To celebrate 100 years of Cinema, we look back at some of the major developments in the history of the moving image, and the inventors behind them.
The Inventions before 1896
Shadow plays, involving projection using a lantern and animated puppets, date back to the 1420s in Europe, having spread from India or Java via the Middle East. Seraphin opened a shadow play theatre in Versailles in 1776 which survived the French Revolution and ran until the 1850s. The Magic Lantern is mentioned in Pepys diary in the 17th century, and by 1800 travelling showmen were using lanterns with a lens and illuminated by oil.
The Fantasmagorie of the 1790s projected ghost shows from a hidden lantern onto smoke. The development of large scale entertainment soon became possible when Professor Robert Hare invented the oxy-hydrogen blowlamp in 1802; this led to Lieutenant Thomas Drummond's signal light of 1826, which used calcium oxide to produce the 'lime light'.
The Thaumatrope demonstrated persistence of vision, which the Victorians thought important for perception, although we now know this to be psychological. Joseph Plateau in Belgium and then Michael Faraday in England studied persistence of vision in the 1820s and this led to the spinning slits of the Phenakistoscope invented by Plateau, and the simultaneous independent invention, in 1833, by the Austrian Simon Stampfer of an almost identical device which he named the Stroboscope.
In 1867, M. Bradley (on 6th March in England) and William E. Lincoln (on 23rd April in America), filed virtually identical patents for The Zoetrope, this used 13 slots and 13 pictures spinning round in a metal cylinder: varying the number of pictures simulated relative figure movement. The device was cheaper to produce, ran more smoothly and for longer than the Phenkistoscope, and could be viewed by several people at once.
A large number of devices were being developed throughout Europe and America, and by the 1880s audiences of 3000 were watching shows involving 2 or 3 lanterns dissolving in and out to produce an absorbing experience.
The next step was to use sequence photography to create moving pictures, and the first successful device for sequence photography was Eadweard Muybridge, who took 12 photographs of the horse 'Abe Edgington' in 1878 and demonstrated how this represented a mere half second of motion. His Zoopraxiscope device of 1879 can be seen in the Kingston Museum, Surrey, UK.
Inspired by Muybridge's work, the Frenchman Etienne-Jules Marey analysed high-speed motion and throughout the early 1890s, helped by developments such as sensitized paper superseding glass plates and general improvements in the equipment available, produced chronophotographic sequence cameras and demonstrated the principles which formed the basis of the cinematography.
Edison's Kinetoscope was the first equipment to use 35mm film, but this was a single viewer machine. The designer W.K.L.Dixon worked for Edison in the USA and then in 1894 moved to England where he helped develop the Mutoscope ('What the Butler Saw') machines. The first 'movie shows'
The Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, produced what is arguably the first real cinema show with the presentation of their Lumiere Cinematographe to a paying audience at the Grand Cafe in Paris on 28th December 1895. In the meanwhile, Robert (R.W.) Paul, a London engineer, had seen the Kinetoscope parlour in Oxford Street and discovered that the machine had not been patented in England. He set about making copies, only to be frustrated when he tried to buy films which the suppliers would only sell to purchasers of the original machines.
However, he soon met up with Birt Acres, a photographer, and together they produced a camera virtually identical to Marey's chronophotographic film camera. On 30th March 1895, Acres filmed the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, and on 29th May the same year he filmed the Derby. On 27th May, Acres patented the Kinetic camera - based on the Paul-Acres machine, and this was probably the cause of the split between the two men which arose shortly after Acres had returned from Germany where he had filmed the June opening of the Kiel canal.
The films were only viewed as a peep-show until Acres projected them, to the Royal Photographic Society on 14th January 1896, and later with his Kineopticon at Piccadilly Circus on 21st March 1896, about a month after the Lumieres' first London show. Until purpose-built cinemas began to appear around 1910, shows would be presented as a turn at the theatre or shown in converted shops. Fairground Bioscope shows toured from 1896 until the end of World War One.
