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Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen
The Films of William F. Cody
By Sandra K. Sagala UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5140-3
CHAPTER 1
The Advent of Western Movies
Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginning. ROBERT COLLIER
Ironically, the horse, that icon of the West, provided the impetus for the development of moviemaking. In 1871, California railroad magnate Leland Stanford bet $25,000 on a popular debate over whether all of a horse's hooves left the ground during a gallop. To win the point, he teamed with British photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Five years and $50,000 in experiments later, Muybridge came up with a high-speed camera shutter. He spaced out a series of cameras connected to trip wires across a Sacramento racetrack. Both the horse and moving pictures were off and running. As it passed each camera, the horse tripped a wire, snapping a photograph. Lined up on a paper strip, the photographs proving that horses do briefly "fly" won Stanford his bet.
Muybridge was not alone in discovering the mechanics of moving pictures. The idea also captivated Thomas Edison, who was generally credited with their invention, when in the late 1880s his resourceful assistant William K. L. Dickson incorporated a motion picture camera, which he called a kinetograph, and a viewing assembly, the kinetoscope. The latter, a boxlike structure housing a battery-powered mechanism, drove the film past a small incandescent lamp and a rapidly revolving shutter. The shutter exposed the flashing pictures to magnifying lenses through which a viewer looked. As one picture fell away another was exposed, creating moving pictures, much like a child's flip book.
During an 1889 trip to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, Edison met Cody, whose Wild West show was encamped outside Paris, when both celebrities attended the same soirée. As Edison reached the venue, Cody entered, "glittering in his well-known costume of white and gold, topped by his white ten-gallon hat, which he removed with a sweep that comprehended the whole audience."
Cody invited Edison to an American-style breakfast at his camp, to which he had also asked other distinguished American tourists, including New York senator Chauncey M. Depew, U.S. minister Whitelaw Reid, and President Harrison's son. Depew made a speech and Nate Salsbury, Cody's Wild West partner, shared amusing stories about life with a traveling show. Edison brought one of his phonographs, which "was put through its usual evolutions to the enjoyment of the whole audience." During a camp tour, sharpshooter Annie Oakley cornered Edison to ask if he could design an electric gun. He told her he would consider it.
At the afternoon's performance of the Wild West exhibition, five thousand spectators gave the inventor an ovation. Carrying on his tradition, Cody invited Edison and Depew to ride the Deadwood coach "on its perilous journey" around the arena. A "savage horde of pesky redskins," some of the same Edison had encountered at the Eiffel Tower earlier in the week, chased the coach with mimic slaughter in mind. Later, at the Exposition, the American Indian performers listened to music and speeches on a phonograph cylinder. Edison's people then recorded Red Shirt shouting a war cry and played it back for the others' astonishment. It may have been at this demonstration that Cody praised Edison's invention: "It is a great pleasure to see this wonder working man at his task.... It seems almost uncanny that the voice in this place can be perpetuated and that he has set out to the world his phonograph, which have given more entertainment and pleasure than any invention in the history of the world."
While he was in Paris, Edison also visited Étienne-Jules Marey, whose experiments with moving pictures involved paper-based film. Edison returned to his New Jersey laboratory to refine the kinetoscope so the viewer peeking through a slit in the top of the machine could watch a minute-long moving picture on a paper strip. Two years later, when Mrs. Edison hosted a meeting of the Federation of Women's Clubs, her husband allowed the ladies to view a film through his new peephole contraption. By August 1893 the "Wizard of Menlo Park," having worked industriously on "an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear," received a patent for a motion picture camera.
Cody and Edison met again when Chicago hosted the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, where both men expected to "make a big splash." Before it opened, Edison's partners received permission to exhibit 150 motion picture viewers to solicit national and worldwide orders. The problem was, though the prototype was ready, Edison did not have many machines or films for them. Eager to exhibit them, he had nevertheless done little to guarantee their appearance. When weather delayed the Exposition's opening, it seemed possible the kinetoscopes might be ready, but the Panic of 1893 jeopardized Edison's other interests and took his time and energy away from the picture machine. None appeared at the Exposition, and another year would pass before they were ready for sale. Still, Edison enjoyed talking about his "happy combination of photography and electricity."
Despite his rejection for a spot at the Exposition on grounds of "incongruity," Cody opened his Wild West show on nearby acreage and attracted over twenty-seven million visitors. Fair managers would rue the day they judged Cody's show "not refined enough" to be an official exhibit. Besides his stock reenactments of the Pony Express, Buffalo Hunt, and Custer's Charge, Russian, German, French, British, and American soldiers competed in military maneuvers while Syrians, Arabians, and Mexicans demonstrated horsemanship. With such all-encompassing representations, no wonder spectators believed they had seen the entire World's Fair in one performance. One of the worst recessions in America's economic history notwithstanding, Cody did a resounding business, netting nearly a million dollars.
