ABSTRACT
EVERY succeeding week of the fall of 1896 added to the complexity of the motion picture situation, and added to the diverse factors to figure in the struggles to come. The progress of development increased in velocity week by week. The state of the screen was like a boom town on the prairie. A jumble of ideas and a tangle of experimental forms, technical and commercial, sprang up in all the crudity and haste of an oil field metropolis.
