Motion Picture Patents Company

The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC, also known as the Edison Trust), founded in December 1908, was a trust of all the major American film companies (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, Star Film Company, American Pathé), the leading film distributor (George Kleine) and the biggest supplier of raw film stock, Eastman Kodak. The MPPC ended the domination of foreign films on American screens, standardized the manner in which films were distributed and exhibited in America, and improved the quality of American motion pictures by internal competition. But it also discouraged its members' entry into feature film production, and the use of outside financing, both to its members' eventual detriment.

Read more about Motion Picture Patents Company:  Creation, Policies, Backlash and Decline

Famous quotes containing the words motion picture, motion, picture and/or company:

    Too many Broadway actors in motion pictures lost their grip on success—had a feeling that none of it had ever happened on that sun-drenched coast, that the coast itself did not exist, there was no California. It had dropped away like a hasty dream and nothing could ever have been like the things they thought they remembered.
    Mae West (1892–1980)

    It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar, and we can’t beat it open. ...The fixed is a world without fire--dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.
    Annie Dillard (b. 1945)

    With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    In not having an appointment at Harvard, I’m in the company of a great many people whose work I admire tremendously, in particular women of color.
    Catharine MacKinnon (b. 1946)