The film used was the 2 3/4 inch (70mm) film developed for Kodak snapshot cameras, which most early movie men split in half, although the Biograph used 70mm film to give better quality. It is often suggested that the technical qualities of the early films are superior to later black and white films, however it must be realised that as the Lumieres' father owned a photographic business they were original manufacturers, and so their lovingly made films should not be compared to a well-worn duplicate of a 30's B-movie.
Sound and Colour
The first films had no sound unless the pit orchestra chose to play an accompaniment or the operator devised his own sound effects or used a device such as the 'Allefex' machine. Sound produced by a gramophone playing records synchronised to the film was first demonstrated by Leon Gaumont at the Paris Exposition of 1900, but there were considerable difficulties involving speed variations and sound amplification.
Gaumont continued his developing and in 1910 he demonstrated his Chronophone to the Academie des Sciences in Paris. In Germany, Oskar Meester patented several synchronisation methods in 1903, and within 10 years his Biophon system was installed in 500 German theatres. The first internationally successful method was the Vitaphone system, backed by Sam Warner of Warner Brothers, which was used in the 1927 Al Jolson film 'The Jazz Singer'.
The system was based on 16 inch discs, playing at 33 1/3 rpm from the centre out, but within 3 years the costs of breakages and shipping the disks led Warner Brothers to discontinue the system. Although F. von Madelar had patented various inventions for mechanically recording sound on film in 1913, and Emil Lauste had demonstrated sound-on-film recording around the same time, their ideas were largely unexploited.
The eventual system adopted in 1928 arose from an amalgamation of Lee de Forest and Theodore Case's Phonofilm system with Charles A. Hoxie's Photophone system. Subsequent developments in sound have been the Dolby system, and more recently digital sound in the forms of Dolby digital which is on the film and Digital Theatre Sound (DTS) which is on a Compact Disc that is automatically synchronised even if the film is edited.
The first successful results with colour filming and projection involved the Kinemacolor system, patented in November 1906 by George Albert Smith, a Brighton film-maker. A 'full colour' image is produced by shooting alternate frames on 'black and white' film with red and green filters and then projecting the film back with appropriate filter at 32 frames per second (double speed). This produces a colour image devoid of pure blue, however modern experiments have shown the results to be effective.
3-D films come and go, but are generally disliked on the grounds that the glasses cause headaches. In reality the headaches are caused by the brain trying to compensate for misaligned images, caused by the film being either badly shot or projected: both these functions require great skill by the operator. One system in use today is the IMAX system which uses 70mm film sideways to give better quality.
In the early days of cinema, no one was entirely sure of the correct way to retain copyright of their film, and as a result the Library of Congress has a collection of frame-by-frame paper prints of films up to 1912. In a neat twist to the original reason for the copy being made, there are instances where these paper prints have been re- filmed to produce a new copy of a film of which no other record remains.
Thank you to the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) and Stephen Herbert of the British Film Institute for their help with this article.
Source: InventorsWorld Limited
History of Motion Pictures
65 B.C. The Roman poet Lucretius discovers the principle of persistence of vision.
165 B.C. The astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria proves Lucretius' principle of persistence of vision.
1832 The Belgian scientist Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau develops the phenakistoscope, the first device that allowed pictures to appear to move.
1877 The San Francisco photographer Eadward Muybridge is the first to photograph motion when he set up 24 still cameras along a racetrack. As a horse ran by the cameras, the horse would break strings which were hooked up to each cameras shutter. When a string broke, the shutter of that camera would open exposing the film.
1889 The American clergyman Hannibal W. Goodwin develops a durable and flexible transparent Celluloid film base. The pioneer of photographic equipment George Eastman manufactures the film.
Thomas A. Edison (or his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson ) invents the kinetoscope.
1894 The Kinetoscope Parlor opens in New York City, London, and Paris. A Kinetoscope Parlor consists of two rows of coin-operated kinetoscopes.
