Guild-y Pleasures! - Firsts in the Movies Quiz

Answer: Animated film

"Fantasmagorie" ran for a bit less than one minute and was made up of only 700 drawings. Some feel the film grew out of Cohl's involvement in the 1880s with an eclectic school of art called "The Incoherents". In 1885, this group sponsored an exhibition open to all works of art, so long as they were neither serious nor obscene. Cohl attended the exhibit's masked ball dressed as an artichoke.

Question submitted by Uglybird.

Answer: Don Juan

It was made in 1926 with the new-fangled Vitaphone technology that synched up a record with the film. "The Jazz Singer" was released a year later and was a lot more popular, which leads to the mistaken belief that it was the first "talkie". The first instance of sound being directly recorded onto the film was used in Movietone's news reels. Incidentally, this technology was made possible by the research Albert Einstein did on the photo-electric effect, which won him his only Nobel Prize.

Question submitted by Tralfaz.

Answer: McDonagh

Lottie Lyell (1890-1925) was an Australian actress, director and producer who made films with director Raymond Longford (1878-1959) in the early 1920s. Tracy Moffatt (1960- ) is an Australian photographer and film-maker. In the 1980s she was among the first Aboriginal directors to achieve commercial success.

Isobel (1899-1982), Phyllis (1900-1978) and Paulette McDonagh (1901-1978) were born in Sydney, to an Irish medical practitioner and his Australian wife. Their father's interest in film and encouragement led the sisters to form McDonagh Productions in 1926. The self-funded feature, "Those Who Love", was made in ten days on a budget of only £1000 and released later that year. "The Far Paradise" followed in 1928, "The Cheaters" in 1929, and "Two Minutes Silence" in 1934. Isobel was the actress of the family, though she usually used the screen name 'Marie Lorraine'. Phyllis and Paulette shared various production, direction, screen writing and art direction duties. As well as the features, the sisters also made the sports documentaries "Australia in the Swim", with Australian swimmer "Boy" Charlton, and "How I Play Cricket", with the legendary Sir Donald Bradman (but of course he was just plain Don then).

McDonagh Productions was dissolved in 1932 when Isobel married Scots rubber broker Charles Stewart (who had previously assisted in funding some of their work) and left with him for England. Phyllis moved to New Zealand and became a journalist, then married a salesman and returned to Australia in 1941. Paulette alone attempted to remain in the film industry, but could not raise the necessary finances on her own.

I could find surprisingly little on these pioneering women, but it was enough to make me want to look for more. If you are similarly inspired to research them internet-wise, I offer a few words of warning. Do not expect to find their birth and death dates easily - I ended up going to the New South Wales Births, Deaths and Marriages site to find them. And if you don't find them under the names listed above, bear in mind that Isobel was listed as "Isabella" on her birth certificate, and "Isabel" on her marriage certificate. Paulette was actually born "Pauline", but Phyllis (mercifully!) seems to have been "Phyllis" all along...

Question submitted by Ing.

Answer: Psycho

According to http://www.toiletmuseum.com/faq.html#Q7 (and NO, I *don't* spend a lot of my time at this website, ha ha...):

"What was the first movie that featured a toilet?

The word on the seat is that the toilet's big-screen debut was in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" in 1960. The toilet had one line: "flusssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh..." Janet Leigh's character, Marion Crane, can be seen flushing the toilet shortly before getting stabbed to death by "mother". Unfortunately for the toilet, it was greatly upstaged by the shower."

This is confirmed in many other web searches on the same subject.

As part of the plot central to the movie, and in a deliberate move by Alfred Hitchcock to unsettle the audience (let's not forget, the sight of a toilet flushing in 1960 was abhorrent - we can only assume people never actually LOOKED at the toilet flushing, even if they themselves had used it) he had the character Marion Crane flush some ripped up note paper.

Hitchcock's theory was that this image would unhinge the audience to such an extent that by the time the infamous shower scene arrived (straight after) it would really be etched into their psyche. He was right.

Question submitted by FussBudget.

