerging from

4389-413: 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

SECTION 20

#1732791317316

4598-415: A launching pad for later careers. They left live performance before achieving the national celebrity of earlier vaudeville stars, and found fame in new venues. The line between live and filmed performances was blurred by the number of vaudeville entrepreneurs who made more or less successful forays into the movie business. For example, Alexander Pantages quickly realized the importance of motion pictures as

4807-469: 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

5016-535: A marketing strategy to attract many different audiences. As stated in Andrew Erdman 's book Blue Vaudeville , the Vaudeville stage was "a highly sexualized space ... where unclad bodies, provocative dancers, and singers of 'blue' lyrics all vied for attention." Such performances highlighted and objectified the female body as a "sexual delight", but more than that, historians think that Vaudeville marked

5225-530: A method of understanding different groups and their societal positions within their cities. The use of the greenhorn immigrant for comedic effect showcased how immigrants were viewed as new arrivals, but also what they could aspire to be. In addition to interpreting visual ethnic caricatures, the Irish American ideal of transitioning from the shanty to the lace curtain became a model of economic upward mobility for immigrant groups. The continued growth of

5434-645: 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 ,

5643-494: A party hosted by Arbuckle at San Francisco 's St. Francis Hotel in September 1921, and died four days later. A friend of Rappe accused Arbuckle of raping and accidentally killing her. The first two trials resulted in hung juries , but the third trial acquitted Arbuckle. The third jury took the unusual step of giving Arbuckle a written statement of apology for his treatment by the justice system. Despite Arbuckle's acquittal,

5852-611: A premise for a film parodying Hart as a thief, bully and wifebeater. Keaton purchased the premise, and the resulting film, The Frozen North , was released in 1922, almost a year after the scandal first emerged. Keaton cowrote, directed and starred in the film, and Hart refused to speak to Keaton for many years afterward. The prosecutor, San Francisco district attorney Matthew Brady , an intensely ambitious man who planned to run for governor , made public pronouncements of Arbuckle's guilt and pressured witnesses to make false statements. Brady at first featured Delmont as his star witness during

6061-503: 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

6270-528: A serious actress but was advised to remain in comedy. She went on to star in a few films but again returned to vaudeville, her original career. Another famous vaudevillian actress was Trixie Friganza , originally born Delia O'Callaghan. She had a famous catchphrase: "You know Trixie with her bag of tricks." She began her career in opera, performing to help provide for her family. The oldest of three daughters, she wanted to help her family financially but had to do it secretly, as female performers were frowned on at

6479-572: A set of guidelines to be an audience member at his show, and these were reinforced by the ushers working in the theatre. This "polite entertainment" also extended to Keith's company members. He went to extreme measures to maintain this level of modesty. Keith even went as far as posting warnings backstage such as this: "Don't say 'slob' or 'son of a gun' or 'hully gee' on the stage unless you want to be canceled peremptorily... if you are guilty of uttering anything sacrilegious or even suggestive you will be immediately closed and will never again be allowed in

Roscoe Arbuckle - Misplaced Pages Continue

6688-459: A single (an individual male or female performer); next would be an alley-oop (an acrobatic act); then another single, followed by yet another sketch such as a blackface comedy. The acts that followed these for the rest of the show would vary from musicals to jugglers to song-and-dance singles and end with a final extravaganza – either musical or drama – with the full company. These shows would feature such stars as ragtime and jazz pianist Eubie Blake ,

6897-402: A single host introducing a series of acts became a popular television style and can be seen consistently in the development of television, from The Milton Berle Show in 1948 to Late Night with David Letterman in the 1980s. The multi-act format had renewed success in shows such as Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and The Ed Sullivan Show . Today, performers such as Bill Irwin ,

7106-498: 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

7315-748: A starring role. By the early 21st century, some of Arbuckle's short subjects (particularly those co-starring Chaplin or Keaton) had been restored, released on DVD, and even screened theatrically. His early influence on American slapstick comedy is widely recognized. For his contributions to the film industry, in 1960, some 27 years after his death, Arbuckle was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard . Neil Sedaka refers to Arbuckle, along with Charlie Chaplin , Buster Keaton , Stan Laurel , and Oliver Hardy in his 1971 song "Silent Movies", as heard on his Emergence album. Silent film A silent film

7524-659: A surprise to audience members when such beautiful women actually possessed talent in addition to their appealing looks. This element of surprise colored much of the reaction to the female entertainment of this time. In the 1920s, announcements seeking all-girl bands for vaudeville performances appeared in industry publications like Billboard , Variety and in newspapers. Bands like The Ingenues and The Dixie Sweethearts were well-publicized, while other groups were simply described as "all-girl Revue". According to Feminist Theory, similar trends in theater and film objectified women, an example of male gaze , as women's role in public life

7733-411: A taste for the risqué . In the 1840s, the minstrel show , another type of variety performance, and "the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture", grew to enormous popularity and formed what Nick Tosches called "the heart of 19th-century show business". A significant influence also came from "Dutch" (i.e., German or faux-German) minstrels and comedians. Medicine shows traveled

7942-496: A theatre where Mr. Keith is in authority." Along these same lines of discipline, Keith's theatre managers would occasionally send out blue envelopes with orders to omit certain suggestive lines of songs and possible substitutions for those words. If actors chose to ignore these orders or quit, they would get "a black mark" on their name and would never again be allowed to work on the Keith Circuit. Thus, actors learned to follow

8151-534: A three-year, $ 3 million contract (equivalent to $ 61 million in 2023). By 1916, Arbuckle was experiencing serious health problems. An infection that developed on his leg became a carbuncle so severe that doctors considered amputation. Although Arbuckle was able to keep his leg, he was prescribed morphine against the pain; he would later be accused of being addicted to it. Following his recovery, Arbuckle started his own film company, Comique, in partnership with Joseph Schenck . Although Comique produced some of

