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December 7, 1903

Michael Ceraolo

I worked for Mr. Edison’s company
manufacturing moving pictures
I did whatever job was needed:
writing the scenario to be filmed,
operating the camera,
what later came to be called directing
I did all three of these
on a moving picture released today,
The Great Train Robbery
I think it was the twentieth picture
I had worked on this year,
and
even with everything we were doing
having the stamp of novelty on it,
we were surprised by the popularity
of this particular moving picture
Who could have imagined
it would still be around a couple years later
when the nickelodeons sprung up?
Who could have imagined that a medium
both literally and figuratively disposable
would become seemingly permanent?
I wasn’t an artist,
I was a tinkerer working with gadgets
(I got out of the business
when the artists took over),
and I think I tinkered very well
Many of the so-called innovations
later claimed by those same artists
were first introduced by me,
and if many historians and biographers
have too easily bought the claims
of those later artists, that’s okay;
they and I both know the truth

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