Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America

For Nancy

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-­Made Disaster of 20th-­Century

America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles

Los Angeles: A Pictorial Celebration

(with Nancy Wilkman)

Picturing Los Angeles

(with Nancy Wilkman)

Black Americans: From Colonial Days to the Present

CONTENTS

Prologue: Facing the Facts

1: The World on a Screen

2: Reality Under Fire and Projected Americanism

3: Bijou Safaris and Truthful Lies

4: Rebels, Government Agents, and Reenactors

5: War, Peace, and Propaganda, Take Two

6: Fun Facts, Gawking Mother Nature, Molding Minds, and Homemade History

7: Small Screens, Big Stories

8: Zooming In

9: For the People, by the People

10: Three Windows, One Landscape

11: Additional Takes

12: 60 Minutes, Mock and Mega Truth, the Multiverse, and Life through the Looking Glass

13: Getting Real in a Golden Age

Epilogue: Virtual Reality and Then What?

Color Plates

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

A Note on the Author

Prologue: Facing the Facts

Is Truth Dead? The question appeared on the April 3, 2017, cover of Time magazine, spelled out with red letters against an ominous black background. Mistrust was widespread. In 2018, 44 percent of Americans couldn’t name a news source they considered objective.¹ With claims of alternative facts and convictions based on personal preference, there was talk of a post-truth era. George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four returned to the bestsellers list. During times of universal deceit, Orwell wrote, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

In the midst of disorienting arguments over what was real, America experienced a golden age of documentary filmmaking, even as the definition of nonfiction was challenged and stretched as never before. Documentary advocate John Grierson once wrote: The penalty of realism is that it is about reality and has to bother forever about not being ‘beautiful,’ but about being right. Alfred Hitchcock saw the big picture. In feature films the director is God; in documentary films, God is the director.² Experimental moviemaker and professor Trinh T. Minh-ha was dismissive: There is no such thing as documentary—whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques.³ To Columbia Pictures cofounder Harry Cohn, the matter was simple. A documentary was a picture without women. If there’s one woman, it’s a semi-documentary.⁴

Describing a film as based on a true story has long been compelling, but for years documentary was the d-word, an expression of dated educational and journalistic connotations that limit creative expression and audience appeal. That’s changing as documentarians explore new forms and question concepts of objectivity. Creative nonfiction may be a more inclusive term, but as a documentarian for more than fifty years, I still believe in the importance of facts and evidence-based truth. How nonfiction filmmakers struggled to capture and honestly portray the real world is an essential theme of this book. It isn’t an easy challenge, but for me the difference between a fictional and nonfictional representation of a murder is the certainty that the victim in a documentary is permanently unavailable for a second take.

In this book I trace the interaction between nonfiction filmmakers, audiences, and the world around them with a widescreen perspective that includes what’s seen on commercial and public television, HBO, Netflix, YouTube, in multiplexes, IMAX theaters, and virtual reality headsets, including old newsreels, classic Hollywood short subjects, travelogues, wildlife adventures, educational movies, informative promotional films, avant-garde experiments, and even home movies. In a world where visual media is conveyed on celluloid and videotape, and through digital signals—projected, broadcast, and streamed—cinema is more encompassing, however for simplicity and familiarity I still use terms like filmmaker, movies, and motion pictures.

There is a rich international documentary tradition, but this book focuses primarily on the lives and work of documentarians from the United States and the backstories of their successes and failures. They have been inventors, adventurers, journalists, educators, entertainers, entrepreneurs, activists, professionals, and enthusiastic amateurs. Since the 1890s, they engaged in a visual give-and-take with the past, present, and future, revealing and affecting America’s evolving identity.

The first movies were images of the real world before they conjured fictions. America’s nonfiction film tradition continued from the earliest days of the twentieth century through World War I; the birth of mass media in the 1920s; the Great Depression, when politics on the left and right fought for the future; the destruction and triumph of World War II, when some of Hollywood’s greatest directors turned from fantasy to facts; the hope and uncertainty of the 1950s; the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s; and the communications revolution that led to a twenty-first-century generation of media-empowered but divided Americans. Yet, even when accurate information was more abundant and easier to access, a documentary-inspired mutant, Reality TV, flourished. At the same time, simulations became immersive, and truth more uncertain.

Although this book isn’t about me, to get started I hope an overview of my decades of experience as a documentarian can serve as an author introduction and a source of historical context for the admittedly selective list of films and filmmakers included in the pages to come.

I was raised in the 1940s and ’50s in the Los Angeles suburb of North Hollywood—in a valley on the backside of the Hollywood Sign. My awareness of movies extended beyond the walls of the local El Portal Theatre. A friend of my architect-father worked at Warner Bros. as a film editor and producer of Bugs Bunny cartoons, but I enjoyed listening to him talk about his eighty-six missions as a combat photographer in World War II and his peacetime experiences as a newsreel cameraman who recorded an early atomic bomb test.