8360-628: A time in which the female body became its own "sexual spectacle". This sexual image began sprouting everywhere an American went: the shops, a restaurant, the grocery store, etc. The more this image brought in the highest revenue, the more Vaudeville focused on acts involving women. Even acts that were as innocent as a sister act were higher sellers than a good brother act. Consequently, Erdman adds that female Vaudeville performers such as Julie Mackey and Gibson's Bathing Girls began to focus less on talent and more on physical appeal through their figure, tight gowns, and other revealing attire. It eventually came as

8569-584: A trained mule) shared a stage with acts more usually regarded as "highbrow" or classical entertainment (opera vocalists, classical musicians). B. F. Keith took the next step, starting in Boston , where he built an empire of theatres and brought vaudeville to the United States and Canada. Later, E. F. Albee , adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize -winning playwright Edward Albee , managed

Roscoe Arbuckle - Misplaced Pages Continue

8778-485: A typical North American vaudeville performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts have included popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals , magicians, ventriloquists , strongmen , female and male impersonators , acrobats, clowns, illustrated songs , jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels , and films. A vaudeville performer

8987-429: A unanimous not-guilty verdict. Five of those minutes were spent writing a formal statement of apology to Arbuckle for subjecting him to the ordeal, a dramatic and unusual gesture. The jury statement read: We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with

9196-401: A unique ethnic interplay between Irish American use of self-deprecation as humor and their diverse inner city surroundings. The interactions between newly arrived immigrants and settled immigrants within the backdrop of the unknown American urban landscape allowed vaudeville to be utilized as an avenue for expression and understanding. The often hostile immigrant experience in their new country

9405-449: A vaudeville troupe organized by Leon Errol . Arbuckle became the main act and the group took their show on tour. On August 6, 1908, Arbuckle married Minta Durfee (1889–1975), the daughter of Charles Warren Durfee and Flora Adkins. Durfee starred in many early comedy films, often with Arbuckle. As a couple, they appeared mismatched, as Minta was short and petite while Arbuckle tipped the scales at 300 lbs (136 kg). Arbuckle then joined

9614-414: A villain because there had been a great deal of media attention on women serving in juries, a practice that had been legalized only four years earlier. Myers also records Hubbard's account of the jury foreman's attempts to pressure her to change her vote. While Hubbard offered explanations on her vote whenever challenged, Thomas Kilkenny, the other juror who voted guilty, remained silent and quickly faded from

9823-505: A wide range of clientele. Many small towns had purpose-built theatres. A small yet interesting example might include what is called Grange Halls in northern New England, still being used. These are old-fashioned, wooden buildings with creaky, dimly-lit, wooden stages, which were meant to offset the isolation of a farming lifestyle. These stages could offer anything from child performers to contra-dances to visits by Santa to local, musical talent, to homemade foods such as whoopee pies. Some of

10032-494: 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

10241-418: 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 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

10450-437: 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 the phonograph in 1877), and some early experiments had

10659-530: Is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs or ballets. It became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, while changing over time. In some ways analogous to music hall from Victorian Britain ,

SECTION 50

#1732791317316

10868-470: Is entirely innocent and free from all blame. Some experts later concluded that Rappe's bladder may have ruptured as a result of an abortion procedure that she may have undergone shortly before the party. However, her organs had been destroyed and it was now impossible to test her for pregnancy. Because alcohol was consumed at the party, Arbuckle pled guilty to one count of violating the Volstead Act and

11077-494: Is often considered to have been the death knell of vaudeville. Though talk of its resurrection was heard during the 1930s and later, the demise of the supporting apparatus of the circuits and the higher cost of live performance made any large-scale renewal of vaudeville unrealistic. The most striking examples of Gilded Age theatre architecture were commissioned by the big time vaudeville magnates and stood as monuments of their wealth and ambition. Examples of such architecture are

11286-484: Is often referred to as a "vaudevillian". Vaudeville developed from many sources, including the concert saloon , minstrelsy , freak shows , dime museums , and literary American burlesque . Called "the heart of American show business", vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America for several decades. The origin of the term is obscure but often explained as being derived from

11495-451: 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

11704-518: The vau de vire origin, a truncated form of chanson du Vau de Vire ' song of the Valley of the Vire ' . Around 1610, Jean le Houx collected these works as Le Livre des Chants nouveaux de Vaudevire , which is probably the direct origin of the word. With its first subtle appearances within the early 1860s, vaudeville was not initially a common form of entertainment. The form gradually evolved from

11913-544: 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

12122-492: The Federal Trade Commission to curb what they perceived as Hollywood debauchery run amok and its effect on the morals of the general public. While Arbuckle saw a resurgence in his popularity immediately after his acquittal, Zukor decided he had to be sacrificed to keep the movie industry out of the clutches of censors and moralists. Hays lifted the ban within a year, but Arbuckle only worked sparingly through

12331-734: The Marx Brothers , Jimmy Durante , Bill "Bojangles" Robinson , Edgar Bergen , Fanny Brice , Burns and Allen , and Eddie Cantor , used the prominence gained in live variety performance to vault into the new medium of cinema. In doing so, such performers often exhausted in a few moments of screen time the novelty of an act that might have kept them on tour for several years. Other performers who entered in vaudeville's later years, including Jack Benny , Abbott and Costello , Kate Smith , Cary Grant , Bob Hope , Milton Berle , Judy Garland , Rose Marie , Sammy Davis Jr. , Red Skelton , Larry Storch and The Three Stooges , used vaudeville only as

12540-671: The Tivoli Theatre are housed at the State Library of Victoria , Melbourne , Australia , with additional personal papers of vaudevillian performers from the Tivoli Theatre, including extensive costume and set design holdings, held by the Performing Arts Collection , Arts Centre Melbourne . The American Vaudeville Museum, one of the largest collections of vaudeville memorabilia, is located at

