Gheorghe ieica National College

Cinematography
U.S.A. and U.K.
Candidate: Enola Camelia Jieanu

Coordinating teacher: Maria Rou

Drobeta Turnu Severin

2017
Table of contents

Argument
The project I have chosen to make a research about refers to the history of
cinematography both in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. I have
always considered watching movies a passion for me because, as in books, movies say
stories and stories make me forget about my one and only life, live much more and
especially, feel more.

Furthermore, making films is undoubtebly related to technology, so as technology is

developing every day, I think it is essential to know the beginning of cinematography to
understand where it goes, due to the permanent development.

Originally, the term movies does not mean films, but the people who make them. So,
we-the people in front of the screens, we-the biggest judges, could be the people who
make our minds a factory of thoughts and feelings, by simply letting a movie guide us
and, for two hours, our problems be others.

As I have always had the affinity to consider myself a film person, I have been interested
in descovering how the greatest films started, how the cinematography passed through
all its highs and lows, how it worked and they made ends meet.
 Chapter I : History of Cinema in the United
States of America

The American film industry, often referred to as Hollywood (from the place name of its
birth), is the industry leader in the form of artistic expression that came to dominate the
twentieth century and continues as a popular art form at the beginning of the twenty-
first century. While the Lumiere Brothers are generally credited with the birth of modern
cinema, it is indisputably American cinema that quickly became the dominant force in
the industry.

Prior to the twentieth century, narrative forms were dominated by the oral, then written,
and finally printed word. Cinema introduced a new visual culture. The immediacy of the
medium created a system of stars with the powerful ability to influence the rest of the
culture, for good or for ill. At its best, film creates visual narratives that teach and
inspire as they entertain. At its worst, it titillates prurient interests and nudges its
viewers to commit acts of evil and stupidity. There is no clearer barometer of cultural
values and interests. For that reason, it has also been an arena of ongoing struggle
between artistic freedom and artistic responsibility.

The history of American cinema is sometimes separated into four main periods: the
silent era, Classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period
(after 1980).

Early development
The first recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing motion was a
series of photographs of a running horse by Eadweard Muybridge, which he captured
in Palo Alto, California, using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's
accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make similar devices that would
capture such motion. In the United States, Thomas Edison was among the first to
produce such a device, the kinetoscope.

The history of cinema in the United States can trace its roots to the East Coast where, at
one time, Fort Lee, New Jersey was the motion picture capital of America. The industry
got its start at the end of the 19th century with the construction of Thomas Edison's
"Black Maria", the first motion picture studio in West Orange, New Jersey. The cities
and towns on the Hudson River and Hudson Palisades offered land at costs considerably
less than New York City across the river and benefited greatly as a result of the
phenomenal growth of the film industry at the turn of the 20th century.
Film-making began attracting both capital and
an innovative workforce, and when the Kalem
Company began using Fort Lee in 1907 as a
location for filming in the area, other
filmmakers quickly followed. In 1909, a
forerunner of Universal Studios, the Champion
Film Company, built the first studio. They were
quickly followed by others who either built new
studios or who leased facilities in Fort Lee. In
the 1910s and 1920s, film companies such as
the Independent Moving Pictures Company,
Peerless Studios, The Solax Company, clair Studios, Goldwyn Picture
Corporation, American Mlis (Star Films), World Film Company, Biograph
Studios, Fox Film Corporation, Path Frres, Metro Pictures Corporation, Victor Film
Company, and Selznick Pictures Corporation were all making pictures in Fort Lee. Such
notables as Mary Pickford got their start at Biograph Studios.

In New York, the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, was built during the silent film era
and was used by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. The Edison Studios were located in
the Bronx. Chelsea, Manhattan was also frequently used. Other major centers of film
production also included Chicago, Florida, Texas, California, and Cuba.

The film patents wars of the early 20th century led to the spread of film companies
across the U.S. Many worked with equipment for which they did not own the rights and
thus filming in New York could be dangerous; it was close to Edison's Company
headquarters, and to agents the company set out to seize cameras. By 1912, most major
film companies had set up production facilities in Southern California near or in Los
Angeles because of the location's proximity to Mexico, as well as the region's favorable
year-round weather.

Rise of Hollywood

In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west
coast with his acting troupe, consisting of actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary
Pickford, Lionel Barrymore and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia
Street in downtown Los Angeles. While there, the company decided to explore new
territories, traveling several miles north to Hollywood, a little village that was friendly
and enjoyed the movie company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever
 shot in Hollywood, In Old California, a
Biograph melodrama about California in the
19th century, when it belonged to Mexico.

Griffith stayed there for months and made

several films before returning to New York.
After hearing about Griffith's success in
Hollywood, in 1913, many movie-makers
headed west to avoid the fees imposed
by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on
the movie-making process Nestor Studios of Bayonne, New Jersey, built the first studio
in Hollywood in 1911. Nestor Studios, owned by David and William Horsley, later
merged with Universal Studios; and William Horsley's other company, Hollywood Film
Laboratory, is now the oldest existing company in Hollywood, now called the Hollywood
Digital Laboratory. California's more hospitable and cost-effective climate led to the
eventual shift of virtually all filmmaking to the West Coast by the 1930s. At the
time, Thomas Edison owned almost all the patents relevant to motion picture production
and movie producers on the East Coast acting independently of Edison's Motion Picture
Patents Company were often sued or enjoined by Edison and his agents while movie
makers working on the West Coast could work independently of Edison's control.

In Los Angeles, the studios and Hollywood grew. Before World War I, movies were made
in several U.S. cities, but filmmakers tended to gravitate towards southern California as
the industry developed. They were attracted by the warm climate and reliable sunlight,
which made it possible to film movies outdoors year-round and by the varied scenery
that was available. There are several starting points for cinema (particularly American
cinema), but it was Griffith's controversial 1915 epic Birth of a Nation that pioneered the
worldwide filming vocabulary that still dominates celluloid to this day.
In the early 20th century, when the medium was new, many Jewish immigrants found
employment in the U.S. film industry. They were able to make their mark in a brand-new
business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after
their admission price of a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men
like Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and
the Warner Brothers (Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the production
side of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise: the movie
studio. (It is worth noting that the U.S. had at least one female director, producer and
studio head in these early years: French-born director Alice Guy-Blach.) They also set
the stage for the industry's internationalism; the industry is often accused of Amero-
centric provincialism.

Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after World War I: directors like Ernst
Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir; and actors like Rudolph
Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and Charles Boyer. They joined a
homegrown supply of actors lured west from the New York City stage after the
introduction of sound films to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth
industries. At motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were
cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million
Americans per week.

Sound also became widely used in Hollywood in the late 1920s. After The Jazz Singer,
the first film with synchronized voices was successfully released as a Vitaphone talkie in
1927, Hollywood film companies would respond to Warner Bros. and begin to use
Vitaphone sound which Warner Bros. owned until 1928 in future films. By May
1928, Electrical Research Product Incorporated (ERPI), a subsidiary of the Western
Electric company, gained a monopoly over film sound distribution.

A side effect of the "talkies" was that many actors who had made their careers in silent
films suddenly found themselves out of work, as they often had bad voices or could not
remember their lines. Meanwhile, in 1922, US politician Will H. Hays left politics and
formed the movie studio boss organization known as the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America (MPPDA). The
organization became the Motion Picture
Association of America after Hays retired in
1945.

In the early times of talkies, American studios

found that their sound productions were
rejected in foreign-language markets and
even among speakers of other dialects of
English. The synchronization technology was
still too primitive for dubbing. One of the solutions was creating parallel foreign-
language versions of Hollywood films. Around 1930, the American companies opened a
studio in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets and wardrobe and even mass
scenes were used for different time-sharing crews.

Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights, and winners of photogenia contests were
chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they shot parallel versions of the English-
language films. These parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were
directed by second-line American directors who did not speak the foreign language. The
Spanish-language crews included people like Luis Buuel, Enrique Jardiel
Poncela, Xavier Cugat, and Edgar Neville. The productions were not very successful in
their intended markets, due to the following reasons:

The lower budgets were apparent.

Many theater actors had no previous experience in cinema.

The original movies were often second-rate themselves since studios expected
that the top productions would sell by themselves.

The mix of foreign accents (Castilian, Mexican, and Chilean for example in the
Spanish case) was odd for the audiences.

Some markets lacked sound-equipped theaters.

In spite of this, some productions like the Spanish version of Dracula compare favorably
with the original. By the mid-1930s, synchronization had advanced enough for dubbing
to become usual.

Portrait of Classical Hollywood Cinema (19171960)

Classical Hollywood Cinema is defined as

a technical and narrative style
characteristic of film from 1917 to 1960.
During the Golden Age of Hollywood,
which lasted from the end of the silent era
in American cinema in the late 1920s to
the early 1960s, thousands of movies
were issued from the Hollywood studios.
The start of the Golden Age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927,
ending the silent era and increasing box-office profits for films as sound was introduced
to feature films.

Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula Western, slapstick

comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biographical film (biographical picture) and the
same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For
example, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred
Newman worked at 20th Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's films were
almost all made at Paramount, and director Henry King's films were mostly made
for 20th Century Fox.

At the same time, one could usually guess which studio made which film, largely because
of the actors who appeared in it; MGM, for example, claimed it had contracted "more
stars than there are in heaven." Each studio had its own style and characteristic touches
which made it possible to know this a trait that does not exist today.

For example, To Have and Have Not (1944)

is famous not only for the first pairing of
actors Humphrey Bogart (18991957)
and Lauren Bacall (19242014), but also for
being written by two future winners of
the Nobel Prize in Literature: Ernest
Hemingway (18991961), the author of the
novel on which the script was nominally
based, and William Faulkner (18971962),
who worked on the screen adaptation.

After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Bros. gained huge success and were
able to acquire their own string of movie theaters, after purchasing Stanley
Theaters and First National Productions in 1928. MGM had also owned the Loews string
of theaters since forming in 1924, and the Fox Film Corporation owned the Fox
Theatre strings as well. Also, RKO (a 1928 merger between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and
the Radio Corporation of America) responded to the Western Electric/ERPI monopoly
over sound in films, and developed their own method, known as Photophone, to put
sound in films.

Paramount, which already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926, would answer to the
success of Warner Bros. and RKO, and buy a number of theaters in the late 1920s as
well, and would hold a monopoly on theaters in Detroit, Michigan. By the 1930s, almost
all of the first-run metropolitan theaters in the United States were owned by the Big Five
studios MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox.
The studio system

Movie-making was still a business, however, and motion picture companies made money
by operating under the studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on
salary actors, producers, directors, writers, stunt men, craftspersons, and technicians.
They owned or leased Movie Ranches in rural Southern California for location
shooting of westerns and other large-scale genre films. And they owned hundreds of
theaters in cities and towns across the nation in 1920 film theaters that showed their
films and that were always in need of fresh material.

In 1930, MPPDA President Will Hays created the Hays (Production) Code, which
followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of
censorship expanded by 1930. However, the code was never enforced until 1934, after
the Catholic watchdog organization The Legion of Decency appalled by some of the
provocative films and lurid advertising of the era later classified Pre-Code Hollywood-
threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it didn't go into effect. Those films that didn't
obtain a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to pay a $25,000
fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the MPPDA controlled every theater in the
country through the Big Five studios.

Throughout the 1930s, as well as most of the golden age, Metro-Goldwyn-

Mayer dominated the film screen and had the top stars in Hollywood, and was also
credited for creating the Hollywood star system altogether. Some MGM stars included
"King of Hollywood" Clark Gable, Lionel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Norma
Shearer, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jeanette MacDonald and husband Gene
Raymond, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly. But MGM did not stand alone.
Another great achievement of US cinema during this era came through Walt
Disney's animation company. In 1937, Disney created the most successful film of its
time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This distinction was promptly topped in 1939
when Selznick International created what is still when adjusted for inflation, the most
successful film of all time, Gone with the Wind.

