In July 1898, when the Chautauqua cultural and educational movement opened its Boulder location for the first time, visitors, as well as Boulder residents, were treated to speakers, entertainers and musicians in the summer resort’s newly built auditorium. That same year, audiences were caught up in the fervor of the Spanish-American War. To please its audience, the Chautauqua Association presented a nationally circulating two-minute newsreel — the first film shown in Boulder.
Boulder audiences quickly realized that with films they could wander the world — and even the moon. Now, with the addition of television and the internet, we do the same today.
Patriotism ran high in the summer of 1898, during the Cuban War of Independence when the United States destroyed the Spanish fleet near Santiago, Cuba. Americans wanted to see action, not just read about it in their newspapers. The first motion picture shown at Boulder’s Chautauqua was the Battle of Santiago Bay, leading riveted audiences to believe photographers had shot it live, in Cuba.
The black-and-white newsreel only lasted two minutes. Little did audiences know that the film featured firecracker “explosions,” with cardboard ship models floating in shallow water, disguised with cigar smoke. It was a huge success, however, and its fledgling producer, American Vitagraph, became so successful that the company was later bought out by Warner Brothers.
In the years to come, Chautauqua was instrumental in ushering in films to an early 20th-century Boulder audience. In addition to newsreels, visitors and residents alike were spellbound when they viewed travelogues and fairy tales, including the six-minute film Cinderella. Produced by French director Georges Méliès, it transformed lizards into footmen and rats with long whiskers into coachmen. According to a Daily Camera reporter, the concluding scenes “sent the audience home in a daze.”
Perhaps the most startling film for early filmgoers was another of Méliès’ productions, A Trip to the Moon. In 1902, the 10-minute science fiction presentation was accompanied by music and shown at Chautauqua. The film’s plot centered on an expedition of space travelers who climbed into a capsule shaped like a bullet. Young women in skimpy (for the era) sailor outfits then pushed the capsule into a cannon and shot it off into space.
A Trip to the Moon was said to have been inspired by author Jules Verne’s science fiction classic, From the Earth to the Moon. In his novel, published in 1865, a manned capsule was fired from a gigantic cannon in Florida. At the time, Colorado was still a territory, but fictional scientists followed the capsule’s progress from their (also fictional) mission control mountaintop observatory on Longs Peak in today’s Rocky Mountain National Park.
The “man in the moon” (i.e., the moon with a face) watched the spacecraft’s arrival, until it hit him in the eye. Once on the moon, the space travelers got out of their capsule, unrolled their blankets, and went to sleep. They woke up surrounded by moon creatures with insect-like features. The men managed to capture one of the creatures and fought off the others before tipping the capsule off a cliff to return to Earth.
When the space travelers in A Trip to the Moon returned to Earth, they landed at sea where they were rescued by a ship, just like astronauts today in recent space missions. The space travelers in the 1902 film returned to cheering crowds that included the same young sailor-suited women.
Meanwhile, Vitagraph continued to release additional newsreels. Some that were shown all over the country, and likely also at Boulder’s Chautauqua, included the 1900 Galveston flood, the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley and the 1904 inauguration of President Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1905, newspapers reported that nationally known “moving picture man” Henry Hale Buckwalter had included Boulder in his short films with one titled, “200 Texas girls vacationing at Boulder Chautauqua.” Unfortunately, many of Buckwalter’s films, including the Chautauqua one, no longer exist.
A few days later, on August 1, 1905, the Daily Camera reported, “H. H. Buckwalter, the moving picture artist, claims that he has taken the funniest picture ever. It is a lot of Chautauqua women running after a man. They faint when the man is corralled by one of their number.” Afterward, the reporter commented, “The picture was amusing, particularly to those who knew the people caught by the camera.”
