WHAT IS SPORTS (CHAPTER 1 PART 1)

CHAPTER 1 Knockout Rounds and Rounding Marks

The first medium featuring sports that contributed to the evolution of sportscast highlights was film. Those contributions emerged in the two decades (1870s and 1880s) before the arrival of film technology thanks to sports like horse racing and boxing, which borrowed promotional techniques and organizational structures from show business entities like vaudeville and the circus. These techniques included the use of road managers, booking agents, and advertising men. 

Known as the sporting and theatrical syndicate, this association of entrepreneurs was closely linked to the press, another institution that would have an important cross-promotional relationship with sports and films.1 Additionally, early Edison films captured sporting activity—some staged and some actualities—by utilizing production techniques, as well as marketing and exhibition strategies, in ways that were distinct from other film subjects. 

Early sporting films not only provided the content required to display the technology’s capacity to capture motion and save it for audiences, but they also demonstrated film technology’s operational aesthetic, which means the ability to capture a live event and represent it in a way that leads the spectator to question how the technology works.2 

This fascination with film technology encouraged spectators to become consumers of the technology, and in turn the films became cultural capital, which acts as a social relation within an exchange system that ultimately confers power and status.3 Another consideration stems from the ways that film enhanced the status and earning capabilities of sport celebrities, whether represented as hero (e.g., Gentleman Jim Corbett) or as villain (e.g., Jack Johnson). 

Film not only facilitated the dissemination of information about sport stars, but it also provided an important source of income to those stars. For example, boxers received royalties from their fight films and earned considerably more than they did from the fights themselves. Previously, fighters earned income by giv ing exhibitions and appearing in vaudeville shows. Even when states made boxing illegal, they did not prohibit the presentation of fight films in peep show parlors and nickelodeons. 

Film technology lent an air of veracity to the representation of sporting events. Before film, sporting events were reported in newspapers and magazines or recreated on stage, but the representation involved the subjective interpretation of the reporter or performer. Because of film’s capacity to document actual events, the filmmaker’s role was to record an event without interpreting, allowing audience members to form their own opinions about the event. 

This observational cinema or cinéma vérité was further enhanced by the use of an expert commentator, who often was positioned to the side of the screen and offered running commentary, a precursor to today’s sports broadcaster. Lastly, producers and exhibitors played important roles in the marketing of film content, and editorial control became a contested area between them. Owners of Kinetoscope parlors did not buy just anything, but viewed new subjects frequently and carefully decided what to purchase and present. 

Some Kinetoscope parlors employed multiple machines to exhibit the different rounds of a staged fight, usually six. Although exhibitors could purchase entire films for a set price or single rounds, the knockout round was often the only one sold.4 A viewer’s having to pay ten cents at each machine to see each round of a fight ultimately inhibited the success of the Kinetoscope. Nonetheless, the packaging and exhibiting of knockout rounds became an important marker on the road to sportscast highlights. Film’s ability to capture movement, whether in the form of a horse race, yachts racing on the water, or boxers in a ring, proved to be highly popular with the public, creating opportunities for a shared culture.

Sport in the Pre-Film Era

The relationship between sport and its dissemination through visual media emerged as a continuation and transformation of magic lantern traditions that had originated in the seventeenth century and gradually took shape along with the invention, development and deployment of nineteenth century communication technologies such as the telegraph, telephone and phonograph. Models for early moving pictures can be traced back to wall paintings and illustrated books, both of which employed series of images to tell a story. 

Arguably, the dissemination of sports via media was also an extension of a visual entertainment tradition (e.g., circus, burlesque, variety theater, etc.) that emphasized an entertainment ethos related to display and spectacle rather than story-telling.5 Another part of the changing cultural system that fostered a fascination for sports and their visual representations was played by post– Civil War sporting magazines, which anticipated newspapers, radio and television in capitalizing on the public’s growing interest in sport. 

As early as 1872, Frederic Hudson, in his book Journalism in the United States, admitted that magazines “unquestionably give more information on the subjects they treat than the general newspaper can.”6 Even before Richard Kyle Fox assumed editorial control of the National Police Gazette in 1877, lurid illustrations and photographs were being utilized to exploit the sensationalized themes of crime and sex. 