At Saturday movie matinees I laughed at Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis comedies, but was also attracted to the urgency and variety of newsreels and short subjects, which were already disappearing from theater screens. My first encounter with television was in 1949, when thousands of Angelenos were transfixed by hours of live images of desperate efforts to save a little girl who’d fallen into an abandoned water pipe—a forerunner of televised real-time dramas to come—including car chases and engrossing courtroom deliberations.

In the 1950s, during the day, along with cartoons and puppet shows, TV stations broadcast films retrieved from long-ignored vaults, re-screening the 1920s and ’30s adventures of African explorers Martin and Osa Johnson, and stirring World War II propaganda films like Hollywood director Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series. I found them exciting.

The father of a high school basketball teammate was the writer/narrator for Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventures wildlife programs. I watched the amazing footage of animals that seemed to act like people, but I was also interested in the cultural TV program Omnibus and the docudrama You Are There, which blurred fact and fiction by reenacting historical events as if they were news reports. Victory at Sea was a stirring saga of naval warfare in the Pacific, and the CBS historical series The Twentieth Century, hosted by Walter Cronkite, was a special favorite.

At Oberlin College in the early 1960s, I had vague ideas about being a writer, and maybe something to do with filmmaking. Since there were no film classes, I learned about movies by reading and volunteering to be the film critic for the campus newspaper. It was an exciting time. Artful international imports challenged Hollywood, and a new kind of nonfiction, cinéma vérité, captured an unprecedented sense of being there.

In 1963 documentarian Leo Hurwitz, famous for his antifascist and prolabor films from the 1930s, a time when documentaries were wielded like weapons in a battle for social and political change, came to Oberlin to speak about his work. I agreed with the politics, but confessed that I thought his storytelling was too agitprop. When I revealed my interest in finding a summer job with a documentary film company, Hurwitz could have told me to have intercourse with myself, but instead he provided a name at David L. Wolper Productions, a new studio in Los Angeles that challenged the networks with documentaries audiences wanted to see.

Wolper didn’t have a job opening, but a referral led to the film-can canyons of the Sherman Grinberg Film Library. Grinberg and Wolper had acquired the rights to old newsreels, dating from the 1898 Spanish-American War. They used these celluloid snippets to assemble historical documentaries. When Grinberg asked if I knew a lot about the Normandy D-Day landing, I said yes (I didn’t). At age twenty, I was a researcher with my first television credit.

After graduation from college, armed with samples of the research I had done for Grinberg, I headed to New York City with hopes for the impossible—a job at The Twentieth Century. When a staff member decided to take leave to have a child, fortuitous timing led to employment as a secretary/researcher and my unofficial enrollment in an on-the-job film school.

My bosses were producers Burton Benjamin, who started as a writer for RKO Pathé theatrical nonfiction shorts, and Isaac Kleinerman, the supervising film editor on Victory at Sea. During narration sessions, Walter Cronkite was friendly but demanding. You better have your facts straight.

To learn about film editing, I watched a crusty old editor, Leo Zochling. He had worked with legendary New Deal documentarian Pare Lorentz on two 1930s classics, The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River.

In 1966 Fred Friendly, who produced landmark network documentaries with the legendary Edward R. Murrow, dramatically announced his resignation as president of CBS News. He hadn’t been allowed to air uninterrupted congressional hearings about the war in Vietnam. Corporate executives believed that reruns of I Love Lucy were a more profitable use of airtime. I didn’t realize it, but documentaries on commercial television were an endangered species.

In 1968 America was racked with social upheaval and racial unrest when CBS produced the series Of Black America. The staff was all white, including me, but I was teamed with Thomas A. Johnson, a pioneering African American reporter from the New York Times, to research and co-write The Black Soldier. With stories that went back to the Revolutionary War, it was an eye-opener for many Americans, white and black. That same year, a new CBS series was launched. Documentary veterans expressed doubts about the program’s showbiz style and magazine format. To everyone’s surprise, 60 Minutes, the brainchild of producer Don Hewitt, became the most popular and influential nonfiction program in television history, revealing how a large number of Americans preferred to see and understand the world.

When The Twentieth Century transitioned to the science-oriented 21st Century series, I became a writer/director. Already, audience interest in shows with educational aspirations was fading on commercial TV. Hired next as the producer/director/writer of Eye on New York, a venerable public affairs series that aired weekly on the CBS New York City affiliate, I was responsible for a ten-to-fifteen-minute mini documentary every Sunday.

The Eye on New York production unit was small. The cameraman, stocky Louie Tumola, and soundman, reserved Tony Girolami, were near retirement. They had stories to share about working on theatrical newsreels in the 1930s and ’40s, including the legendary March of Time, the most popular and influential nonfiction film series of its day. While shooting a piece at a local museum, we came across a boxy hand-cranked film camera. Louie knew how to thread it. I learned that a similar camera had been used by director Robert Flaherty in the early 1920s when he made Nanook of the North, considered the first narrative documentary. I knew Flaherty’s romanticized realism influenced generations of documentarians. Later, I found out there was much more to the truth of Nanook.

