But the novelty was wearing off, and the nascent industry needed something to better hold audience attention. Exhibitors would string several together for an evening's entertainment - a quick pratfall, a brief newsreel, a snippet of children playing, a shred from a prizefight, a stolen kiss, a landscape, a cityscape, farm animals, anything, really - then add music, narration, lantern slides, live performers, or whatever else they could think of to lure in customers.
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Prior to 1900, a movie was essentially a single scene lasting only a few moments. After Porter's own attempt to manufacture movie cameras and projectors failed, Edison hired him in 1899. Brazenly calling himself Thomas Edison, Jr., he introduced Edison's invention - and the one-scene films he was making for it - to the West Indies and South America. Captivated by moving pictures, Porter entered the business, first as a projectionist, and then as an exhibitor. In 1896 Thomas Edison patented the Vitascope, which allowed him to make short moving pictures he could project onto a screen for paying audiences. When he got out three years later, he found his true port in an industry just being born. Wanderlust in his early twenties led to a hitch in the Navy as an electrician.
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Still in his teens, Porter taught himself how to run a telegraph and became one of the youngest telegraph operators in the nation.
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At fourteen, he dropped out of public school for a series of odd jobs at Connellsville's Newmeyer Opera House, where traveling troupes came through to entertain the locals with comedies, dramas, and light operas.
So would his early introduction to theater. A natural tinkerer, he was fascinated by electricity and had a flair for invention, traits that ultimately served him well. The son of a prosperous merchant, Porter was born in Connellsville, in the heart of coke country near Pittsburgh, in 1870, the fourth of eight children. As one of the movies" first producers, writers, directors, and cameramen, his curiosity and innovative vision helped spawn a new art: the feature film. Film pioneer Edwin Stratton Porter knew what scared and thrilled an audience. Like any good ambush, it had surprise on its side. Reports of the day describe nascent cinemaphiles as scampering for cover. Through the heart-pumping immediacy of that pistol shot, observers in their seats became participants in the action, as enthralled as they were terrified, for they had never seen anything like it before.
The year was 1903, and that moment highlighted the groundbreaking movie The Great Train Robbery. Silently, he pulls the trigger, then disappears, ghostlike, behind a plume of discharged smoke. The image is as unforgettable as the action is startling: In moderate close-up, a bandit with a revolver stares coolly at the audience, the muzzle of his pistol aimed straight at its heart. Pioneer filmmaker Edwin Stanton Porter, circa 1910.
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