Dec. 28, 1895 The Lumiere brothers publicly project a motion picture onto a screen for the first time in a Paris cafe.
April 23, 1896 Edison presents the first public projected motion picture on a screen in the United States at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City with his latest invention, the projecting kinetoscope.
1899 The French magician Georges Melies becomes the film industry's first artist by being the first to use movies to tell a story. Melies wrote, designed, directed, and acted in hundreds of his own fairy tales and science fiction flicks.
1900 Movies become a popular attraction in amusement arcades, music halls, traveling fairs, wax museums, and vaudeville houses in many countries.
1903 The American director Edwin S. Porter releases his most important film, The Great Train Robbery, which was the first movie to use modern film techniques such as filming out of sequence for practical reasons and later editing the scenes into their proper order.
1907 About 5,000 nickelodeons exist throughout the United States. Many studios are born to keep up with the increased demand for films.
The first movie was made in Los Angeles. Previously, movies were filmed in New York City and in Fort Lee, NJ. Filmmakers saw the Los Angeles area as a good filming area with a favorable climate and a variety of natural scenery.
1910 The rise of movie stars begins. Previously, acting in a movie was looked upon as degrading compared with stage acting, so actors were never identified by name.
1911 The Nestor Company builds the first studio in a district of Los Angeles known as Hollywood. Soon, Hollywood is to become the motion-picture capital of the world.
1912 The famous stage actress Sarah Bernhardt appears in the motion picture Queen Elizabeth. Motion picture acting now gains its respect and is no longer looked upon as degrading. The public singled out certain actors and actresses as special favorites. These actors and actresses, who became the very first movie stars, include cowboy actor Bronco Billy Anderson and comedian John Bunny.
The Canadian writer and actor Mack Sennett opens the Keystone Studio in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. Nearly every major comic performer in America worked at Keystone during this time including Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin.
Motion pictures move out of nickelodeons and into real theaters. Movies become longer and more expensive as movie companies start hiring the biggest names in theater to star in the movies. Filmmakers begin to target the middle class as an audience who had previously thought films unworthy of attention.
1913 The American director D. W. Griffith, director of hundreds of short films, is credited with defining the art of motion pictures. In making his films, Griffith used filming techniques still used today. Such filming techniques included altering camera angles, using close-ups in a dramatic way, breaking scenes up into multiple shots, and more. Previously, filmmakers kept the camera in one position which was generally 12 feet away from the actors and at a right angle to the set.
1914 World War I starts. The motion-picture industry in Europe comes to a halt when there becomes a shortage of power and supplies. But the Europeans demand to watch movies because it provides a nice escape from the burdens of war. The American motion-picture industry thrives on this business in the European market, using the profits to produce even bigger and better motion pictures.
1915 The owner of Thomas H. Ince Pictures Thomas H. Ince introduces methods for the mass production of films. Previously, Ince had directed all of his films. But now it was technically impossible for him to personally direct every one of the films his company was producing because they were so many in number. Instead, Ince appointed a group of supervisors called producers who each had control over a certain number of pictures. Ince introduced a "factory system" where different films in various stages of production would be systematically rotated through his movie studio. Sometimes he would have ten or more movies being produced in his studios at one time.
1922 The Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov experiments with montage, a new editing technique pioneered by Russian filmmakers. In his experiment, Kuleshov took a close-up shot of the expressionless face of an actor. He inserted this shot before a shot of a bowl of soup, a shot of a dead woman, and a shot of a child with a teddy bear. When an audience viewed the short film, they believed that the actor showed hunger at seeing the bowl of soup, grief at seeing the dead woman, and delight at seeing the child.
1925 Most of the major Hollywood motion-picture studios are established including Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Paramount, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers. These studios used Thomas H. Ince's filmmaking "factory system" because it served them well in bringing in the profits. Unfortunetly, the system limited creativity and because of strict shooting schedules, many directors could not experiment with new ideas. Because of this, the art behind motion pictures developed more rapidly in Europe during this time.