The film editor for Eye on New York, Steve Seligman, became a lifelong friend. Editing sessions were more than efforts to finish programs on time. There were debates about documentary ethics. One piece involved a man in an impoverished area of the Bronx who had rallied his neighbors to restore a neglected park. As I interviewed him, he became increasingly emotional. When tears streamed down his face, I tried to contain my excitement. Tears! Documentary gold! Afterward, the man apologized. He explained that he was moved by what he and his neighbors had accomplished, but added that his dog had died the day before and he hadn’t gotten over the loss.

Was he crying about the park or the dog? Steve asked. I wasn’t sure, but was certain it would be a terrific ending to the piece. It was a classic ethical dilemma, one that some modern, entertainment-oriented nonfiction filmmakers might ignore. Should I go for an emotional effect and show something that is doubtful, even false, or settle for something less dramatic? The interview was edited without the tears.

In 1970 I left CBS and started a film production company—really just me. I had an Emmy Award to my credit, but like so many independent documentarians, I worked on corporate-sponsored films to pay the bills. While making a documentary about the space program, paid for by Bell Telephone Laboratories, I rented an editing room from Albert and David Maysles, pioneers of cinéma vérité. In the aftermath of the huge success of the concert documentary Woodstock, the Maysles hoped their film Gimme Shelter, about a Northern California Rolling Stones concert, would tap into a lucrative trend. Instead, when a young black man was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, they had a murder story to tell. One afternoon, everyone gathered in editor Charlotte Zwerin’s cutting room to watch filmed evidence of the killing and discuss how to show it. The final decision was the beginning of more arguments about cinéma vérité and how to frame and filter reality.

PBS had just been founded when I was the co-producer/director of a ninety-minute documentary about the deadly 1971 inmate uprising at Attica Prison. The program was made possible by the Ford Foundation, a vital source of early support for public television. While I was at work, a team of PBS editors was attempting to make sense of hours of footage that followed the lives of a Santa Barbara, California, family, the Louds. The finished product, An American Family, marked a controversial new direction for nonfiction filmmaking.

Another PBS job was as an episode producer for an innovative short-lived series The Great American Dream Machine (1971–72). A mix of serious mini-documentaries, cultural pieces, and comedy bits, Dream Machine offered another glimpse of nonfiction possibilities and the hazards ahead for uncomfortable facts.

In the 1970s, documentaries rarely appeared in movie theaters, but a larger and more impressive camera and projection system would change that. I briefly worked on pre-production for To Fly!, a 1976 film produced by Francis Thompson, known for his visually elaborate World’s Fair documentaries, in association with MacGillivray Freeman Films, owned by California filmmaking partners Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman. To Fly! was made for the new Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The spectacular imagery, called IMAX, was an immersive new technology that satisfied audience demands for experiences as well as education.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was a source of income for independent filmmakers. There was, however, one problem for anyone who hoped to use it to expand their reputation: USIA films weren’t shown in the United States, the result of fears of government domestic propaganda that dated from before World War I. Never one to turn down interesting work, in 1975 I put together a documentary based on the lives of three everyday Americans—an African American ballet dancer, a country doctor, and a cross-country truck driver. In contrast to films about abstract issues, they were the kinds of personal profiles that audiences around the world enjoyed.

The USIA project was preparation for a foray into educational filmmaking, a business built to inform and influence young minds. For many kids, watching instructional movies was their first experience with documentaries, and not always a pleasurable one. Classroom powerhouse McGraw-Hill wanted a series about U.S. geography. Rather than maps and charts, I chose to characterize regions through the lives of people and how they lived. In a way, it was an eight-part travelogue that never left the boundaries of the United States. The series did what documentaries had been doing best for decades: take viewers to different places and introduce them to people they might never encounter.

Technology has always affected how films were made and reality portrayed. Change accelerated during the 1970s and ’80s. Videotape replaced film on television, much to the benefit of nonfiction moviemakers. Without the limitations of ten-minute rolls of film, we could shoot for more than half an hour without a pause and immediately review what had been recorded. Best of all, although some complained about image quality, without the expense of developing and printing, documentaries could be cheaper to make.

Video also was a way for Americans to celebrate and remember their lives. Eight-millimeter home movies had been around since the 1930s, but by the end of the 1980s they had been replaced by video. Even if amateur movies mostly consisted of shaky shots of birthday parties, holidays, and vacations, they could be accidental history, none more so than the twenty-six seconds of 8mm film captured by Abraham Zapruder in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

The impact of videotape initiated a power shift between moviemakers and audiences that affected how screened reality was consumed. The ability to tape television programs off the air gave viewers the power to break the grip of scheduled broadcasts. For documentarians, being able to distribute and sell their work on videocassettes, and later DVDs, created a new way to target viewers without the need to cater to a mass audience.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cable networks transformed the television landscape—another boon for documentary filmmakers. In 1978, when I left New York to return to Los Angeles, HBO was expanding from showing Hollywood movies to commissioning nonfiction. A colleague from CBS and The Great American Dream Machine, Sheila Nevins, Director of Documentaries, looked to give HBO an original and uninhibited identity beyond PBS and network programs like 60 Minutes. In a time when women filmmakers were rare, Nevins became an influential figure in getting American documentaries made and widely seen. In response to her interest in docutainment, I came up with a series of one-hour specials that told historical stories using Monty Python–style collage animation, a reminder that fact-based nonfiction could be more than photographic realism.