To those themes, Fox integrated the world of sport, especially boxing, so that the Gazette’s coverage of the Ryan-Goss fight of 1880 resulted in a run of 400,000 copies and justified the journal’s subtitle asThe Leading Illustrated Sporting Journal in America.7 These and many other achievements within a long, dynamic process were necessary to help shift the cultural milieu from pragmatic, business-oriented technologies to a consumer-oriented one.8 

It was the conjunction of these lines of development that would ultimately produce the first filmed sports highlights. While sporting magazines and newspapers were cultivating a fascination for sporting events and athletes, attempts to capture and project motion were being conducted in the laboratories of Muybridge, Edison and Marey. In February 1888, Eadweard Muybridge met Thomas A. Edison in the latter’s West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory to discuss combining Edison’s phonograph with his zoopraxiscope to project a series of painted images onto a screen, a process that Edison ultimately deemed impractical and inconvenient. Eight months later Edison wrote the first of his caveats about projecting motion pictures. 

However, it was not until Edison met Étienne-Jules Marey at the 1889 Paris Exposition that he formulated the ideas for a machine that “passed a tape-like band of film past a camera lens, halting and then exposing a single frame of film for a brief fraction of a second, after which the strip was again moved forward, until the next frame of film was halted in front of the lens and likewise halted.”9 After several experiments with cylinders, Edison and his camera specialist William Kennedy Laurie Dickson enlisted William Heise for the project, largely because Heise had expertise in moving tape-like strips of paper through a machine. In the spring of 1891, their experimentation produced a horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewer, which used three-quarter-inch wide film. Of the seven films known to have been made with this camera, the last captured two men boxing. 

Edison, who had recently returned from Chicago where he had been asked to provide some electric novelty for the World’s Fair exposition, was quoted in a New York Sun story of May 28, 1891, that he had a machine being perfected that would allow viewers to sit in their own parlor and see and hear opera singers. Not content to satisfy the more refined tastes and knowing what had already been produced in his Photographic Building, Edison added: That is only one part of what the machine will do. To the sporting fraternity I can say that before long it will be possible to apply this system to prize fights and boxing exhibitions. 

The whole scene with the comments of the spectators, the talk of the seconds, the noise of the blows, and so on will be faithfully transferred.10 Edison’s comments anticipated a level of sophistication that became characteristic of the “Up Close and Personal” production values of Roone Arledge at the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Edison clearly understood that boxing, wrestling and strong men were the sporting content that could most effectively be captured by a motion picture camera. Part of this was grounded in Edison’s fascination with boxing and the fact that newspaper and magazine coverage had already lent a degree of legitimacy to prize fighting, despite its illegal status in many parts of the country. In fact, after the last bare-knuckle championship fight in which John L. Sullivan defeated Jake Kilrain (ring name of Joseph Killion) on July 8, 1889, in Richburg, Mississippi, Governor Lowry vowed to prosecute Sullivan and even offered a thousand-dollar bounty.

The state of Mississippi indicted Sullivan for the offenses of prize fighting and assault and battery. Tried and convicted of the first charge, Sullivan and his lawyers appealed that decision on the grounds that the nature of the crimes had not been adequately specified in the indictment, that the fight had not been public and that the law required two defendants be charged.11 Although the court reversed the first decision and quashed the indictment, the entire ordeal cost Sullivan more money than he had won by defeating his opponent, and he vowed never again to fight under the old ring rules. 

The press played up both sides in the unseemly affair, exploiting the bout to sell newspapers and decrying the fighters’ flaunting of the law. Typical was the coverage found in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper: The spectacle of two bruised and battered ruffians dodging about the country, to escape the officers of the law, was in itself sufficiently demoralizing, without the addition, in print, of the story of their debaucheries and their low brutalities: and the two together, as illustrative of prevailing popular tendencies, certainly afford little ground for confidence as to the future dominance of the better forces in our life as a people.¹²

Once cleared Sullivan toured North America with a theatrical troupe performing the melodrama Honest Hearts and Willing Hands, written especially for him. After a lackluster tour of Australia in early 1892, Sullivan was goaded into issuing a challenge to face “any and all bluffers who have been trying to make capital at my expense,”13 according to Marquis of Queensberry rules. Among the opponents to whom Sullivan was willing to give preference—all white fighters—was a young Californian named James J. Corbett, with whom he had previously sparred. 

That the first heavyweight championship fight to be settled with gloves would be a legitimate media spectacle was testified by the fact that the articles for the $25,000 purse and $10,000 side bet were signed at the offices of the New York World and not the Police Gazette. The battle between Sullivan and Corbett was scheduled for September 7, 1892, at the Olympic Club in New Orleans, which was equipped with electric lights and a canvas mat. 

