“This Week in Film History” Archive
Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
February 25, 1906: Future Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle enters the moving pictures business with Chicago's first nickelodeon, the White Front Theater.
February 22, 1934: A Depression-weary American public flocks to Frank Capra's comedy It Happened One Night, starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable.
February 23, 1935: Gene Autry opens in his first starring role, headlining the unusual science fiction/western serial The Phantom Empire.
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Jay Steinberg | This Week in Film History
February 18, 1913: The Edison Film Co. introduces its synchronized film-phonograph Kinetoscope process for showing "sound films" in New York.
February 14, 1927: Director Alfred Hitchcock first tries his hand at suspense with The Lodger, based on the Jack the Ripper murders.
February 15, 1927: Whatever "It" is, starlet Clara Bow has it in abundance, as can be seen in director Clarence Badger's film of that name.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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