1910

1910	The first screen credit was given to Florence Lawrence, in IMP's short crime romance The Broken Oath (aka The Broken Bath), directed by her husband Harry Solter.
1910	Dialogue titles began to appear with regularity. Studios began distributing publicity stills of actors and actresses.
1910	The first US multi-reel "feature" film was Vitagraph's five-reel Life of Moses. It was shown at a single sitting in New Orleans. Such multi-reel films weakened exhibitors' control of their programs (i.e., prior to this development, exhibitors effectively "edited" the program by arranging their selections of short films without directorial intervention.)
1910	Film companies began to move to the area later known as Hollywood. Los Angeles annexed Hollywood.
1910	The first film made in the new municipality of Hollywood, by Biograph and director D.W. Griffith, In Old California, was released. It launched the film industry in the city.
1910	For the first time, Hollywood purchased the rights to adapt a novel from a publisher (Little, Brown & Company who published Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona), for a D.W. Griffith film to be made in 1910.
1910	The first western silent film super-star Tom Mix made his first major screen appearance as Bronco Buster in Selig Polyscope's Ranch Life in the Great Southwest (1910), filmed at their studio in the Los Angeles area. The one time bartender, cow hand and Texas Ranger would go on to make hundreds of silent westerns for both Selig and Fox Studios, some of which he also produced, wrote or directed.
1910	Brooklyn Eagle newspaper cartoonist John Randolph Bray patented the 'cel' process ultimately used by animators. He pioneered true animated (motion-picture) cartoons with structured story lines.
1910	The first movie stunt -- a man jumped into the Hudson River from a burning balloon.
1910	Filmdom's first major comedy star of the early silent film era, the happy and rotund John Bunny (almost 300 pounds), originally a successful stage comic, made his film debut in Brooklyn-based Vitagraph's Jack Fat and Jim Slim at Coney Island (1910), and was paid $40/week. By 1911 he was Vitagraph's biggest moneymaker. He died in 1915 at the height of his fame.
1910	The first Frankenstein monster film in the US was Edison's Frankenstein, a 16-minute (one-reel) version made by the Edison Motion Picture Studios and starring stage veteran Charles Ogle (uncredited) as the monster, and Mary Fuller as Frankenstein's fiancée Elizabeth. The film was directed and written by J. Searle Dawley and filmed in the Bronx. The monster appeared misshapen and pathetic rather than horrifying in this first film adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel. In this early version, the Monster was created in a cauldron of chemicals.
1910	Vaudeville press agent William Foster launched his Foster Photoplay Company, the first African-American film production company (to produce "race films" as they were called), in Chicago. It produced primarily slapstick comedies starring black vaudeville performers.
1910	Max Factor created the first makeup formulated especially for film.
1910	The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) tried to monopolize film distribution and absorb independent distributors by setting up the General Film Company. Independent William Fox responded by making his own films.
1910	In Denmark, Fotorama introduced the multi-reel documentary film Den Hvide Slavehandel (The White Slave Trade) - one of the first examples of a vice film, and the first time film was used to study prostitution.
1910	At the Gaumont Palace in Paris, French engineer Leon Gaumont demonstrated his more advanced Chronophone system, a synchronized sound system using phonograph cylinders, to allow synchronized sound while viewing films.
1910	Pioneering French female filmmaker, the first female film director Alice Guy Blache, became the first - and so far the only - woman to own and run her own studio plant - The Solax Company Studios - first in Flushing, NY from 1910 to 1912 (and then in Fort Lee, NJ from 1912 to 1914). It was the largest pre-Hollywood studio in America. From 1896 to 1920, she directed hundreds of short films (including over 100 sychronized sound films and twenty-two feature films), and produced hundreds more.