The New Orleans city council had authorized Queensberry rules fights in March 1890, with stipulations that no liquor be served, that no bouts be staged on Sundays, and that promoters contribute fifty dollars to charity.14 Additional evidence of boxing’s transformation from a sport dominated by gamblers to one in which entrepreneurs seized control was seen in the person of Corbett’s manager, William A. Brady. 

Having a background in show business instead of the ring, Brady soon became a theatrical and motion-picture promoter, one who clearly recognized boxing and bicycle racing as extensions of the entertainment field. In addition to the heavyweight championship fight, the Olympic Club organized and publicized a triple-main-event card over three nights, billed as “The Carnival of Champions.” The card included a lightweight title fight between champion Jack McAuliffe and Billy Myer on September 5, and the next night a featherweight championship bout between Jack Skelly and George “Little Chocolate” Dixon.15 The latter fight, in which the black champion defeated his white opponent in eight rounds, drew calls from both the Daily Picayune and the Times Democrat that the Olympic Club cease staging interracial matches. 

Although no hostile reaction was reported to have occurred at the Olympic Club, segregation became the law of the land within four years. Press coverage of the heavyweight championship fight was extensive. Weeks before the fight, the New York Herald declared that “the events on hand are of national and international importance.”16 The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that “now men travel to great boxing contests in vestibule limited trains; they sleep at the best hotels ... and when the time for the contest arrives, they find themselves in a grand, brilliantly lighted arena.”17 The Times Democratnoted that New Orleans was packed “with visitors of all classes, from the millionaire to the baker to the fakir. Politicians, lawyers, merchants and gamblers elbowed each other in all public places on comparatively equal terms.”18 

The 10,000 fans who filled the Olympic Club were not the only ones anxious to see the fight, hyperbolically called the “clash of the Titans.” In almost every major city in the country, thousands of interested fans jammed into theaters, hotels and newspaper offices to receive telegraphic reports of round-by-round descriptions “read aloud and shared for a moment in an instantaneous national culture.”19 On top of the Pulitzer Building in New York, a red beacon was poised to signal when the fight went Sullivan’s way or a white one for Corbett. The national information network of telegraph, telephone and newspaper communication provided instantaneous results of the fight. Not only did Corbett’s victory signal a change in the titleholder, it also ushered boxing out of a saloon-centered, gambler-controlled subculture and into the larger modern landscape of big business, mass media, and capitalist ideologies.

The Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope and the Black Maria

Less than a month passed after the Corbett-Sullivan fight before Dickson and Heise were testing the design of their motion picture camera. In October 1892 they shot four new films which used film whose width had been adjusted to one and nine-sixteenth of an inch (approximately 35 mm). The subject matter for three of the four films was sports—boxing, fencing and wrestling—and selected frames were subsequently published in the October issue of The Phonogram, which clearly articulated the Kinetograph’s importance, noting that viewers need not resort to seats in the open air to see events: 

Those who are interested in swift-running horses can see a race going on in Sheepshead Bay or Monmouth, without leaving New York and just here let it be remembered that this instrument may play a most useful part, for in a close race where a few inches of space turns the scales, it will take down just what happened faithfully; and the kinetograph will also record with fidelity all that takes place at prize fights, baseball contests and the noise, stir and progress of games.20 Significantly, this passage not only heralded the kinetograph’s technological achievement in settling sporting disputes, anticipating the use of photo finishes and instant replay, but it also suggested the camera’s ability to capture the ambience of sporting events, similar to Edison’s comments for the Sun article published in May 1891. 

Having achieved a working camera, the Edison Company set about in late December 1892 to construct a studio specifically designed for motion picture production. The Black Maria, so named because it resembled the black paddy wagons that brought prisoners to jail, was constructed between December 1892 and January 1893. In his History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope & Kinetophonograph, Dickson related that the “exigencies of natural lighting” and “the lack of a suitable theatrical stage”21 necessitated the construction of this revolving building that could follow the rays of the sun. The Black Maria measured 48' × 10' to 14' × 18' overall, and swung suspended on a central vertical axis over a graphite pivot to accommodate the need for sunshine, although nearly all Black Maria subjects were shot close to noon.22 Although Edison had entered into an agreement to supply A. O. Tate with 25 Kinetoscope machines for use at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, production progressed slowly. 

