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 ...