Since I’ve been working in Menlo Park, California, these days, my thoughts have turned to the other city with the same name on the other coast that contained the famed laboratory complex of Thomas A. Edison. In keeping with yesterday’s entry, did William Dickson actually demonstrate projected film to Edison in 1889 or later? Short answer, no, despite all the history and litigation. I had read a tattered copy of Gordon Hendrick’s The Edison Motion Picture Myth about a decade ago. It was around the same time that I read the debunking of Fritz Lang’s dramatic exit from the Third Reich after turning down Goebbels’ request that Lang head the German film industry. Lang had told his story a few times, but his passport showed that at the time he was coming and going, to and fro, closing down his household in Berlin. Also, Goebbels didn’t mention it in his diary. What next? How old were the Marx Brothers and did Kuleshov really conduct his experiment with Ivan Mosjoukine’s image?
Posted by jim at December 17, 2003 07:33 AM | TrackBack