The Kids Stay At The Pictures
Family films are now the cornerstone of Hollywood cinema. Strange then that, for a long time, both the studios and the movie theatres thought that children were better unseen and unheard...
Visit any multiplex and you’ll be struck by what a family-friendly place it is. From the no smoking policy and the extensive range of pick ’n’ mix to the wealth of afternoon screenings, the modern-day cinema reflects a contemporary movie trend. Family entertainment is now Hollywood’s main order of business. It’s a long way from when moving pictures first came into being, as the last people they were intended for were children.
Back at the birth of film, children were not encouraged to see moving pictures such as the Lumiere Brothers’ early blockbuster The Arrival Of A Train. Convinced that films would corrupt kids, puritan authority figures spoke out against juveniles hanging around the local Roxy, or the Cinematographe, as it was more likely to be called. Father Charles E. Coughlin, the man later famous as the right-wing voice of religious radio, even went so far as to claim that cinema posed a “special threat to the young and the sensitive.”
In the absence of children, the cinema was as much a place for adults as the theatre, an establishment which then resembled a pub rather than a fine arts venue. Indeed, at the first movie houses, patrons were positively encouraged to smoke and, in some licensed theatres, drink.
This isn’t to say that early movies didn’t have child appeal. But while youngsters would have lapped up animated shorts like 1914’s ‘Gertie The Dinosaur’, such pictures were more likely to be enjoyed by adults, who’d praise them as ingenious experiments – J. Stuart Blackton, creator of the world’s first cartoon ‘Humorous Phases In Funny Faces’ (1906), found himself championed as “the father of a new art form” by The New York Times.
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