Some of the most impressive motion pictures of this time came from Germany. Almost all German movies were filmed in large, well equipped studios in Berlin. All of the sets were built in these studios which thereby gave the directors the ability to choose camera angles and place the lighting without the hassles of filming on location.
Perhaps the German's greatest contribution to the film industry was their subjective use of the camera. An example of a subjective use of a camera is placing the camera on the ground looking up at the actor. This makes that character appear grand and majestic.
The greatest Russian filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein makes Potemkin, a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of an unsuccessful Russian Revolution. The film effectively uses montage to express the mourn of the revolution.
1926 Warner Brothers use the Vitaphone system in the film Don Juan. The Vitaphone, developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories, successfully coordinated sound on a record to play in conjunction with a projected motion picture. The sounds in Don Juan consisted of some sound effects and music, but no dialog.
1927 Warner Brothers produce The Jazz Singer, a musical starring Al Jolson. It had accompanying audio which consisted of a few songs by Jolson and a few lines of dialog. This film ends the age of silent films.
A newer and better sound system named Movietone was developed. In this system, sound was photographed onto the actual film next to the picture frames.
1929 The public demands only movies with sound. Theaters rush to install sound equipment. The public enthusiasm for these talking movies caused movie attendance to increase to 110 million, almost double the movie attendance in 1927.
These first sound movies were clumsy, stiff, and self-conscious in comparison with the old silent films. Many silent film stars' voices were not well suited for sound films and their film careers end. But other stars such as Greta Garbo, and the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy successfully adapted to sound.
1930's The most popular dramas of the time are musicals, gangster films, newspapers movies, a few westerns, and the occasional horror movie.
1935 The American film The Informer has an impressive composed musical score written by Max Steiner. With the success of this film, a full musical accompaniment became an important status symbol in movies.
Alfred Hitchcock becomes an internationally famous director for his thrillers including The 39 Steps and later The Lady Vanishes (1938).
1939 The 1930's end triumphantly with the release of Gone With the Wind as directed by Victor Fleming. The movie, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, is a 220 minute Civil War drama. It is one of the greatest money makers in film history.
1941 The 24 year-old American "boy wonder", director and actor who had won his reputation in radio and on the stage, Orson Welles directs and stars in Citizen Kane, a movie about a powerful newspaper publisher. Welles used startling camera angles and dramatic lighting. For the first time, Welles movie used accompanying music, as composed by Bernard Herrmann, to reflect the shifting moods in the film.
1942 Welles directs his second motion picture The Magnificent Ambersons. In this film, for the first time, dialog is spoken more realistically. Previously, each actor would finish a sentence before another actor began his/her. In The Magnificent Ambersons, actors often interrupted each other's dialog, adding more realism.
1943 UPA (United Productions of America) is formed by a group of animators who broke away from Disney, following an artists' strike in 1941. The film production company intention is to promote less inhibited modes of expression in the field of animation.
Neorealism is born in Italian cinema, beginning with Luchino Visconti's Ossessione.
1945 The Screen Extras Guild (SEG), a union representing the interests of persons regularly casted as extras, is organized.
Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi moves to make The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC - an organization with the goal of stopping communism domestically) into a permanent standing committee, and Hollywood soon becomes one of the main targets. The congressional hearings into Hollywood's alleged un-American activity really begin when ten witnesses (who came to be called "The Hollywood Ten") are cited for contempt after refusing to answer the question, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" What follows is a decade characterized by suspicion and paranoia, during which many promising and established careers are destroyed by anti-Communist blacklisting.
1946 Universal Pictures merges with the independent production company International Pictures to become Universal International.
1947 The Actors Studio, rehearsal group for professional actors, is established in New York City by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford. It soon becomes the epicenter for advancing "the Method," a technique of acting that is inspired by Stanislavski's teachings.
