It's About Time

Thought I’d take a look at a few trends in movies, particularly filming history. Not to worry, though, this isn’t ivory tower stuff. Still just my twisted, maniacal look.

I first did a search (yeah, the Internet. I’ll consult a few of my actual books shortly) on movie history, and found a timeline at http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0150210.html. First thing I noticed, though, was the hit-or-miss info. For example, sure, they’ve got the Lumiere brothers pegged for the first private showing of a film short in 1895, but where’s Georges Melies, the father and grandfather of special effects? Ah, well, I’ll search elsewhere.

Here’s an interesting site, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/film_chron.cfm, that appears a little more detailed with its timeline, going with headings such as The Invention of Photography and Depression-Era Hollywood to categorize movie stuff. Nice, but it’s still a 35000 foot view. On to the next one.

This one, http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/History-of-Movies, looked promising, but there’s apparently videos to watch that just eat the heck out of memory. Took forever to load, and I frankly lost interest due to my ADHD.

http://www.themovietimeline.com/ appears to be just plain, good ol’ fun, plus great info for us information/trivia junkies. Gonna have to spend some time on this one. They want people (like you, me, and the rest of the world) to send movie events to them and they’ll figure them into this massive, mondo-grando timeline of pretty much everything in movies (and, eventually, TV, they say). As an example, let’s pick a random event from, say, Alien, when Ripley escapes from the Nostromo. The main web site guy and his team of dedicated researchers will come up with a date for when that happened (or will happen, since it’s in the future), and sandwich that chronologically between two other movie events. I love it!

Next site that popped up was http://horror.about.com/od/horrorthemelists/ss/horrortimeline.htm, a rough horror movie history from About.com. Looks good, but I’m gonna need to check it out and compare a few dates.

Finally, here's this one: http://www.filmsite.org/filmh.html. It gives a breakdown by decade of important film events. I like this site, too, as it has info on good ol' William Castle and his "Illusion-O" film gimmick. It also gives info on Smell-O-Vision. Yeah, this one's good.

That's about all I can do for now. 'til next time... Adios.