Edison, Essanay, Gaumont, Lubin, Méliès, Pathé, Selig, Vitagraph

March 2, 2017 8:34 AM

Moving Picture World was a weekly trade journal covering the early years of the American film business, 1907-1927. Each issue contained plotline summaries of new films for the benefit of exhibitors and theater musicians. Some unknown hero has uploaded 15,338 of those summaries to IMDb.
posted by Iridic (6 comments total)

A Bear in the Flat, 1908:

A practical joker in an apartment building puts on a bear suit and saunters through the halls and terrorizes the tenants. Pandemonium reigns. Finally a squad of police is rushed to the scene, and during the search for the wild beast much damage is done to the contents of the flats. Finally, however, the suit is found in the joker's rooms, and the police vent their anger on the unlucky tenants who have given them a false alarm.

Well, that turned quickly.
posted by Etrigan at 8:43 AM on March 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

A Bachelor's Persistence (1909:

A confirmed bachelor, possessed of all the attributes and characteristics of a charter member of his class, falls a victim to the unerring darts of Dan Cupid and with the same persistence with which he previously sought to evade the meshes of matrimonial entanglements he now strives to enter the realm of connubial bliss.

TIL that Cupid apparently has a first name. And it is Dan.

(Apparently, based on this reference to the name's appearance in Love's Labors Lost: "The reference to "Dan Cupid" (III.i.180) has prompted some interesting speculation. "Dan," first, means Lord, whose Latin form is Dominus, shortened to Don by the Spanish and distorted into Dan by the English." )

fucking english...
posted by Naberius at 9:14 AM on March 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

This is wonderful in no small part because these plot summaries may be all that is left of the films.

At the same time, scrolling through the pages, I note there are, at most, perhaps 10 movies out of each 100 listed per page that have IMDb viewer ratings, and more frequent are pages of 100 with three or less. Those ratings too are from a very small group of viewers, who, if they are honest, number in teens and twenties for a "well watched" short, with only a handful here and there garnering more notice, usually being from more famous artists like Chaplin or Griffith.

These summaries then are a record of creations lost, and while having them is a gift for those few who might seek the information out, even the summaries will mostly sit unread and ignored until IMDb changes format or shuts down some day. I can't help but think that too may be apt given how much has been created and written on the web by millions that also sit all but forgotten on some server somewhere until they too disappear.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:16 AM on March 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

And it was on my Facebook feed yesterday that the brick Vitagraph smokestack in Brooklyn, the only bit of architecture left from the studio complex, is being repointed as part of its preservation.
posted by apartment dweller at 11:34 AM on March 2, 2017

My internet scent glands inform me that the unknown hero may possibly have left some tracks.

I of course have no meaningful evidence in support of this assertion except to note that the user in question has posted a large number of reviews also sourced from the same publication and with similar formatting choices.
posted by mwhybark at 4:06 PM on March 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

So this post led me to watch this dazzling epic of special effects, so thank you.
posted by octothorpe at 4:59 PM on March 2, 2017 [1 favorite]