1948 Block booking, the system by which an exhibitor was tricked into buying a whole line of films with weak potential for box office returns, is deemed illegal. The studios attracted the exhibitors with films that had prestige and popular stars, and only sold them under the condition that the exhibitor purchase the poor films along with the good ones. The system spread from the US to Europe, but came to a halt due to a court decision that legislated the separation of the production and exhibition functions of the industry.
1950 Revitalizing the career of former silent star Gloria Swanson, Sunset Blvd. is nominated for eleven academy awards and wins three - one for Writing, one for Art Direction/Set Decoration, and one for Music.
1951 Riddled in debt, United Artists is sold to a syndicate headed by two New York entertainment lawyers, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin. The new United Artists is fortunate enough to announce business at a time when many independent producers are looking for distribution, and the new UA becomes successful almost instantly.
1952 Hollywood is losing the battle with television, but for a counter-attack, 3-D films are put into production, promising an effect that television cannot compete with. The first 3-D film released is Bwana Devil, which is followed by a flood of quickly and cheaply made, but sometimes successful, 3-D features.
Universal International is sold to Decca Records.
1953 Jack Palance becomes a major star after the release of Shane, which wins an Oscar for Best Color Cinematography and is nominated for five more (Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor - Brandon de Wilde, Best Supporting Actor - Jack Palance, Best Director, and Best Writing).
1955 The International Confederation of Art houses (CICAE) is founded in Paris. An art house is a theater dedicated to the exhibition of films for a specialized audience, either classic revivals or new releases, frequently foreign or independently produced domestic films.
Also in France, the Magirama, a triple screen projection process, is developed by Abel Gance and Andre Debrie. It is later demonstrated in Paris with a slew of short films.
1956 The Ten Commandments becomes Edward G. Robinson's comeback part after being unfairly blacklisted in the 1950s. The film is nominated for seven Academy Awards including: Best Picture, Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Sound, Best Film Editing and Best Costume Design.
1958 Both of the Cohn brothers, who had been in control of Columbia Pictures since its birth, are posthumously succeeded by Abe Schneider and Leo Jaffe.
1959 Hollywood, still having trouble with the menacing medium of television, introduces Aroma-Rama, a scenting system that is developed by inventor Charles Weiss to add a sense of smell to the documentary film Behind the Great Wall by filtering Oriental scents into the auditorium trough the air-conditioning system. It competes with Smell-O-Vision, which pipes odors into the individual seats.
1960 Spartacus, based on Dalton Trumbo's original script - his first screen credit since he was blacklisted more than a decade earlier, is released. The film is such a great success, getting nominations for Best Film Editing and Best Score, and earning Academy Awards for Best Color Cinematography, Best Art Direction(Color), Best Costume Design (Color), and Best Supporting actor, that it allows Director Stanley Kubrick to avoid Hollywood almost completely, and begin to direct movies on his own.
1962 The soon to be long-running and highly profitable James Bond series commences with Dr. No. Starring Sean Connery, the film is to be followed with many sequels and stars that include: David Niven (If the spoof Casino Royale counts), George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan (so far).
Universal is bought out by talent agency MCA.
1965 New German Cinema designates the unexpected revival of West German feature film productions.
1966 Pressure of social change, Supreme Court decisions concerning obscenity, and the power of civil liberties groups bring a sweeping revision in the Hays code, which originally imposed a standard of decency upon all films. The new code still encourages virtue and condemns sin, but suggests restraint in questionable themes, rather than forbidding them completely.
The National Legion of Decency, with a purpose that originally involved arousing public opinion against objectionable motion pictures and urging Catholics to avoid patronizing the films, changes its official name to the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures and, in respect to Pope John XXIII's policy of modernizing Catholic thought, announces a more progressive attitude.
1967 New Line Cinema is created, making its niche with films like Pink Flamingo and Polyester, both by Director John Waters.
Jack Warner, co-creator of Warner Bros., sells his remaining interest in the company to a Canadian corporation called Seven Arts.
