Silents are Golden: What Were Films Like in The Nickelodeon Era?

Silents are Golden: What Were Films Like in The Nickelodeon Era?

We’re all at least somewhat familiar with nickelodeons, the tiny 1900s-era theaters where patrons paid a nickel each to watch some films. And we all know that these quaint little storefronts evolved into the familiar neighborhood theaters and big city “movie palaces.” But not everyone knows exactly what nickelodeon-era motion pictures were like, at least beyond the usual Méliès films, clips of ladies dancing, and famous early works like The Great Train Robbery (1903).

Many nickelodeon films had originally played in traveling picture shows, the humble ancestor of the “movie house” era. Traveling from town to town armed with films, slides, and projectors, neatly-dressed entertainers would set up shop in a school, church, or even a tent and sell tickets for an evening’s worth of entertainment. Many of the films they showed would also end up in nickelodeons, mixed in with the newer films that were being churned out like crazy to meet the public demand.

So if you could travel over a century back in time and pop into the nearest nickelodeon, what films were you likely to see? The subjects were as endless back then as they are on YouTube today–everything from travelogs to comedies to military films to, yes, films of funny animals.

The majority of 1900s films have disappeared, but fortunately, some catalogs of rental films survive. These include descriptions of the films and their lengths–that is, the lengths of the physical strips of films themselves. (Being an era of rampant copyright infringement, dates were seldom included.) A minute’s worth of film was about 100 feet long, and a standard reel of film was 1000 feet or about ten minutes. Many films at the time were under 500 feet long or even less than 100. So for every 10-minute single-reel production, you could find a few dozen little films like the popular The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1905), which was 300 feet, or The Four Troublesome Heads (1898), which ran about 75 feet.

The largest group of films fell under the “comic” label. Many of the titles are pretty self-explanatory: How Mike Got the Soap in His Eyes (1903), Firing the Cook (1903), Lady Plumpton’s Motor Car (1904), The Bull and the Picnickers (1902). A number of very short films simply illustrated old jokes, like How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed (1898), a 28-foot film showing how a maid “mistakes the order and brings in the salad in a state of dishabille hardly allowable in polite society.” There were even riffs on well-known films, like Something Good–Negro Kiss (1898), described as a “burlesque on the John Rice and May Irwin Kiss” (this film was rediscovered only a couple of years ago).

Popular comic situations included clashes between maids and cooks, run-ins with tramps, dignified ladies and gentlemen in undignified situations, romantic rivalries, and sometimes ladies getting back at annoying suitors. One popular film was The Insurance Collector (1903), showing the titular character attempting to woo a woman’s pretty daughter, who “rejects the collector’s advance and shoves him into the [wash] tub, where he flounders while the two women douse him with water.” Another very popular comic genre revolved around the “bad boy” or “Mischievous Willie” character, already familiar from comic strips. These mischievous boys were always playing rather violent pranks on their elders. In Tommy’s Trick on Grandpa (1900), “Tommy has filled his grandpa’s big Dutch pipe with powder, and the old gentleman sits down to the enjoy his evening smoke. A terrific explosion occurs.” Similarly, A Ringer Joke on His Pa (date unknown) involved the “Bad Boy” tying a cord to his napping father’s chair and attaching the other end to a clothes wringer. When the mother starts wringing out the laundry the dad’s chair tips over. Doubtless, these simple films were geared towards the delighted kids in the audience.

Many other comic films were unapologetically surreal, like A Jersey Skeeter (1900) which showed a giant mosquito trying to bite a farmer, “and after sharpening its bill on his grindstone, seizes the farmer by the seat of his trousers and carries him away.” Others, like Michael Casey and the Steam Roller (1902), make you wonder what kind of primitive effects were involved: “The engineer does not see him, and the great machine weighing several tons passes over his body, flattening it out like a piece of sole leather. Other workmen rush to the rescue and discover Casey in his flattened condition, and about twice his normal length…One of the workmen procures a barrel, and standing upon it he pounds Casey upon the head with a great mallet until he has driven him down to his proper height and circumference.”

Non-comic genres were common too, of course, especially travel films with such varying locations as Panorama of “Miles Canyon” (1903), Fijian Fire Walk or Fire Dance (date unknown), Niagara Falls in Winter (date unknown), or From Monte Carlo to Monaco (1902). Even mundane scenes were interesting since they showed bits of life in exotic locations, such as Street Cleaning in Porto Rico (date unknown) or A Ferry in the Far East (1904), which showed how “unlike other ferries, the Eastern people hung an immense raft on cables across the stream and the raft is pulled across.”

Shots of naval ships and military drills were also standard fare at nickelodeons, as were recreations of various battles. These recreations sound pretty modest today, although they were thrilling at the time. The popular Advance of Kansas Volunteers, Caloocan (1899) showed U.S. troops in the midst of a battle: “This is one of the best battle pictures ever made. The first firing is done directly toward the front of the picture, and the advance of U.S. troops apparently through the screen is very exciting; the gradual disappearance of the fighters sustaining the interest to the end.” Advance was a mere 60 feet long!

There were several other popular genres in the nickelodeon era, of course, including the religious genre and one intriguingly called “mysterious.” I’ll be covering them more in next month’s post–stay tuned!

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Information on the films in this article is from historian Darren Nemeth’s reprint of the 1907 Chicago Projecting Co’s Entertainer’s Supplies Catalog No. 22, a very rare catalog from his collection. It’s a wealth of information for anyone interested in the very early days of film and is highly recommended! IMDb.com and loc.gov were also consulted to help figure out the dates of the films. Some films may have been released under different names, making it difficult to determine the year.

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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.

Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.