Going to the

MOVI ES
Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema

edited by Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen

 g oing t o the mov ies

From Manhattan nickelodeons to the modern suburban megaplex,

and from provincial, small-town or rural America to Istanbul and
the shanty-towns of Southern Africa, Going to the Movies analyses
the diverse historical and geographical circumstances in which
audiences have viewed American cinema, and the variety of ways
in which these audiences have been constructed by the American
film industry.
The book examines the role of movie theatres in local
communities, the links between film and other entertainment
media, non-theatrical exhibition and historical trends toward the
globalization of audiences. Two novel features of the book are the
emphasis on movie-going outside the metropolitan centres of the
American North-East and the manner in which several of the
chapters analyse the complexities of race and race formation in
relation to cinema attendance.
Many of the leading researchers in this rapidly-developing
field of cinema history have contributed to this collection, which
showcases the range of issues and perspectives being examined by
film scholars and historians who are exploring the complexities of
the social experience of movie-going.

Editors: Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies at Flinders

University, South Australia. Melvyn Stokes teaches at University
College London. Robert C. Allen is Professor of American Studies,
History, and Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
 Exeter Studies in Film History
Published by University of Exeter Press in association with the Bill Douglas
Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.

Series Editors: Richard Maltby, Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University,

South Australia and Steve Neale, Professor of Film Studies and Academic
Director of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular
Culture, University of Exeter.

Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema

Lynne Kirby (1997)
The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939
Ruth Vasey (1997)
‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939
edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (1999)
A Paul Rotha Reader
edited by Duncan Petrie and Robert Kruger (1999)
A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929–1939
David Sutton (2000)
The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema
Laurent Mannoni, translated by Richard Crangle (2000)
Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures
John Sedgwick (2000)
Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism
Martin Stollery (2000)
Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail
Peter Stanfield (2001)
Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930
edited by Andrew Higson (2002)
Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films 1908–1918
Jon Burrows (2003)
The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (1914­–1918)
Michael Hammond (2006)
Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet
edited by James Lyons and John Plunkett (2007)

University of Exeter Press also publishes the celebrated five-volume series looking at
the early years of English cinema, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, by John
Barnes.
Going to the Movies
Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema

edited by
Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen
 First published in 2007 by
University of Exeter Press
Reed Hall, Streatham Drive
Exeter EX4 4QR
UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk

© Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen,

and the individual contributors 2007

The right of Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen,

and the individual contributors, to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 0 85989 812 6

Hardback ISBN 978 0 85989 811 9

Typeset in 10½ on 13 Adobe Caslon

by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Printed in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd, Exeter
Cover image: An African American moviegoer climbs the stairs to the ‘Jim Crow
roost’ in a motion picture theatre in Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939.
 Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Notes on Contributors x
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes

Part I: Studies of Local Cinema Exhibition

1. Race, Region, and Rusticity: Relocating U.S. Film History 25

Robert C. Allen
2. Tri-racial Theaters in Robeson County, North Carolina,
1896–1940 45
Christopher J. McKenna
3. The White in the Race Movie Audience 60
Jane M. Gaines
4. Sundays in Norfolk: Toward a Protestant Utopia Through
Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1910–1920 76
Terry Lindvall
5. Patchwork Maps of Moviegoing, 1911–1913 94
Richard Abel
6. Next Year at the Moving Pictures: Cinema and Social
Change in the Jewish Immigrant Community 113
Judith Thissen
 g oing to the mov ies

7. ‘Four Hours of Hootin’ and Hollerin’’: Moviegoing and

Everyday Life Outside the Movie Palace 130
Jeffrey Klenotic
8. Cinemagoing in the United States in the mid-1930s:
A Study Based on the Variety Dataset 155
Mark Glancy and John Sedgwick
9. Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts, and Lily White Palaces:
Desegregating the Motion Picture Theater 196
Thomas Doherty

Part II: Other Cinema: Alternatives to Theatrical Exhibition

10. The Reel of the Month Club: 16mm Projectors, Home

Theaters and Film Libraries in the 1920s 217
Haidee Wasson
11. Early Art Cinema in the U.S.: Symon Gould and the Little
Cinema Movement of the 1920s 235
Anne Morey
12. Free Talking Picture—Every Farmer is Welcome: Non-
theatrical Film and Everyday Life in Rural America during
the 1930s 248
Gregory A. Waller
13. Cinema’s Shadow: Reconsidering Non-theatrical Exhibition 273
Barbara Klinger

Part III: Hollywood Movies in Broader Perspective:

Audiences at Home and Abroad

14. Changing Images of Movie Audiences 293

Richard Butsch
15. ‘Healthy Films from America’: The Emergence of a Catholic
Film Mass Movement in Belgium and the Realm of
Hollywood, 1928–1939 307
Daniel Biltereyst

vi
 contents

16. The Child Audience and the ‘Horrific’ Film in 1930s

Britain 323
Annette Kuhn
17. Hollywood in Vernacular: Translation and Cross-cultural
Reception of American Films in Turkey 333
Ahmet Gürata
18. Cowboy Modern: African Audiences, Hollywood Films,
and Visions of the West 348
Charles Ambler
19. ‘Opening Everywhere’: Multiplexes and the Speed of
Cinema Culture 364
Charles R. Acland
20. ‘Cinema Comes to Life at the Cornerhouse, Nottingham’:
‘American’ Exhibition, Local Politics and Global Culture in
the Construction of the Urban Entertainment Centre 383
Mark Jancovich
Notes 394
Index 462

vii
 Illustrations

2.1 Community Service Pictures’ Special Announcement, 1920 50

2.2 The newly reopened Pastime Theater in Lumberton, 1934 53
2.3 The theater changed to cater mainly for African Americans,
prompting Indian outrage, 1934 53
2.4 The Rowland Theatre reopened in 1937 with three race-specific
entrances, 1937 56
2.5 Race-specific pricing structure: advertisement from the Riverside
Theater for the film Topper Takes a Trip, 1939 58
3.1 Lincoln Motion Picture Company distribution survey form, 1918 61
3.2 Noble Johnson and Harry Gant, Lincoln Company cameraman 64
3.3 The Flying Ace poster, Norman Manufacturing Company, 1926 65
3.4 The Ebony Motion Picture Company 66
3.5 Opening Night of the Rex Theater, Hannibal, Missouri; and detail
of the balcony 70
3.6 Noble Johnson, early ‘cross-over’ star 74
4.1 Billy Sunday, 1915 77
4.2 Judged by their formal attire in this cartoon, members of the
social elite did attend motion pictures 80
4.3 The Granby Family Theatre in Norfolk, 1907 81
4.4 The American Theatre, 1913 82
4.5 Billy Sunday and Mae West, 1933 91

viii
 illustr ations
5.1 Mutual Movies ad, 1914 95
5.2 Advertisement for ‘Iowa’s Most Beautiful Photo Play Theatre’,
1912 97
5.3 Advertisement for the Canton Odeon, 1912 98
5.4 Pawtucket/Central Falls, Rhode Island 104
5.5 Downtown Pawtucket, c. 1913 105
5.6 Advertisement for the Pawtucket Star, 1907 106
5.7 Advertisement for the Star Theatre, 1913 108
6.1 ‘Next Year at the Moving Pictures,’ 1912 114
6.2 ‘Abie’s moving picture’ cartoons, 1912 123
7.1 The Franklin Theater, c. 1940 133
7.2 A map of Springfield showing ‘social quality’ rankings, 1926 139
7.3 One week’s programming at the Franklin theatre, May 1937 152
9.1 Separate entrance, separate seating: ‘Jim Crow roost’ in a motion
picture theater in Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939 198
10.1 Catalogue for Kodak’s 16mm Kodascope Library Service, 1930 223
10.2 Advertisement for Pathégrams, 1930 224
10.3 Advertisement for a ‘home-talkie’ unit, 1930 227
10.4 ‘A click of the Switch …’ Kodak advertisement, 1927 229
10.5 Advertisement for Kodak’s line of film furniture, 1930 231
12.1 Advertisement for a Free Show in Campbellsville, Kentucky, 1940 249
12.2 Ad for John Deere Day, 1938 254
12.3 The 1926 USDA Motion Picture Catalogue 263
15.1 Father Felix Morlion 312
15.2 Lloyd Bacon’s Wonder Bar, 1934 318
17.1 Vue de remerciements au public, 1900 334
17.2 Ferdi Tayfur dubbing a Laurel-Hardy film, 1941 340

ix
 Notes on Contributors

Richard Abel is Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies in the

Department of Screen Arts & Culture at the University of Michigan. Most
recently he edited the award-winning Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (2005)
and published Americanizing the Movies and ‘Movie-Mad’ Audiences, 1910–
1914 (2006). Currently he is co-editing Interrogating the National and Early
Cinema (forthcoming) and completing research for Trash Twins Making Good:
Newspapers and the Movies, 1911–1915.
Charles R. Acland is Professor and Concordia Research Chair in Communication
Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches media and cultural
theory and history. His books include Residual Media (2007), an edited
collection of research on the aging of media and culture, and Screen Traffic:
Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (2003). Currently, he is working on a
history of popular ideas about media manipulation called Hidden Messages.
Robert C. Allen is James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies,
History, and Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. He is the author of Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American
Culture (1991), which was awarded the Theatre Library Association’s George
Freedley Memorial Award, and of Speaking of Soap Operas (1985). He is the
co-author with Douglas Gomery of Film History: Theory and Practice (1985), and
the editor of two editions of Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary
Criticism (1987, 1992). His most recent book is The Television Studies Reader
(2004), which he co-edited with Annette Hill.
Charles Ambler is Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso.
His publications include Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism (1988),
Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa (1993, with Jonathan Crush), and (with
Emmanuel Akyeampong) a special issue of the International Journal of African
Historical Studies on leisure in colonial Africa (2003). He is currently working


 contr ibu tors
on a study of Alcohol and Empire as well as a general book on Popular Culture
and Mass Media in Modern Africa.
Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in Film, Television and Cultural Media Studies,
Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the Working Group Film and TV
Studies (www.wgfilmtv.ugent.be). His work is on screen culture as sites of
controversy, public debate and moral/media panic, more specifically on film
censorship and the historical reception of controversial movies and genres.
Recent essays can be found in: Understanding Reality TV (2004), Rebel without
a Cause: Approaches to a Maverick Masterwork (2005), Communication Theory
and Research (2005), Youth Culture in Global Cinema (2007), Historical Journal
of Film, Radio and Television (2007).
Richard Butsch is Professor of Sociology, American Studies, and Film and
Media Studies at Rider University. He is author of The Making of American
Audiences from Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (2000) and The Citizen Audience:
Crowds, Publics and Individuals (2007); and editor of For Fun and Profit: The
Transformation of Leisure into Consumption (1990) and Media and Public Spheres
(2007).
Thomas Doherty is a Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University.
He is an associate editor of Cineaste and the author of Teenagers and Teenpics:
The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (1988), Projections of War:
Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (1993), Pre-Code Hollywood:
Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (1999), Cold
War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (2003),
and Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration
(2007).
Jane M. Gaines is Professor of Literature and English at Duke University,
where she founded the Film/Video/Digital Program. She is author of two
award-winning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (1991)
and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (2001). Currently she is
working on The Documentary Destiny of Cinema and Fictioning Histories: Women
in the Silent Era International Film Industries.
Mark Glancy is a Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of
London, where he teaches courses in American and British film history. His
publications include When Hollywood Loved Britain (1999), The 39 Steps: A British
Film Guide (2003), and, as co-editor, The New Film History: Sources, Methods,
Approaches (2007).
Ahmet Gürata is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Bilkent
University, Ankara. He has written on Turkish cinema and cross-cultural
reception. He is currently researching on local film culture in Turkey.

