IV.

The Nickelodeon Boom

In the early period, prints of films were sold outright by length, at so much per foot, through specialist film sales organizations to the showmen who exhibited them as items on a variety bill, or who travelled the countryside showing them in tent theatres. There were no permanent theatres dedicated solely to showing films. This changed in 1905, because by that time there were enough films that were several minutes long to provide the programming for cinemas running full time. Beginning in the United States with the original Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh, there followed a worldwide boom in film exhibition and production. Up to this time the only countries to have a film industry were France, Britain, and the United States, but now film-makers went into regular production in Italy and Denmark, followed fairly closely by Germany, Sweden, and Russia.

In the United States, other film-making companies had been set up to compete with the Edison and Biograph companies, and the most important of these was Vitagraph. This company was modelled on Pathé, and as soon as Albert Edward Smith and James Stuart Blackton had established it with the films they directed themselves, it too moved over to a multiple-production unit structure with specialized departments for scripting, set construction, wardrobe, and so on. Smith and Blackton were responsible, along with the Pathé film-makers, for speeding up film narration and introducing the beginning of the technique of cross-cutting between scenes of parallel action.

As the number of nickelodeons in the United States increased into the thousands by 1908, the standard pattern of exhibition became the one-hour show costing 10 cents, made up of several films one reel long. A reel of film was towards 300 m (1,000 ft) long, and ran for between 10 and 15 minutes.