The Movies March On

A "March of Time" presentation of the evolution of movies compiled primarily from film clips of silent movies through the early sound pictures to the present (1939) date. Industry executives such as Jack and Harry Warner, Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, et al are seen taking bows in the live (non-archive) footage.

At the beginning, Thirty Years of Motion Pictures (The March of the Movies) was merely a presentation/lecture given by Otto Nelson at two National Board of Review conferences, in 1925 and 1926, under the title Early History and Growth of the Motion Picture Industry. These proved so successful that work on a film version began, with historian Terry Ramsaye (who around the same time published the seminal study A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture) coming onboard the production.

Pioneer filmmaker J. Stuart Blackton was intrigued by the idea of a film about the history of the movies as early as 1915. He finally released a 52-minute feature called The Film Parade that was shown in New York and favorably reviewed by "Variety" in 1933. He continued tinkering with the film for the rest of the decade, and later filmmakers and distributors used Blackton's footage for stock or to produce their own variously titled and truncated versions. -UCLA Film & Television Archive