xi
 g oing to the mov ies
Mark Jancovich is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University
of East Anglia. He is the author of several books, including: Horror (1992);
Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (1996); and The Place of the Audience:
Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (with Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings,
2003). His edited books include: Approaches to Popular Film (with Joanne
Hollows, 1995); Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste
(with Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer, and Andrew Willis, 2003); and
Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (with Paul Grainge and Sharon
Monteith, 2006).
Jeffrey Klenotic is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University
of New Hampshire-Manchester. His essays on cinema history and histori-
ography have been published in the Communication Review, the Velvet Light Trap
and Film History, as well as in several edited anthologies and encyclopedias. He
is currently developing a research tool on moviegoing and cultural geography
using Geographic Information System (GIS) software to construct interactive
maps from multiple databases.
Barbara Klinger is a Professor in the Department of Communication and
Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where she teaches film
and media studies. Her research focuses on reception studies, fan studies, and
cinema’s relationship to new media. Along with numerous articles, she is author
of Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (1994)
and Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (2006).
Annette Kuhn writes and teaches on films, cinema history, visual culture, and
cultural memory. She is co-editor of Screen; Visiting Professor at Queen Mary,
University of London; Docent in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University;
and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books include An Everyday Magic:
Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002); Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and
Imagination (2002), and (co-edited with Kirsten Emiko McAllister) Locating
Memory: Photographic Acts (2006). Her book on Lynne Ramsay’s film Ratcatcher
is forthcoming in the BFI Modern Classics series.
Terry Lindvall holds the endowed C.S. Lewis Chair of Communication and
Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Virginia, and is
the author of Sanctuary Cinema (2007), The Silents of God: Silent American Film
and Religion (2001) and other works. He has been executive producer of over
50 award-winning films (Cradle of Genius, 2003) including several Student
Academy Awards (Bird in a Cage 1986), and has taught at Duke University and
the College of William and Mary.
Christopher J. McKenna is a Ph.D. candidate in English and American Studies
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is completing a
dissertation concerning the history of moviegoing in Robeson County, North

xii
 contr ibu tors
Carolina (focusing on issues of race, censorship, and entrepreneurship). After
nearly twenty years in the financial-technology industry, he currently serves
as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Smith Breeden
Associates, Inc., a global investment management firm.
Richard Maltby is Professor of Screen Studies and Head of the School of
Humanities at Flinders University, South Australia. His publications include
Hollywood Cinema (2nd edition 2003), Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture in the
Twentieth Century (1989), Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of
Consensus (1983), and ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and
Cultural Exchange, 1925–1939 (1999), which won the Prix Jean Mitry for cinema
history in 2000, as well as numerous articles and essays.
Anne Morey is an associate professor in English at Texas A&M University.
Her book Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–1934
(2003) deals with Hollywood’s critics and co-opters in the later silent and early
sound periods. She has published in Film History, Quarterly Review of Film
and Video, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other venues. She is
presently at work on a history of religious film-making in the United States
from the late nineteenth century to the present.
John Sedgwick is a film economic historian who lectures at London
Metropolitan University. He is particularly concerned with the measurement
and interpretation of film popularity and has developed a methodology
(POPSTAT) for estimating the former. His publications include Film-going in
Britain during the 1930s (2000), an anthology of articles on the Economic History
of Film (2005) edited with Mike Pokorny, and essays in Cinema Journal (2006)
Explorations in Economic History (1998), the Journal of Cultural History (2001),
the Journal of Economic History and the Economic History Review (2005).
Melvyn Stokes teaches at University College London, where he has been
principal organiser of the Commonwealth Fund Conference on American
History since 1988. His edited books include Race and Class in the American
South since 1890 (1994), The Market Revolution in America (1996), and The
State of U.S. History (2002). He has co-edited, with Richard Maltby, four
volumes on cinema audiences: American Movie Audiences (1999), Identifying
Hollywood’s Audiences (1999), Hollywood Spectatorship (2001) and Hollywood
Abroad (2004). His book D.W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’: A History of
‘The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time’ has just been published by
Oxford University Press.
Judith Thissen is Assistant Professor in Media History, Utrecht University,
Netherlands. She is the author of several essays on the politics of popular
entertainment in the immigrant Jewish community of New York City. Her most
recent publications include ‘Film and Vaudeville on New York’s Lower East

xiii
 g oing to the mov ies
Side’ in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (2007), ‘National and Local
Movie Moguls: Two Patterns of Jewish Showmanship in Film Exhibition’ in
Jews and American Popular Culture (2006), and ‘Reconsidering the Decline of
the New York Yiddish Theatre in the Early 1900s,’ Theatre Survey (2003).
Gregory A. Waller is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication
and Culture at Indiana University. His publications on American film include
Moviegoing in America (2002) and Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial
Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1900 (1995), which won the Katherine
Singer Kovacs Award from the Society for Cinema Studies and the Theatre
Library Association award. He is currently completing two projects: Movies on
the Road, a history of itinerant film exhibition, particularly in the 1930s, and
Japan-in-America, a study of the representation of Japan in American culture,
1890–1915 (http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/).
Haidee Wasson is Assistant Professor of Cinema at Concordia University,
Montreal. She has previously taught at the University of Minnesota and Harvard
University. She is author of Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the
Birth of Art Cinema (2005), and co-editor of Inventing Film Studies (2007), on
the history of the discipline of film studies. She has published numerous articles
in journals such as Film History, Convergences, Continuum, Frameworks, and
The Moving Image. Her research interests include extra-theatrical film culture,
historiography, museums and cinema, and emergent screen technologies.

xiv
 Acknowledgements

T h i s book has its origins in a large conference on ‘American Cinema

and Everyday Life’ held at University College London in June 2003.
Most of its chapters are revised, expanded and updated versions of selected
papers that were first delivered at that conference. We would like, in
particular, to thank the four keynote speakers (Richard Abel, Jane Gaines,
Barbara Klinger and Richard Maltby) for their contribution to the success
of the conference as a whole.
The editors wish to thank the Commonwealth Fund, Graduate School
and Friends Programme of University College London for helping to making
this conference financially possible. They would also like to acknowledge
financial support from the Cultural Affairs Office of the US Embassy in
London, the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the London
University Institute for United States Studies (now Institute for the Study
of the Americas), W. W. Norton and Co. and the Film Studies programme
of King’s College, London.
This book has been published with the help of grants from the late
Miss Isobel Thornley’s bequest to the University of London, from Flinders
University, and from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. The
editors are very grateful to these organisations for their support.
We would like to offer our thanks to Simon Baker, Anna Henderson
and Vicky Owen at the University of Exeter Press for their work on the
book, to Ian Christie for his help and support on the project, and to Leigh
Priest for preparing the Index.
Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen

xv
 Introduction
Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes

D u r i ng the last ten years, researchers have increasingly acknowledged

that cinema cannot be comprehensively studied merely by studying
films, and that in order adequately to address the social and cultural history
of cinema, we must find ways to write the histories of its audiences. In
part, this redirection of research interest forms part of what some scholars
have called the ‘historical turn’ in cinema studies.1 To some extent, the
change of emphasis reflects a growing recognition that psychoanalytically
derived theoretical models of ‘the spectator’ have, in the end, little more
to tell us about cinema’s audiences and their reception of movies than do
pseudo-scientific laboratory-based studies of media ‘effects.’ More broadly,
however, this reorientation addresses what one 1970s theorist has recently
called ‘the weaknesses and insularity’ of contemporary film studies by
challenging its intellectual isolationism and developing accounts of cinema
that place audiences, rather than films, at their centre.2 The work in this
collection endeavours to address the evidential and methodological issues
in writing historical studies of cinema that are not centrally about films.
It represents what may well come to be seen as being among the most
important research in the study of cinema in the last decade, not least
because of the opportunity that studies of the social history of reception
offer for cinema studies to converse with other disciplines in the humanities
and social sciences.
In the second edition of Global Hollywood, published in 2004, Toby
Miller and his co-authors suggest that screen studies has so far failed ‘to
engage political and social history and social theory on the human subject,
the nation, cultural policy, the law and the economy.’ 3 ‘What would it
take,’ they ask, ‘for screen studies to matter more?’ Part of their answer
is to avoid the ‘reproduction of “screen studies” in favour of work that
studies the screen, regardless of its intellectual provenance.’ 4 One aspect


 g oing to the mov ies

of such a project may be to recognise that in order to make connections

to other disciplines, the study of cinema must abandon its preoccupations
with medium-specificity and with the centrality of the film text. As
James Hay has argued, film histories written under the assumption of
the centrality of the film text have tended to produce ‘self-contained,
self-perpetuating’ aesthetic accounts of ‘film as a distinct “language” or
set of formal conventions … without a clear sense of cinema’s relation
to other social sites.’ 5 Histories of reception, on the other hand, must
begin by acknowledging that for most audiences for most of the history
of cinema, their primary relationship with ‘the cinema’ has not been with
individual movies-as-artefacts or as texts, but with the social experience of
cinemagoing.6 An historical examination of the ways in which the cinema
has provided a site and an occasion for particular forms of social behaviour,
or of the ways in which individual movies have specified the nature of the
site, the occasion, and the behaviour, is an enquiry into the production of
meaning, but that meaning is social, not textual.
We are proposing a distinction between what might be called film
history and cinema history: between an aesthetic history of textual relations
between individuals or individual objects, and the social history of a cultural
institution. Film history, the history of textual relations and stylistic
influence, borrows its methods and rationale from the practices of art and
literary history. It is predominantly a history of production and producers,
concerned with issues of intention and agency underpinning the process
of cultural production, usually at the level of the individual, and relatively
little interested in anything, other than aesthetic influence, that happens
after the point of production.
Writing the history of the American cinema is by contrast a project
engaging with economic, industrial, institutional history on the one hand—
in accounts of how the commercial institution of cinema operated—and
the socio-cultural history of its audiences on the other. These two histories
are, we believe, far more closely bound together than either of them is
to a film history of textual relations. This book is concerned in the main
with the socio-cultural history of audiences (in the plural) and their
relationships (in the plural) to American cinema, attempting to specify
both Hollywood’s audiences and their behaviours. Such audiences have
never been homogeneous. In consequence, writing the history of American
cinema involves setting aside an idea of ‘the audience’ as a unitary entity,
and detailing some of the ways in which tastes and practices varied markedly
from region to region, between small towns and cities, between racial,
ethnic and gendered groups. It also involves analysing the ways in which
the industry knew this and accommodated it in its product.


 introduc tion

For cinema history to matter more, it must engage with the social history
of which it is a part, not through the practices of textual interpretation, but
by attempting to write cinema history from below; that is, to write histories
that are concerned not with the ‘great men’ and women of Hollywood
but with their audiences and with the roles that these performances of
celebrity played in the ordinary imaginations of those audiences. Histories
that concern themselves with the conditions of everyday life as they are
experienced by ordinary people require, as George Iggers has argued,
new conceptual and methodological approaches that see history not as
‘a grand narrative in which the many individuals are submerged, but as
a multifaceted flow with many individual centers,’ and ‘an epistemology
geared to the experiences of these many that permits knowledge of the
concrete rather than the abstract.’ 7 The aim of such histories, which we
are only now beginning to write, is in part ‘to reconstruct the lives of
individual men and women from the popular classes of the past,’ in order
to reconstruct ‘the relationship (about which we know so little) between
individual lives and the contexts in which they unfold.’ 8 As such, the work
involved here forms part of a broader historical turn that seeks to restore
agency to the ‘undistinguished’ classes by recognising ‘the degree to which
they contributed by conscious efforts to the making of history’ and historical
meaning.9 As E.P. Thompson famously sought to ‘rescue the poor stockinger,
the Luddite cropper … and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott,
from the enormous condescension of posterity,’ the goal of such histories
will be to rescue the undistinguished membership of cinema’s audiences
from the condescension of a posterity that has so far been more concerned
to contemplate ‘its own desires, criteria, and representational structures’ than
it has been to construct a meaningful account of the past.10
Ironically, this book’s concern with reception and with the social
context and consequences of moviegoing involves an historical return to
the prevailing concerns of the earliest studies of cinema, as an object of
sociological and psychological enquiry, rather than the object of aesthetic,
critical and interpretive enquiry that has ensued from the construction
of film studies as an academic discipline in the humanities. These earlier
studies, from Hugo Münsterberg to the Payne Fund research, concerned
themselves with what Frankfurt School theorist Leo Lowenthal called ‘the
underlying social and psychological function’ of cinema as a component in
the modern urban environment; their methods were those of the ‘human
sciences,’ and their objects of enquiry were people, rather than artefacts.11
The contributions to this collection all respond to the call by David
Bordwell and Noël Carroll for ‘middle-level research’ and piecemeal
theorising, although the principal object of their enquiry—the conditions


 g oing to the mov ies

of cinema exhibition and reception—is significantly different from Bordwell

and Carroll’s own concerns.12 All these essays are firmly grounded in
empirical research among primary historical sources. None of them, however,
is ‘empiricist’ in a naive or unthinking way. To argue that what Lawrence
Stone called the ‘dirty and tedious archival work’ of digging evidence
out of sources can produce an account of the past bearing a plausible
relation to an historical reality does not involve naïvely assuming that the
relationship between evidence and reality is transparent or unmediated.13
On the contrary, the very task of constructing something so unremarked and
unrecorded as the quotidian experiences of ephemeral communities requires
a conscious attention to the methods of discovery, criteria of evidence and
modes of telling not always evident in more solipsistic studies of cinematic
textuality.
Part one of this book deals with the history of cinema exhibition sites.
In the first chapter, Robert C. Allen argues that our understanding of the
social history of moviegoing has been retarded by broad generalisations
that have greatly simplified actual exhibition experience, such as ‘the
nickelodeon era,’ and by a focus on particular areas and groups. He points
to the as yet largely unexplored complexities of cinemagoing in the South
as a good illustration of what is lacking. More rural than other areas of the
United States, the South had fewer immigrants, especially from Europe,
and film-going there was inflected more by issues of race. For Southern
blacks, watching film was deeply influenced by segregatory practices: Allen
notes that the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1896 recognising the
lawfulness of segregation came just three weeks after the first successful
commercial exhibition of motion pictures at Koster and Bial’s music hall in
New York. Given the restraints on their moviegoing, Allen suggests that, for
many Southern blacks, visiting the cinema may have been for many decades
an occasional experience rather than a regular habit. For whites, by contrast,
cinemagoing had more to do with factors such as where they lived (movie
houses tended to be part of the fabric of town life, whereas few farming
families went to picture shows), wider attitudes within the community
(many Protestant churches were suspicious of the movies), and even the
season (many theatres traditionally closed during the heat of summer).
A further complexity of moviegoing in the South, according to
Christopher J. McKenna, was the existence of multi-racial as well as bi-racial
communities. Based on a local study of Robeson County, North Carolina,
from the 1890s to the Second World War, McKenna maps out the complex
geography of moviegoing in a community with both white inhabitants and
two subaltern cultures (blacks and Lumbee Indians). Segregation itself, he
notes, worked both ways: ‘whites only’ houses were balanced by ‘colored