While Cody was entertaining with displays of shooting, riding, and a reality of a West he considered still relevant, a comparatively unknown historian was making news at the American Historical Association in downtown Chicago. Frederick Jackson Turner read his thesis on the frontier's significance in American history, explaining how its settlement formed distinctly American characteristics and influenced the country's future. While Turner focused on "the closing of a great historic movement," Cody's program recounted the "rapidly extending frontier." The historian and the showman described American Indians first as obstacles to western settlement, then as woeful reminders of a bygone era. In show acts, Indians, fulfilling every dime-novel reader's expectations, portrayed stereotyped warlike savages and play-acted attacks on innocent settlers and ill-fated soldiers. In light of Cody's honoring his "ambition ... to instruct and educate the Eastern public to respect the denizens of the West by giving them a true, untinselled representation of a page of frontier history that is fast passing away," journalist Brick Pomeroy endorsed the exhibition's reality and wished for "more progressive educators like William Cody in this world."
His show performed frequently in New Jersey where, in West Orange, workers had built the world's first motion picture studio. William Dickson referred to it as "The Kinetographic Theater;" Edison called it a "dog house," but it was more familiarly known as "Black Maria" for its resemblance to a patrol wagon. Black tarpaper covered the 15- by 50-foot exterior; steel wheels underneath each end allowed it to pivot on a circular wooden track. Its sharply pitched roof opened to allow sunlight to stream onto the interior stage.
With the large cumbersome kinetograph camera, Dickson began taking scenes on short strips of film. Initially he could record only one or two performances, then needed a week to process fifteen seconds of usable footage. Edison's camera operators used ordinary events as the first cinematic subjects: a man sneezing, a prize fight, two boxing cats. Once journalists publicized the need, dancers, acrobats, and vaudeville acts of all kinds offered to perform before the camera for no remuneration except a "sumptuous dinner." Edison himself thought the motion picture idea, though fine for fun, would not be profitable and estimated that about ten kinetoscopes would suffice for the entire country.
He was wrong. A year after the Columbian Exposition, the first kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City. For the first time, commercial movies were available to patrons, who paid to look at a different film on each of ten machines. In the beginning, kinetoscopes were quite profitable, but the novelty wore off for want of new films and because only one customer could use a machine at a time.
Profits picked up when inventors devised projectors that enabled several people to view a film simultaneously. Enterprising exhibitors set up "theaters" in narrow storefronts with as many chairs as would fit and charged ten cents admittance. "It was too much," protested the press. When they lowered the price to five cents, such theaters became known as "nickelodeons." The idea caught on like "a frenzy," so that by 1905 theaters were "multiplying faster than guinea pigs" and attracting nearly two million viewers daily from early morning until midnight. Exhibitors enticed customers with megaphone calls or shocking promotional posters. Because early films were frequently "blood-and-thunder types" and included murders or train robberies, they held little didactic value. Nevertheless, Moving Picture World, a film industry journal, recognized that "the possibilities of them in an education way are unlimited."
Contemporary critics arrived at similar conclusions about the phenomenon. In March 1912, Henry Spurr observed that the cinematograph (the projector) had "created nearly fifteen million new [motion picture] theater goers in the last ten years." Harold Edwards wondered if anyone would ever again pay two dollars to see actors onstage when they could see them more cheaply in pictures. "Everyone," wrote W. Stephen Bush, a Moving Picture World columnist, "young and old, rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant," was going to the movies. Cinema's appeal soon led to a need for longer and more complex films, forcing filmmakers to develop narratives with decent plots and thorough characterizations. "The people want a story," one manager said. "More story, larger story, better story, with plenty of action"—requisites even now characterizing popular films.
In 1903, Edison cameraman Edwin S. Porter became one of the first to produce, direct, and edit a narrative film set in the West—The Great Train Robbery. Railroad holdups still made headlines; two years previously, Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch failed in their attempt to rob the Great Northern. Porter's twelve-minute film combined essential elements of a now-familiar western: villains performing a dastardly deed, good guys in pursuit, a long chase, and comeuppance for the outlaws. The unique film from the wilds of New Jersey's Essex County Park along the Lackawanna Railroad scarcely looked authentically western, but the subject launched a renewed fervor for the genre.
