#322 Nickelodeons and Movie Palaces: New York and the Film Industry 1893-1920

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2020

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

EPISODE 322 The historic movie studio Kaufman Astoria Studios opened 100 years ago this year in Astoria, Queens. It remains a vital part of New York City's entertainment industry with both film and television shows still made there to this day. The Museum of the Moving Image resides next door in a former studio building. To honor this anniversary, we are re-issuing a new version of one of our favorite shows from the back catalog -- New York City and the birth of the film industry. New York City inspires cinema, but it has also consistently manufactured it. Long before anybody had heard of Hollywood, New York and the surrounding region was a capital for movies, the home to the earliest American film studios and the 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. Along the way, films were made in locations all throughout the city -- from the rooftop of Madison Square Garden to a special super-studio in the Bronx. This is a special 'director's cut' of a podcast we first released on February 18, 2011. For more information, visit our website. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	Episode 32 of The Bowery Boys, Nickelodeons, and Movie Palaces.
0:06.0	Hey, it's The Bowery Boys.
0:08.0	Hey.
0:09.0	Support for The Bowery Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:12.0	Join us for as little as $1 a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowery Boys.
0:22.0	Hi there, welcome to The Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:25.0	And this is Tom Myers. And today we are representing one of our older episodes.
0:31.0	You could call it a vintage episode, Greg.
0:34.0	One that many listeners may not have heard.
0:37.0	So recording that last episode on Lauren McCall got us in a bit of a movie mood, I guess.
0:44.0	So we wanted to revisit our show that we recorded on the history of New York City and the movies.
0:50.0	Yes.
0:51.0	But not the history of New York and individual movies, you know, like Taxi Driver or Ghostbusters.
0:59.0	Because we have The Bowery Boys Movie Club on Patreon to do that.
1:03.0	Now, you know, this is a very different kind of show.
1:05.0	This is a show that we recorded back in 2011.
1:08.0	The subject is the roots of the film industry itself, the very first moving pictures that were ever made in America.
1:16.0	From the 1890s to the mid 1920s, the heart of that industry was New York and New Jersey.
1:24.0	And let's face it, you know, many of us are spending quite a bit of time watching movies, you know, during these days of staying safe at home.
1:33.0	So we thought that we would spend some time then exploring where these movies first came from.
1:39.0	And where they were first exhibited in New York City, from canettoscope parlors to Nickelodeons to movie palaces.
1:48.0	Believe it or not, the first American movies were not made in Hollywood at all.
	...

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