12749-421: 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

SECTION 60

#1732791317316

12958-659: The concert saloon and variety hall into its mature form throughout the 1870s and 1880s. This more gentle form was known as "Polite Vaudeville". In the years before the American Civil War , entertainment existed on a different scale. Similar variety theatre existed before 1860 in Europe and elsewhere. In the US, as early as the first decades of the 19th century, theatergoers could enjoy a performance consisting of Shakespeare plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing, and comedy. As

13167-457: The "Irwin Sisters". Many years later, their act had taken off and with performances in both vaudeville and burlesque at famous music halls, until Irwin decided to continue her career on her own. She then changed her approach to vaudeville, performing African-American-influenced songs, even later writing her songs. She introduced her signature in vaudeville, "The Bully Song", which was performed in

13376-425: The "big time" (possible remuneration of several thousand dollars per week in large, urban theatres largely patronized by the middle and upper-middle classes). As performers rose in renown and established regional and national followings, they worked their way into the less arduous working conditions and better pay of the big time. The capital of the big time was New York City's Palace Theatre (or just "The Palace" in

13585-526: 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

13794-496: The 1920s. In their deal, Keaton promised to give him 35% of the Buster Keaton Comedies Co. profits. He later worked as a film director under the pseudonym William Goodrich . He was finally able to return to acting, making short two-reel comedies in 1932–33 for Warner Bros. Arbuckle died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1933 at age 46, reportedly on the day that he signed a contract with Warner Bros. to make

14003-519: 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

14212-639: The Chinese, Italians, Germans and Jews utilized ethnic caricatures to understand themselves as well as the Irish. The urban diversity within the vaudeville stage and audience also reflected their societal status, with the working class constituting two-thirds of the typical vaudeville audience. The ethnic caricatures that now comprised American humor reflected the positive and negative interactions between ethnic groups in America's cities. The caricatures served as

14421-646: 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

14630-584: The French expression voix de ville ' voice of the city ' . A second hypothesis is that it comes from the 15th-century songs on satire by poet Olivier Basselin , "Vau de Vire". In his Connections television series, science historian James Burke argues that the term is a corruption of the French Vau de Vire ' Vire River Valley ' , an area known for its bawdy drinking songs and where Basselin lived. The Oxford English Dictionary also endorses

14839-423: The Irish becoming subject to discrimination due to their ethnic physical and cultural characteristics. The ethnic stereotypes of Irish through their greenhorn depiction alluded to their newly arrived status as immigrant Americans, with the stereotype portrayed in avenues of entertainment. Following the Irish immigration wave were several waves in which new immigrants from different backgrounds came in contact with

15048-453: The Irish in America's urban centers. Already settled and being native English speakers, Irish Americans took hold of these advantages and began to assert their positions in the immigrant racial hierarchy based on skin tone and assimilation status, cementing job positions that were previously unavailable to them as recently arrived immigrants. As a result, Irish Americans became prominent in vaudeville entertainment as curators and actors, creating

15257-635: 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

15466-540: 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

15675-656: The Morosco Burbank Stock vaudeville company and went on a tour of China and Japan , returning in early 1909. Arbuckle began his film career with the Selig Polyscope Company in July 1909 when he appeared in Ben's Kid . He appeared sporadically in Selig one-reelers until 1913, moved briefly to Universal Pictures , and became a star in producer-director Mack Sennett 's Keystone Cops comedies. Although his large size

15884-591: The Party (1920), survive only as worn prints with foreign-language intertitles. As with most American films produced during the silent era , little or no effort was made to preserve original negatives and prints during Hollywood's first two decades, making most films that included him lost media or lost films . However, it is likely that due to the reputation Arbuckle received around the death of Virginia Rappe, that many studios wished to avoid any negative backlash and purposely destroyed any surviving films in which he had

16093-888: The Plantation Club near the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios on Washington Boulevard as Roscoe Arbuckle's Plantation Café on August 2, 1928. By 1930, Arbuckle sold his interest and it became known as George Olsen's Plantation Café, later the Plantation Trailer Court and then Foreman Phillips County Barn Dance. In 1929, Doris Deane sued for divorce from Arbuckle in Los Angeles , charging desertion and cruelty. On June 21, 1932, Roscoe married Addie Oakley Dukes McPhail (later Addie Oakley Sheldon, 1905–2003) in Erie, Pennsylvania . In 1932, Arbuckle signed

16302-515: 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

16511-616: The U.S., although when Warner Bros. attempted to release the first one ( Hey, Pop! ) in the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Censors cited the ten-year-old scandal and refused to grant an exhibition certificate. On June 28, 1933, Arbuckle had finished filming In the Dough , the last of the Vitaphone two-reelers (four of which had already been released). The next day, he signed a contract with Warner Bros. to star in

16720-426: 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

16929-423: The United States and Canada and a large interest in two vaudeville circuits. Another major circuit was that of Alexander Pantages . In his heyday, Pantages owned more than 30 vaudeville theatres and controlled, through management contracts, perhaps 60 more in both the United States and Canada. At its height, vaudeville played across multiple strata of economic class and auditorium size. On the vaudeville circuit, it

17138-466: The United States and Canada, first for about three months in Emil Boreo’s Mirage de Paris followed by nine months in their own Ballet Caprice . After Jack quit the act near the end of 1927, Betty continued to manage the troupe and, with a new dance partner, toured throughout the northeastern United States for the next six months as Betty Felsen and Company. The final performance of Ballet Caprice

17347-402: 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

17556-547: 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

17765-687: 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

17974-412: 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

18183-411: The bathroom vomiting into the toilet. He claimed that Rappe had told him that she felt ill and asked to lie down, and that he carried her into the bedroom and asked a few of the party guests to help treat her. When Arbuckle and a few of the guests entered the room again, they found Rappe on the floor near the bed tearing at her clothing and experiencing violent convulsions. To calm Rappe, they placed her in

18392-562: 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)

