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

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