Yeah but the movie was made in 1930s Hollywood. There were drugs for sure.

Me too. I don't know what Opium those filmmakers were smoking back then but it must have been good.

Looks like the beginning of an after school special

Someone had to design the rocket to the moon ride

It's a colorized photo, they probably weren't wearing white but rather a light color.

The guy in the middle is definitely wearing Sex Panther.

I make up back stories for them. She slowly poisoned him with arsenic and inherited his horse meat packing fortune before dying herself in a tragic dirigible accident.

But, like I said, companies that were part of Edison's patent trust were shooting in California early on and they didn't need to worry about his lawyers. NYC based Biograph joined Edison's trust in 1908. They first started filming in California in 1910. Chicago based Essanay was also in the trust and they opened studios in California in 1912 after a failed attempt shooting in Colorado.

The studios that weren't part of the trust saw some benefit in being in a different court jurisdiction but the fact that studios that were part of the trust also relocated around the same time would indicate that was not the biggest factor.

It wasn't distance so much as court jurisdiction. The west coast courts weren't as friendly to Edison. But even the studios that were part of Edison's patent trust started shooting in California during the winter pretty early on. Other places were tried like Florida (too tropical) but LA emerged as a go to pretty early on because of climate, varied geography (mountains, desert, ocean) and because LA was in a boom period at the time so it was growing large enough to have the resources to support the industry.

As far as I've heard the proximity to Mexico thing is mostly a myth. In a 1910s car on 1910s roads I think it would have taken half a day to get to the border, if that were the motivation you'd just put the studio in San Diego.

It wasn't marketing it was meeting the demands of consumers better. Beta may have had slightly better video quality and better made machines with better tracking and pausing in the first generation but they were also really expensive and initially they could only record one hour. The first prerecorded movies available had to be split onto two tapes.

In the early days of VCRs there wasn't much of a rental market, people mainly bought them so they could record their favorite shows on TV and watch them later while they weren't at home or while they were watching something else on another channel.

VHS sacrificed quality so it could record longer and because it was licensed to multiple companies you could buy a machine for less too. The slightly better picture quality of Beta didn't mean much to somebody with a shitty 15" late 1970s TV. All they knew was they could get a VHS player for half the price and they could record an entire movie or football game off TV. Sony realized their mistake and made changes but it was too late and they finally gave up in the late 80s. Also Laserdisc came out shortly after VHS and anybody who had the money and was a real movie buff wanted that for playback quality versus Beta.

Hollywood was reluctant at first because the business model had always been you had to pay to see the movie each time. Who's gonna go see Star Wars or a Disney movie in the theater again if they can just watch it at home over and over whenever you want. That's why the tapes were initially so expensive when they did come out, because it was for renting not owning unless you were rich enough to not care.

With porn there was the obvious appeal of privacy.

Not to mention the majority of them were probably racists which was the style of the time.

That's his grandpa's birthday not the year the photo was taken. Grandpa is old in the photo.

He was in his mid 30s when the US entered the war, he wasn't exactly front line material. But yeah he could have made training movies with his buddy Ronnie in the Army.

It says colorized. I'm thinking this was a black and white newspaper photo and the colorization makes it look artificial.

Bum bumm ba dump bummmm.....

They were analog, though. So instead of your call dropping it just got staticky. I got one to work when I was camping one time even though we were far away from any city. Reception was terrible but I got a call to go through. With modern gsm phones you probably just wouldn't have a signal at all.

We had one like this in my mom's car when I was in High School circa 1992. It probably wasn't the latest model but she had a budget plan that was just for emergencies so they likely gave her the absolute cheapest model they had.

We had one of these in my mom's car in the early 90s in SoCal and it was also cellular one. Her plan only had a handful of minutes a month, it was really just in case we had car trouble and needed to call AAA. At the end of the month we got to use up the 15 minutes or whatever it was. I remember calling my grandma while were driving to her house and the entire conversation was just, "Grandma! I'm in a car and I'm talking to you!".

And that was after he was already the head of a New York mafia family