Date

Event

17^th February

Edison attempt to relaunch their Kinetophone Sound film system in a limited number of cinemas but meet with little success. The synchronised sound system is scrapped in less than two years.

18^th February

Famous Players release Edwin S. Porter’s The Prisoner of Zenda. It becomes the studio’s first release after The Count of Monte Cristo, which was completed first, becomes involved in litigation.  

February

The Regent Theatre, designed by Thomas Lamb in Harlem, New York, opens. Considered the first ‘movie palace’, its construction marks the beginning of the end of the Nickelodeon era.

March

Vitagraph closes New York production and relocates to new premises on a former sheep ranch at 4151 Prospect Avenue, Los Angeles.

March

Hiawatha, the first film to feature an all-Native American cast, is released.

12^th May

Alf Reeves, manager of the Fred Karno Troupe, receives a telegram from Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann, the heads of the New York Motion Picture Company, enquiring whether he has anyone named ‘Chaffin’ in his company. They are seeking 23-year-old British comic Charlie Chaplin.

26^th May

The Actors Equity Association union is founded in New York.

29^th May

The Gangsters, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle’s first film for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios, is released.

May

W. W. Hodkinson resigns from the Motion Picture Patents Company after it rejects the film distribution scheme he pioneered in San Francisco.

Summer

D. W. Griffith secretly films Judith of Bethulia as a four-reel feature despite Biograph forbidding him from doing so. It is to be his last picture for the studio.

17^th July

Mabel Normand throws slapstick cinema’s first custard pie into Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle’s face in Keystone’s A Noise from the Deep directed by Mack Sennett. (Some sources credit the pie in the face Ben Turpin received in the 1909 film Mr. Flip, but that pie was handheld not thrown).

10^th September

In the Bishop’s Carriage, Mary Pickford’s first feature for Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players is released. The contract will earn her $500 a week for fourteen weeks and three pictures.

25^th September

Charlie Chaplin signs with Keystone Studios for $150 per week. He arrives in Los Angeles in early December 1913.

September

Eastman Kodak introduce a special-order panchromatic film for colour motion pictures.

September

Trade paper Motion Picture News, founded in 1908, merges with the Exhibitors’ Times.

30^th October

The Artist’s Dream, the first film by animator John Randolph Bray, is released. He uses identical backgrounds printed on hundreds of sheets of rice paper.

October

D. W. Griffith signs with Harry Aitken’s Reliance-Majestic production company to make feature-length films.

Late

Jesse L. Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille and Samuel Goldfish found The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Co.

24^th November

Traffic in Souls, a sensationalised exposé of the white slave trade is released to what the New York World calls “popular hysteria”. Demand to see the Universal film, directed by George Loane Tucker, results in New York’s Weber’s Theatre raising its ticket prices to 25 cents.

7^th December

The seven-reel The Sea Wolf, the last of twelve feature films made in the US this year, is released.

13^th December

Bison release Henry McRae’s two-reel drama The Werewolf, cinema’s first werewolf movie.

22^nd December

Cecil B. DeMille rents a barn on the corner of Selma Avenue and Vine Street for $25 a month on behalf of the newly formed Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company.  

29^th December

Cecil B. DeMille begins filming The Squaw Man, Hollywood’s first feature.

29^th December

Lubin release the first episode of The Adventures of Kathlyn, the world’s first ‘cliffhanger’ serial. Kathlyn Williams stars.

Cameramen in California form The Static Club of America, while three Edison cameramen form the Cinema Camera Club.

Exchange owner William Fox, concerned that demand for films is exceeding supply, founds the Box Office Attraction Company to produce movies.

Lubin’s Wilbert Melville and a company of 30 arrive in California on what is planned to be the first stage of a world tour. The Great War results in the temporary stage Melville had built on his arrival expanding into a permanent studio. Among his entourage is future director Henry King.