In 1982 another HBO project was a docudrama about a famous mass murder. I stayed close to the evidence by using interviews with detectives who investigated the case. Excerpts from courtroom transcripts were the basis of the script, and I used actors who resembled the killer and his victims, and filmed as much as possible at actual locations. Black-and-white film matched the newsreel look of the 1960s. Audiences enjoy docudramas. For nonfiction filmmakers, they offer new ways to tell real stories, but create temptations to emphasize drama over docu. I did my best not to succumb.

When HBO began to produce feature films, if the subject involved actual events, I was occasionally asked to deliver documentary-style segments, including a phony newsreel that announced that the Nazis had won World War II. The use of fictional narration over deceptively edited news footage falsified the past. Dead American soldiers afloat in the surf off Normandy Beach were described as evidence of an Allied defeat, not a costly victory. It was a reminder that what looked true could be an intentional lie. Any guilt was salvaged by the excuse that my manipulation of reality was in the context of an obvious fiction.

In Los Angeles I discovered the city’s underappreciated history and encountered overlooked stories. Since Of Black America, I had known the experiences of minorities were often ignored. I was proud to make a documentary about rock and roll created by Mexican Americans in East Los Angeles. More than a musical history, it was a narrative about a search for identity in multicultural America. Since the story of Chicano Rock! The Sounds of East Los Angeles was virtually unknown outside L.A.’s Chicano/a community, it took ten years to raise the money, complete production, and get the hourlong film shown on PBS—sadly, not an atypical experience for an independent documentarian. By the time the program aired in 2008, Latino and Latina filmmakers and other minorities were telling their own stories, enriching an understanding of American cultural history.

In 1985 entrepreneur John Hendricks launched the Discovery Channel, with high hopes for a commercial cable operation that would provide informative nonfiction programming that matched if not superseded the quality and importance of PBS. Although some thoughtful shows survived into the twenty-first century, something very different, Reality TV, was on the rise. Before A&E, founded as the Arts & Entertainment Network, waded into the wetlands of Duck Dynasty, I was hired to produce a three-part biography of Thomas Edison. At Edison’s New Jersey laboratory, an 1889 contraption showed some of the earliest moving photographs, evidence of the fact and fiction beginnings of motion pictures. They were actualities, like the record of a sneeze, and the peep show entertainment of a preening muscleman and wriggling belly dancer.

It wasn’t long before shows about serious history and science were outnumbered by The Real World, Shark Week, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, and Survivor. Even if many viewers knew that what they watched was phony, in subtle and obvious ways Reality TV changed how Americans perceived the world and what they demanded from the truth. Certainly, one of Reality TV’s greatest hits, The Apprentice, played an important role in the successful presidential campaign of real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump and the arguments over facts and evidence that characterized his administration.

During an emerging post-truth era, dedicated documentarians continued to tell stories grounded in reality. Frederick Wiseman offered unadorned visions of the present, and Ken Burns stuck close to the facts when he revisited the verifiable past. The truth itself was the subject of mind-bending films by Errol Morris. As part of a long tradition of resistance to injustice, corruption, and lies, activists like Michael Moore, Barbara Kopple, and Alex Gibney pushed back with humor, socially committed storytelling, and relentless journalism.

New technology allowed others to get involved. In a digitized world, cameras that are smaller, lighter, and less expensive make it possible for documentarians to move more freely and minimize the effect of their presence. At the same time, everyday Americans were able to experiment with nonfiction storytelling. When I travel, I take a camera that’s hardly larger than my hand, weighs less than two pounds, and shoots professional-quality stills and video. As a backup, there’s a cell phone that takes pictures almost as good. When I finish editing my hourlong, poor man’s PBS-style travelogues, they can be streamed to the world via YouTube or Vimeo. As fiction director John Milius once exclaimed: Today everyone is a filmmaker. If true, multiple points of view could provide a corrective to a post-truth world … or worsen it.

In 2015 an envelope from the New York Times arrived in the mail, containing folded cardboard goggles. When I downloaded an app and media file and inserted my cellphone in front of the lenses, a slightly blurry landscape appeared. As I turned my head, there was more to see. I was watching a virtual reality documentary about children displaced by war. Was it a glimpse at a radically new relationship with the real world, or a fad that would require years more of refinement and innovation? In either case, it was an eye-and-mind-opening experience.

Three years before my first encounter with a virtual world, I completed a seven-part television series about the history of Hollywood filmmaking. The saga of moguls and movie stars was important and enjoyable to show, but I knew there was another narrative that parallels and often openly opposes Dream Factory fantasies. The struggles, compromises, and accomplishments of nonfiction filmmakers, from the 1890s to the present, are varied, lively, and arguably more valuable for anticipating what’s next for America. Driven by curiosity, enabled by technology, shaped by negotiations between image makers and audiences, it’s a story that’s urgent and timely. And fun.

