Filmed Scenery on the Live Stage

Not quite half a year after Edison's introduction of projected motion pictures to the American public in 1896, North American Review writer George Parsons Lathrop wondered whether the stage would be revolutionized by filmed scenery. Theatrical entrepreneurs and effects inventors quickly explored the multimedia potential of the new medium, enlarging the scenic scope of the stage and bringing to the theatre a spatial freedom that in some cases transcended the limits of traditional stagecraft, for instance by simulating movement in depth. Prominent Broadway producers featured filmed scenery effects in popular productions for several decades. As projection technology has improved—most recently with digital techniques—designers repeatedly have envisioned a stagecraft of screens and moving images, but practitioners and historians are largely unaware of the origins of this perpetually innovative scenic approach. In this article, Gwendolyn Waltz examines the early history of filmed scenery.