 The first public showing of movies projected on a screen took place at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in 1896.Lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions, many performers and personalities, such as Al Jolson, W. C. Fields, Mae West, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Edgar Bergen, Fanny Brice, Burns and Allen, and Eddie Cantor, used the prominence gained in live variety performance to vault into the new medium of cinema.In doing so, such performers often exhausted in a few moments of screen time the novelty of an act that might have kept them on tour for several years.