Going to the Early Movies Trivia Quiz

Answer: Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison, known as the Wizard of Menlo Park, was a movie pioneer in addition to inventing other things. Between 1889 and 1894 Edison, his employee William Dickson and their team developed a motion picture camera and the Kinetoscope, a motion picture viewer used by one person at a time.

Dickson was in charge of making the movies for the Kinetoscope, of which 'Record of a Sneeze' (early 1894) was the first one to be shown to the public. 'The Serpentine Dance' appeared later in 1894 and by the end of that year Edison's factory had made movies showing boxing matches, a rodeo and other scenes featuring staff from Buffalo Bill's Wild West, and other documentary and fictional movies.

Viewing movies through a Kinetoscope was very popular in America and Europe at first but Edison and his staff then became involved with projection systems that enabled movies to be watched by a number of people at a time. In 1896 American audiences acclaimed the first movies to be shown via these newer projectors but the projectors were not commercial successes. However, Edison continued to be an influential figure in the fledgling movie industry for several years.

Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone, William Cullen invented an early method of refrigeration and Christopher Latham Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard for typewriters.

Answer: The Great Train Robbery

A few short Western 'vignettes' appear to have been made before 'The Great Train Robbery' was released. However, this movie is accepted as being the first full-length (for the time) Western movie at twelve minutes long although it was shot in different locations on the East Coast of America. The movie was made by Edwin S Porter, had a coherent plot - of a train robbery followed by a chase and then a shoot-out - and became very popular across America.

A short, two-minute Western, 'Kidnapping By Indians', made in 1899 in England was discovered in 1994 and has been referred to as the first Western. It shows the kidnap and rescue of a child but is much simpler than 'The Great Train Robbery' though and was shot in one part of a field by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon.

The 1978 movie starring Sean Connery was set in England in the nineteenth century and concerned the attempted robbery of gold from a train. It was released as 'The First Great Train Robbery' in the UK but as 'The Great Train Robbery' in America.

Answer: Historical fiction

The seventeen-minute long movie 'In Old California' was made in Hollywood in 1910 and was a fictional film set sometime between 1821 and 1848 when California was part of Mexico. It was directed by D W Griffith who apparently saw the Hollywood valley while visiting California and, as other people were doing, decided it was a good place to make movies.

Hollywood itself had only grown up in the few decades before this movie was made. It evolved from a place with one hut in 1853 into an agricultural community named Cahuenga Valley some twenty years later. By 1900 it was a thriving town which incorporated as the municipality of Hollywood in 1903 and the first movie studio was opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1911 by the Nestor Film Company. In the following years a number of major movie companies moved to Hollywood from the East Coast.

Answer: Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin was an English actor and comedian who signed with Keystone Studios in 1913 and appeared first in 'Making a Living' then in many others of their short silent movies. He quickly became popular in several countries and in 1919 was one of the founders of the United Artists company, set up to allow them control over their own work. He also began directing, producing, writing and composing music for the movies he appeared in.

He played comic roles, usually a tramp, in his early movies and continued to do so for many years in longer popular movies. His successes of the 1920s included 'The Kid' and the 1925 'The Gold Rush' while his later very popular movies included the 1931 'City Lights', the 1936 'Modern Times' and the 1940 'The Great Dictator'. He received a number of awards over the years, such as three Academy Awards, and was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1972.

Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Ben Turpin were all Americans who played comic heroes in Hollywood silent movies.

Answer: Hinemoa

Whilst several short documentaries had been made and shown in New Zealand from the late nineteenth century onwards, the first feature film believed to be made there was directed by the Frenchman Gaston Melies in 1913. He very quickly made three more films in New Zealand and sent them all to America to be worked on and it seems doubtful that they were shown in New Zealand.

Whether by coincidence or not, in 1914 a New Zealand director, George Tarr, made a movie with the same plot and name. Hinemoa was a Maori princess who swam across a lake one night to join her lover, Tutanekai. This movie has been accounted the first feature film financed and made by and for New Zealanders. It was shot in the area around Rotorua and was shown first in Auckland then around the country.

