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The rise of vaudeville
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Vaudeville, Act Two: Nickelodeons
With the entertainment business already booming with traveling circuses, wild west shows, burlesque, and vaudeville, just to name a few, it seemed like Americans already had an abundant amount to choose from. However, going into the 20th century, with the invention of early motion picture cameras, such as Thomas Edison's kinetograph, it seemed like only the beginning for the entertainment industry; new means of entertainment were bound to be founded. Americans wanted cheap and easily available entertainment.1 They wanted something big, as evident in the quick decline in the popularity of the kinetoscope, a novelty one-man motion picture viewer also invented by Edison.2 Americans seem to prefer sitting and watching the show with everyone else. Vaudeville, an inexpensive variety show comprised of a variety of acts, was what Americans seem to have been looking for. However, as technologies improve, people become interested by the next big thing, creating a path for nickelodeons, which showed early films. Nickelodeon theaters continued to build upon the vaudeville model to create even more convenience for film distribution and exhibition, resulting in attracting consumers to nickelodeons rather than vaudeville theaters and the prominence of the film industry.
Vaudeville first introduced cinema to the general working class, thus allowing cinema to
1 Charles W. Stein, American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries (New York: Knopf, 1984) 3-4.
2 Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: U of California, 1991) 56.
explode in popularity and the introduction of theaters specifically for film. Firstly, amid the circuses, the wild...
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"Guide to Motion Picture Catalogs - The Edison Papers." Guide to Motion Picture Catalogs - The Edison Papers. N.p., 20 Feb. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2014. .
Kraut, Alan M. The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982. Print.
Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: U of California, 1991. Print.
Sandler, Kevin S. Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998. Print.
Stein, Charles W. American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print.
"Vaudeville Theater Shows (1900′s)." Mortal Journey. N.p., Mar. 2011. Web. 19 Apr. 2014. .
Vaudeville was very popular from the late 1800s to the early 1900s in North America. Vaudeville shows were made up of many random acts that were placed together in a common play bill. Some acts were, for example, plays, clowns, jugglers, comedians, etc. Once the radio was introduced, vaudeville’s started to become less popular as the radio’s popularity started to increase. The radio started out with maximum five programs but as the demand for radios increased so did the amount of programs, which went up to almost 500. Radios was the place families and friends gathered to hear the news, sporting events, music, entertainment, etc. One show millions of people listened to was The Burns and Allen Show, starring George Burns and Gracie Allen. Allen was the one who had all the punch lines and was very silly and Burns was the straight man, serious, and was the one who allowed Allen the opportunity to say her punch lines. Burns and Allen were one of the few people who succeeded in different medians and brought changes to the way entertainment was performed.
Cullen, Frank, Florence Hackman, and Donald McNeilly. Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
The 1930’s was dominated by the Great Depression. There was not much time of money for people to spend on entertainment, but there were a few pin pricks of light. People, especially kids, went to the movie theater. They could spend ...
Lewis, J. (2008). American Film: A History. New York, NY. W.W. Norton and Co. Inc. (p. 405,406,502).
Theatres and How We Had Fun." Little, Brown, and Company. (Boston, Toronto, London); 1991. P. 139, 144.
Smith, Cecile Michener, and Glenn Litton. Musical Comedy in America. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1950. 627-8. Print.
Popularity for live performances heightened exponentially during the late nineteenth century. The United States flourished with circuses, ballparks for sporting events, night clubs, world and state fairs, as well as theatrical road shows. Growing amusement parks, such as Coney Island, attracted customer attendance not just by supplying thrillingly-fun rides, but by also providing an array of the newly emerging vaudeville theatrical shows. Vaudeville was gaining much popularity because it strived to appeal to people of all socioeconomic classes and cultural background as well as offered low admission prices. It consisted of a diversity of individual performances which could range from comical skits, singing, acrobatic stunts to magic shows. “Variety theatre drew larger audiences than the ‘legitimate’ theater which presented classical performances” (Administrator). For this reason, vaudeville theatre was gaining much attraction because it was able to enthrall the population with a wide range of
During this decade, the film industry went through massive changes that would completely change what movies were or stood for. After the Great War, more people began considering movies as a form of entertainment. This increased attention caused change in the industry, allowing the experience of the movie goer to massively change for the better. Many new genres, ideas and technologies emerged in the 1920s that would later dominate the industry. The 1920s saw massive changes happening in the movie industry that would help it to get one step closer to what it is today.
Stanley, Robert H. The Movie Idiom: Film as a Popular Art Form. Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. 2011. Print
...netti, Louis, and Scott Eyman. “The Talkie Era.” Flashback: A Brief History of Film. Ed. Leah Jewell. 4th ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001. 140-145. Print.
Slide, Anthony. The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Google Books. Web. 1 May 2014.
An artistic achievement that can demonstrate that the United States is in its Golden Age is its very influential fast growing entertainment business, a business very important to the U.S. economic activity. The U.S. entertainment has been popular around the world globalizing U.S. pop culture and the U.S. entrainment business economy. This globalization is a result of new innovations, that the U.S. itself developed, that allows film, music, and television, to spread worldwide. Because the U.S. is generally first to have such innovations the entertainment is commonly considered better quality thus appealing to the masses of people. Other factors that lead to the huge success of its entertainment business include their methods of distribution, which is through large and powerful foreign companies, and their large English-speaking market potential. High market ability and general international appeal of the U.S. entertainment business has put the U.S. in a “Golden ...
The ‘Golden Age of Television’ is what many refer to as the period between the 1950s and 60s when the television began to establish itself as a prevalent medium in the United States. In 1947, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and the Du Mont Network were the four main television networks that ran stations with regular programming taking place. (Television, 2003) While regular television programming was a new innovation, the television itself had been commercially available for over twenty years prior to the 50s. It was conceived by many worldly innovators and went through several testing stages before it was finally completed in the late twenties. The three main innovators were Niplow - who first developed a rotating disk with small holes arranged in a spiral pattern in 1884, Zworykin - who developed the Iconoscope which could scan pictures and break them into electronic signals (a primitive form of the Cathode Ray Tube) in 1923, and lastly Fansworth - who demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to transmit an electrical image in 1927. (Rollo, 2011) However, one of the many reasons why this medium was successful in the 50s was due to the fact that it became more accessible to the public. Television sets were more affordable to middle class citizens which created further interest in the new technology. Through an historical account of the medium, the spread of television across America throughout this particular decade will be examined.
The Jazz Age was more than merely a musical revolution—“The Jazz Age denotes not only a period of early big band, but also the events and fashions of an era”. During this decade a number of modern developments were invented, which included an expanded telephone service, network radio, electric inventions, and records set in aviation. These modern developments had a profound effect on American culture, creating a rise in leisure, specifically mass leisure. Automobiles, movies, and the radio overtook the lives of Americans, becoming necessities and part of everyday routines. This period also marks the beginning of films with soundtracks, an audio component, marking the rise of the musical and giving the American people another vehicle for leisure activity. The Jazz Age shaped the culture and attitude of America, “it was the first truly modern decade and, for better or for worse, it created the model for society that all the world follows today”.
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