The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies by Paul Fischer

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies by Paul Fischer A page-turning history about the invention of the motion picture and the mysterious man behind it—detailing his life, work, disappearance, and legacy. The year is 1888 and Louis Le Prince is finally testing his “taker” or “receiver” device for his family on their front lawn. The device is meant to capture ten to twelve images per second on film, creating a reproduction of reality that can be replayed as many times as desired. In an otherwise separate and detached world, occurrences from one end of the globe could now be viewable with only a few days delay on the other side of the world. No human experience—from the most mundane to the most momentous—would need to be lost to history. In 1890, Le Prince was granted patents in four countries ahead of other inventors who were rushing to accomplish the same task. But just weeks before unveiling his invention to the world, he mysteriously disappeared and was never seen or heard from again. Three and a half years later, Thomas Edison, Le Prince’s rival, made the device public, claiming to have invented it himself. And the man who had dedicated his life to preserving memories was himself lost to history—until now. The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures pulls back the curtain and reveals the riveting story of both Louis Le Prince’s life and work, dispelling the secrets that shroud each. This captivating, impeccably researched work presents the never before told history of the motion picture and sheds light on the unsolved mystery of Le Prince’s disappearance.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss i want to go on a monster roller coaster ride with my brain anyway i don't know what that's all about who wrote that beginning thing hi folks chris voss here in the chris voss show.com the chrisastshow.com. Hey, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here once again after all these years.

We have an amazing author on the show. He's written an amazing book, and you're going to want to see it, hear it in every place you can. Make sure you refer to the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Get them involved in the show. Put your arm around them. Hold them close. Say, you know, I love you, man,

and you should subscribe to the Chris Voss Show podcast. Remind them that we're the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. It's kind of weird that way. It's either a cult or, I don't know, it's one of those love things that you do when you sit around a hut and smoke a bunch of weird weed or something. I don't know what that means, but maybe you do. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss.

Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com forward 4chesschrisfoss here. Big group on LinkedIn. Subscribe to the LinkedIn newsletter and all that good stuff. You know the drill. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021.

And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies.

I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. And today, oh my gosh, hot off the presses. This baby is hot off the presses as of two days ago. It's just steaming still. It has that beautiful, you know, fresh ink smell that you can get high on still the man who invented motion pictures a true tale of obsession murder and the movies is the title

of the book that just came out paul fisher is on the show with us today he's gonna be talking to us about his amazing book that he's gone into he is an author and film producer based in the United Kingdom. His first book, Kim John Il Production, has been translated to date into 12 languages. It was nominated for the Crime Writers Association's Nonfiction Book Award. It was chosen as an Amazon Best Four of the Year Nonfiction Selection, one of Library Journal's Top Ten Books of the Year, and one of NPR's best books of the year. He was also nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for history and biography. He's written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Independent, among others. Welcome to the show, Paul. How are you?

Hey, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm good. How are you? There you go. Thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot coms or wherever you want. Thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to look you up on the interwebs. Sure. Website is paulfisherauthor.com. That's Fisher with an S and a C, the nice old-fashioned German way, paulfisherauthor.com. And I'm on Twitter at 10cents77, T-N-C-N-T-S-7-7.

There you go. There you go. So this is your second book. What motivated you on to write this book? Well, I get kind of fascinated about weird film stories. My first book was about this time Kim Jong-il in North Korea in the 70s kidnapped these two South Korean filmmakers and kept them for eight years, forced them to make propaganda films. And in this one, I'd heard about this guy. So I grew up in france we had told the lemire brothers invented the movies and in the u.s people get told thomas edison invented the movies and in both cases that story is kind of cut and

dry but there's this guy i heard and read about called louis le, who was also French, but he worked in England. And Le Prince made a film seven years before Delamere Brothers, three years before Thomas Edison, and no one talks about him. And I remember hearing about him and thinking, okay, this sounds fake, but I'll look it up. And it turns out Le Prince, he made these films. These films exist. They can be dated pretty accurately because someone in at least one of the films died in October 8th and 88th. So it had to be made at that point. He held patents. He held the first motion picture patents ever given out anywhere.