1

The World on a Screen

AN EYE-OPENER

The history of nonfiction filmmaking started a frame at a time.

Entrepreneur Leland J. Stanford helped finance the western leg of America’s transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. With profits from his Iron Horse locomotives, he indulged an enthusiasm for living horseflesh, building a racetrack on his Palo Alto farm and ranch, southeast of San Francisco. Curious and hopeful for competitive advantage, the railroad magnate considered an old question: Were all four hoofs of a running horse ever off the ground at the same time?

To separate fact from guesses, Stanford turned to English-born California photographer Eadweard Muybridge, an eccentric, self-proclaimed artist with a long, unkempt, cigarette-smoke-stained beard. A contemporary described him as Walt Whitman preparing to play King Lear.¹ Muybridge’s passion was using a camera to explore and document the world around him.

By the 1870s anyone with enough money could sit stiffly and have a cameraman (virtually all were men) create a true-looking likeness. Capturing life in motion was elusive. The basis for a solution to this challenge dated from the 1830s, when it was learned that individual images of progressive stages of an action, shown in rapid succession, were processed by the human brain as an illusion of movement. Capitalizing on this perceptual phenomenon, clever entertainers created an array of devices with tongue-twisting Greek-derived names: phenakistoscope (eye deceiver), thaumatrope (turning marvel), and zoetrope (wheel of life).

These early moving picture machines used drawings or paintings. Photographs could appear truer to life, but they required a camera with a shutter that opened and closed fast enough to ensure that moving objects weren’t blurred. Capturing a rapid series of exposures was even more difficult. Muybridge’s solution was ingenious. It involved multiple cameras lined up a couple of feet apart, each equipped with a high-speed electronic shutter attached to strings stretched across Stanford’s racetrack. When a horse galloped by, the animal hit the strings, activating the camera shutters one after another. If all worked as planned, the result would be sequential snapshots.

After six years of delays, false starts, and questioned results, on June 15, 1878, with the local press watching, success was achieved. Stanford’s trotter Sallie Gardner was clearly seen, step-by-step, in separate photographs. One showed all four hoofs off the ground. Muybridge’s images not only answered Stanford’s question; they were the first steps toward modern motion pictures and a new way to record and understand the real world.

With hardly a pause, Muybridge launched an ambitious photographic study of animal and human locomotion, using a sequential array of cameras triggered without trip wires. Eager to go beyond displays printed on paper, he submitted a patent for a device called the zoopraxiscope (animal action viewer). It was a moving–image mechanism similar to the zoetrope, connected to a magic lantern, a slide projection system that had entertained audiences since the seventeenth century.

In the years that followed, Muybridge delivered illustrated lectures throughout the United States and Europe. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, his show was presented in Zoopraxographical Hall, a theater dedicated to the photographer’s re-creation of life in action. Muybridge’s motion pictures involved only a few frames, but when they were repeated as a loop, audiences were informed and fascinated for a longer time.

Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photographic study of a running horse.

U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Besides studies of animals, perhaps Muybridge’s most popular presentations revealed nude men and women running, jumping, playing sports, and performing daily tasks, such as disrobing before a bath. Along with the photographer himself, the models were mostly athletes from the University of Pennsylvania and, it was said, daring Philadelphia society ladies. If a few in the audience harbored Victorian inhibitions, most were willing to suspend disapproval—in support of the advancement of science, of course.

THE WORLD IN A BOX

After watching images of Stanford’s horses gallop on the screen, one observer summed up the experience: Nothing was wanting but the clatter of the hoofs upon the turf and an occasional breath of steam from the nostrils to make the spectator believe that he had before him genuine flesh-and-blood steeds.²

The possibility of recording clattering hoofs was already a reality. On December 1, 1877, a few months before Muybridge produced his successful stop-action photographs, thirty-year-old Thomas Edison arrived at the Washington, D.C., offices of the journal Scientific American. He’d come to reveal his latest invention, the phonograph (sound writer). The inventor turned the crank attached to a cylinder wrapped with tin foil as a stylus followed a spiraled pattern of indentations. Through a din of hiss, a disembodied voice greeted the editors, inquired about their health, and asked what they thought of the new talking machine. If capturing motion with photographs was a wonderful technological illusion, a mechanism that recorded and reproduced the intangibility of sound seemed miraculous, especially for Edison, who was nearly deaf.

Ten years later, on February 25, 1888, after a zoopraxiscope presentation, Edison and Eadweard Muybridge met. The photographer shared an idea. Why not link the zoopraxiscope to Edison’s phonograph and create moving pictures with sound? The suggestion got Edison thinking. On October 17, 1888, he announced plans to create a new machine that would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.³

Edison handed responsibilities for the moving image machine to a dapper twenty-seven-year-old Scotch-Irishman, William Kennedy Laurie W. K. L. Dickson. In a laboratory filled with rumpled, chemical-stained mechanics, proudly known as Edison’s muckers, Dickson looked and acted like a practical-minded aesthete. He played the violin, enjoyed amateur theatrics, and was already enthusiastic about photography.