18601-458: 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

18810-432: The best short pictures of the silent era, Arbuckle transferred his controlling interest in the company to Buster Keaton in 1918 and accepted Paramount's $ 3 million offer to make up to 18 feature films over three years. Arbuckle disliked his screen nickname. "Fatty" had also been Arbuckle's nickname since school; "It was inevitable", he said. Fans also called Roscoe "The Prince of Whales" and "The Balloonatic". However,

19019-476: 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

19228-1027: The business side of Vaudeville, like Amanda Thorpe, a white woman who founded a black theater in Virginia, and the Griffin Sisters , who managed several theaters in their efforts to create a Black Vaudeville circuit. Black performers and patrons participated in a racially segregated vaudeville circuit. Though many popular acts like Lewis and Walker, Ernest Hogan , Irving Jones , and the Hyers Sisters played to both white and black audiences, early Vaudeville performances for white audiences were limited to one Black act per show, and performers faced discrimination in restaurants and lodging. Entertainers and entrepreneurs like The Whitman Sisters , Pat Chapelle and John Isham created and managed their own touring companies; others took on theater ownership and management and created Black vaudeville circuits, as

19437-553: The carousing, a 30-year-old aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe was found seriously ill in room 1219 and was examined by the hotel doctor, who concluded that her symptoms were mostly caused by intoxication and administered morphine to calm her. Rappe was not hospitalized until two days after the incident. At the hospital, Rappe's companion at the party, Bambina Maude Delmont, told a doctor that Arbuckle had raped Rappe. The doctor examined Rappe but found no evidence of rape. She died Friday, September 9, 1921 from peritonitis caused by

19646-461: 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

19855-500: The chain to its greatest success. Circuits such as those managed by Keith-Albee provided vaudeville's greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength. They enabled a chain of allied vaudeville houses that remedied the chaos of the single-theatre booking system by contracting acts for regional and national tours. These could easily be lengthened from a few weeks to two years. Albee also gave national prominence to vaudeville's trumpeting "polite" entertainment,

20064-420: The circuit's central office weekly, follow each act's description. The bill illustrates the typical pattern of opening the show with a "dumb" act to allow patrons to find their seats, placing strong acts in second and penultimate positions, and leaving the weakest act for the end, to clear the house. In this bill, as in many vaudeville shows, acts often associated with "lowbrow" or popular entertainment (acrobats,

20273-440: The commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed. The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in no way responsible. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and woman who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle

20482-416: The countryside offering programs of comedy, music, jugglers , and other novelties along with displays of tonics, salves, and miracle elixirs, while " Wild West " shows provided romantic vistas of the disappearing frontier, complete with trick riding, music and drama. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in America's growing urban hubs. From

20691-494: The courtroom. Hubbard's husband was a lawyer with connections to the district attorney's office, and he expressed surprise that she was not challenged during the voir dire process. Some of the jurors revealed that they believed Arbuckle to be guilty, but not beyond a reasonable doubt . During the deliberations, some jurors joined Hubbard in voting to convict, but all but one eventually changed their vote. Researcher Joan Myers suggests that Arbuckle's defense team targeted Hubbard as

20900-498: 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

21109-409: The daughter of a musician, she moved to the United States of America in her childhood. At just fourteen years old, she left home to begin her career, lying about her age and sending her mother half of her paycheck. Dressler found great success and was known for her comedic timing and physical comedy, like carrying her male co-stars. She eventually worked on Broadway, where she had a great desire to become

21318-505: The death of vaudeville. After all, when "small time" theatres could offer "big time" performers on screen at a nickel a seat, who could ask audiences to pay higher amounts for less impressive live talent? The newly-formed RKO studios took over the famed Orpheum vaudeville circuit and swiftly turned it into a chain of full-time movie theatres. The half-century tradition of vaudeville was effectively wiped out within less than four years. Inevitably, managers further trimmed costs by eliminating

21527-405: The death penalty, but the charge was later reduced to manslaughter . After nearly three weeks in jail he was released on bail of $ 5,000. Arbuckle's trial was a major media event. The story was fueled by yellow journalism , with many newspapers portraying Arbuckle as a gross lecher who used his weight to overpower innocent girls. William Randolph Hearst 's nationwide newspaper chain exploited

21736-451: The defense rested. On December 4, 1921, the jury returned five days later deadlocked after nearly 44 hours of deliberation with a 10–2 not-guilty verdict, and a mistrial was declared. Arbuckle's attorneys later concentrated on juror Helen Hubbard, who had told other jurors that she would vote guilty "until hell freezes over." She had refused to examine the exhibits or read the trial transcripts, having already decided on Arbuckle's guilt in

21945-459: 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

22154-401: 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,

22363-555: 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

22572-487: The famous and magical Harry Houdini , and child star Baby Rose Marie . In the New-York Tribune ' s article about Vaudeville, it is said that at any given time, Vaudeville was employing over twelve thousand different people throughout its entire industry. Each entertainer would be on the road 42 weeks at a time while working a particular "Circuit" – or an individual theatre chain of a major company. While

22781-411: 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 a music-only soundtrack in place of dialogue. The term silent film

22990-481: 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

23199-411: 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

23408-456: The first trial, Rappe's history of promiscuity and heavy drinking was detailed. The second trial also discredited some major evidence such as the identification of Arbuckle's fingerprints on the hotel bedroom door. Heinrich disowned his testimony from the first trial and stated that the fingerprint evidence was likely faked. The defense was so confident that Arbuckle would be acquitted that they did not call him to testify, and McNab did not deliver

23617-648: 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

23826-576: The general public. In spite of the acquittal and the apology, his reputation was not restored and the effects of the scandal continued. Will H. Hays , who served as the head of the newly formed Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America censor board, cited Arbuckle as an example of Hollywood's poor morals. On April 18, 1922, six days after Arbuckle's acquittal, Hays issued a lifetime ban that would prohibit Arbuckle from film work. Hays also requested that all showings and bookings of Arbuckle's films be canceled, and exhibitors complied. In December of

