The rocket ship plunging into the eye of the man in the moon is the most famous image in early cinema, yet two decades after creating it, Georges Melies was anonymously selling toys and candy from a kiosk in the Gare Montparnasse. This episode follows the stage illusionist who owned the Theatre Robert-Houdin, saw the Lumiere brothers' camera as a tool for manipulating reality rather than documenting it, and built a glass greenhouse studio in Montreuil in 1897 to capture the sunlight that primitive film stock demanded.

We examine how a jammed camera at the Place de l'Opera revealed the substitution splice, the 10,000-franc, three-month gamble of A Trip to the Moon in 1902 and its satirical anti-imperialist message, and how rampant piracy, including duplicates struck by Thomas Edison's company, robbed him of American profits. Then come the fl ...