The main title was originally produced as a lantern slide
for vaudeville theaters and the nickelodeon that showed
the first films. Such slides named the film (framing
audience response), filled in gaps in the narrative and
dialogue, and addressed the audience directly about filmwatching etiquette. As Charles Musser (1990) points out,
the main title card frequently identified a pro-filmic
event familiar to audiences, thus instantly aligning their
orientation to the screen narrative. Biograph films from
1896 on relied on lantern slides to effect continuities
between shots, sometimes bridging ellipses and pointing
to the unfolding character of the story. In July 1903,
Edison’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin introduced the filmed title
card (as opposed to a title on a slide provided by the
exhibitor), which appeared between and labeled each
scene. Around 1905, Musser notes, Edwin S. Porter
(1870–1941) used animated, filmic intertitles, with swirling or moving letters that formed words against a black
ground. Some ‘‘head titles’’ for early films were supplied
by the film exchanges (early distribution facilities), not by
the producers.
Early titles were made on a copy stand, and, in a
1911 encyclopedia, a tabletop method is given with
illustrations. During World War I, Barry Salt (1983)
notes, the practice of carrying the narrative action
through dialogue titles became established in American
cinema. D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) continued it into
the 1920s. Some lines of dialogue were not carded,
prompting the audience to participate in forming an
understanding of what the characters were saying. Title
cards containing illustrations or designs began in 1916.
In the 1930s and 1940s, cinema frequently was
marketed on the basis of its attachment to popular and
high-brow literature; a main title sequence for such films
could establish the prestige-bearing literary connection in
more ways than by simply listing the book from which
the movie had come. For example, in The Fountainhead
(King Vidor, 1949), the names of Gary Cooper (1901–
1961) and Patricia Neal (b. 1926) appear on what
appears to be a title card with a sketch of skyscrapers in
the background; one of the buildings suddenly rotates to
reveal itself as the spine of a gigantic book, The
Fountainhead, the ‘‘pages’’ of which systematically open
to reveal the principal credits—prominently featured
among which is a card of attribution to Ayn Rand
(1905–1982), the author. The central character in Leave
Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1946) is an author, and
the main title is an artist’s rendering of his book cover.
By contrast, the main credits for There’s No Business like
Show Business (Walter Lang, 1954), aim to reflect vaudeville as a principal source of twentieth-century show business: here, flamboyant gold lettering is superimposed on
plush red velvet theater curtains.
From the 1940s to the 1980s, main titles often
showed filmic background action or scenery under the
title cards. One example among thousands is Out of the
Past (1947), in which the main credits are backed by
stationary and panning background shots of bucolic
countryside. Titles of this sort were produced early on
through matte photography, with optically printed splitscreen technique debuting in the 1960s. Relatively elaborate main title sequences began in the 1950s to add
attraction to motion pictures, largely in response to the
rise of television and the Paramount Decree, which
curbed the big studios’ ability to succeed in exhibiting
their own films.
Saul Bass was the principal agent of this first design
wave, especially, although not exclusively, for the films of
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) and Otto Preminger
(1906–1986). In the 1960s, Stephen Frankfurt’s
(b. 1931) eerie and elegiac sequence for Mockingbird was
the first main title in which loving attention was paid
to the details of objects (through macrophotography).
Blake Edwards (b. 1922) commissioned Warner Bros.
cartoonist Fritz Freleng (1905–1995) to design the cartoon opening sequence for The Pink Panther (1963), a
sequence audiences adored because of its goofy animated
pink cat and Henry Mancini’s (1924–1994) sophisticated and bouncy theme. The split-screen technique is
masterfully shown in the title sequence of The Thomas
Crown Affair (1968), where color still frames appear
against, and move around on, a black screen.