Many film historians have remarked upon

the many great works of cinema that
emerged from this period of highly
regimented film-making. One reason this
was possible is that, with so many movies
being made, not everyone had to be a big hit.
A studio could gamble on a medium-budget
feature with a good script and relatively
unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (19151985) and often
regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description. In other cases, strong-
willed directors like Howard Hawks (18961977), Alfred Hitchcock (18991980),
and Frank Capra (18971991) battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic
visions.

The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of
such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, Wuthering Heights, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka and Midnight.
Among the other films from the Golden Age period that are now considered to be
classics: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, the original King
Kong, Mutiny on the Bounty, Top Hat, City Lights, Red River, The Lady from
Shanghai, Rear Window, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without a Cause, Some Like It
Hot, and The Manchurian Candidate.

Decline of the studio system (late 1940s)

The studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood succumbed to two forces that
developed in the late 1940s:

a federal antitrust action that separated the production of films from their
exhibition; and

the advent of television.

In 1938, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released during a run of
lackluster films from the major studios, and quickly became the highest grossing film
released to that point. Embarrassingly for the studios, it was an independently produced
animated film that did not feature any studio-employed stars. This stoked already
widespread frustration at the practice of block-booking, in which studios would only sell
an entire year's schedule of films at a time to theaters and use the lock-in to cover for
releases of mediocre quality.

Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnolda noted "trust buster" of the Roosevelt
administration took this opportunity to initiate proceedings against the eight largest
Hollywood studios in July 1938 for violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The federal
suit resulted in five of the eight studios (the "Big Five": Warner
Bros., MGM, Fox, RKO and Paramount) reaching a compromise with Arnold in October
1940 and signing a consent decree agreeing to, within three years:

Eliminate the block-booking of short film subjects, in an arrangement known as

"one shot", or "full force" block-booking.

Eliminate the block-booking of any more than five features in their theaters.

No longer engage in blind buying (or the buying of films by theater districts
without seeing films beforehand) and instead have trade-showing, in which all 31
theater districts in the US would see films every two weeks before showing movies in
theaters.

Set up an administration board in each theater district to enforce these

requirements.

The "Little Three" (Universal Studios, United Artists, and Columbia Pictures), who did
not own any theaters, refused to participate in the consent decree. A number of
independent film producers were also unhappy with the compromise and formed a
union known as the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers and sued
Paramount for the monopoly they still had over the Detroit Theaters as Paramount
was also gaining dominance through actors like Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, Veronica
Lake, Betty Hutton, crooner Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, and longtime actor for studio Gary
Cooper too- by 1942. The Big Five studios didn't meet the requirements of the Consent of
Decree during WWII, without major consequence, but after the war ended they joined
Paramount as defendants in the Hollywood anti-trust case, as did the Little Three
studios.

The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the major studios ownership of theaters and
film distribution was a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. As a result, the studios
began to release actors and technical staff from their contracts with the studios. This
changed the paradigm of film making by the major Hollywood studios, as each could
have an entirely different cast and creative team.

The decision resulted in the gradual loss of the characteristics which made Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, RKO
Pictures, and 20th Century Fox films immediately identifiable. Certain movie people,
such as Cecil B. DeMille, either remained contract artists till the end of their careers or
used the same creative teams on their films so that a DeMille film still looked like one
whether it was made in 1932 or 1956.

Impact: Fewer films, larger individual budgets

Also, the number of movies being produced annually dropped as the average budget
soared, marking a major change in strategy for the industry. Studios now aimed to
produce entertainment that could not be offered by television: spectacular, larger-than-
life productions. Studios also began to sell portions of their theatrical film libraries to
other companies to sell to television. By 1949, all major film studios had given up
ownership of their theaters.

Television was also instrumental in the decline of Hollywood's Golden Age as it broke
the movie industry's hegemony in American entertainment. Despite this, the film
industry was also able to gain some leverage for future films as longtime government
censorship faded in the 1950s. After the Paramount anti-trust case ended, Hollywood
movie studios no longer owned theaters and thus made it so foreign films could be
released in American theaters without censorship.

This was complemented with the 1952 Miracle Decision in the Joseph Burstyn Inc. v
Wilson case, in which the Supreme Court of the United States reversed its earlier
position, from 1915's Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio case,
and stated that motion pictures were a form of art and were entitled to the protection of
the First amendment; US laws could no longer censor films. By 1968, with film studios
becoming increasingly defiant to its censorship function, the Motion Picture Association
of America (MPAA) had replaced the Hays Codewhich was now greatly violated after
the government threat of censorship that justified the origin of the code had endedwith
the film rating system.

New Hollywood and post-classical cinema (1960s1980s)

Post-classical cinema is the term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling
in the New Hollywood. It has been argued that new approaches to drama and
characterization played upon audience expectations acquired in the classical period:
 chronology may be scrambled, storylines
may feature "twist endings", and lines
between the antagonist and protagonist may
be blurred. The roots of post-classical
storytelling may be seen in film noir,
in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in
Hitchcock's storyline-shattering Psycho.

The New Hollywood describes the

emergence of a new generation of film
school-trained directors who had absorbed the techniques developed in Europe in the
1960s; The 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde marked the beginning of American cinema
rebounding as well, as a new generation of films would afterwards gain success at the
box offices as well. Filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George
Lucas, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and William
Friedkin came to produce fare that paid homage to the history of film and developed
upon existing genres and techniques. Inaugurated by the 1969 release of Andy
Warhol's Blue Movie, the phenomenon of adult erotic films being publicly discussed by
celebrities (like Johnny Carson and Bob Hope), and taken seriously by critics (like Roger
Ebert), a development referred to, by Ralph Blumenthal of The New York Times, as
"porno chic", and later known as the Golden Age of Porn, began, for the first time, in
modern American culture. According to award-winning author Toni Bentley, Radley
Metzger's 1976 film The Opening of Misty Beethoven, based on the
play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (and its derivative, My Fair Lady), and due to
attaining a mainstream level in storyline and sets, is considered the "crown jewel" of this
'Golden Age'.

