From Live Theatre to Silent Screen: A Glimpse into the Relationship between Vaudeville and Silent Films
Laugh uniquely combines the two main platforms for entertainment: theatre and film. The roots of film originated in Vaudeville houses in the 1920s.
Vaudeville houses originated in the late 1880s. Throughout the 1850s and ’60s, variety entertainment became popular among frontier settlements as well as urban centers. As the immigration population increased in urban areas, the entertainment houses started to become more popular and by the late 19th Century, became the most popular form of cheap entertainment. Tickets to a show would from 5-10 cents and were mainly attended by immigrants and middle-low class citizens. Vaudeville shows usually contained 12 acts of singing, dancing, magic, comedy, acrobatics, trained animals, impersonators, jugglers, and much more. The sequence of the acts was not arbitrary. The first and last spots were usually held for the less popular or weaker performances as people entered and exited the house. Each week the acts would change. One act, although initially an exiting act, proved to be the start of a new medium of entertainment known as film.
The first film can be traced back to the French Lumière brothers. Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the first motion picture projector and printer known as the cinematograph. Unlike previous motion picture inventions, the cinematograph allowed multiple viewers to watch a film. In 1885, the brothers made the first motion picture entitled Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon. The short film pictured workers who worked at the Lumière brothers’ factory. The Lumière brothers eventually moved to the United States where they projected their short films to live audiences in vaudeville houses. After a few years passed, the short film act, a closing act, started to gain popularity and separate venues dedicated to their showing began to appear across the nation. These viewing houses became known as Nickelodeons. Nickelodeons co-existed with Vaudeville houses and while vaudeville featured live acts, Nickelodeons (derivation comes from “nickel” because of its cost and the Ancient Greek word “odeion” which means “a roofed-over theatre”) featured several short silent films. By 1907, approximately 2 million Americans visited a Nickelodeon.
The transition of popularity began to shift from vaudeville to silent film in 1901. The White Rats, a labor union for vaudeville performers, went on strike to combat a five-percent kickback from all performers in exchange for steady bookings. In February of 1901, many performers went on strike and refused to work. As a consequence, many of the vaudeville houses defaulted to the short films to replace the vaudeville live acts.
Short films started to become longer and more and more people began to attend them as a source of entertainment. The Deluxe Theatre was soon built for the avid filmgoers. These theatres were much larger and played longer, feature films. Some film history scholars claim that the rise of deluxe theatres lead to the decline of vaudeville and nickelodeons.
In 1902, Henry Miles of San Francisco started a renting system for theatres. Instead of theater owners buying films from their respective factories, Miles proposed that the theatres rent the films, thus significantly reducing costs. The first theatre devoted solely to film was The Electric Theatre in Los Angeles, CA. It opened in 1902 and admission was 10 cents.
The world premiere of Laugh symbolizes this marriage of theatre and film with its short scenes and slapstick jokes. Laugh is truly a unique coming together of two of the most cherished entertainment forms of the United States. The only work the audience has to do is sit back, relax, and allow the pies to fly!
—Lauren A. Winters