24035-475: The hotel doctor who had examined Rappe, testified that an external force seemed to have damaged the bladder. However, during cross-examination, Campbell revealed that Brady had threatened to charge her with perjury if she did not testify against Arbuckle. Dr. Heinrich's claim to have found fingerprints was cast into doubt after McNab produced a maid from the St. Francis Hotel who testified that she had thoroughly cleaned

24244-632: The ice on Rappe's stomach to ease her abdominal pain. Arbuckle denied any wrongdoing. Delmont later issued a statement incriminating Arbuckle in an attempt to extort money from Arbuckle's attorneys. Arbuckle was regarded by those who knew him closely as a good-natured man who was shy around women, and he had been described as "the most chaste man in pictures." However, studio executives, fearing negative publicity by association, warned Arbuckle's industry friends and fellow actors (many of whose careers they controlled) not to publicly defend him. Charlie Chaplin told reporters that he could not believe that Arbuckle

24453-465: 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

24662-430: The impact of Arbuckle's overweight body on top of Rappe caused her bladder to rupture. At a press conference, Rappe's manager, Al Semnacher, accused Arbuckle of using a piece of ice to simulate sex with Rappe that led to her injuries. By the time that the story was reported in newspapers, the object had evolved into a Coca-Cola or champagne bottle rather than a piece of ice. In fact, witnesses testified that Arbuckle rubbed

24871-486: The indictment hearing. The defense obtained a letter from Delmont admitting to a plan to extort payment from Arbuckle. Delmont's constantly changing testimony effectively ended any chance of the case proceeding to trial. Ultimately, the judge found no evidence of rape. After hearing testimony from party guest Zey Prevon that Rappe said "Roscoe hurt me" on her deathbed, the judge decided that Arbuckle could be charged with first-degree murder . Brady had originally planned to seek

25080-715: 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

25289-535: 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

25498-860: 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

25707-495: The instructions given to them by B. F. Keith for fear of losing their careers forever. By the late 1890s, vaudeville had large circuits, houses (small and large) in almost every sizable location, standardized booking, broad pools of skilled acts, and a loyal national following. One of the biggest circuits was Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit . It incorporated in 1919 and brought together 45 vaudeville theatres in 36 cities throughout

25916-532: 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

26125-478: 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

26334-427: The last of the live performances. Vaudeville also suffered due to the rise of broadcast radio following the greater availability of inexpensive receiver sets later in the decade. Even the hardiest in the vaudeville industry realized the form was in decline; the perceptive understood the condition to be terminal. The standardized film distribution and talking pictures of the 1930s confirmed the end of vaudeville. By 1930,

26543-615: 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

26752-426: 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

26961-563: The lower-priced cinema in the early 1910s dealt the heaviest blow to vaudeville. This was similar to the advent of free broadcast television 's diminishing the cultural and economic strength of the cinema. Cinema was first regularly commercially presented in the US in vaudeville halls. The first public showing of movies projected on a screen took place at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in 1896. Lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions, many performers and personalities, such as Al Jolson , W. C. Fields , Mae West , Buster Keaton ,

27170-462: The media spotlight after the trial ended. The second trial began on January 11, 1922 with a new jury but with the same legal defense, prosecution and presiding judge as those of the previous trial. The same evidence was presented, but this time, witness Zey Prevon testified that Brady had forced her to lie. Another witness who testified during the first trial, a former studio security guard named Jesse Norgard, testified that Arbuckle had once offered him

27379-535: The mid-1860s, impresario Tony Pastor , a former singing circus clown who had become a prominent variety theater performer and manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in his New York City theatres. Pastor opened his first "Opera House" on the Bowery in 1865, later moving his variety theater operation to Broadway and, finally, to Fourteenth Street near Union Square . He only began to use

27588-401: 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

27797-681: The more visible directorial projects under the Goodrich pseudonym was the Eddie Cantor feature Special Delivery (1927), which was released by Paramount and costarred William Powell and Jobyna Ralston . His highest-profile project was arguably The Red Mill , also released in 1927, a Marion Davies vehicle. In 1930 he served as an uncredited gag writer for the Wheeler and Woolsey military comedy Half Shot at Sunrise . Arbuckle and Dan Coombs, one of Culver City's first mayors, reopened

28006-485: The most prominent vaudevillians successfully made the transition to cinema, though others were not as successful. Some performers such as Bert Lahr fashioned careers out of combining live performance with radio and film roles. Many others later appeared in the Catskill resorts that constituted the " Borscht Belt ". Vaudeville was instrumental in the success of the newer media of film, radio, and television. Comedies of

28215-493: The movie business. Arbuckle was one of the most popular silent stars of the 1910s and one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood , signing a contract in 1920 with Paramount Pictures for $ 1,000,000 a year (equivalent to $ 15.2 million in 2023). Arbuckle was the defendant in three widely publicized trials between November 1921 and April 1922 for the rape and manslaughter of actress Virginia Rappe . Rappe had fallen ill at

28424-449: The name Fatty identifies the character that Arbuckle portrayed on-screen (usually a naive hayseed), not Arbuckle himself. When Arbuckle portrayed a female, the character was named "Miss Fatty", as in the film Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers . Arbuckle discouraged anyone from addressing him as "Fatty" off-screen, and when they did so his usual response was, "I've got a name, you know." On Monday, September 5, 1921 ( Labor Day ), Arbuckle took

28633-518: The name was derived from the satirical alias "Will B. Good". Between 1924 and 1932, Arbuckle directed a number of comedy shorts under the pseudonym for Educational Pictures that featured lesser-known comics of the day. Louise Brooks , who played the ingenue in Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), told of her experiences working with Arbuckle: He made no attempt to direct this picture. He just sat in his director's chair like