By early May George Hopkins of the Scientific American examined the Kinetoscope in anticipation of demonstrating it at the annual meeting of the Department of Physics of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. This became its first official public demonstration, and although it did not include sound as promised, The Brooklyn Standard Union story offered an interesting account: The Instrument which was exhibited, however, only presented the moving picture without the noises accompanying. But even in this form it was startling in its realism and beautiful in the perfection of its working.... The pictures taken by the camera can scarcely be distinguished from one another, so slight is the difference between successive views. 

This explains the continuity and unbroken character of the scene as presented in the kinetograph.23 Only one Kinetoscope was sent to Chicago and displayed in the Edison exhibit there, and the first parlor was not ready for the public until April 14, 1894. In anticipation of the grand opening, the pace of film production in the early months of 1894 picked up considerably. One film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze, was made specifically for publicity purposes to illustrate an article that appeared in the March 24 issue of Harper’s Weekly. The other films capturing athletic movement included Athlete with Wand; Amateur Gymnast, no. 1; Amateur Gymnast, no. 2; Men on Parallel Bars; and Boxing Match. The most significant films of this period, however, included three films of Eugen Sandow, body builder and strong man, shot on March 6, 1894. Sandow, one of the most popular theatrical stars, was at the time appearing at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, and his appearance at the Black Maria initiated the commercial phase of Edison’s motion picture work. Dickson relates in his History that Sandow’s chest expansion was 14 inches. 

“The greatest expansion ever known at the Olympic games was six. This is demonstrated in the kinetograph series, together with the more remarkable feats relating to the action and uses of the various muscles, such as the lifting of three-hundred pound dumb-bells at arm’s length over his head.”24 Despite Dickson’s seemingly overblown contention about expansion, the making of the Sandow film marked an important break from past efforts and introduced a relationship between the motion picture world and a performance culture, of which athletic performance would become increasingly popular. 

The next major development occurred later that summer with the production of two fight films for the Kinetoscope Exhibiting Company,25 controlled by Samuel Tilden Jr., Enoch Rector and the Latham family— Woodville and his sons Otway and Grey. The Lathams proposed the exhibition of prize fight films in enlarged Kinetoscopes that could accommodate approximately 150 feet of film, almost three times as much film as the standard Kinetoscope. The enlargement involved the addition of spools to the spool bank, a stronger motor and changes to the Black Maria’s interior, including the addition of padding on the walls and ropes on three sides of the 12foot square ring. 

The rounds lasted a minute with seven or eight minutes in between rounds to load more film into the kinetograph. Newspaper accounts noted that several attempts to enlist fighters had been made before June 14, but those attempts proved unsuccessful. Although titled Leonard-Cushing Fight, it is important to consider this production in the Black Maria as distinctively different from a legitimate fight documented by a motion picture camera. Rather, this match was a staged boxing exhibition, limited by the constraints of the camera and the Black Maria space. 

Nonetheless, the Leonard-Cushing Fight was indeed marketed and advertised as a legitimate fight, evidenced by the descriptions in various catalogues. For example, the Maguire Catalogue (1898) noted, “This fight consists of six rounds between Mike Leonard, the very popular and well-known pugilist ... and Jack Cushing. It was an actual contest, and is full of hard fighting. It has proved a popular and interesting subject.”26 The Edison catalogue of July 1901called it “an actual six-round contest between Mike Leonard ... and Jack Cushing.”27 The Maguire and Baucus catalogue of 1897 read: “Each of the above spirited boxing contests consists of SIX live rounds with ‘knock-out’ in the last.”28 By emphasizing that this was an “actual” fight with “spirited boxing” and “full of hard fighting,” the producers were obviously attempting to dispel the notion that this was a pseudo-fight, and to present it as a novelty worth the 60 cents a viewer paid to watch all six rounds. 

Although the fight garnered considerable newspaper coverage, it seems doubtful that viewers expected a legitimate boxing contest. Nonetheless, this graying of boundaries between films of legitimate fights and those staged fights set up for the camera undermined the legitimacy of both the motion picture industry and the sport of boxing until the 1920s.29 While problems did surface when exhibitors attempted to pass off recreations as the real thing, no evidence suggests that customers entering a peep show parlor were duped into paying for anything other than a staged fight. More significantly, the Latham scheme of serializing the presentation in machines that offered viewers three times as much film for twice the cost of the standard nickel-slot Kinetoscope created a viewing experience that emphasized the knockout as climax. 

