Birthdays: Jules Verne,
Dmitri Medeleyev- inventor of the Periodic Table of Elements, James Dean,
William T. Sherman, John Williams is 84, Ivan Ivano-Vano, Lana Turner, Jack
Lemmon, Alejandro Rey, Ted Koppel, Nick Nolte, Buck Henry, Gary Coleman, Robert
Klein, Seth Green is 42
1914- Windsor McCay's "Gertie the Dinosaur" premiered as
part of a vaudeville act. Up to then most U.S. animations were attempts to
bring popular newspaper comic characters to life, but Gertie was a new
character never before seen. Some critics had wondered if animated characters
weren’t some kind of man in a special suit, so McCay drew a dinosaur, a
character that couldn’t possibly be impersonated by a living thing. The brilliant draftsmanship and timing of
this film would inspire the generation of Animation artists of the Golden Age
of the 1930's-40s.
1915- THE BIRTH OF A NATION or The Clansman premiered at
Clunes Auditorium in Los Angeles. Film pioneer D.W. Griffith's racist movie was
considered for years the first American feature length film. The discovery in
1999 of a 1913 Richard III film predates it. Son of a Confederate veteran, it’s
been thought that Griffith was making a personal statement, truth is there was
a flood of films to mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil War and the book the
Clansman by Thomas Dixon was a best seller. President Woodrow Wilson (another
son of the Confederacy ) called it :"History
written with a thunderbolt and I’m afraid all too true."
Birth of a Nations’ inflammatory imagery and this
politically incorrect Presidential endorsement helped a rebirth of the defunct
Ku Klux Klan, and caused an increase in lynching. But despite the film’s politics, it’s
technique influenced world cinema and established once and for all the feature
film length as the standard for all future motion pictures. It’s original
running length was 3 hours.
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