Innovation In The Movie Industry

The new innovations and changes to American life in the 20th century critically impacted the time and place of the 1920's movie industry explosion. New technology like automobiles and radios would help adapt Americans to the future movie industry and put them in the position to connect and travel like never before. The ability to have faster transportation to public places and easily maintain connection between people prepared the movie industry for the push that it would soon experience.
During the mid 1890’s, early picture projectors dubbed Kinetoscopes became easily available to the public. Although completely silent, “People enjoyed these and similar machines as technological novelties; one film advertisement, for example, describes the film's excellent documentation of water spraying from a sprinkler” (Halperin.) The 1900’s was when people became interested in plots and characters, and only in the 1910’s and 1920’s when more advanced technology became available did films become highly regarded.
The addition of any type of sound to movies was handled mainly by the use of musical instruments, such as the organ or piano, and it wasn’t until the year 1923 that movies actually contained music or voices. After decades of looking into synchronizing sound with movies, a successful way of doing so was founded by Lee De Forest. Contrary to his belief however, the film industry had little interest in his innovation. It was not until “Warner Brothers, a struggling industry newcomer, turned to sound as a way to compete with its larger rivals” (Mintz). A prerecorded musical sound track eliminated the expense of live entertainment. In 1926, Warner Brothers released the film Don Juan and made history. Being the first film with a synchronized...

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...ically dictated their life. In work and outside, the studios had a great deal of control over what went on and how the stars would act. This system mainly came into place to quench the thirst that many Americans had over information on their favorite stars. This is considered the main reason why celebrity gossip, couple names, and scandals are the way they are today.
The first ever successful full-feature film was named Birth of a Nation. Running just over three hours long and taking nearly 100,000 dollars to make, this movie made over 18 million dollars in revenue and set a standard for future movies to come. This highly racist story was considered very powerful and deep. The movie adapted most of its story line from the book The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon. Controversial, exciting and interesting, this movie showed every reason to be one of the best of the 1920’s.