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Film Appreciation Hum 8 » History of Hollywood andCinema
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History of Hollywood andCinema
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The Frenchman Louis Lumiere is often credited as inventing the first motion picture camera in 1895. But in truth, several others had made similar inventions around the same time as Lumiere. What Lumiere invented was a portable motion-picture camera, film processing unit and projector called the Cinematographe, three functions covered in one invention. George Eastman wanted to simplify photography and make it available to everyone, not just trained photographers. In 1883, Eastman announced the invention of photographic film in rolls. Kodak the company was born in 1888 when the first Kodak camera entered the market. George Eastman was one of the first American industrialists to employ a full-time research scientist. Together with his associate, Eastman perfected the first commercial transparent roll film which made possible Thomas Edison’s motion picture camera in 1891.
The videotape format war was a period of intense competition or "format war" of incompatible models of video cassette recorders (VCR) in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It has gone down in marketing history as a classic example of technological rivalry. Home VCRs first became available in the early 1970s — such as a Philips VCR model, released in 1972.
The LaserDisc did enjoy a brief resurgence in the late 1980s, and early 1990s, after the compact disc introduced the consumer to high quality audio on an optical disc. The arrival of DVD ended that. MOVIE STUDIOS: The Big 5
By the mid-1920s, the evolution of a handful of American production companies into wealthy film industry conglomerates that owned their own studios, distribution divisions, and theaters, and contracted with performers and other filmmaking personnel, led to the sometimes confusing equation of "studio" with "production company" in industry slang. Five large companies, 20th Century-Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros., came to be known as the "Big Five," the "majors," or "the Studios" in trade publications such as Variety, and their management structures and practices collectively came to be known as the "studio system." The Little 3
Although they owned few or no theaters to guarantee sales of their films, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists also fell under these rubrics, making a total of eight generally recognized "major studios". United Artists, although its controlling partners owned not one but two production studios during the Golden Age, had an often tenuous hold on the title of "major" and operated mainly as a backer and distributor of independently produced films. A movie studio (aka film studio) is a controlled environment for the making of a motion picture. This environment may be interior (sound stage), exterior (backlot), or both. In general parlance, the term is synonymous with "major film production company," due largely to the fact that the leading production companies of Hollywood's "Golden Age"—stretching from the late 1920s to the late 1940s—owned their own studio facilities, as do a few today. However, worldwide (and even in the United States) the majority of production companies have never owned their own studios, but have had to rent space at independently owned facilities that, in many cases, never produce a film of their own.
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