Recognizing the limitations of Muybridge’s multiple-camera approach, Edison and Dickson, inspired and informed by experimenters in Europe, envisioned a single-lens device that would take an unlimited number of sequential images on strips of photosensitive film. During early tests with a camera called the Kinetograph, Dickson persuaded a young shop hand to wave his arms for a film Dickson called Monkeyshines #1, suggesting, in future Hollywood fashion, sequels to come.

On May 20, 1891, members of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, friends of Edison’s wife, Mina, showed up for a luncheon at the Edison family’s West Orange, New Jersey, home. The ladies were asked to peer into a wooden cabinet. Inside, they saw something amazing—a photograph that moved—Dickson greeting them by repeatedly doffing his hat. It was the first public showing of Edison’s latest marvel, an illusion of life in a box.

As experimental results improved, the pace of Dickson’s movie production quickened. In 1893 he convinced his boss to approve construction of a separate tar-paper-covered shack to house his work. The structure could be rotated on a circular rail track to follow the path of the sun, allowing natural light to illuminate the space any time during the day. Reminding fellow muckers of a police paddy wagon, the shack was nicknamed the Black Maria. Edison called it the dog house. It was the first movie studio, built with a budget of $637.67. Dickson made many short films in the Black Maria, including of vaudeville acts from the New York City theater district and even of a staged boxing match.

Edison was an inventor, but also an entrepreneur. With an eye to future profits, he wanted to maintain legal control of his inventions. On January 7, 1894, a jovial lead machinist, Fred Ott, was invited to the Black Maria to star in another Dickson movie. When the Kinetograph clattered into action, Ott held some snuff to his nose and sneezed. The response happened too quickly to be seen clearly in real time, but Dickson wasn’t conducting a scientific investigation. A paper copy of the individual frames was filed with the Library of Congress, an early documentary record of a common real event, and the first movie to be copyrighted.

Finished Dickson films were viewed on a device called the Kinetoscope. By April 14, 1894, Edison was ready to cash in when the first Kinetoscope parlor opened on Broadway in New York City. Crowds lined up to pay five cents to peer into one of his magic boxes. By then, to enhance a sense of reality, Dickson was already experimenting with synchronous sound. In 1894 he filmed himself playing a violin into a phonograph recording horn while two lab colleagues danced arm in arm. When he failed to synchronize the recorded sound and picture, Dickson helped create the Kinetophone, a peep show box that incorporated a separate phonograph that allowed movie viewers to watch a short silent movie while listening to recorded music through an 1890s version of earbuds.

Thomas Edison associate W. K. L. Dickson plays a violin during an 1894 sound film experiment.

U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PROJECTING ACTUALITY

Progress toward movies as they are seen today came quickly. In Lyon, France, Charles Lumière and his sons, Louis and Auguste, owners of a photographic equipment factory, were impressed by the Kinetoscope. By 1895 they had patented their own camera and viewing system in a single lightweight wooden box called the Cinématographe (motion writer). Unlike Edison’s bulky camera and separate viewer, the Cinématographe projected moving images on a screen in front of a large audience. On March 19, 1895, the Lumière brothers produced a film showing workers leaving the family factory in Lyon. On December 28, 1895, a premiere was held in the basement salon of the Grand Café in Paris. Eight short films were screened. As many as 120 people at a time watched twenty shows a day, shown at thirty-minute intervals.⁴

The Cinématographe camera, perfected in 1895 by brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, shown recording everyday activities.

AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

The Lumière’s lightweight, hand-cranked Cinématographe could go where the action was. The earliest films, many photographed by Louis, focused on everyday scenes rather than professional entertainers. Along with workers leaving his factory, he recorded children digging for clams on a beach, an enthusiastic snowball fight, a ship arriving at a dock, and even a home movie of Auguste and his wife feeding their baby daughter, Andrée.

With overwhelming public demand, special theaters, known as cinemas, were established. One of the Lumière brothers’ most impressive short films, called actualities, showed a train arriving at a station.⁵ It was said that frightened viewers panicked, afraid the locomotive would burst through the screen. Stories of such audience naïveté were probably early movie hype, but at the time screened reality was undoubtedly memorable.

Audiences were impressed by early actualities, but some expressed disappointment. After centuries of colored magic lantern slide shows, one important aspect of the real world was missing from black-and-white movies. Filmmakers attempted to make up for this with tinted film stock and hand-colored individual frames. An obscure English photographer, Edward Turner, experimented with a full-color motion picture system as early as 1902, but audiences would wait more than thirty years for a satisfactory representation of the world in all its hues.⁶

By the end of 1897, the Lumière film catalog contained one thousand titles. The company’s cameramen traveled as far as Japan, Australia, and Mexico, showing audiences tourist sites in foreign capitals, marketplaces, military parades, and even an opium den. These early travelogues had a name: documentaires.

Then, just as an international movie industry was taking off, the Lumières decided to return to their original business and concentrate on selling equipment rather than producing films. Louis concluded that although cinema might have scientific value, it was an invention without a future.

