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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: First In Flight Movie
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Michael Putlack
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 187
From: Fort Collins, Colorado
Registered: Sep 2011
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posted 06-21-2014 10:34 AM
http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/was-this-the-first-in-flight-movie-1591487207/+ericlimer
quote:
The photo above, taken on April 6, 1925, shows a movie projector being loaded into an Imperial Airways airplane for the first in-flight movie ever. And the photo below shows the screen and interior set-up for this historical feat. But was it really the first in-flight film ever shown? Technically, no.
Indeed is was one of the first, and amazingly those Imperial Airways flights even experimented with sound delivered via radio and a live orchestra. But if they weren't the first to play a movie in the sky, as they proudly claimed with that banner on the side of the plane, then who was? The answer is probably a flight in 1921 showing a short film called "Howdy Chicago!"
The "Howdy Chicago!" flights were happening during a trade show called Chicago's Pageant of Progress, and the film itself was more or less just an ad for how great Chicago was. We can compare and contrast that with the Imperial Airways flights four years later in any number of ways.
Imperial was screening The Lost World, a major Hollywood movie adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel. The Chicago flights were showing a short film made by Chicago business boosters. So, yes, the Imperial flights were closer to what we think of today as in-flight entertainment. But the Chicago flights were the first known demonstrations of movies in an airplane.
The image below (clearly a photo-illustration, since the screen itself wouldn't have photographed that well) appeared in the August 22, 1921 issue of Aerial Age magazine and showed what the "Howdy Chicago!" screening might have looked like.
From the August 22, 1921 issue of Aerial Age magazine:
Motion pictures on the screen while flying through the clouds at 90 miles an hour! History's first aerial movie show was on board the eleven-passenger hydroplane, Santa Maria, at the Chicago Pageant of Progress—and the first picture ever to be projected 2,000 feet above the earths surface was 'Howdy Chicago!" produced by the Rothacker Film Co. for the Chicago Boosters Club, for use in telling the world about the Windy City's selling points. A screen was hung in the forecabin of the machine; a DeVry suit-case projection machine fastened firmly in position and connected with an electric light socket. The projectionist pressed the button and the audience beheld cinema views of Chicago while flying over Chicago,
Before the flight it was feared that the vibration of the giant hydroplane as it shot through at 90 miles an hour would seriously interfere with the screening. But it did not. This historic flight demonstrated the practicability of movie entertainment for transatlantic aerial commuters in the days to come.
Anytime you're dealing with claims of technological "firsts" you're stepping into a steaming river of shit. Technically, the Imperial Airways flights were the first Hollywood feature movies shown on commercial flights. But the pedantic weirdos out there (read: me) can always say, "yes, but what about..." any time there's some technology or demonstration that was close and happened earlier.
You see this all the time with claims of "first" to technology — like how today's brutal patent battles between companies like Apple and Samsung try to lay claim over the invention of glowing rectangles. And things only get more complicated as years pass and new high-tech becomes ancient history.
There may even be some example of a short movie being shown in an airplane prior to the 1921 Chicago experiments. If you know of any, please provide photos and links below, you pedantic jerks.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 06-22-2014 11:55 AM
quote: Scott Norwood
Nitrate film and airplanes sound like a great combination!
It could have been safety. Safety film did exist before the invention of what was then called "high acetyl" (i.e. triacetate) in 1948, but it was a lot more expensive, fragile and brittle than nitrate. So 16mm, film for still photography and film for virtually every application in which fire precautions were impractical was made on diacetate, butyrate and/or propionate base. A limited amount of theatrical 35mm was, usually for ads, trailers and shorts so that they could be sent through the regular mail.
All that having been said, if you were willing to take a ride on an inter-war airliner, the hazard posed by nitrate film on board was probably insignificant! That having been said, the Handley-Page HP42 (Imperial Airways's flagship land plane during the 1930s) was probably one of very few 1930s airliners that had no accidents and did not injure anyone who flew in it throughout its service life. Their flagship flying boat, the Short Empire, however, was a different story: of about 40 built, half were destroyed in accidents! Alexander Frater's book Beyond the Horizon: On the Track of Imperial Airways is an entertaining read about early British passenger flying.
Anecdote alert: working in an archive about a decade ago, a friend was coming to visit from the south-west of England. For a long time, I'd known about two reels of nitrate sitting in an archive down there that needed to come up to me. She offered to collect and bring them for me, and for some reason I just assumed that she'd be driving. So when the day of the visit arrived, she showed up at my front door and immediately handed over a carrier bag containing the two, 1,000 reels, in ordinary cans. "Thank goodness," she said, handing them over, "...I didn't know how heavy these things were. They were awful to get into the overhead rack!". She'd come by plane, with the nitrate as carry-on luggage! ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 06-22-2014 03:39 PM
quote: Joe Redifer
Also notice that there are 6 passengers but only 4 of them showed up to the movie. Did the other two see what movie it was and just decide to jump?
That third picture ls odd; is it a photograph, maybe heavily retouched, or a drawing? It's certainly a different aircraft, and if that square box that the man has his hand on it the projector then where are the spools?
Maybe the 35 mm machine seen being loaded in the first picture was experimental, and they then switched to 16 mm. What were they screening I wonder? Newsreels and shorts would have been ok, but for features they would have needed two 35 mm machines, and there seems to be very little room in that aircraft.
Pathe used safety stock for their 28 mm prints in 1912, so it was certainly available by then.
I'm guessing that these aircraft were covered in either aluminium or plywood, but at one time scrap nitrate film was used for making dope for fabric covered aircraft.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 06-23-2014 02:07 AM
quote: Randy Stankey
I thought 16mm was never supposed to be nitrate.
Yes - the Kodak stuff was propionate throughout the '20s and '30s, hence the camphor/mothball smell of small gauge stock from that period. It tends either to be totally immune from any sort of base decomposition (i.e. the stuff feels like the day it was made) or has shrunk and hardened up so much that it's a write-off. You hardly see anything in between, for some reason.
16mm nitrate was made in Russia and China, though probably only in very limited quantities, as late as the early '60s. In the late '90s I had a 16mm print of a 1949 Chinese feature, The Green River Flows East, delivered for a screening at the arthouse place I was working at the time. It had a nitrate-y smell to me, and burn testing a few frames confirmed it. Needless to say, that screening was cancelled. I've also heard stories of 16mm nitrate prints of '50s and early '60s vintage from the USSR surfacing, too.
quote: Rick Raskin
They probably allowed smoking too.
Until relatively recently. I remember that Northwest's DC-10s had ashtrays built into the seat armrests. By the time I started flying on them (early '00s), the flights were all no smoking, but when those planes entered service there must have been a smoking section, I guess, or else those ashtrays wouldn't have been put in. And even brand new airliners still have illuminated "no smoking" notices. Whether this is because there are some airlines somewhere that still do allow smoking (i.e. they actually turn those signs off) or for the benefit of the occasional moron who would think it's OK to light up if the signs weren't there, I don't know.
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