28842-636: The neighborhood character of vaudeville attendance had always promoted a tendency to tailor fare to specific audiences, mature vaudeville grew to feature houses and circuits specifically aimed at certain demographic groups. Black patrons, often segregated into the rear of the second gallery in white-oriented theatres, had their own smaller circuits, as did speakers of Italian and Yiddish (see below). This foreign addition combined with comedy produced such acts as "minstrel shows of antebellum America" and Yiddish theatre. Many ethnic families joined in on this entertainment business, and for them, this traveling lifestyle

29051-520: 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

29260-547: The new era adopted many of the dramatic and musical tropes of classic vaudeville acts. Film comedies of the 1920s through the 1940s used talent from the vaudeville stage and followed a vaudeville aesthetic of variety entertainment, both in Hollywood and in Asia, including China. The rich repertoire of the vaudeville tradition was mined for prominent prime-time radio variety shows such as The Rudy Vallée Show . The structure of

29469-461: The party and testified that she saw Arbuckle with a smile on his face hours after the alleged rape occurred. Another witness, hospital nurse Grace Hultson, testified that it was very likely that Arbuckle raped Rappe and bruised her body in the process. Criminologist Dr. Edward Heinrich testified that fingerprints on the hallway door proved that Rappe had tried to flee, but that Arbuckle had stopped her by placing his hand over hers. Dr. Arthur Beardslee,

29678-517: The past seven months with stories of Hollywood orgies, murder and sexual perversion. Delmont was touring the country performing one-woman shows based on her involvement with the case and lecturing on the evils of Hollywood. The third trial began on March 13, 1922, and McNab took a forceful approach, attacking the prosecution's case with long and aggressive examination and cross-examination of each witness. McNab also introduced more evidence about Rappe's lurid past and medical history. The prosecution's case

29887-450: 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

30096-451: 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

30305-438: 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

30514-404: The promotion of black-face minstrelsy on the stage, purposefully used to place African Americans beneath the Irish in the racial and social urban hierarchy. Although the Irish had a strong Celtic presence in vaudeville and in the promotion of ethnic stereotypes, the ethnic groups that they were characterizing also utilized the same humor. As the Irish donned their ethnic costumes, groups such as

30723-424: 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

30932-540: The recent, worldwide phenomenon of TV shows such as America's Got Talent . In professional wrestling , there was a noted tag team, based in WWE , called The Vaudevillains . In 2018, noted film director Christopher Annino, maker of a new silent feature film, Silent Times , founded Vaudeville Con, a gathering to celebrate the history of vaudeville. The first meeting was held in Pawcatuck, Connecticut . The records of

31141-491: 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 ,

31350-421: The room before the investigation took place. Dr. Beardslee admitted that Rappe had never mentioned being assaulted while he was treating her. McNab coaxed Hultson to admit that the rupture of Rappe's bladder could have been the result of cancer and that the bruises could have been caused by the heavy jewelry that Rappe was wearing that evening. On November 28, Arbuckle testified as the defense's final witness and

31559-471: The same year, under public pressure, Hays rescinded the ban. However, Arbuckle remained unable to secure work as an actor. Most exhibitors still declined to show Arbuckle's films, several of which are now considered lost . Paramount withdrew his latest film Crazy to Marry after only a brief release, and shelved two features he had already completed: Leap Year and The Fast Freight . The latter films were ultimately released only in Europe, far away from

31768-456: The scandal has mostly overshadowed his legacy as a pioneering comedian. At the behest of Adolph Zukor , president of Famous Players–Lasky , his films were banned by motion picture industry censor Will H. Hays after the trial, and he was publicly ostracized. Zukor was faced with the moral outrage of various groups such as the Lord's Day Alliance , the powerful Federation of Women's Clubs and even

31977-415: The scandalmongers in America, and recouped at least part of their production costs. In March 1922, with Arbuckle's films banned, Buster Keaton signed an agreement to award Arbuckle 35% of all future profits from his production company Buster Keaton Comedies, hoping to ease Arbuckle's financial situation. In November 1923, Minta Durfee filed for divorce from Arbuckle, charging grounds of desertion. The divorce

32186-440: 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

32395-401: 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 a person would even narrate the inter-title cards for the audience. Though at the time the technology to synchronize sound with

32604-470: 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

32813-467: 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

33022-483: 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

33231-451: The silent nature of the "flickering shadow sweethearts" would preclude their usurpation of the paramount place in the public's affection. With the introduction of talking pictures in 1926, the burgeoning film studios removed what had remained the chief difference in favor of live theatrical performance: spoken dialogue. Historian John Kenrick wrote: Top vaudeville stars filmed their acts for one-time pay-offs, inadvertently helping to speed

33440-427: 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

33649-497: 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 . Vaudeville Vaudeville ( / ˈ v ɔː d ( ə ) v ɪ l , ˈ v oʊ -/ ; French: [vodvil] )

33858-667: The situation with exaggerated and sensationalized stories. Hearst was gratified by the profits that he accrued during the Arbuckle scandal, and he allegedly said that it had "sold more newspapers [...] than when the Lusitania went down." Morality groups called for Arbuckle to be sentenced to death . The trial began on November 14, 1921 in the San Francisco city courthouse. Arbuckle hired as his lead defense counsel Gavin McNab,

34067-438: 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

34276-468: The slang of vaudevillians), built by Martin Beck in 1913 and operated by Keith. Featuring a bill stocked with inventive novelty acts, national celebrities, and acknowledged masters of vaudeville performance (such as comedian and trick roper Will Rogers ), the Palace provided what many vaudevillians considered the apotheosis of remarkable careers. A standard show bill would begin with a sketch, follow with

34485-448: The songs that were popularized onstage by white singers, and paved the way for African-American musical theater . In addition to vaudeville's prominence as a form of American entertainment, it reflected the newly evolving urban inner-city culture and interaction of its operators and audience. Making up a large portion of immigration to the United States in the mid-19th century, Irish Americans interacted with established Americans, with