Edison, too, wondered if the first moving images were little more than a fad. But faced with increasing competition, he acquired an existing American projection system and improved it as the Vitascope. When his first show premiered in New York City on April 23, 1896, an impressed reporter from the New York Times called Edison’s creation the ingenious inventor’s latest toy.⁷

Before then, Dickson, ambitious and impatient to improve and expand movie production, had joined the American Mutoscope Company, later the Biograph Company. There he helped develop a new camera and projection system with improved image quality and got to work as a producer, director, and cameraman of actualities. In Rome he convinced Pope Leo XIII to bless the movies with an appearance on film.

Dickson’s Edison lab associates were the first American cinematographers. By 1896 there were many others. Johann Gottlob Wilhelm Billy Bitzer was among the most influential and famous. He was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1872, the year Muybridge made his first attempt to stop a Leland Stanford trotter in its tracks. As a young man, Bitzer took courses in electrical engineering and found a job with the Magic Introduction Company in New York City. At the time, it wasn’t a surprising path for a future filmmaker. To early audiences, moving photographs were the ultimate magic trick. In France, with apparitions and sudden transformations, a magician, Georges Méliès, created entertainments that amused, astonished, and redefined perceptions of time and space.

When Bitzer found a job at Biograph, he admired debonair W. K. L. Dickson. He grew a moustache to emulate his idol as he learned to run a huge and hazardous projector, nicknamed the coffin, and figured out how to thread film in the giant Biograph camera.

Biograph equipment produced superior images, but creating them required heavy lifting. A promotional flyer admitted: The total weight of the outfit is 1700 pounds and it comprises a large camera and electric motor, weighing about 265 pounds, five storage batteries weighing 200 pounds, and a large trunk containing films, lenses, cable, and other paraphernalia.⁸ Young, strong, and eager, Bitzer didn’t care. Photographing actualities was fun. Expressing enthusiasm shared by documentarians ever since, he recalled: There was the satisfaction in having put in a good day’s work … The end of each day only meant, ‘What are we shooting tomorrow?’ ⁹

Adding to the movies’ illusion of truth, as early as 1896 showmen like Lyman Howe traveled to small American towns and projected motion pictures of distant lands, complete with live, behind-the-screen sound effects. In 1904, anticipating virtual reality to come, George C. Hale, a retired Kansas City fire chief and inventor, took actualities an innovative step further at the St. Louis World’s Fair. He seated his customers in a mock railway car that served as a theater. Projected movies, seen through the windows, showed passing landscapes as assistants rocked the train/theater, enhancing the simulated journey.¹⁰

Most early actualities were simpler and more direct. Always on the lookout for something special and, most of all, action, Bitzer and his cohorts crowded their viewfinders with movement. Holding tight at the front of moving trains, they cranked new, lighter cameras, creating point-of-view films known as phantom rides.

Cameraman Billy Bitzer films a phantom ride from the front of a moving locomotive.

EVERETT COLLECTION

In one of many phantom rides, a cameraman traveled on a trolley down San Francisco’s Market Street in 1906. Moving at a leisurely ten miles per hour, he passes horse-drawn wagons and a surprising number of automobiles. For eleven minutes, buildings go by as people stroll along and casually cross the street. Watching well over a century later, it’s hard not to wonder—who were these people and what were they thinking? Appearing and disappearing from the edges of the photographic frame, where had they come from and where were they going? The trolley ride was taken only four days before the disastrous April 18, 1906, earthquake and fire that devastated San Francisco. How many of those whose lives were preserved on film were about to die? Adding to the historical record, after the shaking stopped and the flames were extinguished, the same cameraman photographed another phantom ride, this time through the ruined and smoke-shrouded city.

PICTURE MEN AND PATRIOTISM

Despite the fact that established businessmen and serious theater people considered movies cheap, disposable entertainment, a courtship between nonfiction filmmakers and publicity-seeking politicians began early. In 1896 W. K. L. Dickson and Billy Bitzer were invited to Canton, Ohio, to photograph Governor William McKinley as he received notification of his nomination as the Republican candidate for president of the United States. McKinley had learned the news weeks before, but that didn’t matter as Bitzer made the first motion pictures of a future U.S. president.

Outside his home (without additional light it was impossible to shoot inside), McKinley and his male secretary hesitantly approached. Uncertain how to perform in front of the newfangled machine, the nominee awkwardly took off his hat, accepted a piece of paper, and walked away. After McKinley was elected, more camera crews attended his inauguration, although positioned too far away to see him clearly. They would be closer when his administration ended.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was eager to be recognized as a rising world power. Moviemakers, who hoped to increase respect for their business, were anxious to advance the cause. An often-overlooked Hollywood mogul and nonfiction film producer was a powerful purveyor of facts, accurate and exaggerated—newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Hearst was attracted early to the persuasive power of the movies. In the 1890s colonists of the enfeebled Spanish empire in Cuba and the Philippines launched freedom movements. When Spain harshly clamped down, Hearst, caught in a newsstand war with his New York City rival Joseph Pulitzer, saw an opportunity to expand his readership. He outdid Pulitzer by printing inflammatory stories to arouse public fervor for military intervention. Inspired by a mischievous cartoon character, the Yellow Kid, a new brand of sensationalized reporting was born: yellow journalism. It was nineteenth-century fake news, based on opinion and bias.

