Hard Telling Not Knowing tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
This story was originally published in March 2024.
Imagine being a resident of rural Maine in the late 1890, and crowding into an auditorium to see something called a “moving picture” — something you’d read about in the newspaper, but hadn’t ever witnessed for yourself.
For eyes that had never seen such a thing, the experience must have been staggering. There are contemporary reports of people ducking when they saw a projection of a moving train coming at them, and gasping in awe at the sight of the ocean on screen.
Nobody knows exactly when the first movie was shown in Maine, but the odds are that it was sometime in 1896. The first mention of a moving picture in a Bangor newspaper was in 1896, when the Vitascope — an early film projection device distributed by the Edison Manufacturing Company — showed movies at the Bangor Opera House. The Bangor Whig and Courier called it “intensely interesting” and “wondrous in its detail and mechanism.”
It would be several more years until a moving picture was actually shot in Maine. While we’ll never be 100 percent certain that it was truly the first, both Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport and the Library of Congress agree that the earliest known example of a film made in Maine was shot in 1901.
That film is just 15 seconds long, and shows — of course — two men drawing up a lobster trap from their boat, somewhere off the coast of Maine. It truly doesn’t get more Maine than that.
“Drawing a Lobster Pot,” as it came to be known, was shot in 1901 and copyrighted in 1902 by Arthur Marvin, who filmed it for the New York-based American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, as part of a series of short films about fishing in the U.S. Many of the earliest movies were called “actualities,” showing people going about their daily lives, rather than fictional narrative stories.
By the turn of the 20th century, moving pictures had become commonplace across Maine. They were typically screened in town halls and opera houses, as part of a larger program of entertainment. With the relative ease of portability of projection equipment, moving picture programs quickly became incredibly popular, especially in small towns — it cost a lot less to set up a projector than it did to host an entire theater troupe or orchestra.
By 1908 most large cities and towns across the country had a movie theater, usually opened in an empty storefront in a downtown. It’s unclear which movie theater was the first to open in Maine, but the oldest ones we can find are nickel theaters — from which we get the word “nickelodeon” — that opened in Portland, Lewiston and Bangor in 1907. Bangor’s opened on Central Street in August of that year, according to the Bangor Daily News archive, which dubbed it Maine’s “prettiest moving picture theater.”
The nickel theaters in Maine were followed in the 1910s and 1920s by purpose-built movie theaters, also called movie palaces. Among the Maine movie palaces still standing and operational today are the Strand Theatre in Rockland, the Temple Theatre in Houlton and the oldest remaining, the Colonial Theatre in Belfast, which opened in 1912. Others, like the Bijou Theatre and the Park Theatre in Bangor, were torn down in the 1970s as single-screen theaters declined and multiplexes became the dominant type of cinema.
Though it’s commonly believed that the 1920 film “Way Down East,” directed by the controversial D.W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish, was the first feature film ever shot in Maine, that movie was actually filmed in Vermont, standing in for Washington County. The actual first movie filmed in Maine was “The Rider of the King Log,” a Maine-produced melodrama filmed in and around Augusta in 1920 and released in 1921. The film, like so many silent films of the era, has since been lost.
The early days of movies in Maine were an exciting time for people just getting used to the wondrous new technology. Today, we can watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters on huge screens with great sound from the comfort of our living rooms. What would those Mainers seeing moving pictures for the first back then think of that?
