Movies have been around since the late 1800s. Those earliest movies, including Fred Ott's Sneeze -- which was part of Edison Labs first Kinetoscope demonstration -- didn't change the industry. They created it. As poor quality as those first movies were, they must rank among the most important movies of all time since you cannot have a movie industry without movies.
Within a short time, the era of the silent movie had begun. These movies went from novelties, such as the sneeze, to short films that included many characteristics of movies today. These included plots and trick (now special) effects. Frenchman Georges Méliès is credited with creating many of the narrative elements and camera effects, all in movies running for only two to five minutes. But we're talking more about people than movies, so let's move forward a bit.
By all accounts I've read, Birth of a Nation, despite all of its racial issues, is considered the first modern motion picture. Released in 1915, the movie pioneered a wide array of dramatic techniques still in use today. Despite protests by the NAACP, the movie raked in millions at the box office and set the bar against which movies would be judged for years to come.
While techniques continued to develop over the next dozen years, the next industry-changing movie was The Jazz Singer. It was the first movie in which the actors actually talked and sang in synchronization with the images on the screen. The success of the movie surprised many movie executives, especially H. M. Warner, famous for asking, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" Anyone who has seen the movie
Shortly after the era of talking movies began, the era of color movies began with the introduction of the Technicolor process. While that was another industry-changer, the change is due to the process rather than the movies filmed using it. The Viking in 1928, Redskin in 1929 and The Mysterious Island, also in 1929, are the earliest Technicolor movies. I've never heard of these movies and suspect only die-hard movie history buffs have. Sorry, movies I've never heard of can't be considered industry-changing movies. Later, more famous Technicolor movies such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind put millions of backsides in theater seats, but they simply built on what came before rather than changing the industry.
However, a full color movie from 1937 was an industry-changer. Scoring as the first feature-length cell-animated film ever, the first feature-length animated film made in the U.S. and the first full color feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs created the animated film market. Definitely an industry-changer.
In my opinion, four decades would pass before the next industry-changing film came along. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of excellent movies produced in that 40 year period; including Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Sound of Music and The Godfather. Yes, I know I left out a lot of truly excellent movies, but I don't feel like quoting a list when this is really just a bridging paragraph to get from Snow White to Star Wars.
And you knew we were going to get to Star Wars at some point. Not only did it revolutionize movie special effects, it was the first true blockbuster movie that was not based on pre-existing material such as a novel, a play or a fairy tale. All I know about film editing is that a poorly edited film usually feels too long and boring or too short and confusing to me. But the editing in Star Wars produced and array of split second scene shifts, involving a multitude of points of view. The breathless pace of the movie made other films of the day seem almost plodding in comparison. I don't think it's possible to explain to anyone who was born after Star Wars just how much the industry changed when the movie was released.
Once again, many excellent movies were released in the years after Star Wars, but it wasn't until the 1995 release of Pixar's Toy Story that I think we had our next game-changer. Toy Story was to computer animation was Snow White was to cell animation. You need merely look at the dominance of computer animated movies over the last 14 years to see just how much changed when Toy Story was released.
Part of me wants to label The Lord of the Rings as another industry-changing movie. It certainly was a bar-raising movie series and it did have some nifty new special effects, but those changes seem to me to be a natural progression rather than a major shift. The movies are amazingly good, but they didn't change the industry.
And that brings us to Avatar and its supposedly industry-changing techniques. Will the movie truly change the industry or will we simply look back at it as the first movie using a newer method of using computer animation? As I haven't seen the movie, I can't say. But I will predict that it will not be the kind of industry-changing film that Snow White or Star Wars were simply because I suspect it's plot will irritate the hell out of too many potential viewers.
But that's just my opinion. Now, let the arguments begin!
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