 introduc tion

theaters.’ Yet Indians, with a social and cultural identity of their own,
often resisted simply being treated as ‘non-whites.’ They refused to go to
the movies at all—or sometimes tried to pass themselves off as white.
Equally, they frequently insisted on having their own section of balcony
space and resisted sharing it with blacks. Tri-racialism in Robeson County
during the 1920s involved showing Community Service pictures to different
racial groups on different nights or in different locations; by the 1930s it
had influenced theatre design to the point that there were three separate
entrances to some theatres and, finally, separate ticket booths for each race.
Jane M. Gaines extends McKenna’s thesis about the complexities of race in
early twentieth-century Southern moviegoing by speculating that there may
have been a white audience for black ‘race’ movies. This would, of course,
have involved breaking segregation laws, since Jim Crow controlled where
whites could go as well as blacks. African Americans, Gaines observes, often
preferred black-only theatres to avoid separate entrances and condescending
ushers. Yet there is tantalizing evidence that whites not only attended late-
night shows that were intended for both races, but that they may also have
sometimes used the darkness of night-time showings to attend supposedly
all-black theatres. In transgressing racial boundaries, these spectators were
prefiguring the much later phenomenon of the cross-over audience.
Whereas Allen notes Protestant suspicion of movies in the South, Terry
Lindvall’s local study of Norfolk, Virginia, in the period leading up to
1920, finds local churches and their middle-class congregations far more
supportive of the cinema. Movie theatres were often used for non-cinematic
purposes, including religious gatherings, while the churches themselves at
times showed films to their congregations. There was little enthusiasm on
the part of ministers in the city for movie censorship. The only matter that
did concern them was the controversial issue of Sunday exhibition, covered
by local ‘Blue Laws.’ Otherwise, Norfolk’s religious leaders perceived moving
pictures as offering more worthwhile and wholesome entertainment than
the saloons and dance-halls of their seaport city. This increasing alliance
between motion picture exhibitors and the fundamentally conservative
Protestant establishment was symbolised by the mission to the city in
January and February 1920 of revivalist preacher Billy Sunday. A former
baseball player, Sunday was close to many Hollywood celebrities and had a
generally positive view of the possibilities of the movies, which he regarded
as ‘the handmaiden of religion.’
The next three studies of local exhibition shift the focus of examination
to the North. Richard Abel laments the lack of a survey in the U.S. similar
to Emilie Altenloh’s 1913 survey of German movie attendance, but believes
that there is sufficient evidence available to demonstrate that the experience


 g oing to the mov ies

of moviegoing varied from place to place.14 When and where people went
to the cinema was influenced in some states and cities by ‘blue laws.’
Citing local studies, Abel finds different patterns of attendance in Lynn,
Massachusetts, and Toledo, Ohio. Toledo had a much larger range of venues,
hours of opening, programme lengths and frequency of programme changes.
In the second part of his chapter, Abel turns to analysing the history of
one local theatre, the Star, in Central Falls/Pawtucket, Rhode Island, from
December 1911 to October 1913. The managers of the Star, as Abel reveals,
had to change tactics a number of times. At the beginning of the period,
they presented cheap vaudeville acts and Motion Picture Patent Company
(MPPC) films. In 1912, they switched to better-quality vaudeville and films
provided by Harry and Roy Aitken’s Mutual Film Company. In 1913, they
abandoned vaudeville completely in favour of feature films from Adolph
Zukor’s Famous Players and Mutual shorts. From time to time, they also
offered ‘specials,’ with varying success. After months of experimentation,
the Star finally hit on a strategy of showing multi-reelers that proved
both profitable and popular. It appealed, in particular, to working-class
and immigrant patrons who lived close to the theatre. Movie attendance
varied throughout the year in accordance with variables such as holidays
and the weather but, generally, was highest on Saturdays. It also peaked on
Monday and Wednesday evenings, when programmes were changed. The
value attached to seeing films as soon as they arrived, Abel notes, suggests
the importance that motion pictures had by this point attained in the lives
of working people.
Judith Thissen observes a similar phenomenon in the New York Jewish
working-class community. By mid-1908, there was a greater density of movie
houses in the Jewish areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn than anywhere else
in the city. This created problems for the community’s self-elected cultural
leadership, notably represented by Abraham Cahan’s newspaper, the Jewish
Daily Forward. Jewish newspapers, out of ethnic solidarity, rallied to the
defence of Jewish exhibitors when Mayor George B. McClellan closed all
the movie theatres in New York on Christmas Eve 1908. Yet the city’s
Jewish cultural elite only became really engaged with the question of
moving pictures in 1909–10, when Adler’s Grand Theater—a live theatre
specialising in Yiddish performances—was taken over by Adolph Zukor
and Marcus Loew and transformed into a venue for vaudeville and motion
pictures. Yiddish papers ignored the fact that Zukor and Loew were both
Jewish, and presented the change as a threat to Jewish identity. With
legitimate Yiddish theatre in sharp decline, they adopted a cultural strategy
that involved elevating the vaudeville that they had previously derided into
the mainstream of Jewish culture, and assigning motion pictures the low


 introduc tion

status formerly assigned to vaudeville. Cultural gate-keepers in the Jewish

community, regarding themselves as people of the book rather than the
image, criticised the moral dangers posed by movies to young people. In
reality, however, the popularity of the cinema amongst immigrant Jews can
be seen as an expression of participatory democracy that won out in the
end. By 1913–14, motion pictures were increasingly regarded as culturally
acceptable. Leading Jewish stage actors were starting to appear on film and
movie news had become a common feature of the Yiddish press.
It is not only film historians who have, as Robert C. Allen suggests,
advanced normative ideas of what the experience of moviegoing was like.
Hollywood itself was eager to advance the view that the characteristic
cinematic experience of the 1920s was to patronise the movie palace. With
its downtown or suburban location, the palace set out to appeal to a primarily
bourgeois audience by offering a complete range of customer services. This
notion of a ‘middle-class accent’ to moviegoing is, however, challenged by
Jeffrey Klenotic, who argues that a wide range of social groups continued to
patronise more traditional film theatres. He illustrates his claim with a local
study of the Franklin Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts. Built cheaply in
1929, the Franklin offered a palpably different experience of moving-going
to the palace. Under Lebanese ownership, it integrated well with the stable
but heterogeneous population of the surrounding area. In the recollection
of former patrons, it played a major role in the social and recreational life
of local children. Its efforts—as a ‘daily grind’—to identify enough films to
fill its schedules led to the use, from time to time, of ethnic programming.
Throughout the Depression of the 1930s, it offered raffles and giveaways as
a means of ensuring that its working-class clients continued to patronise the
theatre. The Franklin, Klenotic concludes, was not a poor imitation of the
movie palace; instead, it offered a genuinely different type of moviegoing,
foregrounding the social and collective experience of cinemagoing.
That experience is discussed further in the chapter by Mark Glancy and
John Sedgwick. Rather than looking at the history of one cinema and its
relationship with its community, Glancy and Sedgwick analyse the material
on a wide range of first-run houses that appeared in the pages of Variety. They
find that a film’s local success was often the consequence of a combination of
factors: pricing strategy, the regional appeal of specific actors and actresses,
and endorsements by local worthies (including ministers). There was
indeed, as Hollywood believed, a clear difference between metropolitan and
provincial tastes. While ‘double billing’ was a Depression-era innovation,
designed—along with engineered ‘events’—to keep audiences coming to
movie theatres, the division between ‘A’ and ‘B’ films was at times not
clear. Double billing also created an opportunity for foreign films, especially


 g oing to the mov ies

British ones, to be incorporated into programmes. Gregory A. Waller has

already pointed out the symbiosis between country music and small-town
cinema in south-central Kentucky during the Depression.15 Using evidence
from Variety, Glancy and Sedgwick question the conventional assumption
that the coming of sound and the Depression brought about the end
of live performance in cinemas, concluding that almost half the movie
theatres involved in their survey were ‘combination’ houses that offered live
entertainment together with films on the same bill. In some cases, the live
performances were tailored to encourage the success of a particular film.
What constituted an evening’s entertainment at the movies in many places
in the mid-1930s could, therefore, include an eclectic range of live acts
(mainly derived from vaudeville) and specific events.
Variety was one of the sources also consulted by Thomas Doherty. In
June 1963, the entertainment trade bible finally published an editorial
condemning the racial segregation of Southern moviegoers—the issue
previously analysed by Allen, McKenna and Gaines. Doherty’s chapter
examines the long-delayed but ultimately surprisingly fast desegregation
of Southern movie houses. As communal spaces, cinemas were affected
by growing demands for integration in the wake of the Supreme Court’s
landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision of 1954. Initially,
civil rights organisations focused their efforts on desegregation in education,
employment and housing, and the first specific agitation for desegregating
cinemas did not appear until 1961. The favourite tactic of the movement was
the ‘stand-in’—a version of the sit-in used in drugstores and other social
spaces. Civil rights activists queued up at the box-office to demand tickets
admitting African Americans to anywhere in the house. When refused,
they simply rejoined the queue to try again. Understandably, movie house
managers hated the tactic, which ate into their profits. Generally, in fact,
the movie industry seemed embarrassed by the publicity and controversy
that surrounded protests against segregation, disliking them as bad for
business. From early 1961, it collaborated with local civic leaders in a
slow, controlled integration of theatres, beginning in Nashville, Tennessee.
This process speeded up in the early summer of 1963 when the Kennedy
Administration, concerned that continuing segregation would undercut the
international fight against communism, weighed in. After Attorney-General
Robert F. Kennedy met with the representatives of theatre chains in May,
over twenty-five Southern theatres voluntarily desegregated within days.
There was still some resistance in the Deep South, but this was broken, first
with the reaction to the assassination of President Kennedy and then with
the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By the end of 1964, motion
picture theatres everywhere in the South were open to all races.


 introduc tion

Underpinning most cinema history is the notion that cinema itself is

synonymous with the public space of the movie theatre. This has been true
from the age of the nickelodeon to the era of the modern multiplex. Yet
the movie theatre has never been the only place at which films could be
seen. In the earliest days of American cinema, from 1896 until the rise of
the nickelodeon, films were shown by itinerant showmen in a wide variety
of venues, including churches, stores, exhibition halls, YMCAs, opera
houses, schools, cafés, and fairs. Even with the rise of the nickelodeon after
1905, films continued to be exhibited in other places. By 1933, as Haidee
Wasson points out below, the number of ‘non-theatrical’ film projectors
in the U.S.—including equipment for home projection—outnumbered
the number of projectors in commercial movie theatres by more than ten
to one. Showing of films of various types in the home was, of course,
destined to grow vastly as the decades passed. Some were ‘home movies’
in the truest sense of the term: amateur productions intended to preserve
cherished images of family life.16 With the rise of television, more and more
Americans watched movies at home on the national networks. Subsequent
changes, from cable television to the video-cassettes, laser discs and DVDs
of the 1980s and 1990s, have ensured that the characteristic experience of
film on the part of most Americans is now a domestic one. Cinemagoing
in the U.S., which reached an all-time peak of 82 million admissions per
week in 1946, collapsed to around 20 million admissions by the 1960s, and
averaged 28 million a week between 1996 and 2005.17 Yet, while watching
films in movie theatres did not really happen until after 1905 and has been
in decline for over half a century, ‘theatrical’ exhibition continues to be
regarded as the norm by most film historians. The next part of this book
discusses aspects of ‘non-theatrical’ exhibition or what might perhaps be
described, more accurately, as ‘other cinema.’
Haidee Wasson argues that privileging movie theatres as the main
centres for watching film was a product of the normalising efforts of the
early twentieth-century American movie industry. There were many who
sought to resist those efforts, however, fighting for a cinema that would be
culturally superior and/or intended for more specialised audiences. Wasson
analyses the history of one such effort: following the introduction of 16mm
film by Eastman Kodak in 1923 (the industry-dominated standard gauge
for theatres was 35mm), a number of people tried to transform the mass
medium of the movies into a type of elitist and educational activity suitable
for the middle-class American home. Following the successful introduction
of the Book of the Month Club in 1926, a ‘Reel of the Month Club’ was
launched in 1927 to bring pictures of key world events to subscribers’
homes. Whereas commercial movies themselves were public, short-lived