The marketing ploy was readily picked up and disseminated by the press, evidenced in the New York World’s report: The theory is that when in the first round he [viewer] sees Mr. Leonard, to use his own language “pushing Mr. Cushing in the face,” he will want to see the next round and the next four. Thus he will pay sixty cents for the complete kinetograph [sic] of this strange and unheard of fight.30 Believing that viewers would pay to see “a fight to the finish,” the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company opened a parlor at 83 Nassau Street in Manhattan that was devoted exclusively to showing the Leonard-Cushing Fighton the new model (150-foot capacity) Kinetoscope. However, the relative obscurity of the fighters, both of whom were from Brooklyn, and the fact that viewers could opt to pay for only the knockout round contributed to the lack of success of the Lathams’ parlor. 

Not surprisingly, the knock-out round of a fight was often the only one sold. Nonetheless, the marketing of fight films by selling rounds remained in vogue into the first decade of the twentieth century and marked a necessary step in the formation of highlights as a way to attract viewers. Regardless of how viewers interpreted the film, the Leonard-Cushing Fight also drew the notice of authorities. An article in the June 16 edition of The Sun noted that the Grand Jury in Essex County was being convened to “investigate a reported prize fight, something which was certainly meant to appear to be a fight to a finish took place in the grounds of the Edison laboratory at Orange on Thursday morning.”31 Although no formal charges were brought against Edison, concerns about the presentation of fight films continued as the technology improved and ultimately was used to capture actual boxing contests. 

With the help of Enoch Rector and Samuel Tilden Jr., the Lathams attempted to arrange a bout that featured heavyweight champion Jim Cor bett. After winning the heavyweight championship from John L. Sullivan in 1892, Corbett had not defended his title and fought only one exhibition against British champion Charlie Mitchell in January 1894. Speculation swirled that Corbett would fight Peter Jackson of the British West Indies, but nothing came of that, in part because Corbett, like Sullivan, had promised not to break the color line and fight a black fighter for the championship. Newspaper accounts reported that Edison’s company had offered $15,000 for the Corbett-Jackson fight, but the fight never materialized. 

Nonetheless, Corbett was enlisted, for a fee of $4,750 to fight “a clever Trenton heavyweight” Peter Courtney, who had supposedly “stood up against” Robert Fitzsimmons.32 That Corbett’s appearance at the Edison complex was a carefully choreographed promotion was evidenced by the fact that the fight was staged on the seventh of September33 (the second anniversary of Corbett’s knockout of Sullivan), by Edison’s presence at the Black Maria to greet the champion, and by the numerous newspaper accounts documenting the entire affair from Corbett’s arrival at the ferry dock at 8:15 A.M. to the celebrations at Johnny Eckhardt’s. 

Clearly, journalists from the Police Gazetteand the World were complicit in assisting the Edison Company’s marketing of this supposed genuine fight, the latter providing a series of drawings that were recorded by the newspaper’s “artist at the scene.”34 Although the Sun’s lead graph notes that “the fight was in the interests of science,” the outcome never was in doubt. In the Sun’s summary of the fourth round, the reporter notes, “It was now a certainty that Courtney would not last the six rounds....” Even as Courtney toed the mark to begin the next round, “he knew very well that Corbett would sooner or later knock him out, but he didn’t flinch a particle, and faced the music like a man.” In the climactic sixth round, “Jim had to finish him, however, as a matter of business....”35 For the purposes of the film, the knockout occurred on cue. 

Dickson served as the producer for the filming of Corbett and Courtney before the Kinetograph, and Heise worked the camera. The Black Maria’s improvised ring was enlarged to “14 feet square, roped on two sides, the other two being heavily padded walls of the building. The floor was planed smooth and covered with rosin.”36 Five-ounce gloves were used, although the gloves were changed to smaller ones because they blocked the fighters’ faces from the camera. Footage of the fight shows Corbett laughing while deflecting Courtney’s wild swings, possibly in the fourth round, when the Sun reported that “Corbett clinched him and then laughingly threw him off.”37 

Each of the six rounds lasted a little longer than one minute, appropriate lengths for the Latham-enlarged Kinetoscope.