His camera survives. His projector survives. The people who worked with him gave sworn testimonies about the work they did. Films survive. And so I was kind of baffled as to how this guy made movies before Edison, before the Mier brothers, and we've forgotten all about him. And it turns out Le Prince, before he, so he took these films and before he was able to make them public, he got on a train in France and vanished, disappeared, never to be seen again. Body

was never found, never heard from ever again. And that meant his intellectual property, including his patents, were frozen for seven years until he could be declared dead. Wow. And in that time period, here comes Edison with basically the same machine, makes millions, renews his fame, all of that. And Le Prince gets forgotten. So I got kind of obsessed with kind of trying to figure out who this guy was and trying to figure out what happened to him. Because it's one of those Victorian mysteries hasn't been solved in a century and a half. Now, was his patents applications on hold?

And that's how technically kind of Edison beat him? Or how did that work? Like I've heard of like the TV guy where like he was the phone guy. There was a guy who invented, I think, both of those and didn't get it to the thing in time. And someone else beat him to the filing or something. It was more kind of legal shenanigans. So Le Prince's patents were approved and he held them and they were his. And what happened was once he was missing and not dead, his family weren't able to exploit them because they were in his name, not theirs. So they weren't able to enter into contracts or anything in his name because the

law essentially held at the time that you either have to wait seven years or a body's got to be found or everything is on hold. You can't spend the guy's money. You can't use anything he owns. And in the meantime, you know, just months after he disappears, Thomas Edison is in the newspapers announcing this motion picture device that works very much the way Le Prince's machine worked. And the thing about Edison is he kept an eye on every patent application, every granted patent. He had library staff who cut out kind of notices and sent them to him. And already then he had a reputation for you know seeing a good idea and deciding to make it his yeah so that's kind of how it started but it took a few lawsuits eventually where this le prince family tried to restore their rights lawsuits that thomas

edison won again with the kind of legal shenanigans he's become associated with. Yeah. Edison was kind of, you know, I grew up being, you know, fed the usual stuff. You know, Washington cut down a cherry tree and Thomas Edison invented like everything, basically him and Benjamin Franklin. But, you know, since I've, you know, we've learned a lot about Edison, you know, who was the inventor of the Tesla, Nikola Tesla. Did I have that right? Yeah. There was a lot of stuff he took from tesla and

you know tesla ends up dying broke doesn't really get paid you know it seems like he was a he was a real scallywag is that the right word to use in that time i don't know maybe yeah that sounds about appropriate yeah the thing about him right is so yeah there's the myth that he was kind of invented everything was a genius and it's kind of part and parcel of the american identity and then there's kind of the pushback of like i know he was a fraud he didn't invent anything he was a fake and the thing i kind of realized is he was a lot more of kind of like the first steve jobs type where like he represented a brand and he was very well known. And he was at this point in the story in his life,

at least kind of like a marketing figure, like the way Steve Jobs would come out on stage and do those presentations. Edison would go into the papers and announce the future basically. And the same way Steve Jobs had the black turtleneck and the glasses and the jeans, Edison had the like workman's chore coat and all that stuff. And the thing with him was kind of early on in his career, he invented a couple of things that he legitimately invented. And they were a big deal and kind of made him famous. And then by this point in his life, which is the 1880s, Edison actually kind of had a reputation as a guy who talked a lot and, and couldn't back it up.

Like he would announce this fantastic stuff and you would make these grand declarations about, you know, we're 30 years away from being able to turn anything into gold. And like, we can make furniture out of concrete and, and I can make books out of copper and like all this weird grand stuff that he would never be able to deliver on. And he had announced stuff before he was done. So like,

it's, I've got, I've invented the light bulb. Well, I've got electricity in every house. And then it turns out two, three years later, he can really only wire up JP Morgan's house.

Cause he hasn't actually worked out how the grid works. And so he had this lab of people who worked for him. And even when you talk about motion pictures and whatever he invented, he didn't invent it. This guy called William Dixon who worked for him, invented it, but it was kind of a work for hire gig the way you would now, you know?

And so he was kind of at the point where rather than coming up with stuff himself, he was so obsessed with finding stuff that would make money and finding stuff that would impress people into kind of thinking of him as the genius he used to be, that he would do stuff like what you were talking about with the telephone, where like he'd see, oh, Alexander Graham Bell's invented this telephone thing. I'm going to go to the newspapers. I'm going to tell the newspaper guys who are friendly with me that that thing actually doesn't work. He's getting ahead of himself, but don't you fret. I've been working on the telephone for years and I've almost got it

