The Great Train Robbery

that's how people often broke into the

they were either the sons and daughters of movie moguls and producers or whatnot or they went to SC or UCLA, there was just no way in other than, well, six degrees of separation, I suppose.

You knew someone who was the cousin of someone who sold drugs to someone who was divorced from someone who slept with someone who was someone in Hollywood.

Which is half of Hollywood.

What if I made it a thriller? What if I made it a horror thing? What if I gender-bend it? What if I make the protagonist a female? So, yeah, 96% of the entries, log lines or story summaries.

It's so good.

One of the things that I loved was when I was looking through it, okay, I am an old movie buff, like... there's really no actors I love better than Spencer Tracy and Catherine Hepburn.

And the fact that they came up

Yeah.

Well, a- and, and to, to, to, to your point about history, which is a very good point, uh, one of the things that I talk about is the, the first example in, in, in cinema history of a narrative film was in, right at the turn of the century, The Great Train Robbery, um, Porter's movie that was the first to use editing and cross-cutting to tell a story.

Because up till then, in the 1890s when film was born, they would, you know, the Lumière brothers or Edison would put a camera and have a guy sneeze, and people would be like, "Wow, that's a cool movie."

[laughs]

[laughs]

Or, or women walking out of a factory.

So D.S. Porter came along, and then D.W. Griffith took it to the next level in, in the early 1900s and said, "Well, we could do something more interesting here and actually tell a narrative story." And The Great Train Robbery, uh, in 1903 or whenever that was, uh, w- was, was the first great example of that.

So, uh, my, my article that I wrote was, "It All Started with a Heist."

In early 20th century, he was America's leading director.

His most famous film was The Great Train Robbery, 1903.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Connellsville bound train that is the Golden Silent Films podcast.

Today we are going to be looking ahead to one of the coolest film festivals in all of the land.

We will definitely have some photos of this tasty Porter Porter, as well as some great looks at the festival itself and Connellsville as a whole on our social media channels, as well as the YouTube version of this episode.

Now the full vintage silent film atmosphere is made complete by what you see and what you hear.

The night's scheduled festivities begin with, appropriately enough, Porter's now iconic 1903 picture, The Great Train Robbery.

After the intermission, the audience will be treated to the Buster Keaton classic, The General.