 g oing to the mov ies

and entertaining, these films were supposed to be private, enduring and

educational. They reflected the 1920s drive to make the American home an
expression of upwardly mobile ideals, filled with symbols of education and
refinement. Like books, these films were meant to be collected and displayed
(Kodak sold faux-leather bindings to store them on shelves). Although
the experiment did not last—16mm was swept away for home use by the
introduction of an 8mm gauge in 1932, followed by the later emergence of
television—it prefigured the modern notion of cinema as a mainly domestic
experience, with most film viewing taking place in the home.18
While Wasson explores the early history of one alternative to theatrical
exhibition of the Hollywood variety, Anne Morey examines another: an early
movement towards ‘art house’ or independent cinema. From approximately
1925 to 1929, a ‘little cinema’ movement existed, with its principal focus in
New York. As a symbol of public revolt against mainstream film-making,
it pioneered different textual practices (preferring European to American
film aesthetics) and distinct institutional structures (patterns of distribution
and exhibition that repudiated the Hollywood ‘norm’). Symon Gould was
a major influence on the movement in New York, running first the Cameo
Theatre and later the purpose-built 500-seat Film Guild Cinema. Gould
sought out little-known European—and especially German—films for his
theatres and pioneered the use of themed retrospectives. By 1929, however,
with the coming of sound (and the additional costs this represented), the
little cinema movement was running out of steam. There were too many
independent little cinemas and too much cut-throat competition. What
doomed the movement finally was the lack of domestic art films that
prompted an over-dependence on foreign imports.
Gregory A. Waller discusses a third variety of ‘other cinema’: the free
films shown in rural America during the 1930s. Although farm families seem
to have gone less frequently to commercial movie theatres than city folk,
they did attend free film shows organised under the auspices of churches,
schools, business service organisations and government agencies. There was
often a directness and immediacy about such films lacking in Hollywood
product: farm families were more likely to see their own environment
and concerns displayed in free films. Tractor-making companies such as
International Harvester and John Deere exhibited films about their products
at dealerships and in other locations. The American Farm Bureau Federation
(AFBF), which began producing and distributing films in 1921, claimed that
within two years it had supplied motion pictures for over 3,500 screenings
in 35 states. By 1931, the AFBF claimed that the eleven films it had itself
produced had been seen by an audience of over half a million. Most of these
screenings took place in town halls, schools, churches or private homes. The

10
 introduc tion

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which had been involved in the

production of documentaries since the 1910s, claimed in 1933 that more than
4,700 films had been exhibited for free in schools, churches, Rotary Club
meetings and similar venues to a total audience of ten million people.
The chapter by Barbara Klinger deals with a somewhat different issue:
not the existence of alternative types of venue and alternative kind of film
to that provided by ‘Hollywood,’ but the manner in which Hollywood
films have been transformed through ancillary, non-theatrical exhibition.
Many films, she argues, circulate well beyond their initial release. As a
process, this involves considerable textual amendment and adaptation.
Between the 1930s and the 1950s, many movies were adapted for radio,
sometimes with the same stars in the leading roles. Inevitably, of course,
this required much abridgement of the film’s narrative. Moreover, different
movie versions were produced for different audiences: films were adapted
for Northern (or Southern) release and for foreign audiences. This has not
always involved permanent changes to the film’s text. In 2002, for example,
an audience of school-children in an Afghan refugee camp were entranced
by a showing of The Wizard of Oz (1939). In deference to the susceptibilities
of local Islamic culture, the projectionist simply fast-forwarded through the
shots of singing Munchkins to avoid the display of too much bare skin.
Actual textual amendments to films, moreover, have involved additions as
well as subtractions: ‘remedial’ re-releases have restored footage eliminated
by censors or studio editors. Perhaps most crucially of all, with theatrical
exhibition now responsible for only a quarter of Hollywood’s revenues,
movies have been ‘repurposed’ for home delivery. Meanwhile, non-theatrical
exhibition, often ephemeral, has continued outside the home—Klinger
cites a range of venues including schools, factories, prisons, hospitals and
aircraft.
The third part of this book deals with the diverse ways in which
audiences have been conceptualised and negotiated, with special reference to
the questions of globalization and censorship outside the U.S. Hollywood’s
role in a more global process of Americanization—that of ‘sell[ing] America
to the world with American motion pictures,’ as Will H. Hays proselytised
in 1923—has long been asserted by both enthusiasts and detractors alike.
Whether ‘every film that goes from America abroad,’ has correctly portrayed
‘the purposes, the ideals, the accomplishments, the opportunities, and the
life of America,’ as Hays claimed it would, has been a subject of contention
ever since.19 Viewed from abroad, where the concept of Americanization has
long carried fewer positive connotations, recent evidence of the catastrophic
failure of the ideological project encapsulated by Hays might lead us
to suggest that the imaginary ‘American’ culture of the movies became

11
 g oing to the mov ies

‘everyone’s second culture’ far more successfully as an agent of commerce

than as an instrument of ideology.20 As Victoria de Grazia has argued,

it is not at all clear how as elusive a force as consumer culture, being

the sum of myriads of marketing strategies, second-order decisions of
government, and mundane choices about getting and spending, was
converted into great power. Nor is it clear how the United States
exercised this great power to promote democracies of consumption
elsewhere, much less to advance global concord.21

The chapters in the final part of this book also inevitably engage with
questions of textual as well as social meaning, since they are concerned
with the ways in which audiences have understood and interpreted their
experiences of cinema. Throughout its history, academic enquiry into
the social meaning of cinema has been enormously constrained by a
preoccupation with an agenda of harm, which has proposed that the primary
public interest in the social institution of cinema is in minimising its ‘capacity
for evil.’ 22 This proposition has continued to determine a research agenda
constructed around a model of uni-directional flow, in which some aspect
of cinema—the darkened room, ‘media violence’—has been identified as a
putative cause or stimulus, and some viewer behaviour—eyestrain, attention
span, ‘aggressive play’—has been identified as a response, a prospectively
measurable effect.23
Models of viewer behaviour, and perceptions of the audience as either
passive recipients of predetermined textual meaning or as agents in the
construction of social meaning have, in many respects, been at the heart
of debates over the regulation of cinema. The underlying relationship
between movie and viewer proposed by the long, expensive, often excessive
history of effects research is remarkably similar to that proposed by the
emphasis on textual meaning: by one means or another, movies are alleged
to cause viewer effects, textual meaning to create social meaning. In such
formulations, the viewer in the act of viewing is understood to be the passive
recipient of an at least theoretically measurable stimulus. In the words of
one of the godfathers of the Production Code, Daniel Lord, ‘people go to
the theatres; sit there passively—ACCEPT and RECEIVE; with the result
that they go out from that entertainment either very much improved or very
much deteriorated; and that depends almost entirely upon the character of
the entertainment which is presented.’ 24 Such a framework directs attention
principally to textual meaning, and determines that the regulation of
cinematic meaning takes place at the point of production, with public debate
circulating principally around producers’ intentions.

12
 introduc tion

In the early 1930s, the industry commonly relied on the protections

offered by the moral narratives of melodrama, arguing that if the movies
told stories in which good and evil were clearly distinguished and good seen
to triumph, then the audience’s moral principles would be reaffirmed. The
evidence then emerging from the Payne Fund studies cast doubt on the claim
that narrative was the primary influence on young audiences, suggesting that
the cinema’s power to corrupt lay in the potential pleasure of its spectacle. In
Movies, Delinquency and Crime, Herbert Blumer and Philip Hauser argued
that young viewers failed to construct an ‘organized interpretation’ of a
movie’s narrative. Instead, they appeared ‘to have a wide range of scattered
and unorganized interests, and, in addition, to be particularly responsive
to incidents which are dramatic, exciting, and tempting.’ As a result, they
were likely to find ‘details or elements of the picture’ more significant than
the moral contained in the movie’s resolution.25 The increasingly strident
debate over the relative interpretive status of narrative and spectacle
became the central point at issue in the debates over movie censorship in
the early 1930s, and led to Classical Hollywood’s formulation of strategies
of indeterminacy, elision, enigma and suggestion as the means by which
Classical Hollywood’s movies provided the material for a mode of exhibition
and a mode of consumption that accommodated the viewer’s agency in
constructing narrative, without at the same time actually acknowledging
the existence of that agency.26
Arguably the most valuable piece of research undertaken through the
Payne Fund project was never published: Paul Cressey’s draft of Boys,
Movies and City Streets.27 Although Cressey never completed that work, he
did summarise his conclusions about the sociology of the motion picture
experience in a 1938 article in American Sociological Review—a piece that
reads like a research agenda for a path unfortunately not taken. Summarising
what he took to be the demonstrable findings of the Payne Fund Studies,
Cressey noted that

When the motion picture is viewed only ‘externally,’ it certainly

appears to be only unilateral, i.e., the patrons are wholly passive
agents who are merely ‘played upon’ through the arts and skills of
cinematography. We have, however, abundant evidence that this
is an erroneous conception. Through imaginative participation,
identification, random reflection, phantasy before and after cinema
attendance, and through the impact of prior interests and values,
the cinema experience is redefined in many ways and may affect the
patron in forms only incidentally associated with film content.28

13
 g oing to the mov ies

Cressey’s proposed agenda was to examine these processes and behaviours

from a position that recognised that ‘the cinema’s “effect” upon an individual,
a community or a society never can be gauged accurately if the motion
picture experience is studied only segmentally and never in its essential
unity.’ Any programme of research that failed to acknowledge ‘all essential
phases of the motion picture experience,’ he argued, could ‘offer little more
than conjecture as to the cinema’s net “effect” in actual social settings and
communities.’ Cressey further contended that it was

a serious misconception of social process to assume that accurate

knowledge of the cinema’s ‘contribution’ can be deduced from
particularistic studies of the motion picture experience … Social
causation is entirely too complex a problem to be explained by any
such simplistic interpretation of incomplete data.29

The media effects research tradition initiated by the Payne Fund

Studies, as David Buckingham has argued, has ‘remained stubbornly tied to
behaviourist assumptions,’ conceiving of the social and cognitive dimensions
of viewer behaviour only as ‘intervening variables’ mediating between the
stimulus on the screen and the response in the viewer.30 Insofar as this
research has addressed Cressey’s questions, its best methodological energies
have been devoted to the construction of elaborate mechanisms to control
for ‘variables’ such as ‘family background, preferences, interests and social
circumstance’ in order to eliminate the noise they create in establishing the
stimulus-response, cause-effect mechanism between content and behaviour.
No amount of rhetoric suggesting that effects research is now a form of ‘risk
analysis’ that has replaced simplistic ‘hypodermic’ hypotheses of cause and
effect with a probabilistic account borrowed from epidemiology changes the
core research paradigm.31 What Graham Murdock has termed the ‘medical
model’ continues to underpin the ‘unbroken line of banal science’ which has
‘failed to ask awkward questions, to pursue other possible lines of enquiry
or to place “effects” in their social contexts.’ 32 The effects research tradition
has yet to devise any empirical procedures that might allow us to fulfil
Cressey’s ambition of studying ‘the cinema’s “contribution” under various
circumstances and social situations and to perceive more fundamentally its
role in the growth of attitudes and personality.’ 33
Perhaps the project that Cressey proposed was just too hard. More
probably, its conclusions were unlikely to support either of the financially
well-endowed camps in the media effects debate, and thus we find
ourselves, nearly seventy years later, hardly better informed about the
mechanisms and processes of ‘the motion picture situation’ and its creation

14
 introduc tion

of ‘imaginative states.’ As Richard Butsch observes in his chapter, however,

the debate over media effects has significantly changed the conception of
what constitutes a ‘bad’ audience. In the nineteenth century, audiences
for the theatre (especially lower-class melodramas) were often perceived
as an unruly and potentially dangerous crowd. Late in the century,
efforts were made to contain this threat: amongst other things, benches
gave way to numbered seats and electric lights permitted the house to
be darkened during performances. From being a crowd, threatening in
its unpredictable collectivity, audiences were transformed into individuals
sitting in the darkness engaged with the performance. Increasingly,
reformers, sociologists and psychologists all came to believe that such
individuals were weak and highly susceptible to suggestive messages from
films. This belief, which underpinned the Payne Fund studies, resurfaced
during the 1950s, when there was increased concern about the link between
movies and delinquency. In modern times, it has influenced perceptions of
fans—ignoring the idea of them as communities to foreground the notion
of them as neurotic and fantasizing individuals. Butsch notes, however, that
most of the ‘weak-willed’ people who make up ‘bad’ audiences are drawn
from subordinate social groups. Constructing them in this way justifies
efforts to control them.
The same principle of suggestibility lay behind the effort to attack
‘morally unhealthy’ movies. The campaign of the Legion of Decency has
been explored by a number of recent scholars, but it was not only in the
United States that such movements emerged.34 Catholic attempts to clean up
the movies occurred in other countries and, at least in the case of Belgium,
preceded the Legion’s activities. Daniel Biltereyst explains that Belgian
Catholics were entrusted by the Pope with the job of co-ordinating other
national Catholic film movements. The Catholic campaign to clean up the
movies in Belgium was greatly affected by the division of the country along
various axes. American movies themselves were more popular in the northern
part of the country, Dutch-speaking Flanders; in mainly French-speaking
Brussels and Wallonia, French films kept their appeal, and increased their
market share after the coming of sound. Catholicism was an important force
in most of Belgium but it found itself increasingly fighting for influence
in French-speaking areas against socialist and liberal organisations. From
1928 onwards, Belgian Catholics engaged in various initiatives designed to
influence the content of films and in 1931—two years before the Legion
of Decency was formed in the U.S.—they introduced a Catholic board
of classification. Although the Belgians praised the achievements of the
Legion, they felt that they had pioneered where Americans followed in
terms of censorship and press action.