34694-438: 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

34903-467: 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

35112-410: The term "vaudeville" in place of "variety" in early 1876. Hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic uptown , Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theatres, eliminated bawdy material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees. Pastor's experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit. The manager's comments, sent back to

35321-627: The theatres built by impresario Alexander Pantages . Pantages often used architect B. Marcus Priteca (1881–1971), who in turn regularly worked with muralist Anthony Heinsbergen . Priteca devised an exotic, neo-classical style that his employer called "Pantages Greek". Though classic vaudeville reached a zenith of capitalization and sophistication in urban areas dominated by national chains and commodious theatres, small-time vaudeville included countless more intimate and locally controlled houses. Small-time houses were often converted saloons, rough-hewn theatres, or multi-purpose halls, together catering to

35530-690: The time. She worked largely in comedy and gained acclaim and success due to her willingness to step into other's roles who had fallen ill, and were otherwise unable to perform. In her acts, she often emphasized her plus-size figure, calling herself the "perfect forty-six". Friganza was also a poet and writer. She used many of her performances as ways to raise money to support the poor or disenfranchised and went on record publicly numerous times to support these social causes. Friganza also spent much of her life fighting for women's equality and pushing for self-acceptance for women, both publicly and within themselves, as well as their rights in comparison to men. Betty Felsen

35739-489: 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

35948-500: 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 ,

36157-629: 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

36366-534: The vast majority of formerly live theatres had been wired for sound, and none of the major studios were producing silent pictures. For a time, the most luxurious theatres continued to offer live entertainment, but most theatres were forced by the Great Depression to economize. Some in the industry blamed cinema's drain of talent from the vaudeville circuits for the medium's demise. Others argued that vaudeville had allowed its performances to become too familiar to its famously loyal, now seemingly fickle audiences. There

36575-478: The vaudeville stage, Irish Americans became interpreters of immigrant cultural images in American popular culture. New arrivals found their ethnic group status defined within the immigrant population and in their new country as a whole by the Irish on stage. Unfortunately, the same interactions between ethnic groups within the close living conditions of cities also created racial tensions which were reflected in vaudeville. Conflict between Irish and African Americans saw

36784-475: 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

36993-683: The wings and somersaulted into the orchestra pit in obvious panic. The audience went wild, and he won the competition and began a career in vaudeville . In 1904, Sid Grauman invited Arbuckle to sing in his new Unique Theater in San Francisco , beginning a long friendship between the two. He then joined the Pantages Theatre Group touring the West Coast and in 1906 played the Orpheum Theater in Portland, Oregon , in

37202-529: The winter of 1923 Betty began a partnership with Jack Broderick. From then until the end of 927 Broderick & Felsen performed on the B.F. Keith and Pantages vaudeville circuits throughout the U.S. and Canada. Their act evolved from a simple dance act to one with over twenty dancers, an orchestra, and elaborate costumes and sets. From 1925 to 1926 they played for 20 straight weeks at the huge Colony Theater on Broadway in New York City. In 1926 and 1927, they starred in two spectacular musical productions, touring across

37411-409: 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

37620-486: The years progressed, people seeking diversified amusement found an increasing number of ways to be entertained. Vaudeville was characterized by traveling companies touring through cities and towns. A handful of circuses regularly toured the country; dime museums appealed to the curious; amusement parks, riverboats, and town halls often featured "cleaner" presentations of variety entertainment; compared to saloons, music halls, and burlesque houses, which catered to those with

37829-688: 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

38038-603: Was a comedienne who got her start in Vaudeville and the Chitlin circuits in the 1920s, and ended up with mainstream success in the 20th century. Other 20th century women performers who started in Vaudeville included blues singers Ma Rainey , Ida Cox and Bessie Smith . Women-led touring companies like Black Patti's Troubadours , the Whitman Sisters and the Hyers Sisters were popular acts. Other women worked

38247-623: Was accepted to be a member of the Chicago Opera’s Pavley-Oukrainsky Ballet corps de ballet. From December 1920 until the fall of 1922 Betty was a ballerina soloist and performed with them throughout North America. Under the name Buddye Felsen, Betty landed a starring dancing role in a new show at Fred Mann’s Million Dollar Rainbo Room in the Rainbo Gardens . The show, Rainbo Trail , directed by Frank Westphal , opened on 15 December 1922, and ran until 1 March 1923. In

38456-664: Was an American ballerina, vaudeville star, and teacher. She was born on 9 June 1905, in Chicago, IL Betty began taking lessons at a local Chicago ballet school when she was eight years old, and often performed solo dances in shows presented by that school. Just before her tenth birthday in 1916, her parents enrolled her as a ballet student with the Pavley-Oukrainsky Ballet School within the Chicago Opera Association. Then, in 1919 Betty

38665-415: 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

38874-478: 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

39083-433: Was expanding. These expectations for women in the 19th century played a big role in the compelling aspects of vaudeville. Through vaudeville, many women were allowed to join their male counterparts on the stage and found success in their acts. Leila Marie Koerber, later Marie Dressler , was a Canadian actress who specialized in vaudeville comedy, and eventually won an Academy Award for Best Actress later in her career. Being

39292-451: 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

39501-652: Was fond of the " pie in the face ", a comedy cliché that has come to symbolize silent-film-era comedy itself. The earliest known pie thrown in film was in the June 1913 Keystone one-reeler A Noise from the Deep , starring Arbuckle and frequent screen partner Mabel Normand . In 1914, Paramount Pictures made the then unheard-of offer of US$ 1,000 a day plus twenty-five percent of all profits and complete artistic control to make movies with Arbuckle and Normand. The movies were so lucrative and popular that in 1918 they offered Arbuckle

39710-509: Was granted the following January. They had been amicably separated since 1921. After a brief reconciliation, Durfee again filed for divorce in December 1924. Arbuckle married Doris Deane on May 16, 1925. Arbuckle tried returning to filmmaking, but industry resistance to distributing his films continued to linger after his acquittal. He retreated into alcoholism . In the words of his first wife, "Roscoe only seemed to find solace and comfort in

