Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

1920s

Herein is a detailed timeline of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events (organized by decade) that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.

Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points

(by decade)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

1920s - Part 1

Year	Event and Significance
1920	The movement of German film Expressionism was established with Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmed in 1919 and released in 1920. Its bizarre sets, angular camera angles and make-up influenced future literary and cinematic styles, notably the cycle of Universal's horror films in the 30s, and film noir in the 40s.
1920	Producer John Randolph Bray's (and Bray Picture Corporation's) The Debut of Thomas Cat was the first color (2-color process) cartoon, using the expensive Brewster Natural Color Process (a 2-emulsion color process), an unsuccessful precursor of Technicolor. This was the first animated short genuinely made in color using color film. However, some sources have claimed that the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company's In Gollywog Land (1912, UK) was the earliest, using Kinemacolor.
1920	It was the "marriage of the century" when stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks married in late March, after divorcing their spouses. He bought a lodge for his new bride -- named Pickfair, which soon became the social center of movieland, and served as a gathering place for politicians, journalists, artists, and foreign diplomats.
1920	Douglas Fairbanks starred in the popular swashbuckler adventure film, The Mark of Zorro as the masked hero - the first of many film versions of the 1919 story "The Curse of Capistrano" by Johnston McCulley. It was the first film released through United Artists, recently formed in 1919 by Fairbanks, Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford.
1920	Alice Guy, the world's first female filmmaker and a key figure in the development of narrative film, directed her final film, the feature-length Tarnished Reputations.
1921	Director George Melford's and Famous Players-Lasky's melodramatic The Sheik debuted and established star Rudolph Valentino as cinema's best-known lover. It was one of the first of numerous exotic and erotic (at least for the day) romance/adventure films for men and women alike, designed to stimulate box office success. Valentino reached the peak of his stardom in this year, and also starred in Metro Pictures' The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
1921	Silent comic star/director Charlie Chaplin's first feature-length film (a six-reeler) and first film as producer, The Kid, was released, with a star-making role for young Jackie Coogan. Both a slapstick comedy and a soap opera tearjerker, it inspired future films such as The Champ (1931) (teaming another popular child star Jackie Cooper with Wallace Beery) and Three Men and a Baby (1987). Chaplin's young 13-year old co-star Lita Grey, who portrayed a tempting angel in the film, became his second wife from 1924-1927.
1921	Heavyweight silent-screen comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle signed a $3 million contract with Paramount and celebrated with a wild party in a San Francisco hotel. There, he was arrested for the alleged rape and murder of 25 year-old bit-player/actress Virginia Rappe. Tabloids sensationalized the crime and made up stories about Arbuckle's 'bottle party.' The multiple manslaughter trials against the innocent actor always ended with the finding of 'not guilty,' but Arbuckle's career was over after two hung juries and a subsequent acquittal. As a result, the public conceived of Hollywood as wild and scandalous -- and pressures were brought to bear on the industry.
1921	The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Famous Players-Lasky for violating anti-trust laws by refusing to allow independent films to play in its theaters.
1921	D.W. Griffith's film Dream Street, with experimental sound (in its introductory prologue) using inventor Orland E. Kellum's Photokinema, has been regarded as the first feature film to use sound.
1921	Writer/director Lois Weber's The Blot was released, a tale of class struggle, with a plea for social tolerance and consciousness toward the working class (clergy and teachers) struggling to survive and make a living.
1922	Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, a record of Inuit Eskimo life, was the first feature film documentary or non-fictional narrative feature film. [The word "documentary" was reportedly first used in February, 1926, by John Grierson in his review of Flaherty's Moana (1926) for the New York Sun. The term may also have been used 12 years earlier by famed photographer Edward Curtis in a prospectus for his Seattle-based Continental Film Company, referring to his film In the Land of the Headhunters (1914).] Flaherty's film helped to usher in the documentary film movement, although it raised some controversy because it 're-created' or staged some of its hunting scenes, rather than being truly non-fictional.
1922	Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov experimented with montage, a new editing technique pioneered by Russian filmmakers.
1922	Nervous Hollywood censored itself by creating the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) - later renamed as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), to be headed by former postmaster General Will H. Hays. The Hays Office (as it would be called), a film review board (censorship division), was created to serve as Hollywood's public relations organization, and to clean up the motion picture industry.
