A Trip to the Moon: How Cinema’s First Blockbuster Was Pirated Across America
Film piracy did not begin with somebody pointing a camcorder at a cinema screen. It arrived almost as soon as films became valuable enough to steal.
In 1902, French magician-turned-filmmaker Georges Méliès created Le Voyage dans la Lune, better known in English as A Trip to the Moon. Its image of a rocket embedded in the irritated face of the Moon became one of cinema’s first truly immortal images.
Hellwood’s Le Voyage Dans La Lune T-Shirt celebrates that wonderfully strange voyage. But the film’s adventures did not end when its astronomers returned to Earth. Méliès soon discovered that his masterpiece was travelling around America without him.
When Cinema Discovered the Impossible
Méliès had been a professional magician and owner of Paris’s Théâtre Robert-Houdin before moving pictures captured his attention. Where other early filmmakers frequently pointed cameras at everyday life, Méliès recognised that cinema could manufacture things that had never existed at all.
He developed stop-camera substitutions, multiple exposures, dissolves, elaborate painted sets and stage machinery into a new cinematic vocabulary. People vanished. Heads multiplied. Devils appeared in smoke. The camera became less a recording device than another piece of conjuring equipment.
A Trip to the Moon was his grandest demonstration yet. Astronomers climb into a projectile, are fired from a cannon, land on the Moon, battle acrobatic Selenites and plunge back to Earth. The entire thing has the cheerful logic of a stage pantomime after several bottles of absinthe.
The Most Expensive Film on the Fairground
The production was unusually ambitious for 1902. Film historian accounts put its cost at around 10,000 francs and describe roughly four months of work. Méliès employed theatrical scenery, elaborate costumes, machinery and acrobats recruited from Parisian music halls.
He also sold prints rather than merely renting them. Black-and-white copies were cheaper; hand-coloured versions commanded a premium. Colour meant exactly what it sounds like: individual frames were painstakingly coloured rather than produced by modern colour photography.
The film became an enormous success in France and attracted particular interest in the United States. Unfortunately, international copyright protection for moving pictures was still a frontier almost as unexplored as Méliès’ papier-mâché Moon.
Edison Takes a Trip to the Moon
The American Film Institute records a remarkable episode. Edison cameraman Alfred C. Abadie obtained a copy of the film from a theatre owner after its Paris opening and shipped it to Edison for duplication.
Other American companies followed. Prints circulated through Edison, Lubin, Selig and others, often without Méliès receiving payment and sometimes without his name appearing at all.
It was piracy in an unusually literal form. A physical print could be acquired, duplicated and sold into a market thousands of miles from the filmmaker. The popularity that made A Trip to the Moon an international phenomenon simultaneously made it extraordinarily attractive to copy.
Méliès responded by establishing an American branch of his Star Film Company in New York in 1903, run by his brother Gaston. The company promised vigorous action against counterfeiters. Cinema had barely learned to tell stories and it already needed an anti-piracy department.
The Film That Had to Be Rescued Twice
The irony is that a film copied too freely in 1902 later came dangerously close to disappearing.
No hand-coloured print was known to survive until one surfaced in Spain in 1993. It was badly decomposed, but thousands of image fragments were painstakingly recovered. A major restoration launched in 2010 eventually reconstructed the colour version, allowing modern audiences to see something approaching the spectacular object early viewers encountered.
That survival gives A Trip to the Moon an unusually satisfying second life. A work created when cinema itself was barely established survived piracy, changing fashions, physical decomposition and more than a century of technological upheaval.
For more journeys through film history, browse Hellwood’s Cult Classic Movie T-Shirts, Foreign Film T-Shirts and wider Film T-Shirts archive.
Méliès imagined astronomers travelling to the Moon before cinema had even worked out how to protect a filmmaker’s work from being copied. The fantasy was futuristic. The copyright problem, rather less impressively, remains completely contemporary.
LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE T-SHIRT
A Hellwood tribute to Georges Méliès’ impossible 1902 voyage and the rocket that gave the Moon cinema’s first unforgettable close-up.