ABSTRACT
Every 10 or 20 years since the invention of the motion picture, a development comes along to revolutionize the way movies are made or shown. In the 1890s, the Lumiere brothers’ Cinematograph changed the way people looked at movies, allowing viewers to sit together in a darkened theater to watch films on an illuminated screen rather than through a peephole. In the teen years of the early twentieth century, renegade immigrants went west to duck the Pinkerton detectives of the East Coast motion picture cartel to make their own pictures and the seeds of Hollywood studios were sown. In the late twenties, sound picture technology transformed the cinema while putting hundreds of actors out of work overnight. After World War II, lightweight cameras and sound recorders gave rise to the independent filmmaker. In the 1960s, Super-8 made moviemaking cheap enough for nearly everyone, and the 1970s ushered in video as a viable portable medium for anyone who wanted to record events on the go. While motion picture production developed and evolved, however, a key link in the movie chain largely resisted change: movie distribution and exhibition. A filmmaker could make a film and still find no outlet to reach an audience.