As soon as newspaper accounts of the Corbett-Courtney fight were published, Judge Depue instructed the Grand Jury “to look into the Corbett fight in West Orange, before Edison’s Kinetoscope, and find an indictment if the law has been violated.”38 The following day, Edison spoke to a reporter for the Newark Daily Advertiser, dismissing the incident: I don’t see how there could be any trouble about that fight. Those kinetograph people take pictures of anything that comes along. They have to do it, and we don’t interfere with them... Certainly I did not understand that a prize-fight was to take place, and it was not a prize-fight in any sense of the word, as I understand it.... I have been told that the men wore five-ounce gloves... I was not there. 

I have my business to attend to up here, but I have seen some of my men who were there and they say that the contest was similar to others, except that Corbett being one of the principals there was more interest in it. There was no knocking out done. It was simply a boxing match for a show for which these men were paid, and nothing more.... I should certainly not permit any fight to a finish in my place under any consideration.39 This constituted almost the entire printed article and illustrates Edison’s careful manipulation of the situation, distancing himself from the immediate proceedings, claiming not to have been there and not to have interfered with the kinetograph people, who produced an exhibition similar to others. 

Edison also clearly differentiated this “boxing match for a show” from a “fight to a finish,” although that distinction was meaningless when it came to marketing the fight for public consumption, at which point it again became an actual fight with knockout. Edison doubtlessly knew that the controversy surrounding the making of this staged film enhanced the public’s desire to see what all the fuss was about. Not surprisingly, then, Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph became the most widely seen Kinetoscope attraction, even after projected film replaced peep shows in popularity. 

The exhibitions earned Corbett considerable royalties; the agreement stipulated that he receive $150 per week (later reduced to $50) for each set of films on exhibition in the Kinetoscopes, the sum of which reached $13,307 by August 1896 and eventually exceeded $20,000.40

Projection of Actualities

The progression from peep show to projection owed as much to the conditions related to audience comfort as to technological innovation.

Woodville Latham testified that almost as soon as the Edison Kinetoscope Company began showing fight films in the enlarged Kinetoscopes at their parlor on Nassau Street in Manhattan, Otway and Grey heard viewers express a desire to see the films projected upon a screen.41 Such a projection enabled several possibilities. For one, the audience would see a larger, if not life-size, representation of the subject matter more clearly and more conveniently. Second, rather than experiencing the film individually, viewers seeing a film projected upon a screen shared the experience with others. Third, projection offered the possibility of exhibiting an entire sporting event instead of an abridged version necessitated by the Kinetoscope’s limited capacity. Projection also benefited the exhibitor in that parlors needed only one projector, reducing the wear and tear on both film and projector. Showing a film to many viewers at one time reduced costs and increased revenues, expanding the exhibitor’s range for distribution since more parlors across a wider territory could be opened with far fewer projectors. 

By autumn of 1894, the Lathams were conducting experiments on a new projection system under the auspices of the Lambda Company, headed up by the Lathams, Éugene Lauste, and William K. L. Dickson, who would resign from the Edison laboratory in April of the following year. These experiments resulted in a new camera and the Eidoloscope projector, a demonstration of which was given at the Lambda Company offices (and workshop) on April 21, 1895. An illustration of the demonstration appeared in the New York Sun the very next day with a caption that read: “Enlarged Kinetoscope Pictures Thrown on a Screen.” According to the Sun article, the projected image was about the size of a window sash, although “the size is a matter of expense and adjustment.”42 It is ironic that the Lambda Company’s first production with the projection system that was so instrumental in capturing actualities involved the re-creation of a fight between Young Griffo (Albert Griffiths) and Charles Barnett on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in early May. The film included no more than eight minutes of action—four rounds of a minute and a half with thirty seconds of rest between rounds—which was not significantly different than Kinetoscope fights. 

What was different was that the action was shot without interruption. With an added loop to the camera— known as the Latham Loop—the capacity for continuous shooting was limited only by the amount of film housed in the film magazine. The Latham Eidoloscope made its debut on May 20, 1895, in a small storefront theater at 156 Broadway. The first commercial audience for projected motion pictures saw a reproduction of the Griffo-Barnett fight. A broad side for the fight related several key components about the exhibition, as well as a summary of the fight. The broadside noted that the reproduction was “Life Size” and that “During the Exhibition the Audience will be Comfortably Seated” and “This is the first practical exhibition of subjects showing Actual Life Movements on a screen ever made in the world.”43 