Answer: Mabel Normand

Normand had worked as an artist's model prior to getting a job at the newly founded Biograph studio, in New York City, in 1909. She met Mack Sennett at Biograph and the two formed a professional and romantic partnership. In 1912, she left Biograph to join Sennett's Keystone Film Company in California, becoming the company's leading actress.

Normand's personal life was as tragic as her films were uproarious. Her romance with Sennett deteriorated after 1916, when she caught him "in flagrante" with another actress. She turned for sympathy to the Irish-born director William Desmond Taylor, who encouraged her intellectual pursuits and is believed to have helped in her struggle against cocaine addiction. Normand was the last person to see Taylor alive before his scandalous (and still-unsolved) murder early in 1922. Though she was never seriously considered a suspect, her involvement in the case brought her much unwanted notoriety. Two years later, at a rather wild Hollywood party, her chauffer took a few shots at a male guest during a jealous argument over the star. These two scandals, combined with health problems related to her drug addiction and her lifelong battle with tuberculosis, sent her career into decline. An attempted comeback in a few Hal Roach comedies in 1926 proved short-lived, as did a stint on the Broadway stage. In 1930, Normand succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of thirty-six.

Film historians have pointed out that the "pie in the face" routine actually originated in a Ben Turpin film in 1905, but it was after the Normand/Arbuckle film in 1913 that the routine became a regular feature of slapstick films.

Question submitted by jouen58.

Answer: In-flight movie

The film was shown on an Imperial Airways flight from London to Paris.

"The Lost World" can claim to be the ancestor of more recent monster movies like "Jurassic Park". By the standards of its day it was a technical triumph, and was also the first to use stop-motion animation. Starring Wallace Beery, Bessie Love and Lewis Stone, it has been released on DVD, in a version compiled from several sources.

Question submitted by TabbyTom.

Answer: Gertie the Dinosaur

It was 1913, in NYC. Both palaeontology and movies were in their early days. George McManus, a newspaper cartoonist, bet Winsor McCay, another newspaper cartoonist, that he could not bring a dinosaur to life. And so, the 1914 film "Gertie the Dinosaur" was born. In the 9-minute long film, Gertie walks around, eats a tree, drinks dry an entire lake, and slings a mammoth by the tail. Gertie can even dance! McCay showed the movie as part of a vaudeville act, in which Gertie obeyed his commands, and eventually gave him a ride (the real McCay walked behind the screen at the same moment an animated McCay appeared, stepping on Gertie's back). Gertie was based on the Apatosaurus in the American Museum of Natural History.

Question submitted by pu2-ke-qi-ri.

Answer: The world's first drive-in cinema

The Camden Automobile Theatre occupied a ten-acre (four-hectare) site with a screen measuring 40 feet by 30 (12.2 x 9.1 metres). It could accommodate 400 cars. High-powered screen speakers came from RCA-Victor. The first movie shown there was "Wife Beware", (a.k.a. "Wives Beware" and "Two White Arms"), starring Adolphe Menjou.

The idea did not catch on immediately. At the end of World War II there were still only 60 drive-in cinemas in the whole of the USA. They multiplied fairly quickly in the post-war years, and by 1958 there were just over 4,000 in the States. Today there are said to be less than 1,000.

Question submitted by TabbyTom.

Answer: It was one hour long.

Actually the film took about fourteen minutes to view. The characteristic shot is the Man on the Moon with a rocket jutting out of his eye. Another little thing that people have noticed is that though they are on the moon, there is a lovely young lady riding on a crescent moon. The film is cited as the most heavily pirated of its era too, including Edison's crew. Our artist did not receive much in terms of profit from the film.

Méliès was a stage illusionist, like the David Copperfield of his era, and he was influenced by the Frères Lumière and their invention of the cinematograph technique in 1895. He attended the first exhibit of this marvellous machine in 1895.

Question submitted by Bruyere.

Answer: Fully nude scene

Munson played an artist's model known for posing for many of the statues in New York City. A sculptor, looking for the perfect model, thinks he has found her but ends up studying many of these statues when she wanders away.