Hollywood Hoofbeats. Audrey Pavia
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The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.”
—D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse
Abe Edgington and the twelve frames that changed the world.
The first cowboy star, Broncho Billy Anderson, in character with some of his equine cast members in Niles, California, where many of his Westerns were made.
The first movie star was a horse. Equus caballus, that potent symbol of human aspiration, had been capturing the imaginations of painters, poets, songsmiths, and sculptors for centuries when he was finally captured in action by motion pictures on a fine June day in 1878. Before Thomas Edison and D. W. Griffith began their careers as film pioneers, before the first cowboy actor on a trusty steed galloped across a silent screen, before the entire film industry exploded to the sound of thundering hooves, there were a revolutionary series of motion pictures starring a Standardbred harness racer with the unlikely name of Abe Edgington. This equine performer blazed unchartered terrain by virtue of a bet that involved his hoofbeats.
The Horse in Motion
Abe Edgington’s place in history was guaranteed in 1878 when his owner, wealthy railroad magnate and one-time California governor Leland Stanford, hired British-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge to photograph his horses. Stanford hoped to prove that a racing trotter going full speed would, for a split second, be completely airborne. On a June day in Palo Alto, California, Muybridge began by shooting a series of photos of Abe Edgington pulling a sulky. Members of the press witnessed this historic event, which utilized twelve cameras with unique lenses and an electronically controlled mechanism designed to operate special shutters. Wires placed underneath the racetrack at 21-inch intervals triggered the release of the camera shutters as the sulky wheels made contact with the ground.
It took half a second to take the twelve pictures, which clearly showed the high-stepping Abe Edgington’s four legs suspended in midair. Stanford had his proof, and the world had the beginnings of a new art form: motion pictures.
Four days later, Muybridge successfully photographed Stanford’s horse Occident being galloped under saddle. Excited by the results, Stanford—who adored his horses and forbade farmhands to speak harshly to them—funded more of Muybridge’s photographic experiments. Within two weeks, Muybridge had produced six more sequential photographs of Stanford’s horses, depicting them walking, trotting, and galloping. The pictures were published as The Horse in Motion.
This revolutionary series aroused international interest, and the University of Philadelphia commissioned Muybridge to take “moving pictures” of a number of animals, including horses. By the time he had completed this work, Muybridge had shot 20,000 pictures, many featuring randomly chosen horses, named Daisy, Eagle, Elberon, Sharon, Pandora, Billy, Annie G, and Bouquet. Along with Abe Edgington, Occident, and Stanford’s other horses, these animals ranked among the world’s first movie stars.
The train robbers made the mistake of dismounting their getaway horses as they are confronted by posse members in this shot from The Great Train Robbery.
Native Americans and their ponies reenact an encounter with cowboys in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, circa 1908.
Edison
In 1894, sixteen years after Muybridge began his unique way of photographing horses, inventor Thomas Alva Edison patented the first motion-picture camera. Edison’s Kinetograph camera and his film-viewing device, the Kinetoscope, had admittedly been inspired by the work of Muybridge, who had invented the first film projector, the Zoopraxiscope, in 1879. Muybridge had shown Edison his invention in 1888 and proposed collaboration, but Edison declined the offer, having his own vision to pursue.
Credited with starting the American motion picture industry, on April 14, 1894, Edison opened a Kinetoscope Parlor in New York City, where awestruck audiences watched his short films. Perhaps again taking his cue from Muybridge, Edison turned to the visual excitement of horses to enliven many early films. A bucking horse, Sunfish, along with Colorado cowboy Lee Martin, starred in the aptly titled 1894 short Bucking Bronco, filmed at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. That same year, Edison filmed Buffalo Bill himself putting his beautiful gray horse Isham through his paces while Wild West performers twirled lassos around them. Technically, these two films could be called the first Westerns.
An early Edison melodrama, The Burning Stable (1896), shows a real barn in flames. This nail-biter depicts four eye-catching white horses being led through the billowing smoke. In the sequel, Fighting the Fire (1896), two horses come to the rescue by pulling a fire engine to the burning stable. Perhaps the first film featuring “trick” horses was the Edison-produced Trained Cavalry Horses (1898), which shows Troop F’s mounts lying down and scrambling to their feet on command. Another 1898 Edison film, Elopement on Horseback, featured a bride sneaking out a window to land behind her beloved on the back of a tall but short-tailed bay. The one-scene thriller was photographed by Edwin S. Porter, who was on the verge of making his own mark on cinema history with the first “feature” film, a twelve-minute Western.
Directed by Porter and released by the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1903, The Great Train Robbery told the story of four bandits in the Wild West. (The film was actually shot in New Jersey.) The train robbers made their getaway on horses, which provided a considerable level of action for the primitive film. The getaway mounts, two grays and two dark horses—it’s difficult to distinguish browns and bays from chestnuts in early black-and-white films—in western bridles and cavalry saddles, don’t appear until the second half of the movie. After the violent stick-up, the robbers leap from the train to mount their waiting horses and gallop into the woods; a posse of six sets off in hot pursuit. Thus Porter staged what would become one of the most enduring elements of cinema—the chase scene.
This crude but exciting Western enthralled naïve audiences, and moviegoers began demanding more narrative films. Movies-only theaters sprang up around the country, and a new form of entertainment was assured its place in American life.
Americans were not the only ones riveted by celluloid horses. France and Australia had their own developing movie industries, and horses played significant roles. The French Lumière brothers made a series of minimalist films in the late nineteenth century. Called “actuality” films, these mini-documentaries were remarkably similar to Edison’s earliest efforts. One such offering, Dragoons Crossing the Saone, consists entirely of eleven shirtless boys riding bareback into a river and swimming their horses to the other side. Another Lumière film, Pack Train on the Chilkoot Pass, filmed in the United States in 1898, shows huge pack mule teams being led by men on horseback through a rugged mountain pass.
In 1906, the Australian brothers John and Nevin Tait produced a full-length feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, which employed fifty circus horses and a team of roughriders. The success of the eighty-minute “bushranging” film, the Australian version of the Western, launched a series of wild and woolly Outback features that attracted audiences with authentic—and often dangerous—horse action. In 1912, the New South Wales Police Department banned the films for allegedly making a mockery of the law. The Australians consoled themselves with Westerns imported from America.
A terrified white horse is led to safety in this frame captured from Thomas Edison’s The Burning Stable.
An early Australian movie horse hits the water in The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906).
The Father of Film
Not long after the success