10 January, Chicago: Charlie Chaplin's first film for Essanay titled His New Job is receiving a spectacular advertising campaign. 12 January, New York: A Fool There Was premieres today. When Frank J. Powell set out to film the stage play (based on Rudyard Kipling's poem The Vampire) for William Fox, he sought an unknown actress to play the agressive femme fatale who ruins men and tosses them aside. He found her in dar-haired, big-eyed Theodosia Goodman, an extra player from Ohio. This "circumspect and demure" girl was at once whisked out of sight and an entirely new personality was manufactured for her. She was renamed Theda Bara, which the publicity office insisted was an anagram for "Arab Death." She was alleged to be the daughter of a French father and an Egyptian mother, to be a seeress and inscrutably but frightfully evil. A dead-white limousine attended by "Nubian" footmen drove her to the Chicago hotel where she gave an unforgettable interview in a dim room hung in black velvet and filled with the fumes of incense. The amused press gave her a very rough time about her supposed Egyptian background, but she stood the ordeal bravely until every reporter and photographer had left. Then little Miss Goodman tore the velvet hangings from a window and gasped, "Give me air!"     The campaign, apparently the first designed artificially to create a movie star, was successful. A Fool There Was made Miss Bara famous overnight, gave the word "vampire" and its derivatives "vamp" and "baby vamp" to the language, and offered the sublime title, "Kiss me, my fool," which was quoted for a generation. Thereafter, Miss Bara was wicked through forty subsequent films in four years. Constantly photographed with skulls and with snakes, she became the public's permanent symbol of evil. Attempts to let her play sympathetic roles were as unsuccessful with audiences as attempts to let Mary Pickford play grown-up, romantic roles. Vamp she was and must remain, until the public tired of pictures that seemed increasingly like carbon copies of one another.     After completion of her lucrative contract with Fox in 1918, Bara, unable to understand the distinction between fame and popularity, waited for further offers. None came. On the strength of her movie name, Al Woods starred her on the stage in a drama of the supernatural, The Blue Flame, which amused Broadway sophisticates for months. Finally, an independent producer at Chadwick Pictures Corp. brought her back to the screen in 1925 in a version of The Unchastened Woman. After that, Bara's occasional roles in short comedies burlesquing the vamp parts she used to play in deadly seriousness only confirmed Hollywood's belief that "they never come back." Wealthy, married to a successful director, Charles Brabin, Miss Bara took up charity work and became something of a social wheel in Los Angeles. But, almost until her death in 1955, she advertised that she was "at liberty" in the Hollywood casting directory. 20 January, New York: Release of Hypocrites, Paramount's 4-reel film from female director Lois Weber - the most important and prolific of all American women directors of the silent era. Hypocrites is considered a shocking and controversial film and is held up for many months because of its full nudity - a figure of the Naked Truth, literally portrayed by a nude woman who reveals hypocritical desires for money, sex, and power. Although the nudity was tastefully done (it was eventually passed by The National Board of Censors), it is still banned in Ohio and causes riots in New York. The mayor of Boston demands that every frame displaying the naked figure of Truth be hand-painted to clothe the unidentified actress who portrayed her. (One historian suggested that Weber herself played the part.) 28 January, Paris: The French branch of the German optical manufacturer Karl Zeiss has been officially impounded. 1 February, Los Angeles: The producer, distributor and businessman William Fox has founded the new Fox Film Corporation with Winfield Sheehan. 8 February, Los Angeles: D. W. Griffith and Harry Aitken have created the Epoch Producing Corporation on the same day as the world premiere of The Birth of a Nation. 20 February, Paris: Abel Gance has accepted a proposition by Louis Nalpas from Film d'Art to film Un Drame au château d'Acre (A Drama at the Château of Acre) in five days with a budget of 5,000 francs. 28 February, Rome: Screening of the first film in a detective series based on the Za la Mort character, Nellie the Gigolette. The film is produced by Emilio Ghione and stars the diva Francesca Bertini. 1 March, Paris: The Prefect of Police has banned the screening of all films depicting the scenes of desolation created by the enemy in certain regions. 17 April, Paris: In a protest against censorship, the Union of Cinematograph Directors has organized a private screening of banned films at the Palais des Fêtes. 21 May, Boston: As a result of the campaign against The Birth of a Nation, the State of Massachusetts has voted in favor of creating a board of censors. 21 May, Berlin: Ernst Lubitsch, who already acted on stage (with Max Reinhardt) and on the screen in Carl Wilhelm's comedies for Union-Film, has gone behind the camera to make On the Slippery Slope. May, Paris: Charles Pathé has returned from a trip to the United States where he opened 22 new distribution agencies in as many states. Pathé-Exchange is now the leading firm for exporting American films to France. 