A one-hour, pop art-inspired version of William Shakespeare's Richard III by the Australian director Philippe Mora, has been hailed by Australia's National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) as the first movie ever created specifically for the internet – uploaded and shared online in 1996.
The master tape and a sheaf of documents in which senior Apple executives discuss the film, sent at the time by post from the company's Cupertino, California headquarters, were found in Mora's private collection in Los Angeles and given to the NFSA in Canberra in May.
Mora's film, featuring 20 actors, mostly friends who worked for free, was shot on Betacam with Walter Bal, operator on Francois Truffaut's Day for Night. The cost of the experiment – US$50,000 – was met by Peter Sterling, a New Zealand mining expert and internet entrepreneur.
NFSA curator Sally Jackson said Mora's film – which will be uploaded for public viewing this month – marks a turning point in film and cinema history: "[This is] a point from which there has been much advancement, and from which we can now see where we have come" she said.
In conversations with Apple at the time, Mora, noted that: "The internet cat is out of the bag and the major players really have no choice but to embrace it because it is here to stay." He forecast that the major studios would eventually become big players in new media but appeared to be "still focused on producing linear TV and movies".
"They will be latecomers," he predicted. "But they have big, elephant feet. I don't think the major corporations have realised that the entertainment paradigm has actually shifted because the net can provide the entertainment community a means of getting their product out to a huge audience without huge distribution costs."
The first upload of an existing movie to the internet was reported by the New York Times in 1993, when Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees was broadcast to "a small audience scattered among a few dozen computer laboratories".
By 1996, Wall Street had decided that the internet was the future, Mora told Guardian Australia. "There was money flying around like crazy in Los Angeles and elsewhere on start-ups that were nonsensical but turned out to be incredible. Money was being thrown around for any idea on the net."
"My friend, Peter Sterling, a New Zealand mining expert and entrepreneur, got hold of, if I recall correctly, a million dollars from a New York banker to start up an internet company to broadcast or try stuff – basically anything – on the net and see what would stick. I immediately said to Peter please invest in a movie and let's see what happens."
Mora chose Shakespeare for his internet experiment because he and his backers believed that only schools and universities would have the necessary hardware to view the movie.
At the time, few organisations were particularly interested in Mora's Richard III. "We got a bit of publicity on National Public Radio at the time but basically, no one understood what we had done," Mora said. Apple, however, invited the filmmaker and Sterling to be interviewed online on their internal network.
"They sent me a transcript at the time and I get a great kick out of the fact that they thanked us on paper hard copy … that's how early this was."
Twenty of Mora's "actor friends" were asked to donate a weekend to the experiment. Catering was equally simple: "buckets of spaghetti – linguine on the second day for a change – with a great sauce made by [wife] Pamela."
There was too much dialogue to remember in 48 hours, so initially there was a squad of people writing lines on cards – who quickly became exhausted. "[They were] unable to write anymore so I said 'forget it, you can read the play and we will say at the outset it is a part reading, part rehearsal'."
The first filmed full-version was too long to screen on the internet, Mora said. And so, on technical advice from Sterling, he ended up editing Act One into a one-hour version.
"[Sterling] had bought a server as I recall for $30,000. We hardly knew what a bloody 'server' was then. That one-hour is what has gone to the National Film and Sound Archives.
"The film shows some Third Reich footage intercut with Aleks Shaklin as Richard prancing around on a rooftop in West Hollywood doing a great Richard. God knows what Nasa, the CIA or whoever else thought was going on."
The original video was digitised and then prepared for storage on a large hard drive located on the CBS studio lot. "The production was taped on Beta SP tape and was edited on an AVID computer, then outputted onto beta SP tape again. The tape was then digitised and uploaded," said Mora.
Conserving digital files is not always straightforward Sally Jackson, a curator at the NFSA, said: "The thing that many don't understand is that digital files are just as fragile as other film formats. It isn't just a matter of putting it on DVD or uploading a low-res clip to Youtube. It's important as an archive to ensure that the original is maintained, regardless of format."
In 2006, Jackson was the curator who found a missing seven-minute part of the first narrative feature film ever made, The Story of the Kelly Gang, in a British Film Institute database. Only 18 minutes exist and Jackson was in charge of restoration. The following year, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) was added to the international register of Unesco's Memory of the World.
Mora, who grew up at the centre of the Australian arts scene in the 1950s, has been making movies independently since the age of 15. His extensive filmography includes the cult movies, Mad Dog Morgan, The Return of Captain Invincible and Howling II.