December 1, 1903: Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, the first motion picture to use intercutting scenes to form a unified narrative, is released.
December 2, 1910: Hefty funnyman John Bunny, the cinema’s first comedy star, makes his debut in Vitagraph’s Jack Fat and Jim Slim at Coney Island.
December 7, 1919: Director/actor Erich von Stroheim, “The Man You Love to Hate,” makes his directorial debut with Blind Husbands.
December 4, 1924: Greed, previewed in a nine-hour, 42-reel version earlier in the year, opens in a studio-mandated 10-reel cut that director Erich von Stroheim disavows.
December 4, 1925: A bureau known as the Central Casting Corporation is set up by the major Hollywood studios as a pool of extras available to film productions.
December 1, 1938: The first movie with an “all-midget cast,” the B-western The Terror of Tiny Town, opens to a Lilliputian box office.
December 7, 1955: United Artists withdraws from the MPAA over the refusal to grant approval to the drug addiction drama The Man With the Golden Arm.
December 7, 1964: Director Sam Peckinpah is fired by the producer of The Cincinnati Kid for shooting nude scenes that were not written in the script.
December 5, 1976: The first film to take advantage of Garret Brown’s Steadicam, a device which stabilizes handheld cameras, Bound for Glory, is released.
December 6, 1979: A decade after the TV show left the airwaves, Star Trek: The Motion Picture opens and gives new life to the Enterprise crew.