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Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
February 8, 1915: D.W. Griffith's Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, opens. At a White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson calls it "like writing history with lightning."
February 8, 1926: The New York Sun is the first to use the term "documentary," in its review of Robert Flaherty's Moana.
February 5, 1927: Buster Keaton's comedic masterwork The General, based on a true Civil War incident, is released.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
February 2, 1922: Hollywood has a real whodunit on its hands when Paramount Pictures director William Desmond Taylor is found slain.
February 1, 1929: MGM's The Broadway Melody premieres in Hollywood, becoming the first musical with an original score.
February 1, 1937: During Clark Gable's birthday party on the MGM lot, Judy Garland sings "You Made Me Love You," a song she'll perform in Broadway Melody of 1938.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
January 27, 1918: Edgar Rice Burroughs' jungle lord debuts on screen in Tarzan of the Apes, starring former Arkansas peace officer Elmo Lincoln.
January 22, 1928: The John Ford melodrama Mother Machree features, as an unbilled extra, former prop man John Wayne in his first film appearance.
January 23, 1932: Educational Films Corporation signs 3-year-old Shirley Temple to appear in a series of film take-offs called Baby Burlesks.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
January 19, 1907: An Exciting Honeymoon and The Life of a Cowboy are the first films to be reviewed in the entertainment trade magazine Variety.
January 18, 1923: Drug addiction claims leading man Wallace Reid, whose morphine dependency followed an injury suffered in a train crash.
January 20, 1929: The release of In Old Arizona, directed by Irving Cummings and Raoul Walsh, marks the first time a sound film was shot on location.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
January 10, 1914: With Mack Sennett's instruction to Charlie Chaplin to "get into a comedy make-up," the legendary "Little Tramp" is born.
January 10, 1923: The "Hollywoodland" sign is dedicated. It was built on the Hollywood Hills to promote sales of homes in Beachwood Canyon.
January 10, 1924: Columbia Pictures Corporation, formerly CBC Film Sales, is founded by brothers Harry and Jack Cohn, and Joseph Brandt.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
January 1, 1900: French film pioneer Charles Path� releases the historical re-enactment Episodes of the Transvaal Warin Paris.
January 1, 1951: 300 Chicago households take part in the first TV pay-per-view movie system. For $1, they can watch 1948's April Showers, with Jack Carson.
January 1, 1954: In his essay "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema" in Cahiers du Cinema, 21-year-old critic Francois Truffaut plants the seed for his "auteur theory."
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
December 31, 1903: Capital Execution is the first feature from what will be a thriving Danish film industry, until its decline during World War I.
December 26, 1913: Less than two years after the sinking of the Titanic, the disaster comes to the screen as the basis for the lavish Danish drama Atlantis.
December 29, 1913: Chapter One of the first true serial, a continuous storyline told in sequential chapters, The Adventures of Kathlyn, is released.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
December 24, 1906: Considered to be the first feature-length (70 minutes) motion picture, the Australian drama The Story of The Kelly Gang debuts in Melbourne.
December 19, 1909: The first use of freeze frame for dramatic effect is employed by D.W. Griffith for the film A Corner in Wheat.
December 21, 1923: Cecil B. DeMille's lavish, big budget biblical epic, The Ten Commandments, makes its premiere to glowing response.
Jay Steinberg | Staff Notes
The skill and professionalism honed onstage since he could walk, combined with an inimitable exuberance, made this diminutive Brooklynite Hollywood's hottest draw over his adolescence, and a welcome screen presence throughout a career that continues to infinity. The son of vaudevillians who divorced when he was four, Joseph Yule Jr. was doggedly pushed by his mother, who brought him to Southern California in search of film opportunities for the boy. He was only seven when he received his name-making opportunity, cast as pugnacious Mickey McGuire in a series of shorts based on the then-popular Toonerville Trolley comic panel. Though his mother unsuccessfully lobbied to legally change his name to that of the character, he adopted his familiar stage name instead, and would make over four dozen Mickey McGuire comedies over the ensuing eight years, which added into his lifetime output, totaled his appearances before the cameras at more than 300 times.
As the series wound down, Mickey signed with MGM, and began receiving supporting roles in features for the studio like his role as young Blackie in Manhattan Melodrama (1934) with Clark Gable and William Powell.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
December 11, 1930: A protest of All Quiet on the Western Front by members of the Nazi Party in Berlin will lead to the banning of the film from Germany.
December 12, 1939: Douglas Fairbanks, dashing and athletic leading man of the silent era and co-founder of United Artists, dies of a heart attack at age 56.
December 14, 1939: Seventy-five years after General Sherman set it ablaze, the city of Atlanta is lit up again-- for the world premiere of Gone with the Wind.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
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.
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
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 1, 1938: The first movie with an "all-midget cast," the B-western The Terror of Tiny Town, opens to a Lilliputian box office.
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