The week of May 18, 2020, Chicago Movie Tours​ looks at movie-related events surrounding the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.

We kick off the week with Thomas Edison. Yep, that guy—inventor of the electric light bulb and phonograph, and while brilliant, also reportedly an egotist, a tyrant to his employees, and a neglectful family man. ⁣
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In 1891, Thomas Edison and his colleague William K.L. Dickson developed the kinetoscope, a device that allowed one person to peep through a small window and watch a series of moving images. Edison’s and Dickson’s kinetoscope, then, is the forerunner of the motion-picture film projector. (In this kinetoscope video, Mr. Dickson greets you with his hat.)⁣

Edison was supposed to premiere the kinetoscope at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago—THE place for showing off new technology. But he could not get the machine perfected in time. ⁣
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Newspapers report that thousands of visitors to the World’s Fair asked exhibitors where they could see “the new machine which was to reproduce moving figures and scenes before the eye.” But the fairgoers were always turned away, “doomed to disappointment.”⁣
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Edison would premiere the kinetoscope at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in May 1893—as “a greater marvel than anything you saw at the World’s Fair” in Chicago.⁣

Travel back in time with us to Chicago's 1893 World’s Fair to learn about the origins of cinema and a photographer (and murderer!) named Eadweard Muybridge.

On May 21, we #TBT to August 3, 1951, when the film Little Egypt premiered at The Chicago Theatre. ⁣
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Little Egypt is a film loosely based on 3-4 real-life bellydancers who performed a dance called the hootchy-kootchy at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. ⁣
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In the Technicolor movie, Rhonda Fleming plays an amalgamation of the bellydancers, including Fahreda Mazar, who danced on the fair’s Midway, near Zoopraxiscope Hall, which we visit in the above walking tour. 

In the fair’s Cairo section, Mazar’s bellydance was so daring and unique that people “saw, gasped, and yelled for more,” one newspaper reports. While religious organizations condemned it and husbands guiltily sneaked away from home to catch a glimpse of it, Mazar’s dance is also remembered as art—and it was copied by many female dancers, including Hollywood’s Rhonda Fleming. ⁣
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Well, kind of.⁣
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By 1951, Universal Pictures had to adhere to more rules than the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Because of Hollywood’s censors, Rhonda Fleming could only move her hips side to side rather than in a clockwise motion, as Mazar et al would have. One Texas reporter writes, “Miss Fleming can make only a semi-circular movement. That is, from one to six o’clock, rather than the full twelve hours.”⁣
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Ahhhh, filmgoing audiences can virtually always count on film censorship and America’s (Puritanical) views on sexuality and the female body.⁣

Our newsletter, Highlight Reel, introduces featured and coming attractions, and it reviews events you may have missed.

OOPS! Issue #6 included the wrong date. We looked back at Marshall Field’s history with cinema​ during the week of May 25, 2020, not during the week of May 18.