Chapter 7 Flashcards
Combination of Edison’s lightbulb, Goodwin’s celluloid, and Le Prince’s camera. Early movie camera.
Kinetograph
Pliable material used to improve film roll, can hold a coating of chemicals sensitive to light.
Celluloid (Hannibal Goodwin).
Single-person viewing system.
Kinetoscope
Enabled filmstrips of longer lengths to be projected without interruption and hinted at the potential of movies as a future mass medium.
Vitascope
Movies that tell stories.
Narrative films
A form of movie theater whose name combines the admission price with the Greek word for “theater”.
Nickelodeons
Control on all levels of the movie business (production, distribution, exhibition).
Vertical integration
A situation in which a few firms control the bulk of the business.
Oligopoly
Firmly controlled creative talent in the industry.
Studio system
Form of distribution: exhibitors had to agree to rent new or marginal films with no stars. Theater operators were pressured into taking a hundred movies at a time to get the few Pickford titles they wanted.
Block booking (Adolph Zukor). It enabled the new studios to test-market new stars without taking much financial risk.
Full-time single-screen movie theaters that provided a more hospitable moviegoing environment.
Movie palaces
Big Five
Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, and RKO
Little Three
Columbia, Universal, United Artists
Moving pictures with sound.
Talkies
“The creative treatment of actuality,” or a genre that interprets reality by recording real people and settings.
Documentary
Documentary style: track reality, employing a rough, grainy look and shaky, handheld camera work.
Cinema verite
Independently produced films
Indies
Hollywood Ten
Aggressive witch-hunts for political radicals in the film industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). HUAC made people in the film industry declare their patriotism and give up names of colleagues. (9 screenwriters and 1 director refused).
Paramount decision
Got rid of vertical integration for the Big Five by forcing the studios to gradually divest themselves of their theaters.
The promotion and sale of a product throughout the various subsidiaries of the media conglomerate.
Synergy
Cultural products that become popular and provide shared cultural experiences.
Consensus narratives