1968 A rating system is developed which classifies films according to their suitability for viewing by the young. This change completely removes the need for a code of decency for the movie industry to follow.
1969 Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, is the only X rated picture to ever win an Oscar for best movie of the year. The rating is later changed to an R.
1970 The original IMAX projection system, which creates a very large picture on a very large screen, makes its debut in the Fuji Pavilion at the Expo in Osaka, Japan.
Warner Bros. is purchased by Kinney National Services, Inc., a New York conglomerate whose interests include parking lots and funeral homes.
1971 Starting with the popular hit Shaft, the blaxploitation genre is born. Blaxploitation films, a type of exploitation film which is aimed at a primarily African American audience and is often directed by an African American, star defiantly proud black heroes and heroines who are rebels in some way, usually against the white establishment.
1972 Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather is finally released after much turmoil involving Italian-American protesters that include Frank Sinatra. Marlon Brando was contracted for only $100,000 and a percentage of the film, which actually yielded about $16 million, as payment. The Godfather is awarded Oscars for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, and Best Actor (Brando). The film is nominated for Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Direction and three nominations for Best Supporting Actor (James Caan, Robert Duvall and Al Pacino).
1973 The once powerful MGM Studios abandons the movie making business because of a string of failures due to ownership changes and bad production choices.
Warner Bros. has its first certified blockbuster with The Exorcist which is, at the time, one of the five highest grossing movies, with more than $82 million a result of a mere $10 million budget.
1974 Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson, is released, and earns much more than its budget of $3.2 million. Twenty-five percent of the film was financed by a tax shelter syndicate which receives about 10 percent of the profits in return, but this avenue of film financing has since been closed by order of federal regulation.
1975 Because every studio lacks a special effects facility, Director and George Lucas and Producer Gary Kurtz create Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) from scratch to help in the creation of the world of Star Wars. Among the many customized innovations that are developed by this organization, the "Dykstraflex" motion-control camera utilizes precision machinery and computer-controlled movement to film, among other scenes, the spectacular space-ship dogfight that brings STAR WARS to its climactic finale.
With the release of the blockbuster Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg, Universal gains a position of prominence in Hollywood.
1977 Shot in Guatemala, Tunisia, Death Valley, and England's Elstree Studios for $11.5 million by George Lucas, Star Wars grosses nearly $200 million on its first release, topping Jaws as the highest earning film to date and generating an astoundingly lucrative merchandising campaign. Using a computer-assisted camera system with advanced memory that allows quick, precise addition of elements to the final shot, ILM compiles approximately 363 special effects to fill the screen. Lucas's film makes science fiction movies more popular than they had ever been, and initiates the practice of selling movie paraphernalia such as bedspreads, T-shirts, and toys to make even more money. Star Wars is nominated for Best Picture (losing to Woody Allen's Annie Hall), Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor. The film conquers all in the technical categories, receiving Oscars for Art Direction, Set Decoration, Editing, Costumes, Score, Visual Effects, and Sound, with a special Oscar going to Benjamin Burtt, Jr., the creator of the robot voices.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, made for $19 million, receives $120 million a few months after its release in November, saving Columbia Pictures from bankruptcy.
1978 Orion Pictures is formed by five disgruntled United Artists Executives who left UA over disagreements with the company about lack of control.
1979 Miramax Films begins when brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein purchase and renovate a run-down movie theater in Buffalo, N.Y., and turn it into a profitable college art house. They soon become distributors, starting with The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, which costs them $180,000 and grosses $6 million.
1980 MGM makes a comeback when it is split into a hotel empire and a movie company, soon acquiring United Artists. The regular release of James Bond films provides most of the studio's hits of the rest of decade.
1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot by Steven Spielberg in Hawaii, France, Tunisia, and at Elstree Studios in England in a whirlwind 73 days with $22.8 million (which is a staggering cost at the time), goes on to earn as much as $200 million to become one of the 10 top box office champions of all time. Oscars are awarded for Best Art Direction, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects. Nominations include Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score.