In the 1970s, the films of New Hollywood filmmakers were often both critically
acclaimed and commercially successful. While the early New Hollywood films
like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider had been relatively low-budget affairs with
amoral heroes and increased sexuality and violence, the enormous success enjoyed by
Friedkin with The Exorcist, Spielberg with Jaws, Coppola with The
Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Scorsese
with Taxi Driver, Kubrick with 2001: A
Space Odyssey, Polanski with Chinatown,
and Lucas with American Graffiti and Star
Wars, respectively helped to give rise to the
modern "blockbuster", and induced studios
to focus ever more heavily on trying to
produce enormous hits.
The increasing indulgence of these young directors did not help. Often, they'd go
overschedule, and overbudget, thus bankrupting themselves or the studio. The three
most famous examples of this are Coppola's Apocalypse Now and One From The
Heart and particularly Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, which single-handedly
bankrupted United Artists. However, Apocalypse Now eventually made its money back
and gained widespread recognition as a masterpiece, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Rise of the home video market (1980s1990s)

The 1980s and 1990s saw another significant development. The full acceptance of home
video by studios opened a vast new business to exploit. Films such
as Batman, Showgirls, The Secret of NIMH, and The Shawshank Redemption, which
may have performed poorly in their theatrical run, were now able to find success in the
video market. It also saw the first generation of filmmakers with access to videotapes
emerge. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson had been able
to view thousands of films and produced films with vast numbers of references and
connections to previous works. Tarantino has had a number of collaborations with
director Robert Rodriguez. Rodriguez directed the 1992 action film El Mariachi, which
was a commercial success after grossing $2 million against a budget of $7,000.

This, along with the explosion of independent film and ever-decreasing costs for
filmmaking, changed the landscape of American movie-making once again and led a
renaissance of filmmaking among Hollywood's lower and middle-classesthose without
access to studio financial resources. With the rise of the DVD in the 21st century, DVDs
have quickly become even more profitable to studios and have led to an explosion of
packaging extra scenes, extended versions, and commentary tracks with the films.

Modern cinema
The drive to produce a spectacle on the movie screen has largely shaped American
cinema ever since. Spectacular epics which took advantage of new widescreen processes
had been increasingly popular from the 1950s onwards. Since then, American films have
become increasingly divided into two categories: Blockbusters and independent films.

Studios have focused on relying on a handful of extremely expensive releases every year
in order to remain profitable. Such blockbusters emphasize spectacle, star power, and
high production value, all of which entail an enormous budget. Blockbusters typically
rely upon star power and massive advertising to attract a huge audience. A successful
blockbuster will attract an audience large enough to offset production costs and reap
considerable profits.

Such productions carry a substantial risk of failure, and most studios release
blockbusters that both over- and underperform in a year. Classic blockbusters from this
period include Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Ghostbusters, Back
to the Future, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Wall Street, Rain Man, Die Hard, Jurassic
Park, Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, Pulp
Fiction, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Fight
Club, The Matrix, The Green Mile, The Sixth
Sense, Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom
Menace, Gangs of New York, Lord of the
Rings, The Notebook and The Bourne Identity.

Studios supplement these movies

with independent productions, made with
small budgets and often independently of the
studio corporation. Movies made in this manner typically emphasize high professional
quality in terms of acting, directing, screenwriting, and other elements associated with
production, and also upon creativity and innovation. These movies usually rely upon
critical praise or niche marketing to garner an audience. Because of an independent
film's low budget, a successful independent film can have a high profit-to-cost ratio
while a failure will incur minimal losses, allowing for studios to sponsor dozens of such
productions in addition to their high-stakes releases. American independent cinema was
revitalized in the late 1980s and early 1990s when another new generation of
moviemakers, including Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith and Quentin
Tarantino made movies like, respectively: Do the Right Thing, Sex, Lies, and
Videotape, Clerks and Reservoir Dogs. In terms of directing, screenwriting, editing, and
other elements, these movies were innovative and often irreverent, playing with and
contradicting the conventions of Hollywood movies. Furthermore, their considerable
financial successes and crossover into popular culture reestablished the commercial
viability of independent film. Since then, the independent film industry has become
more clearly defined and more influential in American cinema. Many of the major
studios have capitalised on this by developing subsidiaries to produce similar films; for
example, Fox Searchlight Pictures.

To a lesser degree in the early 21st century, film types that were previously considered to
have only a minor presence in the mainstream movie market began to arise as more
potent American box office draws. These include foreign-language films such
as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero and documentary films such as Super
Size Me, March of the Penguins, and Michael Moore's Bowling for
Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.

According to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, 2013 has seen "the industry at an
extraordinary time of upheaval, where even proven talents find it difficult to get movies
into theaters"; Spielberg predicts "there's eventually going to be an implosion or a big
meltdown. There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-
dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to
change the paradigm", with Lucas suggesting movie theaters following "a Broadway play
model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket
prices are much higher."
 Chapter II: History of Cinema in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has had a significant film industry for over a century. While film
production reached an all-time high in 1936,
the "golden age" of British cinema is usually
thought to have occurred in the 1940s, during
which the directors David Lean, Michael
Powell, (with Emeric Pressburger) and Carol
Reed produced their most highly acclaimed
work. Many British actors have achieved
international fame and critical success,
including Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, Sean
Connery and Kate Winslet. Some of the films
with the largest ever box office returns have been made in the United Kingdom,
including the second and third highest-grossing film series (Harry Potter and James
Bond).

The identity of the British industry, and its relationship with the Cinema of the United
States, has been the subject of debate. The history of film production in Britain has often
been affected by attempts to compete with the American industry. The career of the
producer Alexander Korda was marked by this objective, the Rank
Organisation attempted to do so in the 1940s, and Goldcrest in the 1980s. Numerous
British-born directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Ridley Scott, and performers,
such as Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant, have achieved success primarily through their
work in the United States.
In 2009 British films grossed around $2 billion worldwide and achieved a market share
of around 7% globally and 17% in the United Kingdom. UK box-office takings totalled
1.1 billion in 2012, with 172.5 million admissions.

The British Film Institute has produced a poll ranking what they consider to be the 100
greatest British films of all time, the BFI Top 100 British films.The
annual BAFTA awards hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts are
considered to be the British equivalent of the Academy Award.