1922	A New York York State Court ruled that actors cannot prevent the re-editing or re-release of a film in which they appeared.
1922	The Toll of the Sea debuted as the first general release (widely-distributed or commercial) Hollywood feature film (five-reels, approx. 54 minutes) to use the improved two-tone Technicolor process. It also starred Anna May Wong (as Lotus Flower), the first prominent Asian-American leading lady.
1922	The Power of Love was the first 3-D feature film shown to a paying film audience. It was projected dual-strip in the red/green anaglyph format, making it both the earliest known film that utilized dual strip projection and the earliest known film in which anaglyph glasses were used. The film utilized and may have been the only commercial film produced in the dual-camera, dual-projector system developed by Harry K. Fairhall and Robert F. Elder.
1922	German director F. W. Murnau's influential, expressionistic vampire film Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (aka Nosferatu eine Symphonie des Grauens, Germ.) initiated a trend for Gothic tales of horror. It was considered the first genuine vampire picture. It starred Max Schreck as Count Orlok - a rat-faced vampire. Without authorized rights to the Bram Stoker novel, Murnau had to rename his vampire Nosferatu, Count Dracula was named Count Orlock, and the action was changed from Transylvania to Bremen.
1922	45 year-old director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered in Los Angeles with a bullet in his back. There were over a dozen potential suspects in the mysterious scandal, including Keystone Kops heroine Mabel Normand, 19 year-old blonde starlet Mary Miles Minter who starred in Anne of Green Gables, Minter's protective mother, and houseman Henry Peavey. Eventually, nobody was ever arrested or tried for this sensationalistic and fascinating crime, although combined with the Fatty Arbuckle case in 1921 and Wallace Reid's drug-related death in early 1923, a new age of censorship would soon be dawning for Hollywood.
1922	German Shepherd Rin Tin Tin became cinema's first canine star - and helped save its studio (Warner Bros.) from bankruptcy during the silent era. Rin Tin Tin made almost 30 films for the studio, beginning with The Man From Hell's River.
1922	The first Walt Disney cartoon was Little Red Riding Hood, one of his Laugh O Grams studio productions that he made at his own animation studio in Kansas City before relocating to Los Angeles shortly thereafter.
1922	Impresario Sid Grauman opened the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood -- the first 'movie palace' outside of downtown Los Angeles. It had Hollywood's first film premiere on October 18, 1922 - showing UA's silent swashbuckler Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks.
1923	The four Warner brothers' film distribution and production business was incorporated and called Warner Brothers Pictures Inc. - one of the first large film studios. They released the 6-reel comedy-drama The Gold Diggers.
1923	At the Rivoli Theatre in New York, Lee de Forest demonstrated a sound-on-film method for recording sound on the edge of the film strip, called Phonofilm. He projected a series of short musical films featuring vaudeville performers. It would become the industry standard.
1923	One of the highest-grossing films of the year was Paramount's and James Cruze's feature-length western The Covered Wagon. It was an expensive effort which cost $800,000 yet brought $4 million at the box-office. The film was the historical drama of a wagon train in the mid-1800s moving westward, encountering harsh environmental and weather conditions (a river crossing and prairie fire), and of course, hostile Indians. Hollywood was encouraged to produce many more westerns in subsequent years.
1923	Handsome silent era actor Wallace Reid was appearing, on average (over a seven-year period) in as many as one feature film every seven weeks, when he died of influenza at the age of 32. The real cause of his death was a weakened immune system due to his addiction to morphine (allegedly often supplied by the studio to keep him working) and his alcoholism. This was one of many scandals that would rock Hollywood and eventually lead to attempts to clamp down and prompt the implementation of the motion picture production code in the early 1930s.
1923	Director Cecil B. DeMille's first version of The Ten Commandments was the most expensive film ever made and featured the largest set ever constructed in movie history to that time - the 'City of the Pharoah' (120 feet tall, 720 feet wide, and with massive Egyptian statuary weighing 1,000,000 pounds). Its 'parting of the Red Sea' scene featured state-of-the-art special effects, and some segments were filmed in early Technicolor. After the film, the director ordered the set in San Luis Obispo County (California) buried -- 60 years later, archeologists uncovered it. DeMille remade his silent epic in 1956.
1923	The Hollywood (originally HOLLYWOODLAND) sign was built for $21,000.
1923	The Fleischer Brothers (Dave and Max) produced the first feature-length animation (a documentary), titled The Einstein Theory of Relativity.
1924	Animator Walt Disney, for Laugh-Gram Studios, directed his first cartoon (his first unfinished pilot film), the 12-minute short Alice's Wonderland (aka Alice in Slumberland). It was never released theatrically. The Alice comedies of the mid-20s, as they were later known, were a major stepping stone in Disney's career.
