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All of this kinda connects to this.
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We added sound.
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It's a silent movie.
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This chart shows all the movies directed or produced by legendary director D.W.
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Griffith in 1912.
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He was a Hollywood titan, but most of his movies?
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They were about the same length.
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Around 15 minutes, with the exceptions topping out around a half hour long.
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Now look at the run time for 1915's Birth of A Nation.
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What happened there?
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The reason movies changed from 15 minute trifles to “featured attractions,” can be traced
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to one silent movie.
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It changed the game in a way that transformed all movies.
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But it wasn't invented in Hollywood.
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It came from 6,000 miles away.
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This is a foot — here you go metric people.
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Early silent film historians actually talk about these movies in...feet.
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And it makes sense — the same way that measuring tape comes on a reel, movies come on reels
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too.
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One reel of film is 1,000 feet, give or take.
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That's 15 minutes or fewer, depending on what frame rate you play it back at.
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In the early days of movies — the 1900s — almost all movies were about 1,000 feet.
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One reel.
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15 minutes or fewer.
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These short movies were usually screened in variety shows or a smorgasbord of short films.
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You'd drop into a Nickelodeon — a lower-class theatre where you'd see a bunch of movies
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for a nickel — 5 cents.
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You'd see Laura Comstock's Bag Punching Dog, followed by The Trapeze Disrobing Act,
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followed by the first screen adaptation of Frankenstein.
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The whole thing was 14 minutes long - 975 feet.
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In America, some of this was enforced by East Coast movie trusts that controlled and licensed
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movie patents for film and projection.
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They preferred single and double reel films.
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But even renegade filmmakers out in Hollywood kept movies pretty short.
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And, with some exceptions, so did filmmakers across Europe.
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It was just easier to transport and project one-reel films.
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That chart, from the beginning?
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It's not a chart of time, but feet.
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And this right here is a thousand feet - that one reel cutoff.
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For the most part, movies were...small.
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Until the Italians thought bigger.
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Italian movies were becoming spectacles in the 1900s.
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They were breaking out of the standard 15-minute short, and trying new things.
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By being outside the American system of high-powered movie trusts, one film in particular was able
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to rewrite the rules.
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That's 1913's Quo Vadis — an epic story of Romans in the time of Nero.
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To tell that story the Italian filmmakers took 2 whole hours - not 15 minutes.
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It was 8,000 feet long!
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To get people to see it, Quo Vadis's promoters needed to invent a new business model.
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Instead of trying to force the long movie into those movie theaters playing a bunch
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of one-reel shorts, promoters rented out classy concert halls for Quo Vadis alone.
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They did the same in the US, at the Astor Theatre in New York, and playing the “mammoth
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photodrama” everywhere from Arkansas to the future state of Hawaii.
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To draw crowds from nickelodeons into those big halls to watch just one really long thing,
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Quo Vadis needed to be special.
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It used real Roman locations, thousands of extras, and the first big stunts - like chariot
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races where the actors rode real chariots and gladiatorial battles with big hits and
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realistic weapons.
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The posters sold the spectacle — and sold out seats.
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And people noticed.
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In the years following the release of Quo Vadis, DW Griffith, increased the length of
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his own movies.
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Quo Vadis and other Italian epics were proof that big movies could work.
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Griffith's movies like “Judith of Bethulia” crept into feature film lengths - 61 minutes,
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a full 4 reels.
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He released Birth of a Nation in 1915.
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It was sold as the “mightiest spectacle ever produced” — and a long one clocking
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in at 12 reels.
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It had big stunts too, like many big battle scenes.
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Now this movie was so controversial that people called it racist in 1915.
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I mean, the KKK are the good guys.
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But despite that, it brought the spectacle of Quo Vadis to Hollywood.
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The trusts that wanted to keep movies short were already fading.
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The public's love of long movies finished the job.
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Birth of a Nation solidified single movies as a style worth funding and paying for.
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And even though today, we don't measure movies in feet, Quo Vadis is not a relic.
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This chart shows average movie times for the most popular 25 movies each year, from 1930
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on.
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This time here?
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It's 2013, 100 years after the 120 minute Quo Vadis came out.
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The running time?
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121.4 minutes.
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This edition of Almanac's all about big changes to the movies that came from outside
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Hollywood, and there are a ton of other business model changes like Quo Vadis, so let me know
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some of the ones that you've heard about in the comments.
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However, I wanna just prove to you one more time that Quo Vadis really was a huge hit.
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This is an ad for “When Ursus Threw the Bull,” a parody movie that was made in response
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to Quo Vadis's enormous success.
