Talking About Movies
With Frank Beaver

My routes home to Ann Arbor last month after a vacation in the South included Interstate 79, taking me near Pittsburgh and New Castle, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio. The highway signs to these three midland cities reminded me of just how important this geographic area was to the growth of the movies exactly 100 years ago.

Motion pictures were barely a decade old in 1903 and still in their infancy as an industry and as a medium for narrative storytelling. Then a one-reel, 10-minute film—shot in New Jersey in the fall of 1903—proved a major catalyst for both film aesthetics and film business. The film was “The Great Train Robbery” and its director was Edwin S. Porter, a Pittsburgh-born jack-of-all-trades: electrician, plumber, mechanic.

Thomas Edison hired Porter as a technician in 1897, but Porter soon moved to the job of newsreel cameraman for Edison’s Vitascope programs.

Porter filmed all sorts of action events—parades, boat races, horse-drawn fire engines rushing to douse a fire—and he saw in these kinetically charged “moving pictures” a real potential for creating human drama on the screen.

He began turning out short slapstick comedies (“Happy Hooligan Turns Burglar, 1902”) and reality-inspired melodramas (“The Life of an American Fireman, 1903”). He also began to experiment with new ways of varying story flow through film editing.

Two of Porter’s most notable innovations were parallel development of story lines and crosscutting within the plot. These techniques were fully on display in “The Great Train Robbery” on its release in December 1903 by the Edison Company.

Audiences were thrilled with the rush of events on the screen, and the film’s story helped launch the mythology of a unique American genre, the Western.

In “The Great Train Robbery,” a gang of robbers at the edge of the frontier commandeers a railroad telegraph office, hijacks a train, robs a mail car and passengers, and flees for its hideout with the loot. A village law-and-order posse is formed and gives chase on horseback. The action culminates with an all-out gunfight.

In editing the film Porter cut back and forth between simultaneously developing events, began new scenes in media res and allowed the intense action to pull the fragmented story forward. As a result, this pioneering film revealed the motion picture’s ability to skip about freely in time and space and still make perfect sense to the viewer.

“The Great Train Robbery” remained the most popular film in the US for more than six years and earned for Edwin S. Porter the accolade “father of film art.”

In 1904, Sam Warner—the son of Polish immigrants living with parents and siblings in Youngstown—urged his family to pool its resources and buy a used film projector. Sam Warner had recognized the growing popularity of movies while working as a projectionist at an Ohio amusement park.

The Warners also purchased a print of “The Great Train Robbery” and, throughout 1904 and 1905, Sam and his brothers Harry, Albert and Jack toured Ohio and Pennsylvania, presenting film programs that included “The Great Train Robbery” as their sensational centerpiece. Sister Rose Warner provided musical accompaniment when a piano was available.

With profits from their traveling shows the Warners opened their own 90-seat film theater in 1905 in New Castle and then shortly afterwards established a multi-state distribution service for other film exhibitors.

In 1912, the Warners began making films in an empty factory in St. Louis, and in 1915 they moved their small production company to Los Angeles. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. (the Brothers in the company title is always Bros., never spelled out) was officially chartered in 1923. Today, 80 years later, Warner Bros. remains a major Hollywood studio.

Passing through the edges of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, I was reminded not only of these events that pushed the motion picture dramatically forward 100 years ago this autumn but also of how wonderfully American “The Great Train Robbery” story was.

An “oater” artfully conceived by an ex-plumber from Pittsburgh, made with New Jersey novices portraying the gunfighters, was the source of capital for the enterprising children of Polish immigrants, founders of one of Hollywood’s first major studios. Could the movies themselves have thought up a better success story? I think not.

Frank Beaver ’70 PhD is professor of communication studies and of film and video studies. A noted historian, critic and essayist on film, his publications include “On Film: A History of the Motion Picture” and “100 Years of American Film” (editor).

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