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Thomas Edison’s
Kinetoscope first went public at
Brooklyn Institute of
Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893.
The film was only a few minutes long and only one person could view it at at time.

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The Invention of the
Vitascope, the first film projector, allowed for a large audience to view a film at the same time.
Along with the Vitascope came Nickelodeons.
The first Nickelodeon opened in a store front in
Pittsburgh, PA in June of
1905
Admission to a Nickelodeon was only a nickel, hence the name Nickelodeon and the film lasted 15-20 min.

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Working class, immigrants were attracted to the cheap form of entertainment.
December of 1908 the
Mayor of New York City had ordered that all nickel theaters be closed, arguing that they posed a “threat to the city’s physical and moral well being.”

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The middle class finally gave films the recognition they deserved as an art form after director D.W.
Griffiths historical epics
The Birth of a Nation
(1915) and Intolerance
(1916).
This secured film in its place in the emerging culture of the 20th century.
Birth of a Nation was the first film to inspire widespread racial controversy.

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By the 1920’s the US reaches its era of greatestever output with an average of 800 feature films annually.
This explosion was directly correlated with the growth of the studio system.
The Big Eight -
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Universal Pictures
Fox Film Corp (later 20th
Century Fox)
Columbia Pictures
Warner Brothers
Paramount
MGM
RKO
United Artists

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With the advent of talking pictures it was felt that a formal code on censorship should be written.
The Production Code, a set of Industry guidelines governing the production of
American motion pictures, was adopted March 31, 1930 by the Motion Pictures
Producers and Distributors
Association (MPPDA) which later became the Motion
Picture Association of
America (MPAA).
For 4 years the Code went without any form of enforcement until the
Production Code
Administration was formed.
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This required filmmakers to submit their films for approval before their release.
In order to receive approval, the movie had to be free of
“excessive or lustful kissing,” and references to “sex perversion” and any depiction of childbirth, among other things.
Enforcement of the
Production Code became difficult so in the MPAA abandoned it entirely in the mid-1960s.

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The MPAA began working on a ratings system so that there were virtually no restrictions on what could be in a film.
The MPAA film rating system went into effect November 1,
1968 with 4 ratings: G, M, R, and X.
M was later changed to PG and a PG-13 rating was added to create a tier between PG and R.
The X rating was changed to
NC-17 to distinguish it from porn.

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Are Hollywood movies and independent films rated equally for comparable content?
Does it make sense that extreme violence is given an R rating while sexuality is banished to the cutting room floor?
Why do Hollywood studios receive detailed directions as to how to change an NC-17 film into an R, while independent films producers are left guessing?
Does leaving the raters and the rating process secret leave the
MPAA unaccountable for its decisions?

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetoscope
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film
 http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761567
568/History_of_Motion_Pictures.html
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_Code
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPAA_film_rating
_system
 http://www.ifc.com/films?aId=18019