15
 g oing to the mov ies

The Belgian Catholic crusaders on film were, of course, particularly

concerned about the effect of movies on suggestible children. Annette Kuhn
traces the growing parallel concern over children’s moviegoing in 1930s
Britain. The British Board of Film Censors, set up in 1913, had developed
a system of classification whose basic division was between ‘U’ films (for
universal exhibition) and ‘A’ (no one under sixteen could be admitted unless
accompanied by an adult guardian). As public and political pressure for
stricter censorship grew, the period 1931–32 witnessed a shift of focus from
the issue of children’s access to ‘A’ films to questions arising from the actual
content of films. The catalyst for this process was the arrival in Britain of
a new cycle of Hollywood horror talkies, heralded by Dracula (1931) and
Frankenstein (1931). Originally passed by the BBFC as ‘A’ films, the new
label ‘H’ (horrific) was invented in 1932 to distinguish such films. This was
an advisory classification: despite all the concerns expressed at the time
over the effect of such films in frightening or horrifying children, it left
the final decision on children’s attendance up to their parents. In 1937, the
‘H’ label became a certificate, banning children under sixteen from seeing
the films involved. Also by 1937, the thrust of the movement concerned
with protecting children had changed: instead of protecting children from
‘unsuitable’ films, it recognised them as a distinct audience with particular
needs who needed pictures produced specially for them.
The chapters by Biltereyst and Kuhn could each be regarded as local
European responses to aspects of Americanization. ‘Americanization’ itself,
of course, is a contested term. Both Janice Radway and Richard Ellis
have recently argued that concepts of ‘the American’ in American Studies
must always be relationally defined, in acknowledgement of the fact that
the culture of the United States is multicultural and inevitably fissured
in its identities.35 Just as concepts of ‘the American’ are relationally
defined, so, too, are concepts of ‘Americanization.’ The term addresses a
different conceptual field once it leaves American shores, losing its positive
connotations to become, instead, a term of something between critique and
abuse: Hollywood as the seducer of the innocent, ‘over-paid, over-sexed, and
over here,’ the representative here, now, of the Great Satan. In thinking over
once again what is now an eighty-year history of exchanges over Hollywood’s
imperialism and cultural protectionism, what strikes the observer most of
all is the mutual incomprehension of the parties involved, and the failure
to construct a common cultural ground—a middle ground.
American historian Richard White has provided an extraordinarily
powerful description of what he calls the ‘middle ground’ between cultures.
White’s description is of the cultural interactions between Europeans and
Native Americans in the Great Lakes region during the eighteenth century,

16
 introduc tion

and is concerned with the face-to-face interactions of the frontier. Yet he

does provide a powerfully suggestive model of how what he calls the ‘search
for accommodation and common meaning’ between cultures takes place,
and his model has much broader applicability than the case he considers:

On the middle ground diverse peoples adjust their differences

through what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient,
misunderstandings. They often misinterpret and distort both
the values and the practices of those they deal with, but from
these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them
new practices—the shared meanings and practices of the middle
ground.

The middle ground that White describes developed from people’s needs
to find a means to gain the cooperation or consent of foreigners. In order to
achieve this, they had to attempt ‘to understand the world and the reasoning
of others, and to assimilate enough of that reasoning to put it to their own
purposes.’ The middle ground was ‘a realm of constant invention, which
was just as constantly presented as convention.’ Instead of being specific
negotiations of agreed-upon differences, exchanges on the middle ground
were struggles over images, often taking place within rather than between
groups.36 It is on a version of the middle ground that ‘nous sommes tous
Américains.’ 37
While Americans themselves might present American-ness ‘as the very
signifier of universal human evolution, subsuming under it all the local
currencies of cultural exchange, a limitless melting pot of mores, nations
and classes,’ 38 non-American cultural élites, particularly in Europe, have
frequently viewed American mass culture as a threat to both the security
of their own cultural nationalisms and to their own cultural authority over
the definition of national culture. They have also constructed the consumers
of American culture as being simpler than they were, not only in the sense
of being comparatively intellectually retarded, but also as being monolithic
in their adoption of an American monoculture. In practice, as Ahmet
Gürata demonstrates in his chapter, foreign audiences constructed a middle
ground on which they made sense of Hollywood in their own cultural
terms, according to their own cultural points of reference, domesticating
the America of their imaginations.
In the beginning, Gürata argues, this process of adaptation was relatively
easy. Film exhibitors used local lecturers, intertitles, music and sound effects
to ‘indigenize’ American films to suit the cultural preferences of Turkish
audiences. With the coming of sound, this process became more difficult.

17
 g oing to the mov ies

Films were instead re-titled to meet local susceptibilities, scenes were cut,
sometimes additional scenes with local stars were added, and speech was
dubbed—first into French, later into English (Laurel and Hardy were very
popular on Turkish screens in the 1930s, speaking broken Turkish with
an American accent). So effectively was this done that spectators joined in
the fiction that, for example, the Marx brothers ‘lived’ in Istanbul (some
local people claimed to be ‘relatives’ of Groucho). Hollywood’s product
was appropriated, transformed and to some extent naturalized as part of
‘Turkish’ cinema, which may help to explain why, given the strict censorship
of films that existed in Turkey after 1934, relatively few American films
were ever banned.
Gürata’s work adds to the growing accumulation of evidence for the
semantic malleability of Hollywood’s products, and their susceptibility to
what Philip Rosen has called ‘local meanings, practices, social rituals and
even politics.’ 39 Charles Ambler uses the evidence provided by his account
of the ‘Copperbelt Cowboys’ of Northern Rhodesia and audiences elsewhere
in Africa to argue that while ‘the often disjointed and exotic images of the
“Wild West” … comprised a crucial repertoire of images’ through which
the young urban population could ‘engage notions of modernity,’ theoretical
models of media or cultural imperialism offer too schematic an explanation
of the complex and contested dynamics of the interpretive process. Ambler
argues that ‘at the same time that audiences were drawing on films to
develop a lexicon of modernity, they were reinventing the films in their
own cultural and political terms,’ investing their characters and action with
indigenous qualities. The movies those audiences watched, at almost the
farthest extreme of the global distribution chain, had been subjected to a
panoply of physical deconstructions, to a point where their plots would have
been barely discernable to an audience equipped with the linguistic and
cultural competences to ‘follow’ them—which Ambler’s protagonists were
not. To make these artefacts make sense, local audiences had to reconfigure
them into patterns of symbol and behaviour which might mean something
in the context of their viewing. An American film focusing on health
care, for example, was disliked by Africans who assumed that disease had
more to do with religion and distrusted what they saw as arrogant, corrupt
nurses. Equally, Westerns appealed because men used ‘Jack,’ the universal
cowboy figure, to help define their own perceptions of masculinity—and the
freedom of watching someone ride across open spaces may have provided a
degree of relief and compensation for Africans’ own oppressed status.
The spread of the Internet, with its prospect of alternative modes of
distribution, has recently provided Hollywood with a dramatic challenge to
its existing business practice, which maintains the major distributors’ control

18
 introduc tion

over product at an acceptable level. As in 1921–48 over issues of anti-trust and

in 1976–82 over the threats and opportunities provided by domestic video-
recorders, the industry has initially sought to resist technological change in
an attempt to preserve its existing commercial model. In the process, the
major companies have also sought to preserve the existing model of viewing
conditions and its assumptions about the viewer’s expectations of the
viewing experience. To comprehend the existing business model, we have
to reconsider the major companies’ behaviour since the mid-1980s, in which
we have seen—as Charles Acland’s chapter describes—not only the vertical
re-integration of distribution and theatrical exhibition in the U.S., but
also the greatly increased internationalisation of these vertically integrated
structures through the majors’ extensive investment in the development of
the megaplex, ‘showcase screens,’ and the re-building of the theatre stock
in Europe, Latin America and parts of Asia. The media marketplace is now
characterised by high concentration of ownership and virtually no regulatory
constraints, and, as Jennifer Holt argues, this situation is in fact very similar
to the business conditions of Classical Hollywood.40 Five companies now
own all the U.S. broadcast networks, four of the major movie companies,
forty-five of the top fifty U.S. cable channels, and provide 75 per cent of all
U.S. prime-time programming. It is arguable that the re-establishment of
vertical integration, and the present sequential arrangement of distribution,
has been of much greater economic—and therefore cultural—significance
than the much more vaunted pursuit of synergy through mergers and
convergence.41 Unlike Classical Hollywood’s distribution system of runs and
zones, where the majors’ profits were concentrated in first-run exhibition,
subsequent release windows in the current system carry a substantially
higher profit percentage than theatrical exhibition does—typically 40
per cent of the profit on videos, 45–50 per cent on DVDs and a rumoured
target of 60 per cent on digital distribution via Movielink.
Acland himself draws attention to the growing international synchro-
nisation of new films—the trend to release them simultaneously in many
parts of the world. This has happened, he points out, not only because of
the increasingly powerful international theatre chains mentioned above,
but also as a means of fighting piracy and securing economies of scale.
Concessions too are increasingly internationalized, although local social
and cultural differences persist: Germans like sweet popcorn, Spanish
moviegoers prefer salty. As this example indicates, while globalization has
fostered an international sense of ‘the new’ and perhaps also a feeling of
community between moviegoers across continents, it has not completely
eliminated national or local idiosyncracies. The rise of the multiplex,
according to Acland, has had a major impact on certain zones of particular

19
 g oing to the mov ies

cities. As Mark Jancovich argues in the final chapter of this book, however,
to see the rise of the multiplex as an especially problematic illustration of
Americanization—something that promotes a world with no sense of place
and reduces most social activity to the level of consumerism—reduces to
clichéd simplicity what is often really the product of complex negotiation
and reinterpretation. As Jancovich demonstrates, the Cornerhouse multiplex
in Nottingham was part of a government-sponsored strategy designed to
regenerate the centre of British cities, increasingly seen as afflicted with
traffic, crime and social problems. It was planned by local developers,
eager to prove that their city could attract global brands of commerce and
entertainment. The fight over its building had little to do with concerns over
Americanization, which only emerged as a discourse near the end of the
struggle. It had much more to do with the alienation of the elderly from
city and local politics and their desire to preserve what remained of the
city of their youth. After its opening, moreover, the Cornerhouse adopted
a policy of showing not just American films: it offered independent films
and, as a concession to the local Indian community, a weekly ‘Bollywood’
presentation. Not simply an outpost of globalization or Americanization,
therefore, the Cornerhouse shows that the supposed homogenization of such
processes is far from being a one-way street.
Our present understanding of how cinema functioned as an agent
of consumerism can usefully be reconsidered through the experience of
consumption in different places at different times in the last century.
Writing about the differential spread of consumer durables in different
parts of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, Victoria de Grazia argues that
the grand narrative of how household goods came to be possessed ‘was in
large measure indifferent to variations in class, local cultures, and history.’
At any given historical moment, however, what these goods meant, socially
and culturally, varied from nation to nation and region to region depending
on how far each locality had progressed through the reiterated narrative of
‘technological change, rise in family incomes, and revolution in outlooks, all
sanctioned and pushed by a new cross-Atlantic standard of living.’ 42 While
in one sense (primarily a textual sense) the movies that have articulated and
spread an Americanized global culture around the world since 1916 have
been similarly indifferent to local variation, they have also been subject
to the specific geographic and historical conditions under which their
performances have been viewed—at this cinema in this neighbourhood
with these people and with these detailed local understandings of social
distinction.
The histories we envisage might, then, ask: to what extent did cinema, as
a social agent in the promulgation of ‘consumptionism,’ require pre-existing