cracked. And then he would just change one little piece on Alexander Graham Bell's model, put that out and say, see, I have actually invented a telephone. And the other thing didn't work. And if Alexander Graham Bell sues me, I'm just going to bankrupt him with my JP Morgan funded lawyers. And I'm going to repeat this myth of the papers over and over again that I've come up with the telephone until it kind of sticks. And that's what he did. Not that different from a lot of CEOs today or like companies today. And like, you know, he hated unions and all that stuff. And so, yeah, he wasn't a total fraud, but he definitely had this thing of if something is near the finish line or just over the finish line, maybe I can co-opt it if there's money in

it. And he was that way about movies. Sounds like he was one of these people I always see. I call them carpetbaggers. And we see that a lot in the social media business where when social media started out, everybody and their dog got into it. Suddenly overnight, everyone's a social media guru. And then it became, I don't know, NFTs now are the latest things.

And, you know, I just see people that switch, you know, every five seconds when there is something new, they're like, oh, I'm the expert on this. And you're like, it just showed up last week. How are you the expert already? Like, what's going on? And I call them carpetbaggers because they just go from one trend to another and don't stick with it and you know i am but podcasts are hot we're in podcasting this week i get that all the time people call me up and they're like yeah that you're you're killing it on the podcast i'm like well we've been doing it for 12 years i hope hope we've gotten good at it. Maybe a little bit.

I don't know. But so it sounds like he was kind of one of those guys. He was. Yeah. There are Thomas Edison interviews that sound like that stuff. And he had an opinion on everything. And, and was he into Bitcoin?

No, I'm just kidding. He would have been like, there's, there is a musky vibe to him. You know what I mean? There is like, you know,

the same way Elon Musk can come out and go like i've revolutionized transport and you go you've just done a death trap tunnel really is there anything else to this just medicine kind of had yeah exactly i just said you know like every time i see a video of that tunnel i'm like i'm never gonna be able to go through that tunnel now without no you just said what's that sylvester Stallone movie where they all get trapped in one of the tunnels leaving New York? I remember watching it on a plane when I was a kid. And all I can remember is like the dark and the dripping water. I remember there was an earthquake in the 70s.

It's something, you know, it was around cliffhanger age. And every time I see one of the videos of that stupid Las Vegas monorail thing, like really all you've done is invented the subway, but deadlier. It's like a Simpsons thing. And every time I see one of the videos of that stupid Las Vegas monorail thing, where like, like really all you've done is invented the subway, but deadlier. It's like a Simpson thing. It's a lot of seeing that thing sits on. Yeah.

Edison kind of had that kind of vibe where he'd be like, I've invented this thing and hadn't actually figured out how it worked and had an opinion on everything and had to give his opinion on everything. And like, like he was worshiped, like he would, there's at this same time period, he went to France and people like celebrated him.

Like he was a King or a God, or he was really attached to this myth that he had the specific kind of genius that meant he could crack any problem. And once he got to the point where he couldn't crack the problems and other people were cracking them instead of him, that really kind of stuck in his craw, especially because he couldn't help himself going, oh, yeah, yeah, I've invented the movies.

And you'd go, okay, but where's the machine then? And you'd go, it's affecting it. Yeah, like, you know, my kid, when I talked to her about homework, like you've done your homework and I see it and it's like, it's in the pile of papers somewhere. Yeah, it's in the, yeah. It's underneath my video game controller. Exactly.

And the weird thing was he had that reputation at the time. There are, like, newspaper cartoons where people kind of depict him as a con man or a circus shyster because they were like, he just keeps talking, and he hasn't done anything in 10 years. And so movies was one of the ways that he thought, okay, this is big enough, even though he didn't believe in it.

He was one of those guys who was like, I'll entertain the plebs for six months and then it'll have to be something else. But he figured it was commercially attractive enough that it could kind of tampen down all that criticism. So this guy, Louis Le Prince, Louis Le Prince, you put in the title that he was murdered when you first said that he got on a train disappeared i'm thinking maybe he's got

a wife he's trying to you know fake a death get away from or something but you put in he's murdered tell us uh tease us out a little on that if you would all right well here's the great hook so he had a wife and several young kids and he legitimately was ready to premiere this invention so his wife's in new york while he's in europe and he's tasked his wife with like renting this this mansion and preparing the premiere and he's told his workman guys to pack up his bags and pack up the equipment and he's booked his his travel over and he's ready to go and then he gets on a train and he disappears and then six months later seven train and he disappears and then six months later seven months later thomas edison is on the front page of the papers