1924-1927	The Fleischer Brothers made the first animated films (cartoons) that featured a soundtrack, in a series of 36 films released in the mid-1920s called Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes (1924-1927) - the precursors to karaoke. The first sound cartoon was one of the Song Car-Tunes -- Mother Pin a Rose on Me. They were also the first audience participation films, with sing-along lyrics and a 'bouncing-ball' helper. They included Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (1926), When The Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves For Alabam' (1926), Comin' Tho' The Rye (1926), Margie (1926), My Old Kentucky Home (1926), Tramp, Tramp, Tramp-The Boys Are Marching (1927), By The Light Of The Silvery Moon (1927). In My Old Kentucky Home, Bimbo said to the audience: “Follow the ball and join in everybody.”
1924	Erich von Stroheim directed the influential Greed, a 10-hour epic based on Frank Norris' novel McTeague. The movie was brutally edited down into a 2-hour length before theatrical release - an early example of directorial vs. studio conflict, and one of cinedom's 'lost films'.
1924	Theaters showed the first double features.
1924	The future MGM studio was formed out of the merger of three US film production companies: Marcus Loew's Metro Pictures Corporation (1916), Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (1917) (known as Metro-Goldwyn), and the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Company (1918). MGM was destined to become the dominant studio of Hollywood's Golden Age during the 30s, under Louis B. Mayer's direction.
1924	The first film produced by the newly-formed studio MGM was He Who Gets Slapped (1924), starring Lon Chaney, although it wasn't their first released film - its release was postponed until the end-of-year holiday season to bring in more profits with increased audiences. He Who Gets Slapped also featured the first appearance of the MGM lion (a lion named Slats). The famous MGM lion roar (from a lion named Jackie) in the studio's opening logo, however, was first recorded and viewed in White Shadows of the South Seas (1928) - via a Gramophone record.
1924	F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, with revolutionary camera work by the celebrated German cinematographer Karl Freund, virtually invented a host of new techniques for a mobile camera ("unchained camera").
1924	C.B.C. Film Sales Company (founded by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn, and Joseph Brandt) officially changed its name to Columbia Pictures Corporation.
Mid-to late 1920s	Most of the major Hollywood motion-picture studios had been established by this time, including the Big Five (Warner Brothers, Fox (later 20th Century Fox), RKO, Loew's Inc. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)), Paramount (from Famous Players-Lasky)), and the Little Three (United Artists, Universal, and Columbia). All of these studios used Thomas H. Ince's efficient and profitable filmmaking "factory system".
1925	The great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein directed Battleship Potemkin, a film celebrating the 20th anniversary of an unsuccessful Russian Revolution in 1905 and a portrait of mutiny aboard a battleship named Potemkin. His influential film, considered one of the greatest of all time, effectively established the dialectic film montage technique, especially in the Odessa Steps sequence (copied later - in tribute - in films such as Brazil (1985), The Untouchables (1987), and comically in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)), as an important structural method to evoke a dramatic response from the juxtaposition of two clashing film shots. Non-linear editing in future films, such as Pulp Fiction (1994) owe their stylistic techniques to this film.
1925	The epic silent film Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was released - it cost a record-setting $3.95 million to produce, but the blockbuster for MGM grossed $9 million on its first release. It was notable for its use of a hanging miniature - to fill in the upper tier portion of the coliseum (with fake spectators) for the famed chariot race sequence. It also contained some two-color Technicolor sequences (e.g., the triumphant processional sequence).
1925	One of silent film genius Charlie Chaplin's classic masterpieces featuring the Tramp character was released -- The Gold Rush. Chaplin directed, produced, starred in, and scripted the film. It became the highest grossing silent comedy film of all time.
1925	Universal foreshadowed their success in the horror genre with Rupert Julian's expressionistic The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, Sr. ("The Man of a Thousand Faces") in his most notable role as the partially-disfigured "Phantom" in the Paris Opera House. It set the prototypical style for the studio's cycle of classic horror films in the early 30s - the decade of Universal's monster movies (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc).
1925	The first feature-length dinosaur-oriented science-fiction film to be released was The Lost World. It was also the first feature length film made in the US with the pioneering first major use (primitive) of stop-motion animation with models for its special effects.
1925	The first in-flight movie, a black & white silent film from First National titled The Lost World, was shown in a WWI converted Handley-Page bomber during a 30-minute flight from London to Paris in April for Imperial Airways. It featured pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien.
1925	Western Electric and Warner Bros. agreed to develop a system to make movies with sound.
1925	A title card in the silent epic war film The Big Parade demonstrated one of the earliest uses of a curse word in a US film: "March and sweat the whole damned day..."