In 1925, a weary man in his sixties sold toys and candy from a kiosk in the Gare Montparnasse train station in Paris. Two decades earlier he had been the most famous filmmaker on the planet. This episode tells the story of Georges Méliès, born in 1861 into a wealthy luxury boot-making family, who was forced to manage factory machinery instead of studying painting, discovered stage magic at London’s Egyptian Hall, and bought the Théâtre Robert-Houdin to stage his own illusions. When the Lumière brothers refused to sell him a cinematograph, he bought a projector from Robert W. Paul and reverse-engineered it into a camera using the mechanical skills his father’s factory had given him.

We explain the legendary jammed-camera accident that turned a bus into a hearse and gave birth to the substitution splice, the glass studio he built in Montreuil to capture enough sunlight for slow orthochromatic film, and why his sets and makeup were painted entirely in shades of gray. We then cover his 1899 Dreyfus affair film that sparked riots, the production of A Trip to the Moon with acrobats and a fish tank, the rampant piracy by Thomas Edison’s operations, the Motion Picture Patents Company monopoly, his ruinous deal with Pathé, and the wartime seizure of his negatives, which were melted down to make boot heels. The story ends with his rediscovery, the Legion of Honor pinned on him by Louis Lumière, and his final years mentoring future founders of the Cinémathèque Française.

• How managing boot factory machinery taught Méliès the engineering he needed to build a camera
• The camera jam that revealed the stop trick and how he turned an accident into a visual language
• Why his glass studio and grayscale sets were necessary for early film stock
• The piracy, patents cartel, and industrialization that crushed an artisanal filmmaker
• His rediscovery, the 1929 gala retrospective, and the Legion of Honor in 1931