Emergent British Cinema 1880-1900

Modern cinema is generally regarded as descending from the work of the French
Lumire brothers in 1892, and their show first came to London in 1896. However, the
first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park in 1889 by
William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. The film is
the first known instance of a projected moving image. At the end of the 19th America had
started to experiment in how to get a moving image onto a screen and in Britain Friese-
Green was working hard at doing much the same thing on a commercial basis. The first
people to build and run a working 35 mm camera in Britain were Robert W. Paul and
Birt Acres. They made the first British film Incident at Clovelly Cottage in February
1895, shortly before falling out over the camera's patent.

Early British Cinema 1900 1920

In 1902 Ealing Studios was founded by Will Barker, becoming the oldest continuously-
operating film studio in the world.

In 1902 the earliest color film in the world was made; like other films made at the time,
it is of everyday events. In 2012 it was found by the National Media Museum
in Bradford after lying forgotten in an old tin for 110 years. The previous title for earliest
color film, using the Kinemacolour process, was thought to date from 1909 and was
actually an inferior method. The re-discovered films were made by pioneer Edward
Raymond Turner from London who patented his process on 22 March 1899.

In 1903 Frank Mottershaw of Sheffield produced the film A Daring Daylight Robbery,
which launched the chase genre.
Another British fellow called George Albert Smith devised the first colour system,
Kinemacolor, in 1908. But even now there was competition - Gaumont and Pathe had
both opened film companies by 1909 and there were now films coming into England
from Europe.

In 1911 the Ideal Film Company was founded in Soho, London, distributing almost 400
films by 1934, and producing 80.

In 1913 stage director Maurice Elvey began directing British films, becoming Britain's
most prolific film director, with almost 200 by 1957.

In 1914 Elstree Studios was founded, and acquired in 1928 by German-born Ludwig
Blattner, who invented a magnetic steel tape recording system that was adopted by
the BBC in 1930.

In 1920 Gaumont opened Islington Studios, where Alfred Hitchcock got his start, selling-
out to Gainsborough Pictures in 1927. Also in 1920 Cricklewood Studios was founded by
Sir Oswald Stoll, becoming Britain's largest
film studio, known for Fu
Manchu and Sherlock Holmes film series.

Ironically, the biggest star of the silent era,

English comedian Charlie Chaplin,
was Hollywood-based.

America was advancing at a similar pace to

Britain at around this time (pre war) and
two Americans, Jupp and Turner, were staring to make American films in Britain. This
of course was all halted by the Great War in 1914 and efforts were directed elsewhere. By
this stage Britain was starting to lag behind the US. Post war saw the nearly the death
knell of British cinema as the desire for American films, and lack of money in Britain saw
the industry slow down and by the mid twenties it had practically stopped.

The desperate 20s and developing 30s

But there was still hope with the careers of Ronald Coleman, Victor McLaglen, Leslie
Howard and Charles Laughton which were starting by then and although Howard was to
be a casualty of WWII these actors along with Balcon and Wilcox were determined that
British pictures should survive. Even the son of the Prime Ministers Anthony Asquith
joined in to keep the industry alive. But in 1927 Parliament brought in an important
piece of legislation the Cinematographers Trade Bill, designed to ensure there was a
guaranteed home market for British made films. This meant that 5% of the total number
of movies shown in theatres had to be from Britain. This figure rose to 20% by 1936.
Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929) is regarded as the first British sound production.

All was not lost and in the 30s. The British Cinema Industry would start to rise from its
knees. The advent of sound offered more challenges to the British Film Industry's
financial stability. Some of the films that Britain was to make were pretty bad, but some
of the exceptions were Juno and the Paycock (1930); Hindle Wakes, Tell England;
(1931), Rome Express, (1932) and the brilliantly successful Korda production.
The Private Life of Henry VIII with Charles Laughton. Wings of the Morning (1937) is
widely accepted as Britain's first colour feature film.
Korda had failed in Hollywood, and when the boom started in the UK, he decided to try
his luck there. He founded London Films and built, reputedly, the finest studios in the
world at Denham. Here he made Katherine the Great; Don Juan, with Douglas Fairbanks
Jr. The Scarlet Pimpernel, Raymond Massey and Leslie Howard; Things to Come Massey
and Ralph Richardson; the Man Who Could Work Miracles; Rembrandt with Laughton.

John Maxwell's British International Studios trained many of this period's notable
directors, writers and cameramen. Among them were Sidney Gilliat, J. Lee Thompson,
Ronald Neame, Jack Cardiff and Charles
Frend. He also had some high calibre artists
appearing with him, including Richard
Tauber, Douglas Fairbanks Jn, Will Hays,
John Mills and Carol Reed was one of
Maxwells directors.

In 1933 J. Arthur Rank, who had started by

making religious films, founded British
National. In 1935 he went into partnership
with Woolf to take over Pinewood Studios.
Boom turned to slump in 1937. The year
before, the British film industry had over produced, making 220 pictures. Studio space
had increased seven fold in ten years. This mean that the overproduction gave rise to
poor quality films and this in turn opened up the door to the American industry, and
American companies moved into the UK to make quality British films that would qualify
them for the home market quota.
All the major film producers started to take over studios. MGM-British, Warner, Radio,
20th Century Fox, they all moved into virtually swallow up the failing industry. This was
a period of classic movies. Some of these included The Citadel with Robert Donat and
Rosalind Russell, Goodbye Mr Chips also with Donat; Pygmalion with Leslie Howard
and Wendy Hiller; Victoria The Great, Nell Gwynn and Glorious Days all with Anna
Neagle; The Man Who Knew Too Much; The 39 Steps; The Secret Agent; Sabotage; The
Lady Vanishes; and Jamaica Inn.
The British Board of Film Censors had been founded in 1912 primarily to keep the
foreign imports acceptable in terms of content and to be able to control their numbers
on the pretext of unsuitability. Home grown productions had an easier time passing the
censors. It was now that the certificates U, for universal and A, for Adult were
introduced.

During the 1930's two other valuable assets came along; the British Film Institute and
the National Film Archives. They maintained, and still do, a film library not just of
British films, but International ones too. They restore damaged prints and transfer
nitrate stock onto safety film, as well as funding projects. Without them, many classics
would be lost today.

