John C. "Jack" Green

Other Events:

• Name: Belsaz the Magician
• Occupation: Guelph City, Wellington Co., Ontario, Canada; manager - Griffin's Theatre
• Residence: Mundare, , Alberta, Canada
• Eby ID Number: Waterloo-223274

Notes:

The Capitol opened amidst much fanfare on Monday, April 18, 1921. Its establishment represented the decline of local ownership and introduction of the corporate cinema in town \endash it was owned by the Famous Players Canadian Corporation (U.S.-controlled). It boasted 1,150 seats on a main floor and balcony, surrounded by "artistic lighting effects" and fixtures that were "exceptionally decorative." Its opening featured an appearance by the famous magician John C. Green, the Ontario district manager for Famous Players Canadian theatres \endash who had in July 1896 in Ottawa overseen one of the earliest film exhibitions in Canada....

"The Closing Of The Capitol Theatre, 1961 - A Peterborough Movie-Going History". 2017. A Peterborough Movie-Going History. https://www.peterboroughmoviehistory.com/other-writing/the-theatre-district-1961.

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The exhibition in Ottawa, as with many early moving picture exhibitions, was part of a magic show bill. John C. Green, the magician at Ottawa's park, did a thirty-minute magic show and described the moving pictures on the screen.

Canadian Film Weekly 1951, p. 25.

" View Of The Vitascope In Canada | Kinema: A Journal For Film And Audiovisual Media ". 2021. Openjournals.Uwaterloo.Ca. https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/kinema/article/view/898/886.

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....John C. Green, known professionally as "Belsaz, the Magician," introduced the short films (less than two minutes in length), which were projected onto a large canvas screen. They included The May Irwin Kiss (1896), the great hit of 1896; Watermelon Contest (1896); Shooting the Chutes (1896); Black Diamond Express (1896); and LaLoie Fuller's Serpentine Dance (n.d.). Interestingly, the Governor General's Foot Guards Band provided a musical accompaniment. The show was a great success. Thrilled by the Vitascope's life-like reproduction of movement, Ottawans flocked to West End Park, and the Holland brothers extended the engagement. Audiences enjoyed the sense of "being there," being part of the activities taking place on the screen. Within months, entrepreneurs were exhibiting motion pictures in urban centres across the country. ...

Manitoba History: Movie Exhibition in Manitoba: The Case of J. A. Schuberg by Robert M. Seiler and Tamara P. Seiler
Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary Number 58, June 2008

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On a warm July night in 1896, a month after Laurier and the Liberals had been victorious at the polls, hundreds of Ottawans took the excursion to the easterly terminus of the Electric Railway, where for 10 cents they were treated to music from the Governor General's Foot Guard Band, a magic act performed by John C. Green (alias 'Belsaz') and the'first motion pictures known to have been shown in Canada. After a quick change from his Belsaz costume, showman Green projected new magic--animated pictures including the 'scandalous' May Irwin-John C. Rice film, The Kiss, on Edison's Vitascope which had been brought to Ottawa by the Holland brothers.

GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACY IN ACTION: A HISTORY OF CINEMA IN CANADA 1896-1941 by JULIET THELMA POLLARD, B.A., University of British Columbia, 1973

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES Department of History

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WHAT is the history of motion picture " exhibition in Canada? Alfred W. Cooper brought Clarke's "Wheel of Life,"invented in 1845, from London, England to Toronto. A tin cylinder, when revolved rapidly by hand, its colored pictures showed people going through the motions of eating, drinking, clowning and so on. It was treated as a toy by the children of each new Cooper generation. When the motion picture industry had grown great enough to invite enquiry into its past by historians, Clarke's "Wheel of Life" became valuable in the eyes of its owners. It is said a bid for it by the Ford Museum was refused.

Before the Kinetoscope there was the triple stereoptican, which was used to show "Dissolving Views" of "Picturesque and Beautiful" Canada and Europe. These, made in England, "were not lantern slides," wrote the late Jack C. Green of Mundare, Alberta, who exhibited them, "but showed the sunrise, which changed visibly to full day and then moonlight." He had three complete two hour performances, one of which was made up of 135 slides about Canada furnished him by an official Canadian Pacific Railway photographer. A second set showed the United Kingdom and the third "Famous Castles and Cathedrals of the World." The first movie exhibitors found it necessary to assure their patrons that what they were about to see were "No Stereoptican Views."

Canada, of course, has had its share of Kinetoscopes, which were discussed at the beginning of this article

WHAT was the first exhibition of movies on a screen in Canada ? Green, 85 years old and still a touring magician through the Canadian Northwest when he died on August 28, 1951, had said that he was associated with the first showing and his claim seems to be correct. In answer to a query, Green wrote to the Canadian Film Weekly on July 26, 1944 and headed his communication: "The actual and true story of the first moving pictures ever to be shown in Canada." Said he:

"In June, 1896 was with Dr. Bailey, a medicine show playing along the Ottawa River, was reading the Ottawa Free Press about June 2 or 3, 1896 and read where O'Hearn and Soper of the Ottawa Street Railway Company were going to bring to Ottawa Tom Edison's marvellous invention - pictures that move, also that only one other machine was in operation at that time in New York at the Eden Musee, if my memory serves me right.