2 June, Boston: Black organizations have presented the Mayor with a petition bearing 6,000 signatures asking him to ban The Birth of a Nation. 6 June, California: Harold Lloyd has completed the first film in a series of short comedies made by his friend Hal Roach. Here he portrays a character named Lonesome Luke, clearly drawing inspiration from Chaplin, and likely to displace the previous character of the Lloyd-Roach collaboration, "Willie Work." 21 June, Los Angeles: Charlie Chaplin's eighth film for Essanay, Work, has been released. Filmed at the Bradbury Mansion studio in San Francisco, it features Chaplin as a down-trodden decorator whose attempt to refurbish peppery Billy Armstrong's house ends in a huge explosion that buries everyone under a mountain of rubble. Co-starring once again with Charlie is an attractive 22-year-old blonde, Edna Purviance, who first joined forces with Chaplin last February in His New Job, appropriately the comedian's first film for Essanay. She had originally been recommended to Chaplin by one of Broncho Billy Anderson's cowboy actors, Carl Strauss, who had spotted her at a restaurant in San Francisco. She was located working as a secretary and Chaplin was instantly captivated by her and her ebullient sense of humor. At a party the night before she made her debut in front of the cameras, she bet Chaplin $10 that he could not hypnotize her. She then played along with him, pretending to fall under his hypnotic spell. There is little doubt, however, that it is Chaplin who has fallen under the spell of the petite beauty with the sensual mouth. In addition to his lovely new leading lady, Charlie is assembling a talented stock company to work with him at the Essanay studios outside San Francisco. They include cross-eyed Ben Turpin, former Karno comic Billy Armstrong and another Englishman, Fred Goodwins, a former journalist and stage actor. 21 July, Paris: Abel Gance has signed up with Louis Nalpas for Film d'Art. Under the terms of his contract he has to produce nine films a year, based on scenarios written by himself. Nalpas was won over by Gance's ideas and spirit in his Un Drame au château d'Acre and La Folie du Dr. Tube (The Madness of Dr. Tube). 30 July, Paris: Louis Feuillade has been discharged from active service due to a heart problem. He can now return to the Buttes-Chaumont studios. 31 July, Los Angeles: Keystone's Mack Sennett has created a curious corps de ballet. Christened his "Bathing Beauties," they are pretty young women dressed in an increasingly extravagant range of swimsuits. Always pictured in a group, they will from now on grace Keystone comedies, popping up in the most unlikely situations something like the hilariously incompetent Keystone Cops, of whom Ford Sterling and Chester Conklin are the most famous. With the advent of the "Bathing Beauties," moviegoers are promised a treat for the eyes. The flood of Keystone films on the market has left both audiences and the studio somewhat breathless of late. But audiences will nonetheless welcome the comic reinforcement this new group is certain to add to performances of Keystone's leading lights, Mabel Normand and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, both now established as international stars. 31 July, Paris: Opening of Maciste, directed by Vincent Denizot and Luigi Romano Borgnetto and with Bartolomeo Pagano who created the role. The film was inspired by Giovanni Pastore's internationally acclaimed Cabiria. 8 August, Montreuil: Gaston Méliès has turned part of his old film studio into a theater in aid of the Montreuil hospital. The Arlesienne, by Alphonse Daudet, is playing at the moment. 19 August, France: The Gaumont Palace in Paris and the Majestic Cinema in Lyon have reopened. 18 September, Copenhagen: Forest Holger-Madsen's Put Down Your Arms is screening today in Denmark. 1 October, Paris: French film production is slowly picking up after the interruption caused by the outbreak of war. As René Navarre has been called up for duty, the Fantômas series has been dropped. However, Louis Feuillade has started filming a new series, Les Vampires, with Edouard Mathé, Marcel Lévesque and Jean Ayme, in the hope of forestalling the probable success in France of the highly popular Mysteries of New York. 1 October, Boston: The Philharmonic Hall is screening Cecil B. De Mille's Carmen, with Wallace Reed and Geraldine Farrar. The prima donna, who was taken on for a fabulous sum, is making her screen debut, but... the famous voice is silent. 15 October, New York: Release of J. Stuart Blackton's The Battle Cry of Peace. Financed with silent backing from the arms manufacturer Hudson Maxim, it is the first propaganda film for America's participation in the war. 15 October, Washington, DC: The US Supreme Court reached a decision today on the anti-trust case brought against the Motion Picture Patents Co. that has sealed the fate of Edison's trust. In fact, this decision has merely confirmed what everyone already knows, since the power of the trust has been declining for several years. The members of the trust have been unable (or unwilling) to adapt to changing conditions in the production, distribution and exhibition of films. Their business has been declining during a period when the total size of the industry has been increasing, led by such independents as Paramount, Fox and Universal. In fact, a number of its own members, such as Pathé and Kleine, have already begun to distance themselves from the trust. Both Kalem and Biograph have substantially reduced their filmmaking activities, while earlier this year Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig and Essanay joined together to form the new V-L-S-E Co. to release features made by its members. 