Music composed and recorded by Mengxue Tan, 2021.
Chicks to Order (1903) 1 min.
American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.
Camera: G. W. Bitzer. Cast: Kathryn Osterman
Released as Strictly Fresh Eggs,
Biograph’s production log originally called this Why She Didn’t Make the Cake.
Source: National Archives and Records Administration. Its catalog has a series called “Motion Picture Films Used as Exhibits in United States Court Cases, between ca. 1902–ca. 1903,” which comprises records for four films in this case. Notes for Chicks to Order say: “Kathryn Osterman breaks egg into a plate. As the content reaches the plate, it transforms into a baby chick. Action repeats twelve times through stop-action photography.” [A dozen eggs, see.] Compared to the Lubin bootleg version, this one has wider framing and sharper focus. It also has a few frames at the beginning and end not seen in the other copy.
Read this informative account of how a 35mm print of this film came to be deposited in the National Archives, along with a 35mm duplicate copy made by the S. Lubin company, a commercial rival. Lubin sold its dupe as Chicks Made to Order. Heidi Holmstrom, “Pioneers of Movie Piracy and the Expansion of Copyright Law,” in The Unwritten Record, National Archives blog, Feb. 12, 2020.
Among the thousands of short films produced in the early twentieth century, few have extensive documentation of their production, distribution, and exhibition. By happenstance, we have two pieces of information about this little Biograph film, number 2,391 in its production queue. Movie magazines or trade journals did not yet exist in 1903. But we have the circuit court records from the case of American Mutoscope and Biograph Company v. Sigmund Lubin (October 1903), for which Chicks to Order was an exhibit contrasted with the Lubin dupe, sold as Chicks Made to Order. The other Chicks tidbit I located is from a published report more than a decade later: “Miles Brothers, Pioneers,” Moving Picture World, July 10, 1915. Miles company veteran James A. Sciaroni shows the reporter his hand-written ledger of film titles they loaned to paying customers for short-term use.
The Miles company of San Francisco is credited with changing the commerce in early motion pictures, renting film prints to theaters rather than selling them outright. Sciaroni documented that in 1903 he was renting films to theaters nationwide (or at least west of the Mississippi River). The second-ever rental transaction was for a reel of 599 feet, combining five prints.
• Strictly Fresh Eggs (78 feet long) a trick film/comedy;
• How I Caught the Burglars (110 ft.) a Biograph comedy;
• Bass Fishing (63 ft.) a Biograph actuality, shot in 1901 for the U.S. Fisheries Commission;
• Destruction of [a] Chimney (123 ft.) from Urban, UK;
• The Enchanted Well (225 ft.) a comic fairy tale from France — and the first Georges Méliès paper print deposited for U.S. copyright.
Biograph’s one-minute films were also sold to the Mutoscope market, printed on flip-cards for viewing on hand-cranked machines found in a variety of amusement centers and arcades. In those cases, no musical accompaniment would have been played.
This video also viewable at stream.nyu.edu/id/1_afbb60dx.
A collaboration between the Orphan Film Symposium and NYU’s Screen Scoring Program.
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Dan Streible, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies
NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies
Orphan Film Symposium director