his employ from performing in vaudeville. McCay's contract did not prohibit him from his vaudeville performances, but Hearst was able to pressure McCay and his agents to cancel bookings, and eventually McCay signed a new contract barring him from performing outside of greater New York. Movie theaters In November 1914, film producer William Fox offered to market Gertie the Dinosaur to moving-picture theaters for "spot cash and highest prices". McCay accepted, and extended the film to include a live-action prologue and intertitles to replace his stage patter. The film successfully traveled the country and had reached the west coast by December. The live-action sequence was likely shot on November 19, 1914. It features McCay with several of his friends, such as cartoonists George McManus and Tad Dorgan, writer Roy McCardell, and actor Tom Powers; McCay's son Robert had a cameo as a camera-room assistant. McCay used a bet as a plot device, as he had previously in the Little Nemo film. As the film opens, McCay and friends suffer a flat tire in front of the American Museum of Natural History. They enter the museum and, while viewing a Brontosaurus skeleton, McCay wagers a dinner that he can bring a dinosaur to life with his animation skills. The animation process and its "10,000 drawings, each a little different from the one preceding it" is put on display, with humorous scenes of mountains of paper, some of which an assistant drops. When the film is finished, the friends gather to view it in a restaurant. 2018 reconstruction of McCay's vaudeville act Using extant original drawings by McCay, David L. Nathan reconstructed the lost "Encore" sequence from McCay's original vaudeville version. He initiated a restoration of the entire film and, with animation historian Donald Crafton, proposed a reconstruction of McCay's vaudeville performance. Crafton, Nathan and Marco de Blois of the Cinémathèque québécoise worked with a team of professionals from the National Film Board of Canada to complete the project, which premiered live during the closing ceremony of the 2018 Annecy Film Festival in France. McCay and animation after Gertie McCay's working method was laborious, and animators developed a number of methods to reduce the workload and speed production to meet the demand for animated films. Within a few years of Nemos release, Canadian Raoul Barré's registration pegs combined with American Earl Hurd's cel technology became near-universal methods in animation studios. McCay used