20
 introduc tion

economic conditions, including a level of discretionary spending among

its potential audience? Where these conditions did not exist, did cinema
exhibition remain a marginal activity not simply because people were too
poor to attend frequently, but also because the pleasures of cinema—the
aspirational pleasures of viewing consumption and viewing-as-consumption
that were part of what economist Simon N. Patten had called the surplus
or pleasure economy—were insufficiently engaged with or integrated into
their daily lives? 43 Can we correlate patterns of cinema exhibition to the
markedly variant patterns of retail sales in the U.S. and Europe for much
of the century? And if we can—or, for that matter, if we cannot—what
will that tell us about the social function of cinema? Did cinema represent
a sort of half-way house between access to ‘Americanized’ consumer culture
and the practicalities of economic possibility, both for poorer communities
in the U.S. and for much of Europe in the first half of the twentieth
century and beyond? To what extent, where, and when, did the cinema
provide a substitute for consumption—a placebo—rather than an aspiration
to consume and a guidebook or practical manual in the development of
the practice of consumption? To put it most simply, why did people go to
the movies?
If the answers to these questions are not yet plain, what is somewhat clearer
is that such explanations as we may be able to offer will require different
historical methods and tools from those that have so far predominated in
film history. Instead, these tools are likely to be drawn from the methodo-
logical dialogues of social and cultural historians. To begin with, we will
need detailed historical maps of cinema exhibition, amplified by evidence
about the nature and frequency of attendance. This data then needs to be
combined with broader demographic information derived from census data
and other surveys to amplify our understanding of cinema’s audiences. Such
detailed quantitative information is vital if we are to progress beyond our
current broad-brush knowledge based on trade figures, diplomatic accounts
and grand theories of classical cinema as vernacular modernism to a more
exact sense of who made up cinema’s audiences. With this knowledge will
come the means better to understand cinema’s cultural function: to consider,
for example, whether the geography of cinema produced new forms of social
differentiation at the same time that the images its audiences consumed
projected a dissolution of ‘the sumptuary lines between classes.’ 44
Just as vital as this demographic history, however, is the inclusion of
experience that will ground quantitative generalisations in the concrete
particulars of micro-historical studies of local situations, effects and
infrastructure, based perhaps around the records of individual cinemas
or small chains. The heroes of these micro-histories—the Menocchios of

21
 g oing to the mov ies

the cinema—will be the small businessmen who acted as cultural brokers,

navigators and translators of the middle ground constructing a creolised
culture out of their community’s encounters with the mediated external
world.45 One of these micro-histories may become the Montaillou of cinema
history, through what it may reveal about how its citizen consumers explained
themselves and their place in the world through their encounters with the
forces of global and globalising culture.46 Such histories, self-consciously
acknowledging their own constructions and mediations, may also form
part of comparative local histories, and, finally, may underpin attempts to
consider the cultural function and performance of individual movies in more
secure social and cultural detail than we can presently achieve. The work in
this collection points the way to the achievement of this goal.

22
 pa r t i

Studies of Local Cinema

Exhibition
 1

Race, Region, and Rusticity

Relocating U.S. Film History

Robert C. Allen

Before I see a movie it is necessary for me to learn something

about the theater or the people who operate it, to touch base before
going inside … If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket
seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should
be seeing one copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and
at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and
time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is
in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville.
So it was with me.
Binx Bolling, protagonist and narrator of Walker
Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer. 1

I n 2004, an issue of Cinema Journal featured a special colloquium entitled

‘Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn.’ In the
introduction to this section, Sumiko Higashi asks whether the field of film
studies has experienced a ‘“historical turn” based on empirical research’ over
the past twenty years or so. The title of her essay would seem to anticipate
an affirmative answer to this question. In fact, however, she argues that
the historical turn in film studies has led not to an intellectual turnpike
but a narrow country lane, and a road less taken particularly by younger
scholars. Why is it that a quarter of a century after scholars began revising
the existing unscholarly, schematic, and largely undocumented histories of
movies in America, historical research today still represents only a ‘slowly

25
 g oing to the mov ies

accelerating movement in film studies?’ Higashi’s explanation is that most

academics who train students in film studies have not themselves been
trained to do empirical research.’ 2
The terminological slip from historical to empirical might be confusing
to some, who could be forgiven for expecting the operative term to be
‘historical’ or ‘historiographic’ rather than empirical. Although Higashi
does not actually explain the relationship between what she calls ‘empirical’
and ‘historical,’ I take it to mean anything existing or posited to exist
outside of the cinematic text and the inferred conditions of its reception
as they are understood by the analyst. Higashi is right to locate the realm
of the empirical as being at the center of the problem of film history, but
the glacial momentum of the historical ‘turn’ today is not the result of an
entire generation of film scholars all sleeping late on the day in 1985 when
empirical methods were discussed in their first-year graduate course. The
ambivalence toward the historical that is manifest in Higashi’s analysis
of the ‘historical turn’ is, rather, symptomatic of an even more pervasive
uncertainty that has hovered over film studies since its academic institution-
alization in the 1970s: what place does anything outside of the film ‘itself ’
and its analysis by the film scholar have in film studies? What constitutes
the universe of the non-textual empirical relevant to film studies? How
would this realm be investigated and to what end?
This ambivalence is apparent in the realm of film studies most associated
with the ‘historical turn’: what is variously called historical spectatorship,
the audience, reception, or the social experience of moviegoing. Higashi’s
overview of the ‘historical turn’ overlooks important work being done on
the history of moviegoing, but that very elision reflects the extent to which
the impact of this work has been vitiated by a complex of factors peculiar
to film study, among them the conventionalism of film study’s theoretical
heritage, its suspicion of the empirical and tendency to confuse intellectual
engagement with the empirical world outside the film text with empiricism,
the academic and intellectual alignment of film studies with the study of
literary texts, and the concomitant distancing of film studies from the work
of our colleagues in cultural and social history.
Despite a number of very important recent studies of the role of movie
culture in local communities, our national road map of the history of
the social experience of moviegoing is schematic, conceptually primitive,
geographically distorted, not drawn to historical scale, and hence, and
of limited epistemological utility. Both geographically and diachronically,
this map still bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the New Yorker map
of the U.S.: with New York, Chicago, and Hollywood looming over and
barely separated by mostly ill-defined intervening terrain, and with the

26
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

foregrounded satellite dishes of post-classical cinema thrown into relief

by the vast flat plateau of bourgeois cinema, and not quite obscuring the
charmingly picturesque working-class nickelodeons along the far historical
horizon. There are very interesting and ambitious research projects underway
in the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia to document patterns
of movie exhibition, audiences, and moviegoing. These will no doubt lead to
much more detailed maps of the history of moviegoing in those countries,
and the example of this work may spur the development of comparative and
transnational historical studies of moviegoing. My hope for the future of the
historical study of moviegoing is, however, tempered by my apprehension
that when these local, regional, national, and transnational maps are
compared, the ones that scholars around the world have to rely upon for
the U.S. will remain seriously misleading.
At a pre-conference symposium held in conjunction with the 2003
Commonwealth Fund Conference on the history of moviegoing, I suggested
that it might be productive to shift our historiographic and geographic
perspective on the social experience of moviegoing in the U.S. in order
to foreground regions, spaces, communities, audiences, and historical
periods that, despite pioneering work by some resourceful scholars, remain
marginalized, unintegrated, or simply unexamined. I also suggested that,
as part of this project, we pay attention not only to avid movie fans and
communities in which moviegoing was embraced, but also to social groups
that resisted the incorporation of moviegoing into everyday life and groups
whose access to moviegoing was limited or denied.
In pursuit of this goal, this chapter considers the history of moviegoing
in the American South, particularly in the decades of film history which
have received the most attention from the ‘historical turn’ in film studies:
roughly, the period between the advent of commercial cinema in the U.S.
in 1896 to the full industrialization of film production, distribution, and
exhibition in the 1920s. The history of moviegoing in the American South
troubles and complicates our assumptions about the role of movies and
moviegoing in American life in the early decades of the century more
generally. In what follows, I am drawing on the published work of other
scholars and on research that my graduate students at the University of
North Carolina have done over the years. My remarks also reflect my
own reengagement with this area of research, particularly the history of
the social experience of moviegoing in North Carolina, the state in which
I was born and raised and where I have lived and worked for the past
twenty-six years. Although I have only just begun to explore the history of
moviegoing in N.C., I would propose as a working hypothesis that three
interlocking factors help to explain the particular character of the experience

27
 g oing to the mov ies

of moviegoing in North Carolina, and in the South more generally, and

to differentiate this experience from that which has achieved premature
historical normative status in American film historiography: region, race,
and what we might call rurality or rusticity.
One of the most enduring and striking features of American film
historiography is its assumption of a particular and in some accounts
determinative connection between the experience of metropolitan urbanity
and the experience of cinema. To the empirical fascination with early
moviegoing in New York City, which began in the late 1970s and revived
in the 1990s, has been added a theoretical justification: that the experience
of early cinema is inextricably tied to the social, sensory, physical, and
psychological experience—what Ben Singer refers to as the ‘hyperstimulus’
of metropolitan modernity.3
Although the early audience for the movies in the U.S. might have
been disproportionately centered in large urban areas, and moviegoing
there certainly received a great deal of contemporaneous public notice, most
people living in the U.S. in 1910 did not encounter the movies in anything
resembling such metropolitan settings. About two-thirds of Americans lived
in towns, villages, or settlements smaller than 2,500 inhabitants, or on farms
in the countryside. There were only nineteen ‘metropolitan’ centers in the
U.S. in 1910 (cities of at least 100,000 and their suburbs). About a quarter
of the U.S. population, then, were ‘metropolites,’ and less than 10 per cent
lived in cities of one million or more.4
The metropolitan focus of U.S. film historiography is sometimes
supported by the claim that American society was urbanizing at a furious
pace in the early decades of the century. By the 1920 census, it is pointed
out, a majority of all Americans lived in cities. But the Census Bureau
rather generously set the threshold for ‘city’ and ‘urban’ at any town of at
least 2,500 people. In 1920 a majority of Americans still lived in places with
fewer than 5,000 people, and in 1930 and 1940, most people were still living
in places with fewer than 25,000 people. A majority of the U.S. population
did not become metropolitan until the 1950 census, and this did not occur
in the South for another twenty years. Even this still does not mean that
most people experienced the movies as a part of everyday life amidst the
‘hyperstimulation’ of big city life: most of the metropolitan growth in the
U.S. over the twentieth century actually occurred in the suburbs and not the
central city. In fact, the percentage of the total population living in cities of
over one million remained relatively constant between 1910 and 1940.5
There were huge regional disparities in urban density and contiguity and
huge differences in historical patterns of urban development in the U.S.
Roughly half the population of the Northeast was metropolitan in 1910;

28
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

fewer than one in ten Southerners lived in or around big cities. And urban
growth—whether in towns of 3,000 or 300,000—did not result in the
hollowing out of rural America. There were 50 per cent more potential rural
moviegoers when Gone with the Wind was released than when Uncle Josh at
the Moving Picture Show was made.6 Keeping the metropolitan experience of
moviegoing at the center of our historical map of American cinema squashes
a complex and dynamic cultural and social geography into a simplistic
binary grid of city/country. It also reproduces Hollywood’s hierarchical
ordering of movie audiences, movie theaters, and theater locations, with
‘metropolites,’ ‘deluxers,’ and ‘big keys’ at the top and ‘hicks’ ‘dime houses,’
and the ‘Silo Belt’ on the bottom.7
Film history’s obsession not just with the urban experience of cinema
but the metropolitan experience bespeaks a more general exaggeration of
the role of the metropolis and a concomitant devaluation of the rural in
contemporary historical and cultural inquiry. In his 1998 review of the field,
Timothy Gilfoyle complains that American urban historiography remains
stubbornly ‘Gothamcentric.’ 8 Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude note that
‘the whole swath of varied and methodologically innovative enquiries
whose appearance marked the authentic coming of age of “the new social
history” … have found urban settings most congenial. … Many of the most
sophisticated, intelligent, and energetic forays into American social history
during recent decades have tended to bypass the countryside.’ 9
Although there is certainly much that we do not know about whether,
how, where, and to what extent movies were a part of the lives of people
who lived in the American countryside, writing the ‘rural’ experience
of moviegoing into American film history is not merely an exercise in
empiricist comprehensiveness. Rather it is necessary if we are to adequately
conceptualize the relationship, past and present, between cinema and
place more generally. Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed draw a productive
distinction between rurality and rusticity. While the former might be
assayed in terms of population density and geography, rusticity is a social
and a cultural construction describing the lived experience of place in the
modern world in relational terms. One’s relationship to any given social and
cultural place is conditioned by the relationship of that place to other social
and cultural places which it is understood not to be. Here Ching and Creed
are not reproducing the tired structuralist binary: country/city. Rather,
they are calling attention to the cultural hierarchies and social distinctions
that inform the relationship between identity and place: to my stepfather
growing up on a farm in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains in
the 1920s going ‘into town’ meant experiencing the decidedly urbane place
that was Rutherfordton, North Carolina. Ching and Creed argue that not