Answer: The Birth of a Nation

David Wark Griffith began his career in movies as an actor then moved over to the production side, becoming a movie director in 1908. He made a number of movies before directing and co-producing 'The Clansman', which became 'The Birth of a Nation'. The plot was based on Thomas Dixon Junior's 1905 novel 'The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan' and covered the period of the American Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction era. Although it attracted some criticism, the movie was very popular.

Along with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, D W Griffith established the production company United Artists in 1919. He was not involved with the company for long but continued to make movies, of which those named as alternative answers to this question were three. 'Intolerance' was released in 1916, 'Orphans of the Storm' in 1921 and 'The Struggle' in 1931. He was noted for innovative movie-making, was very influential for a time and was awarded a Honorary Oscar in 1936 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

Answer: Rudolph Valentino

Rudolph Valentino was born in Italy in 1895 and his original name was Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi. He emigrated to America when he was eighteen, taking different jobs in New York before travelling across the country to Los Angeles. He obtained a number of minor and not-so-minor roles in movies for different companies and his role in the very popular 1921 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' was his 'breakthrough' one.

He then starred in the later 1921 movie 'The Sheik', which was a great success and established what Hollywood chiefs named his 'Latin Lover' image with movie-goers, especially the female ones. Other movies followed until Rudolph became ill and then died in 1926, which caused an outpouring of grief from his fans. An estimated hundred thousand people lined up in New York to pay their respects to him before his funeral.

Francesco Totti is a retired soccer player, Antonio Meucci was an inventor and Andrea Bocelli is a classical singer.

Answer: Sergei Eisenstein

In 1905 the crew of the real battleship Potemkin refused to eat a meal because the meat was rotten. Things escalated into a mutiny and the mutineers took over the ship for a time but were eventually forced to surrender it to the Romanian authorities. The latter returned the ship to the Russian government but gave the surviving mutineers sanctuary. The last survivor of the mutiny, Ivan Beshoff, died in Dublin, Ireland in 1987 aged 102.

After the 1917 Revolution the Bolsheviks succeeded in taking control in Russia. The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein made a movie - the 1925 'Battleship Potemkin' - about the mutiny. This movie made some minor changes to the actual events to fit in with then prevailing communist beliefs but it was widely shown and has received lasting acclaim for its artistic qualities. For instance, in 1958 it was accounted the greatest film of all time at the Brussels World's Fair.

Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, Luc Besson is a French one and Leni Riefenstahl was a German one.

Answer: Metropolis

Fritz Lang was an Austrian-German movie director and had already made some well-received movies before he spent seventeen months directing 'Metropolis', which was released in Germany in 1927. It was also shown in other countries and has been described as among the first full-length science-fiction movies. Lang's then wife, Thea von Harbou, wrote the screenplay about a man who was born into the ruling employer class of a dystopian society but realised their workers were badly treated and rebellious so he attempted to reconcile the two sides.

When it was released the movie's plot was criticised as naive but other aspects, such as its complex special effects and technical excellence, were lauded. Over the years 'Metropolis' has received much greater appreciation, for example reaching number thirty-five in 'Sight and Sound's 2012 poll of the 100 Greatest Films of all Time. Lang later moved to America where he made over twenty movies during the next few decades. In 1960 he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame while the British Film Institute later accorded him the title of 'Master of Darkness'.

Answer: Emil Jannings

The first Academy Awards were presented on 16th May, 1929, in the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. There were twelve awards which were intended to acknowledge the best films and filmmakers of 1927 and 1928 and, apart from an honorary award presented to Warner Brothers, all were awarded to silent films and their personnel. The winners had been announced a few months before the ceremony took place, hosted by Douglas Fairbanks Senior.

Emil Jannings won his award for his performances in both 'The Way of All Flesh' (1927) and 'The Last Command' (1928). After becoming an established stage and movie actor in Germany, Jannings had moved to America where he made several silent movies. When 'talkies' became more common his strong accent made it difficult for English-speaking audiences to understand him and he returned to Germany. He died in 1950 and in 1960 was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Daniel Mendaille was a French actor, George Beranger an Australian one and Lon Chaney an American one.