39919-438: Was guilty, having known him since they both worked at Keystone in 1914. Chaplin "knew Roscoe to be a genial, easy-going type who would not harm a fly." Buster Keaton issued a public statement in support of Arbuckle that resulted in a mild reprimand from Keaton's studio. Actor William S. Hart , who had never met or worked with Arbuckle, issued a number of damaging public statements presuming Arbuckle's guilt. Arbuckle later wrote

40128-403: 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 ,

40337-516: Was no abrupt end to vaudeville, though the form was clearly sagging by the late 1920s. Joseph Kennedy Sr. in a hostile buyout, acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theatres Corporation (KAO), which had more than 700 vaudeville theatres across the United States which had begun showing movies. The shift of New York City's Palace Theatre, vaudeville's center, to an exclusively cinema presentation on 16 November 1932,

40546-514: 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

40755-498: Was now used for comic relief on the vaudeville stage, where stereotypes of different ethnic groups were perpetuated. The crude stereotypes that emerged were easily identifiable not only by their distinct ethnic cultural attributes, but how those attributes differed from the mainstream established American culture and identity. Coupled with their historical presence on the English stage for comic relief, and as operators and actors of

40964-413: Was on 4 June 1928, at Broadway’s Palace Theater in New York City. Another famous comedienne, one who brought in thousands of audience members with her signature improvisational skills, was May Irwin . She worked from about 1875 to 1914. Originally born Ada Campbell, she began her life on the stage at thirteen years old following the death of her father. She and her older sister created a singing act called

41173-468: Was ordered to pay a $ 500 fine (equivalent to $ 9,000 in 2023). At the time of his acquittal, he owed more than $ 700,000 (equivalent to $ 13 million in 2023) in legal fees to his attorneys for the three criminal trials, and he was forced to sell his house and all of his cars to pay some of the debt. Following Arbuckle's arrest, hundreds of exhibitors withdrew his films from distribution. The scandal and trials greatly damaged Arbuckle's popularity among

41382-686: 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

41591-418: Was remarkably agile and acrobatic. Mack Sennett, when recounting his first meeting with Arbuckle, noted that he "skipped up the stairs as lightly as Fred Astaire " and that he "without warning went into a feather light step, clapped his hands and did a backward somersault as graceful as a girl tumbler". His comedies are noted as rollicking and fast-paced, have many chase scenes, and feature sight gags . Arbuckle

41800-447: Was reported to be simple, direct and unflustered under both direct and cross-examination. In his testimony, Arbuckle claimed that Rappe (whom he testified to have known for five or six years) entered the party room (1220) around noon that day, and that sometime afterward he retreated to his room (1219) to change clothes after Mae Taub, daughter-in-law of Billy Sunday , asked him for a ride into town. In his room, Arbuckle discovered Rappe in

42009-440: Was rivaled only by churches and public schools among the nation's premiere public gathering places. Another slightly different aspect of Vaudeville was an increasing interest in the female figure. The previously mentioned ominous idea of "the blue envelopes" led to the phrase "blue" material, which described the provocative subject matter present in many Vaudeville acts of the time. Many managers even saw this scandalous material as

42218-565: Was said that if an act would succeed in Peoria, Illinois , it would work anywhere. The question "Will it play in Peoria?" has now become a metaphor for whether something appeals to the American mainstream public. The three most common levels were the "small time" (lower-paying contracts for more frequent performances in rougher, often converted theatres), the "medium time" (moderate wages for two performances each day in purpose-built theatres), and

42427-460: Was simply a continuation of the circumstances that brought them to America. Through these acts, they were able to assimilate themselves into their new home while also bringing bits of their own culture into this new world. White-oriented regional circuits, such as New England 's "Peanut Circuit", also provided essential training grounds for new artists while allowing established acts to experiment with and polish new material. At its height, vaudeville

42636-575: 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

42845-984: Was the case for Sherman H. Dudley and the Griffin Sisters Later, in the 1920s, many bookings were managed by the Theatre Owners Booking Association . African-Americans challenged the prevailing Blackface stereotypes played by white performers by bringing their own authenticity and style to the stage, composing music, comedy and dance routines and laying the groundwork for distinctly American cultural phenomena like blues , jazz , ragtime and tap dance . Notable Black entertainers in Vaudeville included comedians Bert Williams , and George Walker , dancer/choreographer Ada Overton Walker , and many others. Black songwriters and composers like Bob Cole , Ernest Hogan , Irving Jones , Rosamond Johnson , George Johnson , Tom Lemonier , Gussie L. Davis , and Chris Smith , wrote many of

43054-454: 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

43263-559: Was traumatic for Mary and resulted in chronic health problems that contributed to her death eleven years later. Arbuckle was nearly two when his family moved to Santa Ana, California . He first performed on stage with Frank Bacon 's company at age 8 during their performance in Santa Ana. Arbuckle enjoyed performing and continued on until his mother's death in 1898, when he was 11. Arbuckle's father had always treated him harshly and now refused to support him, so he got work doing odd jobs in

43472-447: Was undoubtedly part of his comedic appeal, Arbuckle was self-conscious about his weight and refused to use it to get "cheap" laughs like getting stuck in a doorway or chair. Arbuckle was a talented singer. After famed operatic tenor Enrico Caruso heard him sing, he urged the comedian to "give up this nonsense you do for a living, with training you could become the second greatest singer in the world." Despite his physical size, Arbuckle

43681-511: Was weakened because Prevon, a key witness, was out of the country after fleeing police custody and unable to testify. As in the first trial, Arbuckle testified as the final witness and maintained his denial of any wrongdoing. During closing statements, McNab reviewed the flaws in the case and attacked Brady for believing Delmont's outlandish charges, a woman whom McNab described as "the complaining witness who never witnessed." The jury began deliberations April 12 and took only six minutes to return with

#315684