29
 g oing to the mov ies

only has contemporary cultural studies largely ignored the rural, but also
that the difficulty of imagining a culturally productive rusticity prevents
the field from adequately theorizing place in relation to other modes of
social identity.10
What is required, I think, is a much more nuanced understanding of
the relationship between the experience of urbanity, rurality, and rusticity,
and the spatial and social emplacement of movies and moviegoing across the
country and throughout film history. For example, the pace of urbanization
was more rapid in the South at the turn of the century than in some other
regions. But the nature of that process; the scale, character, diversity, and
density (human, phenomenal, semiotic) of urban life; and the relationship
between any given urban space and what lay beyond its political and social
boundaries varied from one region of the country to another and within a
given state.
In 1938, the Motion Picture Herald found 365 theaters in 196 towns in
North Carolina, 40 per cent of them in towns of fewer than 2,500 people
and two-thirds of them with fewer than 500 seats. In all but twenty-four
of these nearly 200 towns, there was but a single movie theater.11 One
of those 24 towns with two movie houses was my hometown, Gastonia,
N.C. It was in some key respects typical of hundreds if not thousands of
towns which sprang up around the turn of the century as a part of the
massive industrialization and urbanization of the South. Like many other
cotton mill towns from Virginia to Alabama, Gastonia was a collection of
separate mill villages connected by a central business district. Hacked out
of pine forests or thrown up over cotton fields, these villages consisted of
the mill surrounded by rows of cheap, quickly built shotgun houses, built
and owned by the mill and rented to the families who worked in them:
each room had to have at least one worker living in it for the family to
qualify for residence in the mill village. In many cases, including that of
my own great-grandfather, the families had been driven off surrounding
farms and recruited into what they called ‘public work’ by periodic crashes
in commodity prices As cultural historian Jacquelyn Hall has noted, ‘urban’
life in the mill village was produced through the dynamic tension between
fundamentally rural social structures and values and the demands of first
paternal and then corporate industrial capitalism, not by the elimination of
the former by the latter.12
In U.S. film historiography, the term nickelodeon has come to stand
not merely for early store-front exhibition venues and their attendant
eponymous pricing policy, but for the interrelationship among specific
physical circumstances of early movie exhibition, a particular social site of
movie encounters, and a particular set of social identities marked by class,

30
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

urbanity, geographic displacement, and ethnicity. The term ‘nickelodeon era’

has been made to cover not only metropolitan moviegoing between 1906 and
1912, but is now shorthand for the national experience of cinema in what
is regarded as the formative period of American cinema. The nickelodeon,
in Miriam Hansen’s account, attracted a ‘distinct class profile’ of the
urban, working-class, including ‘millions of people,’ principally European
immigrants with little or no disposable income, who had never been
regarded as a potential audience for mainstream commercial entertainment.
Nickelodeons tended to be located in the same tenement neighborhoods in
which their urban audiences lived and worked. They were a ‘space apart’
from bourgeois culture where ‘older forms of working-class and ethnic
culture can crystallize’ and be ‘articulated in a communal setting.’ This
sense of the nickelodeon as a socially liminal space applied, Hansen argues,
with particular force to working class women, for whom it functioned ‘as a
particularly female heterotopia.’ 13
Quite apart from the question of whether this account of early moviegoing
is adequate for people living in Manhattan around 1907, it does not apply
to the majority of people living in the United States, and it certainly does
not apply to any city, town, audience, neighborhood, or movie theater in the
South. As in every other North Carolina town my graduate students and I
have looked at, when permanent movie exhibition came to Gastonia in 1907,
it started out and remained for a long time anchored in the town’s central
business district. Early theaters in these Southern towns were not located
where accounts of nickelodeons in Manhattan or even Roy Rosenzweig’s
history of commercial leisure in Worcester, Massachusetts, might suggest
they would be: in the mill villages themselves. Rather, they operated as a
part of the commercial, social, and civic hub, alongside the other institutions
of Southern urban life: the town bank, hotel, drug store, department store,
and municipal administration.
Who might have attended these first movie theaters? From fire insurance
maps, newspaper accounts, and photographs, it appears that the first
permanent movie theaters in cities and small towns in North Carolina
were frequently unprepossessing spaces, but this does not mean that their
audiences had a ‘distinct’ class profile. The fact that as late as 1938 so
many towns in North Carolina still only had one theater, combined with
overwhelming tendency for theaters to be located not in working-class
neighborhoods but in the central business district, suggest that the white
audience for movies in these towns was, of economic necessity, socially
heterogeneous. Furthermore, as Stuart Blumin and other social historians
have suggested, we cannot simply assume that the metropolitan experience
of class operated in smaller cities and towns beyond the shadow of the big

31
 g oing to the mov ies

city, and this experience certainly does not tell us much about the rural
experience of class.
Ethnicity and immigration status were not important features of the
Southern experience of moviegoing, and even during the nickelodeon period
the significance of both factors decreased steeply outside the metropolis and
beyond the Northeast quadrant of the country. Although recently arrived
European immigrants, most of them from Southern and Eastern Europe,
represented nearly half the total population of Manhattan in 1910, the
demographic group whom the Census Bureau called ‘foreign-born whites’
made up less than 15 per cent of country’s total population, about the same
proportion as in 1860.14 If the first movie theaters in the American South
had had to rely upon recently arrived immigrants—from anywhere —to
fill their theaters, there would not have been a single viable movie theater
south of Baltimore and east of New Orleans for most of the history of
American cinema. In the South, immigrants made up only 2.5 per cent of
the total population, and in North Carolina only 0.3 per cent: 6,092 out
of 2,206,287.
What is striking about the social status of small town movie theaters
in North Carolina, and, I suspect, in other parts of the country as well,
is not how removed or obscured they were from what Hansen would call
hegemonic culture or how alternative or autonomous they were as public
spaces, but rather how tightly woven they were, or aspired to be, into not just
the town’s social and cultural life but its civic life as well. The Theatorium,
the first permanent theater in Concord, N.C., a cotton mill town north
of Charlotte, opened its doors on 25 January 1908. The advertisement on
29 January announced that ‘Our shows are run under the auspices of and
for the benefit of the firemen of Concord.’ 15 Small town movie theaters in
North Carolina arranged special screenings or offered concessionary prices
to school groups, served as a venue for local musical talent, and routinely
organized or participated in charity drives. Sometimes movie theaters were
the only or the largest secular public meeting spaces in town. They hosted
high school graduations, town meetings, beauty pageants, and, during
World War I, bond rallies. As Terry Lindvall argues in his chapter in this
book, in Norfolk, Virginia, a not so small southern city, theaters quickly
established themselves as civic institutions by forming an unusual strategic
alliance with local mainstream Protestant and Catholic denominations to
steer sailors on shore leave away from brothels and saloons and into the less
morally dubious space of the movie theater.16
Where would white Southerners have experienced movies prior to
1907? Hansen says the first audiences for the movies were as varied as the
venues in which movies were shown: vaudeville theaters, penny arcades,

32
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

and amusement parks. A new ‘public sphere … eluding the control of

cultural and religious arbiters’ was constituted, she says, through a range
of commercial entertainment forms around the turn of the century and was
built around the ‘new urban middle class.’ 17
This account of the historical context of early movie exhibition has very
limited salience with respect to small towns in the South, and, again I
suspect, elsewhere in the country as well. Most towns in the South were
too small and too far from a main rail line to sustain a vaudeville theater.
Amusement parks were features only of cities large enough to have streetcar
or trolley systems. In hundreds and hundreds of small towns throughout
the South, the only permanent venue for commercial entertainment between
1896 and 1907 was the local opera house.
Far from being a social space eluding the control of cultural and religious
authorities, it typically was not only constructed by order of the town’s
political authorities, but was frequently also a part of the same physical
structure that housed the town’s executive and judicial operations. When
a town achieved sufficient commercial and political density to warrant the
construction of a court house or a town hall, a building was designed to
accommodate civic authorities on the first floor or floors with space left
on the uppermost floor for an auditorium, which might have simply been
an open space with a small stage erected at one end. The Opera House in
Concord, N.C. was located above the fire department. In Hendersonville,
films were first shown in its opera house, located above the town’s public
library. The history of commercial entertainment in small towns was thus
intertwined with the development of local power structures. Opera houses
were typically leased to a local manager, who arranged for the appearance
of traveling theater companies, minstrel shows, variety ensembles, and, at
some of them at some point after 1896, movie showmen.
The role of the opera house in the circulation of culture in America
cries out for further study. In 1900, only 26 per cent of the U.S. population
lived in the 160 cities large enough (25,000 or more) to have had vaudeville
theaters. There were, however, nearly 3,000 (2,960) towns of at least 1,000
but fewer than 5,000 residents, and two thirds of the U.S. population lived
in places with fewer than 5,000 people.18 We do not know how many small
towns across the country had opera houses at the turn of the century, nor
do we know how many of these hosted the visit of traveling movie showmen
or with what frequency. But it is a credible hypothesis that most white
Americans living at the turn of the century had their first encounters with
motion pictures not in a vaudeville theater, nickelodeon, amusement park,
or penny arcade, but in a small town opera house. In some communities
the irregular scheduling of visiting movie showmen at the local opera house

33
 g oing to the mov ies

might well have been their only opportunity to see movies at all until
sometime after 1906, when and if the town was large enough to support a
separate dedicated venue for movies.
The most important aspect of the history of moviegoing in America that
is illuminated by a change of geographic perspective and that, conversely, is
most obscured by the fixation on the metropolitan experience of cinema is
race. The African American experience of moviegoing in the early decades
of the century has received only a parenthetical mention in most accounts,
completely overshadowed by the focus on class and ethnicity in narratives
of the metropolitan nickelodeon phenomenon. Although it by no means
justifies the marginalization of race in these accounts, African Americans
were still demographically marginal populations in the American metropolis
of that time. As late as 1920, African Americans made up only 2.7 per cent
of the population of New York City. By contrast, one out of every three
New Yorkers had been born in Europe.19
Jacqueline Stewart’s recent Migrating to the Movies sets out to correct
both the empirical elision and theoretical marginalization of the black
experience of film spectatorship in American film history. Challenging
the ‘familiar paradigm of immigration,’ in accounts of early moviegoing,
she organizes her account of African American moviegoing around the
internal migration of Southern blacks to the urban North between 1890
and 1930, noting that this ‘Great Migration’ also coincides historically
with the institutionalization of cinema. Focusing specifically on African
American life in Chicago in the years during and after World War I, she
finds there evidence for ‘Black spectatorship as the creation of literal and
symbolic spaces in which African Americans reconstructed their individual
and collective identities in response to the cinema’s moves toward classical
narrative integration, and in the wake of migration’s fragmenting effects.’
Stewart’s reconceptualization of black spectatorship is predicated upon
the lived experience of race; the psychic and social dislocations of rural
to metropolitan migration; the experience of metropolitan modernity; and
the particular social, cultural, and physical circumstances of metropolitan
moviegoing, as they relate to the experience of watching the ‘self-enclosed
film texts[s] on the screen’ available to African American Chicagoans
around 1920.20 Stewart’s points of reference in the construction of black
spectatorship are other figurations of American and European metropolitan
modernity in relation to a received notion of bourgeois cinema: ‘I would
argue that Black spectatorship is elaborated within the contradictions of
the modernist promise of urban mobility, and the persistence of racial
hierarchies and restrictions impeding smooth transitions into and through
urban modernity. African American spectators share with the flâneur,

34
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

the surrealist, and the … [Neapolitan] “streetwalker” a kind of cultivated

distance from the immobile spectator-in-the-dark position imposed by the
classical cinematic apparatus and its attendant theories of the gaze.’ 21
Although Stewart’s work offers a rich and densely textured account of
black movie culture in Chicago in the teens, the explanatory reach of her
construction of black spectatorship is limited. Despite the image we have of
the great racial migration of Southern African Americans to Northern cities
in the early twentieth century, in 1910 nine out of ten African Americans
still lived in the South, and seven out of ten lived in the rural South.22 The
complex geographical displacement and relocation that has been summed
up in the term Great Migration was one of the most significant social and
demographic phenomena of twentieth century in the U.S., but it did not
result in the wholesale evacuation of African Americans from the South to
the North, and it certainly did not result in an exchange of rural modalities
of social life for metropolitan modernity for most African Americans alive
in the first decades of the twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1920, the
number of African Americans living in the South rose by nearly 12 per cent,
from roughly 7.5 to 8.4 million. The black population of Chicago in 1920
was 110,000, still only about 5 per cent of the city’s total population of 2.7
million. Between 1900 and 1920, the black population of North Carolina
increased by 139,000 (22 per cent) to more than 763,000. In 1920, one out of
every three North Carolinians was African American.23 The black migration
of the early twentieth century was not just from the South to Northern
cities, but to and between Southern towns and cities as well. By 1920,
blacks made up a much larger proportion of Southern urban population than
was the case for any Northern city: Birmingham, Memphis, New Orleans,
Wilmington, and Gastonia were all more than 30 per cent black.
For most African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century,
moviegoing was a part of the experience of Southern urban modernity,
not Northern or Midwestern metropolitan modernity. That experience
was profoundly shaped by the rigorous and systematic organization of
space and place in every Southern town of any size, as sanctioned by the
U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. It is worth keeping in mind that the court’s
decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, authorising the organization of social and
economic life into separate spheres according to race, was handed down on
16 May 1896, only three weeks after the debut of ‘Edison’s’ Vitascope at
Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City.24 By the time permanent
exhibition came to Southern towns and cities a decade after that decision,
urban spaces throughout the South already had been ruthlessly remapped
according to the ‘hyperterritoriality’ of Jim Crow Moviegoing did not
cease being a direct expression of the apartheid logic of Jim Crow in the

