Did you know?
On July 6th, 1896, three Fayette County natives walked into a darkened theater in Los Angeles, Calif., and they projected beams of light that would ignite an industry that still thrives to this day.
Los Angeles today, is unquestionably the motion picture capital of the world.
In 1896, Connellsville’s J.R. Balsley (a part-time inventor, who had retired from the lumber business); Richard S. Paine (a shoe store owner), and Edwin S. Porter (who had mustered out of the Navy just days before) – introduced the very first moving pictures to the city that would eventually become best known for them.
The 1991 book “Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company,” chronicles how four Connellsville businessmen (Paine, Balsley, drug store owner F.E. Markell and Cyrus Echard, who worked in the coal trade) bought the exclusive rights to introduce Thomas Edison’s Vitascope motion picture presentation device to the state of California.
Porter, who wasn’t one of the original investors in Edison’s Vitascope process, had been discharged from his military service on June 18, 1896. After spending a few days in New York, and then a brief time in his hometown of Connellsville, he joined Paine and Balsley in California.
Porter was a budding inventor, who offered his engineering skills to help the entrepreneurs.
Paine and Balsley had taken the Vitascope projection process to San Francisco the previous month. It had not gone well. Or, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, it had not proven to be much more than a novelty, worthy of only a two- line review.
Edison’s other new invention — the x-ray — had become the source of much deeper speculations than mere pictures dancing across a wall.
Los Angeles, with the addition of Porter, was next.
The Grand Opera House known as the Los Angeles Orpheum, was where, it seems, the real possibilities of film were fully about to take hold.
These days, full-length movies can be shown on your cell phone. You can now view 3D movies on your computer. And the devices that enable these kinds of technological wonders are “selling like hotcakes,” and nearly as cheap.
Consider what it must have been like for the overflow audience of the 1,311 seat Los Angeles Orpheum to have seen, for the very first time, single-scene, and oh-so brief pictures that did little more than flicker and flutter across a makeshift screen.
That might be hard to imagine, unless consider the first time you ever saw color TV, or connected and plugged-in that first video game — Pong — to a screen that had once only been reserved for broadcasting over-the-air programs.
According to “Before the Nickelodeon,” the entire programs the Connellsville men presented were nothing more than five short films, with two-minute intermissions between each one.
Yet, the Los Angeles Herald wrote, “Can genius go farther? We have been made to hear the voices of our distant friends and now we are enabled to see them move and act.”
If that writer had not seen, say, a single shot of Niagara Falls (as he did that day), but instead “Star Wars,” with all of its color, sound and special effects, he might not have survived the event long enough to write anything about it.
He did, however, issue the first glowing review of the experience he had witnessed. “Truly it is enough to make (Benjamin) Franklin turn in his grave with wonder of it and yet, so attuned are we to the marvelous in this day and age of the world that we are scarcely decently surprised,” he concluded.
The fact that 20,000 people took in the first motion pictures in Los Angeles that week, and 10,000 were turned away – was an obvious triumph for Thomas Edison, and, of course, those brave entrepreneurs of Connellsville, Pa.
But it wasn’t their only triumph.
Edwin S. Porter’s most important contribution to American film would come seven years later. That’s when he wrote, produced, directed and edited the 12-minute 1903 film, “The Great Train Robbery.”
With “The Great Train Robbery,” Porter took motion pictures to a new, more sophisticated level that film scholars still study and pay homage to, to this day.
He would later direct Mary Pickford and John Barrymore among the stars of his numerous feature films.
Yet, there is another film that Porter actually shot in Connellsville, that gets little attention, and rightly so.
It seems, in August of 1905, Porter took a film camera to Connellsville’s Olympia Park, and he shot “The Little Train Robbery,” which spoofed his most famous film.
Instead of a violent story about a group of bandits holding up a train like they did in “The Great Train Robbery,” Porter substituted local children who performed the same functions in “The Little Train Robbery.”
The young bandits didn’t steal money, they stole candy and dolls.
But unfortunately for Porter,” The Little Train Robbery” wasn’t much of a success.
But by then, as “Before the Nickelodeon” puts it, he had already made a film that was “universally admitted to be the greatest production in motion pictures.”
At least up to that point.