Moguls & Movie Stars: Peepshow Pioneers (2010)
*** (out of 4)
This first entry in Turner Classic Movies seven-part series takes a look at the men and women who really formed what would become known as movies. We start off in the late 1880s as the camera is invented and experiments are being made to try and get the images to move. This eventually leads to the Lumiere Brothers, Edwin S. Porter, Georges Melies and of course D.W. Griffith. We learn about the nickelodeon days and how the likes of the Warner Brothers, Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle and William Fox ended up buying theaters, which would lead to bigger moves. This first entry in the series is pretty good but at the end of the day I couldn't help but feel that too much was left out in terms of some basic information. I'm sure those who have no idea about the early days of what would eventually become Hollywood will find a lot of great information here and there's no question that we do get a lot of stuff but 57-minutes just isn't long enough to give us a true identity of many things that were going on in these early days. We briefly hear about the controversy that movies were faced with but we only hear about THE KISS. There were many more examples and there were many legal battles that movies would face but this is just overlooked. Porter gets mentioned for THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and of course Melies' A TRIP TO THE MOON is discuss. With Griffith we get clips from several of his films but we're quickly told that he made 400+ movies and then we move on. Even towards the end we're told about the big move to California where several names are brought up but not the first person who actually moved his film crew there. Again, this is a very good documentary but I think more time could have been devoted to some of these major figures in the early days of cinema. Leonard Maltin and several other film historians give their views of these early days and we get countless film clips as well.
*** (out of 4)
This first entry in Turner Classic Movies seven-part series takes a look at the men and women who really formed what would become known as movies. We start off in the late 1880s as the camera is invented and experiments are being made to try and get the images to move. This eventually leads to the Lumiere Brothers, Edwin S. Porter, Georges Melies and of course D.W. Griffith. We learn about the nickelodeon days and how the likes of the Warner Brothers, Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle and William Fox ended up buying theaters, which would lead to bigger moves. This first entry in the series is pretty good but at the end of the day I couldn't help but feel that too much was left out in terms of some basic information. I'm sure those who have no idea about the early days of what would eventually become Hollywood will find a lot of great information here and there's no question that we do get a lot of stuff but 57-minutes just isn't long enough to give us a true identity of many things that were going on in these early days. We briefly hear about the controversy that movies were faced with but we only hear about THE KISS. There were many more examples and there were many legal battles that movies would face but this is just overlooked. Porter gets mentioned for THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and of course Melies' A TRIP TO THE MOON is discuss. With Griffith we get clips from several of his films but we're quickly told that he made 400+ movies and then we move on. Even towards the end we're told about the big move to California where several names are brought up but not the first person who actually moved his film crew there. Again, this is a very good documentary but I think more time could have been devoted to some of these major figures in the early days of cinema. Leonard Maltin and several other film historians give their views of these early days and we get countless film clips as well.