Listen to part lecture in a film history class.Okay, last time we talked about something that rose to popularity in the United States in the late 1880sa form of entertainment known as vaudeville.We said that vaudeville shows were live variety shows with a jumbled mix of offerings from singing and dancing and dramatic scenesto comedy acts juggling and acrobatic routinesand even trained animals.By the late 19th century, in both rural areas and cities,North Americans, regardless of socioeconomic status,had developed an appetite for entertainment and amusement.This was an era when traveling shows and circuses were crisscrossing the continent,and vaudeville especially was in high demand.Vaudeville would remain popular until the 1930safter which it was replaced by the new entertainment of choice, moving pictures.But the relationship between vaudeville and movies is not simply about competition or the replacement of the old by the new.From the very beginning, even when people weren\'t questioned what movies were,vaudeville was already promoting them by including them in its entertainment lineup.So movies became a standard vaudeville offering,and by touring along vaudeville\'s well established circuit,movies started reaching audiences in far flung areas of the country,Natalie. It\'s funny to think of movies as a rural activity way back then.Well, there\'s a misconception that urban centers, because of their association with progress and progressive ideas,were responsible for catapulting movies to unprecedented popularity.But the truth is that starting around the turn of the century, wherever there was entertainment, there were movieseven up near the border between Alaska and Canada, almost at the Arctic Circle,people who\'d gone there in search of gold, who were coming together, far from any big cities to watch movies.Gorge: So did people think of movies as more than just a passing thing in those early days? It must have been hard to predict.Certainly, there were those who saw them as a passing fad and a pale substitute for actual live performances,but the vaudeville show directors and managers understood that the novelty of movies was sure to pull in the crowds.People were drawn to the new and unfamiliar.Not too long before that,electricity had been a hugely popular attraction in some of these very shows.You mean electricity, when it was first introduced, was presented as some kind of magic act, an amazing magic act,no wonder people came to see it.And later on, vaudeville started adding another technological novelty to the lineupmovies. But in a way, the first movies were also a continuation of an old vaudeville tradition, pantomime.A pantomime, of course, is a story that actors convey without speaking.They just use actions and gestures and facial expressionsand in the theater, pantomimes go back centuries.In fact, way before vaudeville.Natalie：yeah,I took a Shakespeare class,and I remember some short scenes like thatwith no dialog at allembedded in the play we were reading.Yes, sometimes it\'s commentary, sometimes for comic reasons,in vaudeville, pantomime be used to announce either intermission or the end of the show. Yeahadding on a short act with outspoken dialogor that allowed people to get up and leave their seats without bothering other viewers too much, because when a pantomime was happening on the stage,nobody would really mind if the room got a little noisy, right?But later, it became common to replace pantomimes with silent movies.Of course, all movies were silent back then,and also shortand at first, their subject matter had more to do with novelty and special effects than with storytelling.For example, one of the earliest American films was a five-second-long film of a man sneezing.It was several years before filmmakers began experimenting with longer featuresand developed films potential for telling a good storyand as movies got long enough to provide a whole evening\'s entertainment show business, people realized that it was easierand more economicalto tour the countryside with a film projector and some reels of film, instead of a caravan of actors, acrobats and circus animals,the performance circuit was already in place,and the audiences were waiting.So in just a decade or two, movies went from filling a few minutes of a vaudeville showto becoming an immensely popular form of entertainment in their own right.