31 October, New York: Douglas Fairbanks has been signed up by D. W. Griffith. Fairbanks has just finished making The Lamb under Griffith's supervision at Triangle for a salary of $2,000 a week. 12 November, Paris: Gaumont has released the first two episodes of Les Vampires from Louis Feuillade: La Téte coupée (The Severed Head) and La Bague qui tue (The Ring That Kills). 22 November, Paris: The film that the young playwright Sacha Guitry is presenting at the Varietés Theatre stars a dazzling cast. In Ceux de chez nous, we see the scuptor Auguste Rodin; the composer Camille Saint-Saëns; the writers Edmond Rostand, Anatole France and Octave Mirbeau; the actors Sarah Bernhardt, Lucien Guitry (Sacha's father) and André Antoine; and the painters Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and old August Renoir. Afflicted by arthritis, Renoir holds his paintbrush with the help of his son Jean, at his side. 25 November, Paris: First release of Giovanni Pastore's Cabiria at the Vaudeville Theatre. 3 December, Paris: Movie theaters in Paris are now screening the first episode of Mysteries of New York, an American film produced in the US by Donald Mackenzie and Louis Gasneir for Pathé-Exchange, the US subsidiary of the French Pathé company. It has been eagerly awaited, and the press has been full of stories of the American infatuation with Pearl White, who plays the serial's heroine, Elaine Dodge. For the French market they have compiled edited versions of three original Pearl White serials, The Perils of Pauline, The Iron Claw and The Exploits of Elaine, 36 episodes in all. The French version runs to 22 episodes, each of which is about 600 metres long. Elaine's father is played by Lionel Barrymore, a talented actor of stage and screen, already well-known for his projects with the director D. W. Griffith. In America, Pearl White has become a star, and the serials have been smash hits. Their appeal lies primarily in the vibrant personality of the young actress, for it has to be said that the version produced by Mackenzie and Gasnier shows signs of haste. Meanwhile, Elaine Dodge's millions of fans are impatiently waiting for the second episode entitled Le Sommeil sans souvenir. Blonde and lithe, our plucky, tender-hearted heroine suffers the ordeal of clutching hands, mysterious voices, threatening rays and deadly kisses, always surviving unscathed to rejoin the fray in the next episode. 20 December, London: Abel Gance is extremely impressed by D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which has not as yet been screened in France. 12 December, New York: Two men and a woman are the lead characters in Cecil B. De Mille's new film, a refreshing change from the enormous casts and extras that today's moviegoers now take for granted. The title is The Cheat, and it heralds the paring down of mise-en-scène. The story is a melodrama involving sexuality and perversion. A foolish young society woman borrows a considerable sum of money from a rich Japanese collector on the condition that she give herself to him. The promise is not kept. Furious, the man brands the young woman with a hot iron. The woman hides the exact circumstances from her husband, and he is accused of the crime. The trial that follows is going against the couple until the victim, in a display of heroism, bares her shoulder and shows the horrified jury the mark of a cheat. This Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company production has been a great success and has confirmed the talent of the young director, De Mille. He shot The Cheat in a few weeks, at the same time as another long feature entitled The Golden Chance. While The Cheat was shot from nine to five during the day, The Golden Chance was filmed at night, sometimes till dawn. In such conditions, one cannot fail to be astonished by the aesthetic quality of The Cheat -- the lighting and the framing of the images. The tragic scene of the red-hot branding iron was filmed in charioscuro, using closeups and exciting editing. The young woman who attempts to deceive both men, and the lecherous Japanese villain are played by the pretty Fannie Ward and the enigmatic Sessue Hayakawa. The excellence of their interpretation, especially a restrained one by the latter, should soon place them both in the firmament of stars. 23 December, Paris: The Chamber of Deputies has voted a resolution to form a committee to encourage the use of films in the education system. 25 December, Paris: AGC is distributing Charlie Chaplin's film Work. 31 December, Poland: Alexander Hertz has directed Pola Negri, formerly known as Apolonia Chalupiec, in The Woman and The Little Black Book. 31 December, Prague: Vaclav Havel has taken over Antonin Pech's Kinofa assets and has formed the Lucerna company.