going i've invented motion pictures which is virtually the first time he's ever spoken about it and le prince's wife widow lizzie she reads this article in the new york sun and she goes that sounds an awful lot like what Louis was working on. And she starts getting visits from friends and telegrams and phone calls going, oh, that's lovely. Louis is working with Edison. I didn't realize that's great news. And so from that point on and kind of over time,

the Le Prince family actually became convinced that Edison had something to do with getting rid of him. Wow. And that Thomas Edison was behind murder do with getting rid of him. Wow. And that Thomas Edison was behind murdering him to steal his invention. Wow. And that's the myth that kind of stuck. The thing is, there's other options. As you're saying, you could have, you know, there's one theory that's actually the machine's

not working. I've spent a lot of money. This is humiliating. I'm just going to kill myself and kind of save my honor. There's the option that Le Prince did the kind of thing that a lot of people did in the Victorian age, which is, I'm just going to go start a new life somewhere else and do the Martin Garak kind of thing. I tried to treat it kind of the way you would treat the cold case. I was like, okay, if I'm going to be one of those

kind of gray talking head cops in a Netflix miniseries, how am I approaching this? And so I looked at all of that and I looked at all the evidence and I hired researchers to go where I couldn't go. And I was like, okay, we're going to drop all the usual list of suspects and we're going to question everything. And the point I get to in the book that I feel about really strongly and has a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing towards is that he was murdered. Murdered and not by who you expect. Maybe his wife had him murdered. Well, the one thing I'll say about his wife is that a lot of the account that we have about what his life was like at the end comes from her and from the family.

And so, like, you'll speak to cops and they'll go, like, make sure you question the validity of where everything is coming. And so we did that. And so the conclusion I get to is definitely closer to home than Thomas Edison is Lex Luthor and had him rubbed out. So you think that's kind of in that way, if you read the book, I guess. I think I definitely,

and that's, you know, the very last pages of the book are kind of me laying out my case and I try and, you know, for me, when I read true crime, part of the fun is trying to get to it before the author does.

Yeah. And then see if you agree so i kind of tried to like maybe maybe edison would see the you know the pilot the patent filings then you get like a spy to work there in the crew there are people are there are people are convinced that he did that kind of stuff and there's le prince himself, originally worked in New York. And then, as far as it's documented, planned to go explore partnerships with people, including Thomas Edison. Wow. And at the last minute went, I can't actually do that. We should be a lot more private about this, not talk to anyone about this.

I'm going to go back to England and work over there. And turned paranoid very quickly. And Edison did have a reputation for stealing. And obviously, you know, this is the age of robber barons and capital over everything. And so he definitely was fearful. Plus, I don't think they had fingerprinting back then. No, they didn't.

It was all rogues galleries. Or CSI, you know. So it was much easier to get away with stuff back then, I guess. For sure. I mean, that's the thing when I was looking at it, like if you disappear on a train, you're kind of between jurisdictions. And there was no, they hadn't even thought of police work being investigative in any kind of way. It really was like, you know, because this is, he disappeared in 1890, which is basically height of Jack, the Ripper paranoia.

And really what the cops knew how to do then was find a body, ask around. And then if you get a couple of witnesses who agree, then I guess that's it. That's the investigation that's done. And so like, you see this a lot and like the Ripper stuff where there's a lot of cases like that one where they waste kind of six or eight or nine months you know like this sounds

horrible but essentially chasing around jewish people because the two witnesses they ask are anti-semites going i bet it was the jew down the road and that's literally the extent of what investigating was you know sherlock holmes had just been invented. And so with Le Prince, he disappears on a train between Dijon in the south of France and Paris. And so he could be anywhere between those two places. And a thing that happened with him was his brother, who we saw in France, was the last person to see him alive, puts him on a train, assumes he's on his way to America. The people in Englandland and in america don't see him coming and for a couple weeks they assume i must be staying in france a bit longer

like there's no texting there's no calling there's no hey by the way you know text me when you get there and so it's like a month before anybody goes before lizzie goes i haven't got his letters i'm gonna cable back and see if everything's okay. That takes a few days. And then the guys in England go, oh, we thought it was in France. Well, cable over there. That takes a day or two. And so it's like a month and a half before anybody realizes he's even gone. Wow. And so the trail's cold right away.

