I have an unique opportunity that has arisen in connection with the book that I am working on, Cinema Before Film: The Magic-Lantern and America's First Great Screen Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale. I may be able to arrange interviews with the surviving managers, projectionists, and audience members of the 1914 "Photo-Drama of Creation." The three-hour "Photo-Drama" was sponsored by the chruch now commonly referred to as the Jehovah's Witnesses, and was a combination of magic-lantern slides (about 1/3 of them by artist Beale), movies, and recorded sound. There were between 80 and 100 copies of the program made, which were then shown to between 6 and 10 million people worldwide. A book of the same title was also created from the slides. Combination shows of magic-lantern slides and movies were common in this period, but the addition of recorded speech was unusual, and the sheer size of the distribution effort and the audience for a single religious production was extraordinary. Heretofore, to my knowledge, there has been little documentation of this early cinema phenomenon, outside of Jehovah's Witness literature. I'd appreciate any information about the "Photo-Drama" that anyone may know of -- anecdotal records, archival material, scholarly articles -- before I do my interviews. Please reply directly to me at [log in to unmask] For more information on magic-lanterns or Beale, see www.magiclanternshows.com. Thanks, Terry Borton The American Magic Lantern Theater ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]