1982 Steven Spielberg's ET: The Extra-Terrestrial is released, soon becoming an all-time blockbuster. It is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing. It wins Oscars for Best Original Musical Score, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects, and Best Visual Effects.
Tri-Star Pictures is formed by CBS television, HBO (Home Box Office) and Columbia Pictures.
1983 The THX ("Tomlinson Holman Experiment") sound system program for movie theaters is developed with the main goal of recreating film sound in theaters exactly as the filmmakers had intended.
1986 Ted Turner, the Atlanta media mogul, buys the vast MGM film library, and becomes the leader of the temporary colorization fad (the computer altering of black and white films to make them appear as if they were shot in color).
Dolby SR ("Spectral Recording") is introduced as a system used both when a soundtrack is recorded and when it is played back. The system permits the capturing of louder sounds with wider frequency response and lower distortion.
1987 Columbia merges with Tri-Star Pictures under the ownership of Coca Cola.
1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit is released, breaking new technological ground by allowing humans and cartoons to interact flawlessly. The movie works by matching the light and shadow on the animated characters with the film noir lighting on the live-action set, by having the Toons interact with real props, and by evoking convincing performances from the actors who must imagine the presence of the Toons they are playing a scene with. Wins awards for Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects, and Best Film Editing. The movie is also nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, and Best Sound.
1989 The Japanese electronics firm, Sony Corp., makes a multi-billion-dollar investment in entertainment "software" by purchasing Columbia and Tri Star Pictures from Coca-Cola, naming itself Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Sunset Blvd. is selected by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as one of twenty-five landmark films that are leading examples of American cinematic art. Warner Communications merges with Time, Inc. to become the largest media company in the world.
1990 New Line Cinema launches an art house division, Fine Line Features, which goes on to produce or distribute movies such as Robert Altman's The Player and Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.
Because of its length of 181 minutes, box office failure is predicted for Kevin Costner's directing debut, but Dances with Wolves is a huge success with audiences, critics, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It wins seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Music, and Best Sound), and is nominated for five more (Actor - Kevin Costner, Supporting Actor - Graham Greene, Supporting Actor - Mary McDonnel, Art Direction, and Costume Design).
The Japanese electronics corporation Matsushita purchases MCA for $6.1 billion.
1993 New Line Cinema is purchased by Ted Turner, and the company soon achieves a new level of mainstream success with two blockbusters starring Jim Carrey: The Mask and Dumb & Dumber.
DTS Digital Sound makes its theatrical debut with the June release of Jurassic Park. The system is designed to create full-range digital sound reproduction using a theater's existing sound system, and utilizing a digital soundtrack recorded not on the film itself, but on two separate CD ROM discs capable of holding three and a half hours of digital sound all together.
Schindler's List, the extremely well-received film about the World War II Holocaust, wins Steven Spielberg his first Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director.
1994 Three of the most powerful, influential and successful individuals in modern Hollywood - director-producer Steven Spielberg, the recently departed Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film and music industry mogul David Geffen - join together to create DreamWorks SKG. The studio announces some animation projects that include El Dorado: Cortez and the City of Gold, and The Prince of Egypt, which is slated for a Christmas 1998 release.
SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound ) is introduced in August. SDDS is a sound-on-film system in which the digital information is printed in two continuous strips along the film's edges, which allows a larger amount of digital data storage space, and avoids the need for separate CD-ROM soundtracks and synchronization codes (DTS).
1995 IMAX 3D is introduced with the movie Wings of Courage, which is 40 minutes long and costs $15 million to make, bringing 3D technology to a new high.
Miramax announces the creation of Rolling Thunder, a "specialty label" presided over by Quentin Tarantino that is expected to distribute up to four films a year. The company's first acquisition reflects Tarantino's love for Hong Kong cinema: Chunking Express, from director Wong Kar Wai.