So we kind of had to go back and dig. I don't know. What about that brother, eh? He was the last one to see him. Isn't that usually how it works out? It's the last one to see him? I don brother hey he was the last one to see him isn't that usually how it works out it's the last one to see him i don't know yeah last one to see him his brother-in-law had had financial troubles people said and they were very very close maybe like the wife the wife was you know some of that going on i don't know all of that i tried to do it the same way you would like hopefully you know like making a murder you're going to talk to your friends and going could it be that guy could it be this guy i feel like i should have that 2020

guy's voice right now and then he disappeared that's the end of every chapter well it sounds like this is an exciting book to read is is there any way that this wrong is going to be righted that you know he held the original patent so therefore we should credit him for that? Or is it just a foregone conclusion of history? No, I think it'll come. Like, I think in England over the last few years, even before the book came out, new textbooks and new books have kind of started amending the history of film to say, you know, Louis La Prince made the oldest surviving motion picture. And it's kind of like, it's weird.

Cause it's kind of a moot point, right? That's kind of like, there's no financial benefit to it. It's not like anybody, you know, Edison made his money that's done and gone. The medium is kind of available now.

And so I think it'll, it'll get there to where he's at least mentioned as, you know, the oldest movie we have is his. The oldest patent is his. And so I guess he was the first. But as you unpack who was the first, I think you also unpack how the way we define the first is kind of nonsensical in the first place. This would make for a good movie.

And movies usually change, you know, the narrative on a lot of things once it becomes a popular culture. So maybe this is set up for someone who can take your book and turn it into a movie. And then everybody would be like, hey, that is. And then got to keep an eye out for that guy. That's the stuff people remember. The book's been optioned for an adaptation. And I always, when I was writing it, I kind of had the prestige in my head. You know, the Christopher Nolan film. when i was writing it i kind of had the prestige in my head you know the chris finnellan film because everything about it has that vibe of like smoky workshops and back rooms and obsessive

people and kind of being rivals almost against competitors you don't i mean obviously in that movie they're obsessed with each other but like le prince and people inventing the movies they knew other people were trying to invent the same thing but they didn't know how far along they were how they were going about it or so there's a real vibe of like racing a ghost over your shoulder yeah this would be this is really cool to see on the big screen and the details of it and the whodunit that or you can hire that guy like i said from 2020 who has that voice you know what i'm talking about yeah yeah where he's like and then you know he's got that voice so you could have at least have it on that show that would be fun to have anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go no i mean it's really cool you know and beyond the

whodunit part of it there is a really positive kind of cool vibe around the whole thing you know as a part of of the 19th century where people were inventing stuff left, right, and center. And the world was changing in a way that's very similar to how fast it's changing now. And for anybody who kind of likes the movies or loves the movies, there is also a cool experience to getting to know the Prince.

You know, everybody who is considered to have invented film, be it Edison, the Lumiere brothers, all these guys, they were industrialists and they thought of it as a toy that would make money for a while. And Le Prince was the first guy to have been like, oh, no, this is going to change everything. We're going to be able to see how people live on the other end of the world and we can teach people stuff with it. And, you know, he had sketches for cinemas, basically. He called them people's theaters but

he was like we're gonna all get together and watch this stuff together and experience life beyond our own life and you had this kind of like faith in it the way if you love movies you have faith in the movies and that's really cool to read about and it's also one of those stories where like cast the cameos is massive you know queen victoria Victoria pops up, Buffalo Bill pops up, Nikola Tesla pops up. It's a really cool, sprawling kind of experience if people are into that kind of thing. This is definitely going to be interesting. People love a whodunit sort of thing. And they love mystery and, you know, CSI and all that sort of good stuff.

So this will be very interesting. Give us your plugs so we can find you on the interwebs. Again, yes, it's paulfisherauthor.com. stuff. So this will be very interesting. Give us your plug so we can find you on the interwebs. Again, yes, it's paulfisherauthor.com. You can read what I'm up to, send a message, anything that I read myself, and then on Twitter, 10cents77. And that's about all I've got the time for. There you go. Thank you for coming on the show, Paul. We really appreciate it, man. Yeah, I appreciate it, Chris. Thanks so much. Thank you. Very insightful. Take care of yourself.

There you go. Guys, order the book wherever fine books are sold. But remember, stay in those alleyways. You might need a tetanus shot if you go in there, and you might get robbed. So go into the good stores. The book is called The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies by Paul Fisher. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, Forge House, Chris Foss. Hit the bell notification button.

Go to Goodreads.com, Forge House, Chris Foss. See everything we're doing on LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time.