On February 15, 1898, American war hawks like Hearst had the provocation they yearned for when the battleship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor, killing 266. An underwater explosion, presumed to have been caused by a mine planted by Spanish combatants, was blamed. Hearst did everything he could to make war inevitable. Newspapers employed still photographers, but Hearst went one better. He encouraged Biograph to send Billy Bitzer and another photographer to capture motion pictures of the Cuban revolution and Spanish atrocities. For transportation to the war zone, he supplied his yacht Anita, equipped with a film-developing darkroom.

Edison had motion picture men on the scene as well. The action was hardly intense. They filmed the half-submerged hulk of the Maine, a few skirmishes in the distance, and lines of Cuban revolutionary prisoners and refugees. When the United States declared war on April 25, the pace quickened with the pageantry of a grand funeral for the Maine casualties, urgent images of troops training and on the march, and staged pictures of cavalry charges. A brief scene, Colored Troops Disembarking, provided a rare historical record of the participation of the African American Twenty-Fourth U.S. Infantry.

Theodore Roosevelt, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, was a politically ambitious interventionist. Eager to join the fight, he marshalled a volunteer troop of horsemen, the Rough Riders, and headed to the battlefield. Hearty and demonstrative, Roosevelt had an affinity for movie cameras. He was happy to pose, confident and barrel-chested, and gallop his troops past assembled cinematographers, who dutifully cranked away.

Back home, movie audiences couldn’t get enough of America’s military might in action. When newspaper headlines celebrated the U.S. Navy’s victory over Spanish forces at Santiago de Cuba, there were cheers, but the decisive defeat hadn’t been recorded on film. One enterprising pioneer of film animation, J. Stuart Blackton, remedied the omission. In his New York City studio he set up a large platform covered with water and launched an armada of model fighting ships. Cigar smoke simulated cannon fire and obscured details of his re-creation. While some movie viewers were fooled, many of those who weren’t didn’t seem to care. They were satisfied to see how the battle might have looked.

Filming the real war, Billy Bitzer and his colleagues worked hard to make the action exciting on-screen. Cameras were lighter and more compact, but lugging the rest of the gear meant that crews struggled to keep up. At least one lagging cameraman was killed in a crossfire fight. Committed to framing the war on film, Bitzer wasn’t the only one who came down with dysentery and yellow fever and was shipped home to a hospital. He had lost sixty-eight pounds and was unable to work, but six months later the war was over.¹¹ The victorious United States now controlled Cuba, acquired an empire in the Philippines, and annexed the islands of Hawaii—the perfect movie ending.

When triumphant President McKinley ran again in 1900, his vice president was Theodore Roosevelt, the hero of San Juan Hill. Six months into his second term, McKinley attended the festivities of the grand Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. By now, he was regularly accompanied by movie crews. They waited outside while the president greeted visitors in an exhibition hall. Inside, as McKinley was shaking hands, an assassin approached and shot him in the stomach. Although cameramen didn’t catch the attack, they photographed the distraught and angry crowd. The president died a few days later, but he would remain alive in frames of motion picture film.

In 1901 cameramen were more prepared when they covered McKinley’s funeral parade in Washington, D.C. Less than two months later, moviegoers found closure and additional satisfaction when an Edison movie re-created the execution of McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, shown seated and blindfolded in another of the inventor’s innovations, the electric chair.

Real history was on display in 1906 when a Biograph actuality cameraman traveled to New York City’s harbor to pick up some shots. He recorded evidence of a dramatically changing America—lines of anxious but hopeful-looking men, women, and children, carrying their sole possessions in bundles and overstuffed suitcases as they arrived from the U.S. immigration center on Ellis Island. The newcomers were in search of a better life. Crowded into ethnic ghettos, they were willing to work hard and enjoyed whatever entertainment they could afford.

For many, that meant the opportunity to watch movies in converted storefronts and, later, theaters called nickelodeons. Dramatic scenes and comedies were fun, but actualities that revealed their new country were especially popular. Views of America flickered to life—big-city streets, natural landmarks, military maneuvers, a parade of automobiles, and Indians performing the Eagle Dance.

To make sense of unfamiliar customs and story lines, a man sometimes stood beside the screen and explained the silent images, speaking in the new arrivals’ native languages. He was an explainer, a forerunner of the narrators who have made sense of documentaries ever since.

By 1899 fact and fiction coexisted on movie theater programs. That year, Edison hired a twenty-nine-year-old former professional ice skater, sign painter, telegraph operator, ship construction electrician, machinist, touring projectionist, and film editor, Edwin S. Porter, to expand the inventor’s movie output. In 1903, as Edison continued to produce actualities, Porter oversaw The Great Train Robbery, the story of a western train heist, shot in New Jersey. With interconnected scenes, the action-packed film was something new. It told a story.

The first box office blockbuster, The Great Train Robbery revealed the moneymaking potential of movies, beyond brief