A World article from late May lauded the advantages of the Eidoloscope, noting that viewers will no longer “have to squint into a little hole” to see the life size presentations. “It is all realistic, so realistic indeed that excitable spectators have forgot themselves and cried, ‘Mix up there!’ ‘Look out, Charlie, you’ll get a punch,’ ‘Oh! What do you think of that Mr. Barnett?’ and other expressions of like character.”44 The article’s point about viewers responding to the realistic images, despite being a representation of a re-created fight, was significant because it showed that in the absence of a commentator, viewers supplied commentary themselves. In the next important fight film, the Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, commentary would be provided for them. The article also noted that the audience sat comfortably and saw “fighters hammering each other, circuses, suicides, hangings, electrocutions, shipwrecks, scenes on the exchanges, street scenes, horse-races, football games, almost anything, in fact, in which there is action, just as if you were on the spot during the actual events.”45 In fact, those actual events included a horse race at the Sheepshead Bay track and several wrestling bouts on the roof of the Police Gazette building. 

Latham’s Eidoloscope Company exploited territorial rights for the projector and exhibited projected films in Chicago’s Olympic Theater in late August before moving on to the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta where they encountered competition from C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat, whose Phantoscope was technically superior in the use of an intermittent mechanism. By the end of 1895, Jenkins and Armat had a falling out, but not before the latter had enlisted the interest of Raff & Gammon, who worked to secure rights to the Phantoscope for Edison. The machine was given a new trade name, the Vitascope, formed from the Latin vita, “life,” and the Greek, scope, “to see,” somewhat ironic since this machine eventually sounded the death knell for the Kinetoscope, the first commercially successful motion picture machine. 

Kinetoscopes would disappear from the American scene by the turn of the century. When the Vitascope debuted on April 23, 1896, showing six films at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall on Thirty-Fourth Street and Broadway, it initiated a new phase in entertainment culture. In addition to the continuous band of 50-foot or 150-foot films spliced together and shown repeatedly, the Music Hall band provided accompaniment to the projected images. The representation of real scenes produced a heightened sense of realism. An article from the New York Mail and Express from April 24 captured this in detail: One could look far out to sea and pick out a particular wave swelling and undulating and growing bigger and bigger until it struck the end of the pier. Its edge then would be fringed with foam, and finally, in a cloud of spray, the wave would dash upon the beach. One could imagine the people running away.46 

This produced congruence between the projected image and the everyday world as viewers knew and experienced it directly. The Vitascope remained a novelty in that most of the filmed actualities were devoid of a narrative. The exceptions were those sporting events like the 1896 Suburban Handicap that the Vitascope, more mobile and sensitive to light, captured on site rather than in the confines of the Black Maria studio. The Edison Manufacturing Company’s footage of the 1896 Suburban Handicap was the first American film of a horse race.47 That also made the Suburban Handicap the first remotely shot sporting actuality to be projected for commercial distribution in the United States. 

The film debuted at Keith’s New Theatre in Boston in late June, less than a week after the running of the race. A Boston Herald article of June 30 explained that the “portion of the picture showing the field was somewhat obscured by the dust raised by the racers, but the finish of the stretch, showing the judges’ box and grand stand crowded with spectators was extremely realistic”48 (emphasis added). Arguably, the race’s finish constituted the most important part of the race and the most natural part to capture on the 150 feet of film shot (approximately one minute), although it was not the only portion of the race captured. This testified to a deliberate, conscious decision on the part of the producers—James White and Raff & Gammon—to guarantee that cameraman Heise captured highlights of the race. An editorial in the New York Herald from June 24 added more details, including the fact that the “day was perfect overhead” and that “the race itself was anybody’s until the horses were nearly home.”49 The team of White and Heise also shot the 1897 Suburban Handicap at the Sheepshead Bay track of the Coney Island Jockey Club. 

This race was also filmed on a 150-foot strip and included several views of the event—the parade past the stand to the starting post, the horses running past the stand, the finish, and the weighing out. The four-shot structure marked this Suburban as particularly noteworthy, although not so significantly different from the previous year’s film apart from the parade. Since the 1896 film is no longer available, a direct comparison is not possible, although only the pre-race parade seems to have been added, according to the Boston Herald account. Both films were framed by editorial decisions about composition, and since a 50-foot strip “showing the start and finish and weighing-out as above”50 was also available, the process of selecting and editing to create highlights of the event was certainly accomplished. The process is a synecdoche in that through the use of condensation and re-contextualization, a part was used to represent the whole.⁵¹