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 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 (article), opens to a Lilliputian box office.
November 29, 1939: The legendary rivalry between gossip queens Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons begins when Parsons is scooped on the divorce of James Roosevelt.
November 30, 1942: B-western star Buck Jones dies from injuries sustained in a Nov. 28 fire at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub that claimed 491 lives.
November 30, 1947: The director whose glossy costume dramas and romantic comedies were marked by “That Lubitsch Touch,” German-born Ernst Lubitsch, dies at 55.
November 30, 1952: Though decades old, 3-D films catch a wave of popularity with the American public, beginning with United Artists’ Bwana Devil.
November 30, 1981: Actress Natalie Wood, 43, dies in a mysterious drowning accident off her and husband Robert Wagner’s yacht.