"So I lost no time in writing O'Hearn and Soper and got an engagement for two weeks. I did a 30-minute magic show and described the four pictures on the screen, all 50-foot films, all fastened together at the end like a belt, so they just kept repeating as long as the machine was in operation. First four films-four colored boys eating watermelon, Black Diamond Express running 80 miles an hour, the New York Central Ry., a bathing scene at Atlantic City, and LaLoie Fuller doing the Butterfly Dance, Governor General's Foot Guards Band furnished the music.

"This all happened at West End Park, Ottawa, June 15, 1896 and kept going all summer to big crowds. I brought Jimmy Hardy, the high wire walker the week after he crossed Niagara Gorge on July 4. Then that fall I went down through New England States with my magic show and was engaged by Archie L. Sheppard as press man and advance agent. "Bought from Alf Harston, New York, an Edison [Projecting] Kinetoscope and came back to Canada. Ottawa had a new park in the way of coming to be Ottawa's Britannia on the Bay. I was engaged at $100 per week all summer and closed Labour Day and furnished moving pictures in front of the grandstand at Almonte and other fairs, wore out three copies of The Great Train Robbery, bought film from Pathe, Biograph, Geo. Kline and many others, played week stand for A. J. Small, Kingston, etc. for several years.

"Just kept going until every vacant store in Canada with benches or kitchen chairs became a 5 and 10c show. Every butcher, baker and candlestick maker became a so-called exhibitor."

There is an interesting sidelight on the foregoing. Mary Pickford was being interviewed by the press in her suite in the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa, to which city she had come to present the annual Canadian Film Awards. One of the newspapermen present was Morris McDougall of Ottawa, correspondent and Press Gallery representative for the Christian Science Monitor. The original Edison letter and the enlarged copy of it for the Edison Museum were on display. These were of special interest to Mr. McDougall because he had seen the first Kinetoscope in Ottawa in 1894 and two years later the first screen movies! The veteran newsman, born in 1882, lived a stone's throw from West End Park. The films were shown, he said, in a rink-like building specially erected and "were terribly crude but tremendously fascinating."

There is, however, a possibility that the Ottawa showing of screen movies was not the first in Canada. F. G. Edmonds, Jr., in company with his father, a theatre manager and entertainer who owned one of the first three stereopticans in Canada, saw a showing in 1895, according to an article he wrote in a Toronto newspaper in the 1920's. Said Edmonds:

"In the fall of 1895, on our way home from the London fall fair, we stopped over in Toronto, and while there met a friend of father's who took us down to a Yonge Street store to see the wonder of the time-a projecting moving picture machine. It was being set up by a mechanic who had come from Paris, France, with two machines for Mr. Percy Hill. This was the Lumiere Cinematograph-without a doubt the first picture machine to be used in Canada, all Canadian rights being controlled by Mr. Hill. "The machine was of the 'Beater' type, using 40- to 50-foot films on a spool bank. This contrivance consisted of a rack carrying a number of velvet covered spools, one of which worked in a groove and acted as a tightener. The spool bank was set up close behind the lamphouse, the film passing over and under the lamp.

"A few weeks later we saw the entertainment in Port Hope, Ont. The films used were: Mr. Lumiere and his family eating lunch in the garden at their home in Fontainbleau; passengers landing from a steamer, 'The Naughty Boy and the Gardener' and several scenic and street scenes."

There seems a flaw in the story. The Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste of Lyons, France, first brought out a combination of camera and projector called the Cinematograph on March 22, 1895 and used it commercially for the first time in the Grand Cafe, Paris on December 28, 1895. It might be, of course, that the Toronto machines of Hill were of the type turned out by the Lumieres before the one they used in the Grand Cafe, from which the "bugs" had been ironed out and which was soon being manufactured in quantity. But until later research clears this matter up, it must be assumed that the Ottawa showing was the first in Canada…..

Canada and the Film THE STORY OF THE CANADIAN MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY

By HYE BOSSIN

Film Weekly YearBook of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry, Edited by Hye Bossin

https://ia800600.us.archive.org/8/items/1951yearbookcana00film/1951yearbookcana00film.pdf

John — . Unknown [Group Sheet]

Other Events:

• Misfortune: Erie, Erie, Pennsylvania, United States; killed in street car accident
• Eby ID Number: Waterloo-437022

Notes:

WIZARD GREEN'S SON KILLED

GALT, Ont., Dec. 28.\emdash The body of the Iate Joseph Milton Green, which was brought here from Erie, Pa., for burial. was interred in Mount View Cemetery. The deceased, who was a motion picture operator, was the son of John C. Green, well known as a magician and a theatre manager. For some time prior to his death he had been working in a munition factory in Erie and was killed in that city. December 20, in a street car accident. His father. mother and sister survive.

Los Angeles Herald, Volume 32, Number 201, 20 April 1905