1895: On March 19, Louis and Auguste Lumiere unveil their cinematographe, a combination camera and projector. On Dec. 28, they project films for a paying audience for the first time at the Grand Cafe on Paris’ Boulevard des Capucines.
1896: On April 23, Thomas Edison introduces the Vitascope, his film projection device.
1903: Director Edwin S. Porter’s “The Great Train Robbery,” erroneously called the first story film (there were earlier ones in France), is an enormous hit. It creates a new appetite for story films and westerns.
1912: Universal Studio is formed by Carl Laemmle.
1914: British music hall comic Charlie Chaplin, who will become the movies’ greatest international star, makes his first films. Paramount Studio is formed.
1914-17: America’s first cinema palaces, the Strand, the Rialto and the Rivoli, open in New York’s Times Square.
1915: William Fox forms the Fox Film Corp.; in 1925, it will merge with Twentieth Century. D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” is released to unprecedented success, opening the market for lavish full-length features (and spurring race riots). Griffith’s filmic innovations revolutionize the industry.
1917: Technicolor, the first viable process for making color movies, is invented by Herbert T. Kalmus and Daniel Comstock; the first film in that process, “The Gulf Between,” is released.
1920: American film production begins to shift decisively from New York to Hollywood, Calif.
1922: The first great documentary, Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North,” is released.
1923-24: Warner Bros., Columbia and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios are founded.
1926: Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone, a talking picture device, is demonstrated. Within a year, Warner Bros. releases the first talkie, the smash hit “The Jazz Singer.”
1927-29: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is created, pushed by MGM’s Louis B. Mayer as a non-union industry organization. As an afterthought, the Academy hands out merit awards at a ceremony in Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel on May 19, 1929. The first Best Picture winners (for 1927-28) are “Wings” and “Sunrise.” (“Sunrise” has its prize designation downgraded the next year.) The awards later are nicknamed “Oscars.”
1927: France’s Henri Chretien invents the anamorphic lens, the foundation for all widescreen processes.
1928: Kansas-born animator Walt Disney, 27, whose main cartoon character, Oswald Rabbit, is stolen by his employer, quickly invents another: Mickey Mouse. Within 10 years, Mickey’s worldwide popularity enables Disney to radically upgrade the field of animation.
1930: Cinema attendance in America doubles, from 57 million to more than 100 million.
1932: The Venice Film Festival, the first major international cinema exposition, begins.
1933: The Writers’ and Screen Actors’ Guilds are formed, joined in 1936 by the Directors’ Guild. A series of bitter labor battles begins between studio bosses and their employees.
1934: The Motion Picture Production Code, drafted in 1930, is put into effect, after years of pressure from church and civic groups. Effectively, it censors sexual, religious and political themes in films for the next three decades.
1934-35: Hitherto moribund British cinema produces an international smash in the Alfred Hitchcock thrillers “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “The 39 Steps.”
1939: Producer David O. Selznick releases the Civil War blockbuster “Gone With the Wind,” the movies’ all-time box-office champ until it was dethroned in 1965 by “The Sound of Music.” The year, which also saw the release of “Stagecoach,” “Ninotchka,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “The Wizard of Oz,” commonly is called Hollywood’s best.
1941: “Citizen Kane,” still widely considered the greatest film of all time, is made by Orson Welles, then 25.
1942: “Casablanca” is released. The U.S. government starts the Office of War Information to coordinate World War II film activity.
1946: The Cannes Film Festival commences. The first grand prize is shared by 11 films, including Roberto Rossellini’s “Open City” and Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend.”
1947: The House Un-American Activities Committee begins investigating Communist influence in Hollywood, leading to the industry black list.
1948: Steadily dropping attendance is linked to the rise of a new medium, television. To cash in, studios begin selling older films to TV stations.
1949: A 12-year-long legal battle results in the Paramount divestiture decree, requiring the studios to sell their theater chains. For most film scholars, this effectively ends Hollywood’s Golden Era.
1950: After winning the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Akira Kurosawa’s sensational “Rashomon” opens Japanese cinema to the West.
1953: Cinemascope is introduced in the biblical epic “The Robe.” Panavision, Vistavision and the others soon follow.
1959: The current all-time Oscar champ, William Wyler’s remake of the silent biblical epic “Ben-Hur,” wins 11.
1964: The first made-for-TV movie, “See How They Run,” is broadcast on NBC.
1966: The Production Code is subjected to a sweeping revision and, two years later, replaced by an industry-sponsored non-binding rating system.
1968: Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction epic “2001: A Space Odyssey” sparks a special effects explosion that eventually transforms Hollywood.
1969: Swede Vilgot Sjoman’s 1967 “I Am Curious: Yellow,” seized by U.S. Customs, is freed for exhibition and opens to huge success, paving the way for explicit sex in “serious” films. Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” reheats a national debate on screen violence.
1971: Francis Ford Coppola’s film of Mario Puzo’s Mafia best seller “The Godfather” becomes the No. 1 all-time box-office hit.
1975: HBO inaugurates the cable TV era, of which movies will be a major part.
1975-77: The gigantic grosses of “Jaws” and “Star Wars” usher in the age of the super blockbuster.
1976: Sony and JVC come out with the videocassette formats Betamax and VHS, causing the biggest revolution in film exhibition since the nickelodeon era. By 1992, 77 percent of American households will own VCRs, and more revenue will be generated by movies watched at home than in the theaters.
1988: Zhang Yimou’s “Red Sorghum” wins the Berlin Film Festival grand prize, opening Chinese cinema to the West.
1989: Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” becomes a landmark film of African-American cinema.
1993: “Jurassic Park” gives director Steven Spielberg the all-time woldwide movie box-office crown for the third time.
Spielberg’s other 1993 film, the Holocaust epic “Schindler’s List,” wins the Best Picture Oscar and most of the major critics’ awards.
