Utah and movies were born the same year - 1896.
Thomas Edison introduced his kinetoscope to the paying public on April 23, 1896, in a New York City music hall, just a few months after Utah's official birthdate of Jan. 4, 1896. He had first shown the moving picture machine as a scientific novelty at the World's Columbian exposition in Chicago several years earlier.Immediately after the first showings, Kinetoscope parlors opened in several American cities to entice a fascinated public.
Many Americans, however, thought the new moving pictures were a bit vulgar and slightly disreputable. Salt Lake newspapers, including the Deseret News, joined in predictions that the movies would harmfully influence young minds.
In 1908, the News referred several times to the "moving picture problem." While the medium had great potential for educating the public, "many of the pictures are as coarse as the colored supplements to yellow or red Sunday papers. Some are demoralizing, teaching crime by suggestion and, insofar as they have ignored the Sunday laws, they are law-de-fying."
But the attraction of vicarious action unfolding before one's eyes was too much to resist. By the time America was a few years into the 20th century, nickelodeons popped up like spring crocuses, with many small stores converted to that purpose. Salt Lake's Main Street was no exception.
Despite the concerns, Americans - and Utahns - were hooked. By degrees, stock theater and vaudeville were forced to exit stage left while patrons paid their nickels and sat on wood chairs, rapt, while trains rushed head-on toward them, audacious outlaws wreaked havoc, damsels in distress teetered on the verge of destruction and heroes rushed in to save the day. Melodrama was in its element.
Lester Park, who later became involved in Utah's movie production industry, is believed to have been the first in the state to show a motion picture. The year was 1905, and the shows were silent.
Utah historian Helen Garrity wrote that, "Down in front of the row of chairs, the hard-working pianist ground out `Asleep in the Deep,' `Hearts and Flowers,' and the `Poet and Peasant Overture,' often hard-put to keep up with the movement on the screen."
With no concerns about sound, players "could gossip to their hearts' content" during actual filming, between outbursts of frantic pantomime.
By the time the first full-length feature was released, Salt Lake had several movie houses.
In its July 4, 1913, story, the Deseret News reported the opening of the American Theater "modeled after the New York Hippodrome" and built at a cost of $150,000. Its 165-foot lobby was a marvel, and its 17-by-22-foot screen was centered between sets of organ pipes. The organ was "excelled by but one pipe organ in this city, namely the Tabernacle organ." A 12-foot fan circulated the theater's air every minute, and the owner, Liberty Theater Co., promised a "choice program" when it opened in four days but never said what that program would be. The American was located at 241 S. Main St. and burned in 1942.
The Victory, however, hosted the first screening of "The Jazz Singer," Al Jolson's landmark introduction of "talkies." For weeks, Utah movie buffs lined up and packed the theater to hear as well as see a filmdom first.
In its day, the Lyric was one of the finest of Salt Lake's movie houses, providing a "cry room" for babies and a registered nurse in the ladies' room.
The LDS Church, which had officially left polygamy behind some time earlier, found itself the butt of several irreverent movies, such as "A Trip to Salt Lake City." The 1905 comedy by American Muto-scope and Biograph Co. dwelled on the problems of a "typical polygamist" father when all of his children wanted a drink at the same time while the family traveled in a railroad sleeping car.
Other anti-Mormon movies - and there were several dozen - were less innocuous. "Trapped by the Mormons," an English-made film, and "A Victim of the Mormons," filmed in Denmark, were particularly troublesome to the church and its missionary efforts.
Gov. William Spry, a Latter-day Saint, felt the latter film, released in Copenhagen in 1911, "will do irreparable injury to Utah by poisoning and prejudicing the minds of the young generation especially against the state." His effort to have the movie censored had no effect.
Later, there were more sympathetic treatments of the Mormon story and of Utah in general. "The Romance of the Utah Pioneers" (1913) was a tale of the handcart companies. "The Uprising of the Utes" (1910) and "A Perilous Ride" (1911) both focused on Ute Indians. A documentary, "Salt Lake City, Utah, and its Surroundings," was complimentary of Utah's unique scenery and called the Salt Lake Temple a "masterpiece of Western architecture."
"One Hundred Years of Mormonism," a monumental 90-min-ute six-reel epic that was a mammoth undertaking for its time, also was released in 1913. Church leaders had cooperated in the production, and one of Brigham Young's grandsons, Frank Young, played the part of the Utah colonizer. The film was started by a Utah group, but they eventually sold to Utah Moving Picture Co., which, despite the name, actually was based in California.
Several Utah companies rose and fell during the heyday of the silent pictures, and there were predictions that the state would become a focal point for film production.
The state contributed to movie history in other ways as well, with some actors and actresses who went on to fame and fortune and some who helped to develop the technology as directors and producers.
A Salt Laker, Aurania Rouverol, who was locally known as "Bob" Ellerbeck, wrote a play called "Skidding," which became the first of the Hardy Family series starring Mickey Rooney and Lewis Stone. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the film rights.
A Salt Lake judge, Willis Brown, appeared in "The Child and the Beast," which depicted four cases in which alcohol proved the downfall of otherwise decent people.
In the late 1920s, a Delaware corporation with Utah interests planned a musical based on the Book of Mormon story of Corianton. Twelve songs were written, and Tabernacle Choir president David A. Smith was finally persuaded to let the choir provide the music. The too-long negotiations and other problems, however, contributed to the company's financial pressures, and it folded before the movie came out.
Most of the Utah companies were short-lived. They could not muster the kind of money film-making was demanding, and they couldn't compete with the growing industry centers in New York and Hollywood.
What Utah had, however, that couldn't be found anywhere else was spectacular scenery that epitomized everyone's idea of the Wild West.
With the western oater holding center stage, movie companies began to flock to Utah to take advantage of its natural beauty. Tom Mix starred in "Deadwood Dick," filmed in Kanab in 1922, and Wallace Beery made his first location trip away from the studios to film "Bad Man of Brimstone." "Drums Along the Mohawk" was filmed on Cedar Mountain in Garfield County as one of the first outdoor movies in Technicolor.
Utah had found itself a natural place in the movie industry. Over the years, scores of movies have been filmed in its deserts, mountains and communities. The state's scenery has become the most lasting "star" Utah ever produced.