Color was delayed until 1935, the wide screen until the early fifties.

Movement itself was the chief and often the only attraction of the primitive movies of the nineties. Each film consisted of fifty feet, which gives a running time of about one minute on the screen. As long as audiences came to see the movement, there seemed little reason to adventure further. Motion-picture exhibitions took place in stores in a general atmosphere like that of the penny arcade which can still be found in such urban areas as Times Square. Brief snips of actual events were shown: parades, dances, street scenes. The sensational and frightening enjoyed popularity: a train rushes straight at the audience, or a great wave threatens to break over the seats. An early Edison production was The Execution of Mary Queen of Scotts. The unfortunate queen mounted the scaffold; the headsman swung his axe; the head dropped off; end of film. An early film by a competitor of the Wizard of Menlo Park simply showed a long kiss performed by two actors of the contemporary stage.

In the field of entertainment there is no spur to financial daring so effective as audience boredom, and the first decade of the new device was not over before audiences began staying away in large numbers from the simple-minded, one minute shows. In response, the industry allowed the discovery of the motion picture as a form of fiction and thus gave the movies the essential form they have had to this day. Despite the sheer beauty and spectacle of numerous documentaries, art films, and travelogues, despite the impressive financial success of such a recent development as Cinerama, the movies are at heart a form of fiction, like the play, the novel, or the short story. Moreover, the most artistically successful of the nonfiction films have invariably borrowed the narrative form from the fiction feature. Thus such great American documentaries as The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains were composed as visual stories rather than as illustrated lectures. The discovery that movies are a form of fiction was made in the early years of this century and it was made chiefly by two men, a French magician, Georges Melies, and an American employee of Edison, Edwin S. Porter. Of the two, Porter is justly the better known, for he went far beyond the vital finding of fiction for films to take the first step toward fashioning a language of film, toward making the motion picture the intricate, efficient time machine that it has remained since, even in the most inept hands.