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