The War Years 40s

The Second World War caused a minor miracle to happen to movie making in Britain. A
new spirit of enthusiasm coupled with strenuous work led to the abandonment of the
stupidity and extravagance of the previous decade. After a faltering start, British films
began to make increasing use of documentary techniques and former documentary film-
makers to make more realistic films, like In Which We Serve (1942), Went the Day Well?
(1942).

With many of the employees being engaged in war work, available manpower was
reduced to one third and half of the studio space was requisitioned, only sixty films were
produced annually. New realism in wartime pictures and a demand for documentaries
gave a whole new look to British films.
Initially, many cinemas closed down for fear of air raids, but the public needed a way of
escaping the reality of war, and turned to the more genteel, sanitized versions available
in the cinema. The majority was war related, The Stars Look Down; 49th Parallel;
Convoy and This Happy Breed.

Some of the finest British work came out of the period including Brief Encounter; The
Wicked Lady; The Man in Grey; Oliviers Henry V. New directors, artists and writers
came to the fore, David Lean as a director, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat as writers
and Richard Attenborough, Michael Redgrave, David Niven and Stewart Granger were
elevated to stardom.

In post war Britain, during the period 1945-1955, the Rank Organization, with Michael
Balcon at the helm, was the dominant force in film production and distribution. It
acquired a number of British studios, and bank-rolled some of the great British film-
makers which were emerging in this period. Their rivals, Korda's London Films
continued to expand, taking over the British Lion Film Corporation in 1946 and
Shepperton Studios the following year.

1949 was a bad year financially partly due to a series of good, but big budget movies. The
Red Shoes; Hamlet; Fallen Idol; Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. Smaller budget
productions also left there mark with Passport to Pimlico; and the very successful Kind
Hearts and Coronets that established Alec Guinness as a star.

The British Watermark 1950 59

It was symptomatic of the changing entertainment habits of the general public that Rank
sold their Lime Grove Studios in West London to the BBC in 1949. Television was just
beginning to have an effect on the film industry. During the 1950' and early 60's Films
had to learn to be more exportable and welcomed to foreign audiences. Many achieved
both of these criteria among them works by David Lean and Carol Reed.

Then in 1947, Ealing's comedy Hue and Cry, was a surprise hit. An entertaining story of a
criminal gang foiled by an enthusiastic army of schoolboys, the film met a public desire
for relief after years of fighting and continuing hardships.

The studio released many comedies before and during the war, but 'Ealing Comedy'
proper began in 1949, with the consecutive release of Passport to Pimlic, Whisky Galore!
and Kind Hearts and Coronet. The Lavender Hill Mob was also very successful, in which
a mild-mannered bank clerk
masterminds a robbery of the Bank of
England's gold reserves.

There were important newcomers in the

acting field that had international
appeal, Jack Hawkins, Kenneth More,
Richard Todd, Richard Burton and Peter
Finch. British actresses of this calibre
remained scarce. Films like The Lady
Killers; Genevieve; The Cruel Sea and The Colditz Story helped to keep the UK's
reputation high. Funding was also kept up by well made popular, but erring on
schoolboy bathroom humour series, which also included the Doctor and the Carry On
series. An unusual success in this decade was The Blue, a documentary about life in
Britain at that time. Interestingly, it actually was more of a tribute to the police written
by one of their own.

Also the fifties saw the beginning of Hammer Horror studios which went to be by far the
most successful studio in the History of the British Isles. It launched the careers of
Christopher lee and Peter Cushing and the directorial success of Terence Fisher.

British New Wave 1959- 63

British New Wave or Free Cinema describes a group of films made between 1959 and
1963 which portray a more gritty realism. They were influenced by the Angry Young Men
of the mid-50s along with the documentary films of everyday life commissioned by the
Post Office during and after the Second
World War, and are often associated with
kitchen sink drama. The group was
established around the film magazine
Sequence that was founded by Tony
Richardson, Karel Riesz and Lindsay
Anderson who together with future James
Bond producer Harry Saltzman established
the company Woodfall Films which made
their early films. These included adaptations
of Richardson's own stage productions of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer.
Other significant films in this movement include Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1960), A Kind of Loving (1962), and This
Sporting Life (1963). The Free Cinema films
also made stars out of their leading actors
Albert Finney, Alan Bates, Richard Burton,
Rita Tushingham, Richard Harris and Tom
Courtenay.

The Stagnation of the 70s

With the film industry in both Britain and the United States entering into recession,
American studios cut back on domestic production, and in many cases withdrew from
financing British films altogether. Major films were still made at this time, including
Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), Battle of Britain (1969), and David Lean's Ryan's
Daughter (1970), but as the decade wore on financing became increasingly hard to come
by.
Also in the 70s, spurred on by his success with Women In Love, Ken Russell challenged
the censors wildly with The Music Lovers and The Devils only just managing to get a
certificate. Likewise Roegs Performance with James Fox was a shock to the system for
many who saw it. But boundaries were gone by now and a couple of years later The
Exorcist was to hit the screens only to be banned after too many people fainted or were
sick in the cinema!

The British horror boom of the 1960s also finally came to an end by the mid-1970s, with
the leading producers Hammer and Amicus leaving the genre altogether in the face of
competition from America. Films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) made
Hammer's vampire films seem increasingly tame and outdated, despite attempts to spice
up the formula with added nudity and gore.
Stanley Kubrick made Clockwork Orange, just about getting a certificate, Dr Strangelove
and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In mainstream terms, pure British cinema was diminishing
and was to get worse before it got even worse.

The 80s decline and re-emergence

The 1980s began with the worst recession the British film industry had ever seen. In
1980, only 31 UK films were made, down 50% on the previous year, and the lowest
output since 1914. This decade also started the downward trend in self financing British
movies the Americans began to take over and really never looked back. When movies
were made in Britain they were either American financed or had American directors /
producers. This was in part because the market potential in Britain is too small to
produce a profit return on anything more than the most modestly budgeted production.

