- Antone Pierucci
- Posted On
This Week in History: ‘The Great Train Robbery’ changes movies
In turn of the century America, going out to the movies was an experience wildly different from today.
To begin with, if you wanted to see a motion picture, you were more likely to find it in front of stores on main street, projected onto a screen by a travelling exhibitor or at a carnival as a part of a vaudeville act.
“Movies” as we understand them did not exist. Instead, motion pictures of under a minute featured scenes of everyday life and usually only consisted of a single scene.
Rarely did these films go beyond two minutes. They were silent, choppy in appearance, sometimes blurry and difficult to follow and they fast became a sensation.
At a whopping 12 minutes long (!), the short 1903 film “The Great Train Robbery” fundamentally changed the experience of watching a motion picture.
When it first debuted at Huber’s Museum in New York City on Dec. 1, the lucky audience present was witness to the first narrative film in history.
Rather than viewing a motion picture for the sheer novelty of seeing simulacra of everyday life, people could now go to a theater to watch a story unfold – to be entertained not just by the magic of the film equipment, but by the artistry of the film director and actors.
The person who dreamed up such a groundbreaking film was Edwin S. Porter, the son of a furniture merchant from Connellsville, Pennsylvania.
When he was 14 years old, Porter dropped out of school and began a spate of odd jobs that would inexorably lead him to his career in the film industry.
He worked for a time as a theater cashier and stagehand and eventually as a machinist specializing in the installation of electrical equipment. In the latter job, Porter contributed to Bradley A. Fiske's development of the electric rangefinder.
In 1893, Porter joined the Navy and served three years. When he returned home to Pennsylvania, he found that his friends had purchased the sole rights to screen films with Thomas Edison's Vitascope projector from promoters and distributors Raff & Gammon.
After working for his friends as a projectionist in Los Angeles and Indianapolis. In 1900, he was asked to come work for the Edison Co. to help them tweak filmmaking equipment and develop new filming techniques.
As Edison’s director-cameraman, Porter began directing and filming more advanced motion pictures, including ones featuring multiple scenes and others with special effects.
In 1903, he developed and filmed “The Great Train Robbery.” The movie opened with a bang – literally, as the film’s outlaw star Justus D. Barnes aimed his gun directly at audiences and opened fire.
The action continued unabated for 12 minutes, as the story of an outlaw band’s failed attempt at robbing a train unfolded scene by scene.
This film featured a number of firsts. For the first time in film history, scenes were shot “on location,” which in this film’s case was on train tracks somewhere in New Jersey, in addition to the studios.
It was the first to use modern film techniques, such as multiple camera positions, filming out of sequence and later editing the scenes into their proper order. And for western fans out there, it was one of the very first western films ever produced.
Audiences in New York City, where the film was initially released, raved about it. His film’s success allowed Porter more freedom within the Edison Co. to create his own one-reel films.
After leaving the Edison Co. in 1909, Porter continued in the film industry on his own for two decades with success.
The crash of the stock market at the end of the 1920s, however, doomed Porter to spend the final years of his career taking any old job he could find as a machinist.
He died with little fanfare in a hotel in New York City in 1941. His films, however, live to this day in the thousands of subsequent movies that built upon his work.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.