25 YEARS OF FILM PLAYS.

Shannon News, 15 July 1924, Page 2

25 YEARS OF FILM PLAYS.

(By the Film Critic). March 10 was the twenty- fifth anniversary of the .birth of a film which tells a story. The first film play, completed on March 10, 1988, was the joint work of two young men, both English by birth, who occupied a. small room on the top floor of a New' York skyscraper—J. Stuart Blackton, who had begun fife as a carpenter, and Albert E. Smith, a music-hall artist. Each has since made a big fortune .out of title film industry. Their first production was called “The Haunted House,” and showed a man reduced to grotesque terror at the sight of a ghost. The young producers had only a hundred feet of film available, and their play took less than two minutes to perform. , Some years passed before any screen' play designed to last more than a quarter of an hour was attempted, and even as late as 1910 the progress of the kinema \vas handicapped. The film, flickered and “jumped”; black spots and scratches and blurs raced across tfye screen.* But when once the flicker and the spots were removed, the popularity of film plays spread like an epidemic. In London there are now over 600 pictirre theatres; the total in the British Isles exceeds 4000, and others are being rapidly built. Last year the number of new films produced in England reached 800. Many of them were over 6000 ft. in length. In some of the “super” pictures 2p,000 people were employed to make a single scene.