Two Reels and a Crank: From Nickelodeons to Picture Palaces

285 pp. 1895--The earliest days of the motion picture, when the movies were nothing more than a big box into which you dropped a nickel and took a peek--that's the beginning of Albert E. Smith's wonderfully fascinating recollections about how his freakish invention, the first movie projector, grew into a multimillion-dollar picture industry in 1925. The story of that success is a robust one, for it occurred in a rough and tumble era of cutthroat competitiveness when vision and inventiveness paid off only to men of guts and daring. Mr. Smith does not hesitate to tell his own acts of skullduggery--how he pirated pictures of the Jeffries-Sharkey fight and had to battle his way out of the arena, how he faked films of the Battle of Santiago Bay and presented them to an unsuspecting public. He tells the inside story of countless exciting feats--how he crept up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, covered the bloody Boer War with Richard Harding Davis, photographed the Galveston flood destruction and the assassination of McKinley. Here are the rollicking tales of early short-story movies, from those first ones filmed on an office-building roof, where steam floated through boudoir scenes and the janitor's wife would emerge at unexpected moments, to the more ambitious productions in Flatbush when the era of the film star began. For Mr. Smith's Vitagraph Company this meant such names as John Bunny, Anita Stewart, Maurice Costello, Clara Kimball Young, Tony Moreno, and the three Talmadge sisters, but Mr. Smith has much to recall about greats like Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino, as well.