However, the 1980s soon saw a renewed optimism, led by companies such as Goldcrest
(and producer David Puttnam), Channel 4, Handmade Films and Merchant Ivory
Productions. Under producer Puttnam a generation of British directors emerged making
popular films with international distribution, including: Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, 1983),
Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, 1981), Roland Joffe (The Killing Fields, 1984), Alan
Parker and Ridley Scott. Handmade Films, part owned by George Harrison, had
produced a series of modest budget comedies and gritty dramas such as The Long Good
Friday (1980) that had proven popular internationally.
Also in this era Sir Richard Attenborough was directing Gandhi (1982) and Lewis Gilbert
- Educating Rita (1983). The later half of the decade saw general decline. That said there
were still successful British actors and actresses around but the big budget blockbusters
were now being populated by mainly Americans.
Following the final winding up of the Rank Organisation, a series of company
consolidations in UK cinema distribution meant that it became ever harder for British
productions. Another blow was the elimination of the Eady tax concession by the
Conservative Government in 1984. The concession had made it possible for a foreign
film company to write off a large amount of its production costs by filming in the UK
this was what attracted a succession of blockbuster productions to UK studios in the
1970s. With Eady gone many studios closed or focused on television work.

Divergent 90s

Film production in Britain hit one of its all-time lows in 1989. While cinema audiences
were climbing in the UK in the early 1990s, few British films were enjoying significant
commercial success, even in the home market. Among the more notable exceptions were
the Merchant Ivory productions Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day
(1993), Richard Attenborough's Chaplin (1992) and Shadowlands (1993) and Neil
Jordan's acclaimed thriller The Crying Game (1992).

The surprise success of the Richard Curtis-scripted comedy Four Weddings and a
Funeral (1994), especially in the United States, lead to renewed interest and investment
in British films, and set a pattern for British-set romantic comedies, including Sliding
Doors (1998), Notting Hill (1999) and the Bridget Jones films. Several of these were also
written by Curtis, who went on to make his directorial debut with Love Actually in 2003.
Working Title Films, the company behind many of these films, quickly became one of the
most successful British production companies, with other box office hits including Bean
(1997), Elizabeth (1998) and Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001).

Note should also be made of Channel 4s own production company Film on four which
soon became FilmFour turning out some classic cinema such as Trainspotting,
Brassed Off and Lock Stock and Two smoking barrels. By July 2002 Channel 4 had
regained power over its subsidiary and decided to return to commercial TV. With the
introduction of public funding for British films through the new National Lottery
something of a production boom occurred in the late 1990s, but only a few of these films
found significant commercial success, and many went unreleased.

There was no shortage of acting talent around at this time with actors like Ewan
McGregor and Ralph Fiennes truly cutting their teeth. Directors to like Sam Mendes and
Anthony Minghella began to come to the fore.
Tax incentives allowed American producers to increasingly invest in UK-based film
production throughout the 1990s, including films such as Interview with the
Vampire (1994), Mission: Impossible (1996), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Star Wars:
Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999) and The Mummy (1999). Miramax also
distributed Neil Jordan's acclaimed thriller The Crying Game (1992), which was
generally ignored on its initial release in the UK, but was a considerable success in the
United States. The same company also enjoyed some success releasing the BBC period
drama Enchanted April (1992) and The Wings of the Dove (1997).

Among the more successful British films were the Merchant Ivory productions Howards
End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993), Richard
Attenborough's Shadowlands (1993), and Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare
adaptations. The Madness of King George (1994) proved there was still a market for
British costume dramas, and other period films followed, including Sense and
Sensibility (1995), Restoration (1995), Emma (1996), Mrs.
Brown (1997), Basil (1998), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Topsy-Turvy (1999).

After a six-year hiatus for legal reasons the James Bond films returned to production
with the 17th Bond film, GoldenEye. With their traditional home Pinewood Studios fully
booked, a new studio was created for the film in a former Rolls-Royce aero-engine
factory at Leavesden in Hertfordshire.
21st Century

The first decade of the 21st century was a relatively successful one for the British film
industry. Many British films found a wide international audience due to funding from
BBC Films, Film 4 and the UK Film Council, and some independent production
companies, such as Working Title, secured financing and distribution deals with major
American studios. Working Title scored three major international successes, all starring
Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, with the romantic comedies Bridget Jones's Diary (2001),
which grossed $254 million worldwide; the sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,
which earned $228 million; and Richard Curtis's directorial debut Love Actually (2003),
which grossed $239 million. Most successful of all, Phyllida Lloyd's Mamma
Mia! (2008), which grossed $601 million.

The new decade saw a major new film series in the US-backed but British-made Harry
Potter films, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2001. David
Heyman's company Heyday Films has produced seven sequels, with the final title
released in two parts Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 in 2010
and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in 2011. All were filmed at
Leavesden Studios in England.

However, it was usually through domestically funded features throughout the decade
that British directors and films won awards at the top international film festivals. In
2003, Michael Winterbottom won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for In This
World. In 2004, Mike Leigh directed Vera Drake, an account of a housewife who leads a
double life as an abortionist in 1950s London. The film won the Golden Lion at the
Venice Film Festival. In 2006 Stephen Frears directed The Queen based on the events
surrounding the death of Princess Diana, which won the Best Actress prize at the Venice
Film Festival and Academy Awards and the BAFTA for Best Film. In 2006, Ken Loach
won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with his account of the struggle for Irish
Independence in The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Joe Wright's adaptation of the Ian
McEwan novel Atonement was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, including Best Film
and won the Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Film. Slumdog Millionaire was filmed
entirely in Mumbai with a mostly Indian cast, though with a British director (Danny
Boyle), producer (Christian Colson), screenwriter (Simon Beaufoy) and star (Dev Patel)
the film was all-British financed via Film4 and Celador. It has received worldwide
critical acclaim. It has won four Golden Globes, seven BAFTA Awards and eight
Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Film. The King's Speech, which tells
the story of King George VI's attempts to overcome his speech impediment, was directed
by Tom Hooper and filmed almost entirely in London. It received four Academy Awards
(including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay) in 2011.

A study by the British Film Institute published in December 2013 found that of the 613
tracked British films released between 2003 and 2010 only 7% made a profit. Films with
low budgets, those that cost below 500,000 to produce, were even less likely to gain a
return on outlay. Of these films, only 3.1% went into the black. At the top end of budgets
for the British industry, under a fifth of films that cost 10million went into profit.

