#120 NYC and the Birth of the Movies

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2011

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

New York City inspires cinema, but it has also consistently manufactured it. And long before anybody had heard of Hollywood, New York and the surrounding region was a movie capital too, the home to the earliest American film studios and inventors who revolutionized the medium. It began with Thomas Edison's invention of the Kinetoscope out in his New Jersey laboratory. Soon his former employees would spread out through New York, evolving the inventor's work into entertainments that could be projected in front of audiences. By the mid 1900s, New Yorkers fell in love with Nickelodeons and gasped as their first look at moving pictures. We also take a look at the medium's first superstar director D.W. Griffith and how he helped hasten the move out west. But even as studios fled for sunny California weather, movie making never left New York. Find out where you can still find some relics of New York's pre-Hollywood movie career. NOTE: As this is of course a New York podcast, we are very NYC-centric here. Our apologies to Georges Melies and to Fort Lee, NJ! www.boweryboyspodcast.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowery Boys episode 120 New York and the birth of the movies. Hey, it's the Bowery Boys. Hey
0:08.7	The Bowery Boys is brought to you by eurochipo.com
0:12.6	Eurochipo editors personally visit and review the best budget hotels in Europe now with hotels in New York City on the web at eurochipo.com
0:21.9	Hi there. Welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young and this is Tom Myers
0:25.8	We're tackling a fan requested topic. This has been one that has been on all minds of a lot of our listeners
0:32.3	We are looking at New York and the movies now
0:36.5	I know what you're thinking. You're thinking oh, they're going to talk about Annie Hall and great movies that have been shot in New York or
0:42.9	Feature New York. This is actually not today's subject
0:46.2	Instead what we're going to do is
0:48.2	Rewind the real all the way to the very beginning of movie making because it was at this time more than any other time in the
0:55.4	History of film that New York is truly the capital of movie making. So we're really going back to say
1:01.8	1885 until about world war one and fact we're going back to a time
1:06.8	Which is sort of early even in the history of silent film a lot of silent film classics won't even come into play in this story
1:13.8	Right because movies won't talk until the late 20s
1:17.0	This is sort of a different kind of show for us. It's a
1:20.2	Cultural history of something that is very American but with deep roots in the New York area
1:26.1	Of course, we're not just going to talk about the whole history of movie making because we want to keep this centered on how it pertains to New York City
1:32.8	Many of the first studios were based here in New York and in the surrounding areas
1:37.2	This is truly going to be a five-burrow podcast because they're studios all over the New York metropolitan area with
1:45.5	Bonus feature lots of action taking place in New Jersey and not only are we going to be talking about the movie making
1:52.2	We're going to be talking a lot about the very first places that movies were shown and exhibited
1:58.0	So hand over your Nichols, please take a seat and join us for a short history of New York City movie making
	...

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