The Technology Trail

- Introduction
- The Role of the Railroad
- The Three Billies
   Six Decades of Change
THE ROLE OF THE RAILROAD

Making this new technology portable was challenging. The Vitagraph motion picture camera used by employees of the Edison Company as they traveled by rail was a polished wooden box about two feet square and nine inches deep. On the front was a two-inch, brass, barrel lens, on the side a crank and some levers. The film stock was of a new design made by the Eastman Co. especially for movie cameras - almost 35mm wide. The perforations, four to the inch, ran along either side of the film, leaving room for a rectangular image. As the 50-foot length of film wound through the camera, the perforations rotated a sprocket wheel and spun the shutter open for about 1/50th of a second. The Vitagraph camera traveled in a special Santa Fe Railway car outfitted with a photographic darkroom. This would be how the Edison Company was to record the earliest motion picture images of New Mexico and the U.S., returning to the company's studio in the early part of 1898 to patent and release the films.

The railroad brought other film pioneers. Along the routes of the AT&SF grew the Albuquerque and Las Vegas production locations - D.W. Griffith and American Biograph to Albuquerque in 1912; Tom Mix and Selig Polyscope to Las Vegas in 1914. The Rock Island (Southern Pacific) in the south with a spur line to the Phelps Dodge mines was a convenient path for the Lubin Motion Picture Company and Romaine Fielding to reach Silver City in 1913. Before relocating his company to Las Vegas later that year, Fielding built a roofless stage in Silver City, which was to be the first motion picture stage in New Mexico.

Another location along the AT&SF, which had remarkable longevity as a favored site, was Gallup. Once discovered, Gallup drew projects during the transitional period from silent to sound films, as well as productions using recently developed technology. The Paramount production of Redskin in 1929 was a technological milestone in the industry. The production shot on location in the Gallup and Ácoma areas, using the huge two-strip Technicolor camera. The camera ran two rolls of film simultaneously with a beam-splitter that separated the red and blue-green contents of the image. The results were very good, yet very expensive; the director filmed only the Indian world in color, the outside world in a toned monochrome.