Those Awful Hats
About Those Awful Hats
A film is already on the screen in a packed little theatre. Women in enormous hats sit down in front of everyone else and keep fussing with them. The rows behind cannot see. Hats are knocked off, and the short ends on a card: "Ladies Will Please Remove Their Hats."
Cast & crew
More about Those Awful Hats
D. W. Griffith directed and wrote it. G. W. Bitzer photographed it. Biograph released it on January 25, 1909. Mack Sennett and Flora Finch are in the audience.
Themes
In film history
A Biograph gag about the people sitting in a movie theatre, made while the hat problem was still a real complaint in the seats.
Making
Bitzer shot the audience and the picture on the screen as two images and combined them, so the film-within-the-film plays behind the hats.
Look
G. W. Bitzer combined the audience and the screen image in one frame.
Technique
A double exposure puts a moving picture on the screen inside the theatre set.
Preservation
A print survives. Wikimedia Commons holds Those Awful Hats.webm.
Notes
- The closing card asks the ladies in the real theatre, not just the ones on screen, to take their hats off.
- Mack Sennett appears as a member of the audience, before he was running Keystone.
Scenes
- A woman settles an enormous hat and the row behind her loses the screen.
- The end card speaks to the audience in the real theatre.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Those Awful Hats.webm)
Quotes
Ladies Will Please Remove Their Hats.
