American Film™ was sold at newsstands from 1975 to 1992 and featured full-length interviews with leading contemporary artists and feature articles on movie history. We will draw upon this treasure trove of material each month, bringing you the best and most relevant articles from the former publication, in addition to new articles. Media historian Erik Barnouw’s cover story in the April 1978 issue of American Film™, “The Magician and the Movies,” struck us as the perfect follow-up to the movie HUGO (2011), Martin Scorsese's love letter to the early pioneers of movie making.

The article fills in the gaps about the earliest days of the moving image and places Georges Méliès, Ben Kingsley’s character in the Scorsese film, in the context of other magicians turned film pioneers like Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, Emile and Vincent Isola and Félicien Trewey. As Méliès says so invitingly in the film, "Come and dream with me..."