Classic melodramatic archetypes from literature and theater—the handsome hero, villainous blackguard, savage Indian, and beautiful maiden—were readily adapted to western film plots. The scenery was already supplied by nature; inherent violence prevailed in the story line. One historian concluded, "All the actor had to do was don the proper costume, mount the proper horse, and he was ready to head for the nearest hills." As American history presented filmmakers with an inexhaustible supply of subjects, true frontiersmen like Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, and Bill Cody presaged the filmic hero. Because a western's impact was not dependent on its faithfulness to history, filmmakers could revise events or reinvent historical characters. They found that westerns, being "distinctly American in characterization, scenery and surroundings," replete with men who portrayed the American ideal of resolute integrity, were the kind of wholesome, educational entertainment Moving Picture World suggested they offer.
One of the extras in The Great Train Robbery was Max Aronson, who would change his name and gain fame as Gilbert "Broncho Billy" Anderson. After working as director, scriptwriter, cameraman, and actor for various film companies, he and George K. Spoor merged their talents and initials to form the Essanay (S 'n' A) Film Manufacturing Company. Essanay headquartered on Argyle Street in Chicago, but Anderson appreciated audiences' growing sophistication and demand for authentic backgrounds. After the New York Dramatic Mirror derided nonwestern westerns as amateurish and insisted that "cowboys, Indians and Mexicans must be seen in proper scenic backgrounds to convey any impression of reality," Anderson regularly traveled to Colorado and New Mexico seeking not only year-round favorable weather but broad western vistas as well. He and Spoor opened a California branch of the company in Niles while maintaining the Chicago center with its three studios, carpentry and props departments, and film-processing laboratories.
During Wild West shows' off-season, filmmakers hired unemployed show people to act as extras, and working cowboys lined up to serve as consultants or actors. The performers brought along their costumes and props, but filmmakers also borrowed equipment and copied stunts and narratives. Routinely filming outdoors to take advantage of the scenery, Essanay could honestly advertise its westerns as genuine, "made in the West ... amidst scenes of beauty." The preponderance of early films are lost, but one estimate holds that by 1910 westerns comprised about 20 percent of films released in the United States. Several filmmakers chose to specialize in the genre and planned to release two reels every week, an achievement surpassed by Anderson, who once made seven one-reel films in a week.
Although most uninformed eastern audiences accepted westerners' cinematic adventures as realistic, one Moving Picture News editor denounced the films "as far from being true to life as it is possible for anything to be." Indulging in the sensational, producers created characters "never known in everyday life." Protagonists operated within improbable scenes and often degenerated from wholesome heroes to desperadoes. Eventually audiences, so "satiated with this sort of food that they are turning in disgust against it," began to "grumble in a pretty loud manner." Stephen Bush chastised exhibitors for showing graphic westerns that attracted "crowds of rowdies" and allowed "scorbutic-looking youths with atrophied brain cells" to frighten "desirable people" away. Aggravated complainers objected to a "screen full of the smother of Western desperadoes' guns, dynamite explosions, or torrents of gore."
Rival critics argued that the sensationalism depicted authenticity. One wistfully contrasted the civilization and order of city life with the "savage forces of Nature" that "primeval man, with all his passions" had to confront. Nevertheless, the public spoke with their dollars, so by 1913 western filmmakers had toned down their heroes' lurid adventures, making them more palatable and "deferential to traditional values."
If producers expected their westerns to be at all credible, besides reducing the hyperbole they had to include American Indians. Again, numbers vary, but most historians agree that at least one hundred films featuring Indians were released between 1910 and 1913. In most stories involving conflicts between Indians and whites, the tribes revealed a moral superiority, having a greater sense of honor, mercy, and altruism. Moving Picture World applauded such characterizations depicting the Indians' "noble traits."
Like their cowboy counterparts, American Indians often worked, and played their roles well, in the western movies. But however genuine they might look at times, some were only whites "sufficiently well made up to pass as such." Directors found themselves defending the employment of whites in Indian roles: "We tried our best to make [the Indians] act, but they wouldn't do it.... The Indians ... found it impossible to move about and behave in the manner of stage Indians and their work was pronounced impossible." To aggravate matters, filmmakers, careless with details, regularly mixed up tribes, putting Sioux bonnets on southwestern tribes or showing Manhattan Islanders dwelling in skin tipis used only by tribes beyond the Mississippi. Indian critics especially condemned the lack of authenticity. John Standing Horse at the Carlisle Indian School ridiculed directors for simply sticking chicken feathers in the women's hair. "It is funny, but they would all look much better without them.... Have also seen pictures with all the made-up Indian men with big war bonnets on their heads. Another big laugh."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen by Sandra K. Sagala. Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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