On 26 July 2010 it was announced that the UK Film Council, which was the main body
responsible for the development of promotion of British cinema during the 2000s,
would be abolished, with many of the abolished body's functions being taken over by
the British Film Institute. Actors and professionals, including James McAvoy, Emily
Blunt, Pete Postlethwaite, Damian Lewis, Timothy Spall, Daniel Barber and Ian Holm,
campaigned against the Council's abolition. The move also led American actor and
director Clint Eastwood (who had filmed Hereafter in London) to write to the
British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in August 2010 to protest the
decision to close the Council. Eastwood warned Osborne that the closure could result in
fewer foreign production companies choosing to work in the UK. A grass-roots online
campaign was launched and a petition established by supporters of the Council.

Countering this, a few professionals, including Michael Winner and Julian Fellowes,
supported the Government's decision. A number of other organisations responded
positively.

At the closure of the UK Film Council on 31 March 2011, The Guardian reported that
"The UKFC's entire annual budget was a reported 3m, while the cost of closing it down
and restructuring is estimated to have been almost four times that amount." One of the
UKFC's last films, The King's Speech, is estimated to have cost $15m to make and
grossed $235m, besides winning several Academy Awards. UKFC invested $1.6m for a
34% share of net profits, a valuable stake that will pass to the British Film Institute.

In April 2011, The Peel Group acquired a controlling 71% interest in The Pinewood
Studios Group (the owner of Pinewood Studios and Shepperton Studios) for 96
million. In June 2012, Warner opened the re-developed Leavesden studio for
business. The most commercially successful British directors in recent years are Paul
Greengrass, Mike Newell, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott and David Yates.

In January 2012, at Pinewood Studios to visit film-related businesses, UK Prime

Minister David Cameron said that his government had bold ambitions for the film
industry: "Our role, and that of the BFI, should be to support the sector in becoming
even more dynamic and entrepreneurial, helping UK producers to make commercially
 successful pictures that rival the quality and impact of the
best international productions. Just as the British Film
Commission has played a crucial role in attracting the biggest
and best international studios to produce their films here, so
we must incentivise UK producers to chase new markets both
here and overseas."

The film industry remains an important earner for the British economy. According to a
UK Film Council press release of 20 January 2011, 1.115 billion was spent on UK film
production during 2010. A 2014 survey suggested that British-made films were generally
more highly rated than Hollywood productions, especially when considering low-budget
UK productions.

Chapter III: Curiosities about American and British Movies

Originally, the term movies did not mean films, but the people who made them.
It was generally used with disdain by early Hollywood locals who disliked the
invading Easterners.
 The first film ever made in Hollywood was D.W. Griffiths 1910 In Old
California, a Biograph melodrama about a Spanish maiden (Marion Leonard)
who has an illegitimate son with a man who later becomes governor of California.
It was shot in two days.

When Horace and Daeida Wilcox founded Hollywood in 1887, they hoped it
would become a religious community. Prohibitionists, they banned liquor from
the town and offered free land to anyone willing to build a church.

The running W was a trip wire to make horses fall over at the critical moment
during filming. The device broke countless horses legs and necks. It is now illegal.

The most filmed author is William Shakespeare, including straight film versions,
modern adaptations (West Side Story [1961], The Lion King [1994], etc.), and
Shakespeare parodies.

The shortest dialogue script since the introduction of talkies was written for Mel
Brooks Silent Movie (1976), which has only one spoken word throughout: Non.

The character most frequently portrayed in horror films is Count Dracula, the
creation of the Irish writer Bram Stoker (1847-1912).
The top five largest worldwide grossing movies of all time before inflation
are Avatar (2009), Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King (2003), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest (2006), and The Dark
Knight (2008).
To Have and Have Not (1945) is the only instance when a Nobel prize-winning
author (Ernest Hemingway) was adapted for the screen by another Nobel-
winning author (William Faulkner).
The movie to hit $100 million the fastest was The Twilight Saga: New
Moon (2009).
A real bridge with a real train crossing it was blown up for the 1957 The Bridge on
the River Kwai.
Planet Vulcan in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) is actually Yellowstone
National Park.
The largest number of fatalities ever in a production of a film occurred during the
shooting of the 1931 film Viking. Twenty-seven people died, including the director
and cinematographer, when a ship they were shooting from exploded in the ice off
the coast of Newfoundland.

The greatest number of takes for one scene in a film is 324 in Charlie Chaplins
1931 City Lights.
 25% of Internet users over 12 years old have downloaded or streamed a feature
film online.

14% of British films produced between 1960 and 1969 were UK-American co-
productions.

Around 20% of all British films were government funded.

The most common genre in 20th century in Britain was crime.

The UK has the third largest filmed entertainment market in the world, after
America and Japan.

Its estimated there are only eight UK military ambulances from WWII in the
world and they all appeared in Atonement (2007).

Britains first cinema was the Regent Street Cinema in London, which opened its
doors on 21 February 1896.

Legend has it a few snakes used in filming Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the
Lost Ark (1981) escaped, and their descendants still live on the grounds of a
London film studio.

Sean Connery wore a wig in every single one of his Bond performances.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was paid approximately $21,429 for every one of the 700
words he said in, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Star Wars was originally prefixed by the definite article The.

The ornaments that Marv steps on in Home Alone are actually candy.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won all 11 Academy Awards it was
nominated for.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, cinematography proved its qualities of becoming the seventh art due to
all discoveries made along the centuries, got close to the hearts of the audience and made
actors popular, as making them idols for their fans.
At first, cinematography was just a few moving images, which needed no script, but
some right people, at the right time, started a revolution and made history, related to the
art of films.

United States of America had a glorious beginning and launched a lot of stars, the
famous Hall of Fame, Hollywood, Oscar Awards being the essential marks of the
country. United Kingdom had also its stars who struggled to represent their country and
compete with the Hollywood stars, making thir own history.

As a passionate film lover, the history of cinematography taught me about the rough
times when movies were hand made and made me observe the evolution of technology
which actually gave birth to the nowadays movies, with such a lot of fame, investment ,
hard word, tops and stars.

As George Melies, father of movie, said: cinematography is the Factory of Dreams, the
two hours medicine which helps us get out of the ordinary.
Bibliography