35
 g oing to the mov ies

South—for all moviegoers there, black and white—until the early 1960s.25
For nearly seventy years, then, the history of moviegoing and the history
of racial segregation in the U.S., particularly in the South, were not only
co-terminus but conjoined.
Jim Crow was not the delayed victory of agrarian traditionalists, nor was
it merely the hardening into de jure writ of an unwritten system of power
relations and de facto social arrangements emerging from reconstruction.
Rather it was itself quintessentially modern—a ‘new and powerful force … as
revolutionary and progressive in its transforming powers as the railroads that
crisscrossed the region.’ 26 As it would have been experienced in everyday life
by white and blacks—to vastly differential effect, of course—Jim Crow was
the racing of space—all space—but particularly Southern urban space. Its
exquisite division of the world into separate neighborhoods, schools, prisons,
hospitals, orphanages, funeral homes, cemeteries, hotels, brothels, telephone
booths, blood supplies, toilets, drinking fountains, waiting rooms, textbook
warehouses, courthouse Bibles, and theater seating was no less an expression
of modernity than window shopping, metropolitan hyperstimulation, or the
‘panoramic perception’ of train travel.27 Zygmunt Bauman makes clear just
what is at stake in understanding the complex relationship between race,
space, and modernity:

[A]s a conception of the world, and even more importantly as an

effective instrument of political practice, racism is unthinkable
without the advancement of modern science, modern technology and
modern forms of state power. As such, racism is strictly a modern
product. Modernity made racism possible. It also created a demand
for racism; an era that declared achievement to be the only measure
of human worth needed a theory of ascription to redeem boundary-
drawing and boundary-guarding concerns under new conditions
which made boundary-crossing easier than ever before. Racism, in
short, is a thoroughly modern weapon used in the conduct of pre-
modern, or at least not exclusively modern, struggles.28

We know very little about the ways or the extent that movies and
moviegoing figured in the everyday lives of most African Americans during
the Jim Crow period, and we know least about the role of movies and
moviegoing in the lives of African Americans in the South. Greg Waller’s
pioneering work on black theaters and moviegoing in Lexington, Kentucky,
and Charlene Regester’s recent article on black theaters in Film History are
exceptions.29 We do know that they are not likely to have shared the same
space or ‘intermingled,’ as it was sometimes expressed, in movie theaters

36
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

with whites: the spatial segregation of blacks in theaters was underwritten

by state statute in Virginia and by municipal ordinances and coercive social
practice elsewhere in the South. Where Southern theaters did admit blacks,
they were consigned to what was called the ‘Crow’s Nest’ or the ‘Buzzard’s
Roost’: a balcony reserved exclusively for African Americans. This seating
arrangement obtained in Southern theaters through the 1950s in many
towns and cities.
The spatial segregation of African Americans in white theaters was not
simply an assertion of white consumer privilege and political authority and
the concomitant relegation of blacks to a physically separate and patently
unequal viewing position. Jim Crow laws and practices were a reaction
against the increased visibility of blacks in the urban public sphere as
well as their increased economic and spatial mobility within that sphere.
Restricting black mobility and regulating their physical and economic
access to the institutions of urban consumer culture was an attempt to curb
what was perceived by whites as ‘a dangerous assertiveness on the part of
African Americans, especially the generations born since emancipation.’ In
John David Smith’s analysis, the spatial isolation of blacks was designed
to protect whites from physical and social ‘contamination.’ 30 The perceived
‘danger’ of black assertiveness and the fear of contamination were most
pronounced in those urban spaces where the possibility of both racial and
gender ‘intermingling’ was greatest. In Atlanta in September 1906, provoked
by newspaper accounts of alleged black assaults on white women in public
spaces, a mob of 10,000 white men began beating every black person they
could find, killing twenty and seriously injuring hundreds more. Movie
theaters were, like steamboats, streetcars, railway cars and railroad station
waiting rooms, especially sensitive Southern ‘urban’ spaces in which racial
separation had to be assured and most vigilantly regulated in the early
decades of Jim Crow. As Barbara Welke has argued with respect to the
railroad’s ‘place’ in the history of racial segregation in the South, ‘statutory
Jim Crow provided an absolute protection of white womanhood and thus
of white supremacy in the South by protecting the enclave of white women
from encroachment by women and men of color.’ 31
Although accounts of the picture palace era of American moviegoing
rarely point out the ‘colored’ balconies of many Southern theaters, the
racing of movie theater space was not improvised or provisional by the
1920s, but rather, as a visitor to a Southern railroad station remarked
about the rod separating white from black waiting rooms, it was as ‘fixed
as the foundations of the building.’ 32 As Southern movie theaters outgrew
their first downtown storefront locations and aspired to larger and more
imposing quarters, the racing of the space of moviegoing was built into

37
 g oing to the mov ies

the very architecture of the theater itself. Architectural drawings for

Southern movie theaters from the 1920s and 1930s show plans not only
for ‘colored’ balconies, but also for separate box offices and (frequently
exterior) stairways, which were the only means that blacks had to entering
and exit the theater.33 The architecture of racial separation in Southern
movie theaters was designed not only to prevent blacks from occupying the
same space as whites—particularly white women—but wherever physically
possible and economically feasible, to efface them from the scopic and social
moviegoing environment experienced by white patrons. One consequence
of the architecture of raced space in Southern movie theaters is that some
older white moviegoers with whom I’ve spoken have no clear memories of
black viewers being present in theaters at all.
The absence of raced spaces in architectural drawings for Southern
theaters signals an even more extreme racing of the space of moviegoing:
excluding blacks from the space of white moviegoing altogether, or at least
when white moviegoers would have been present. Without further research,
we simply do not know what proportion of Southern theaters excluded
blacks or whether this strategy tended to be employed more in larger or
smaller towns. Certainly, it would have been the case in the opera houses
and converted storefront theaters in which a balcony was not an architectural
possibility. It seems also to have been a common practice that long outlived
architectural exigencies. The first theater to admit blacks in Durham, North
Carolina, was not built until the late 1920s, and was the only segregated
white theater in town until the desegregation of all theaters in the early
1960s. Both downtown white theaters in Chapel Hill excluded blacks until
August 1961, when a fourteen month protest sparked by the exclusion of
blacks from screenings of Porgy and Bess eventually resulted in the grudging
admission of two black UNC students to the Carolina Theater. The film
playing that week was The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.34
The authority of Southern theater owners to exclude blacks from movie
theaters derived from the legal status of the space of moviegoing. Unlike
streetcars, railroad cars and station waiting rooms, movie theaters in
the South were regarded not as public spaces but as private spaces. This
crucial legal distinction gave racial exclusion the force of law and helped
to deflect the desegregation struggle away from movie theaters and toward
public transportation until after the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins in
Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960. The particular distinction at
issue here was between commercial enterprises operating public accommo-
dations or serving as common carriers and those that were not. By the time
of the advent of moviegoing, common carriers—inns, coaches, trains, and
other modes of public transport—had a long-established common law ‘duty

38
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

to serve’ that, while not absolute, regulated and restricted the conditions
under which admission or service could be refused. The issue in Plessy v.
Ferguson was not whether a black ticket holder could be refused passage in
a public conveyance, but whether the state of Louisiana could pass a law
requiring railroad companies operating in the state to provide ‘equal but
separate’ accommodation for passengers on the basis of race. The federal
Civil Rights Act of 1875 actually included theaters among its list of public
accommodations, but key provisions of the law were struck down by the
Supreme Court in 1883.35 Eighteen states drafted civil rights legislation to
restore public accommodations protections to theater-goers; none of those
states was in the South. There the essentially private status of theatrical
space was reasserted with a vengeance by post-reconstruction legislatures
and courts. Some states passed laws specifically immunizing theater owners
from liability for excluding anyone for virtually any or no reason. The
Tennessee law gave ‘keepers of places of amusement’ a right to control access
or exclusion ‘as complete as that of any private person over his … private
theater or places of amusement for his family.’ 36 In the twentieth century
the ‘classical statement’ of the legal status of theatrical space is to be found
in the court’s opinion in Tyson & Brother v. Banton (1927): although there is
a sufficient public interest to warrant the licensing and regulation of theaters
by state or municipal governments, a ‘license is not a franchise which puts
the proprietor under the duty of furnishing entertainment to the public or,
if furnished, of admitting everyone who applies.’ 37
One thrust of recent critical legal studies has been a reconceptualizing
of the relationship among space, place, and the law. As Nicholas Blomley
argues, the law does not simply impose itself upon pre-existing legally
empty space, but rather the legal apparatus actively produces, organizes, and
reorganizes space. By the same token, law is always produced in relation to
the ‘local’ places in which it operates: ‘Law is, as it were, produced in such
spaces; those spaces, in turn, are partly constituted by legal norms. Either
way, law cannot be detached from the particular places in which it acquires
meaning and saliency.’ 38
The legal definition of theatrical space as private space in the South
not only helped to structure the social experience of moviegoing for whites
and blacks in segregated theaters, it also help to create the social space
in which black theaters operated in the South for nearly sixty years. To
date most of what little scholarly attention that has been paid to black
theaters has focused on the experience of moviegoing in black theaters
in Chicago.39 And yet, as Thomas Doherty notes in his chapter in this
book, most black theaters were located in the South. There has been no
systematic, comprehensive mapping of black theaters anywhere, including

39
 g oing to the mov ies

in the South, by film historians, and black moviegoing was largely ignored
by the Hollywood film industry. Doherty quotes a 1963 Variety article
claiming that the industry possessed almost no information on the number
or location of black theaters, the proportion of white theaters that were
segregated or ‘Southern communities in which there are no film theaters of
any sort to which Negroes have admission.’ 40 A 1937 Motion Picture Herald
survey found that only 1.5 per cent of the nation’s 17,000 movie theaters were
black theaters. Complicating the argument that black theaters might have
represented an alternative public sphere for African American moviegoers,
particularly in the South, is the likelihood that most ‘black’ theaters were
owned and managed by whites.41
Furthermore, as Stewart has noted, the black movie audience was
not homogeneous. In towns where blacks could ‘choose’ to watch movies
either from the balcony of segregated theaters or at a black (though not
necessarily black-owned) theater, class and other social fractures in the
urban black community sometimes became evident. Charlene Regester
notes a 1930 cartoon in a black newspaper in Durham, N.C. showing black
patrons attending the city’s only segregated theater. The caption read: ‘The
common people look on with amazement as the professionals and leaders
climb upstairs to the Jim Crow buzzard’s roost.’ 42 On the other hand, Janna
Jones notes that in the 1930s and 1940s blacks in Atlanta either sat in the
balconies of white theaters or attended the city’s one black theater. In 1940
the newly arrived president of Morehouse College, Benjamin Hays, made
his position pretty clear: ‘I wouldn’t go to a segregated theater to see Jesus
Christ himself.’ 43
There is so much that we do not know about the cultural and social
complexities of black moviegoing, particularly in the South, and the histori-
ographic challenge represented by its reconstruction is especially daunting.
Establishing which white theaters admitted blacks at all is difficult. Black
theaters did not advertise in white newspapers, which were much more
likely to have been preserved than local black newspapers. As a result, it
is extremely difficult to know what films actually played in black theaters,
or when they played. We have a few published first-hand accounts of black
moviegoing and some oral histories, but in my limited experience, many
African Americans in their 60s and 70s who grew up in the South are
not particularly eager to recall or recount the very ambivalent ‘pleasures’ of
going to the movies.
Given the rural character of the South and the concentration of African
Americans there, the likelihood that most opera houses and storefront
theaters in the South excluded blacks altogether, the continuation of the
policy of racial exclusion in many theaters in many towns for decades,

40
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

the sparseness of black theaters (only fourteen in North Carolina in 1937

for a black population of nearly a million, for example), and the social
humiliations associated with relegation to the buzzard’s roost, it is likely
that most African Americans were not a part of the ‘moviegoing audience’
at all during the pre-bourgeois period of American film history. It is also
likely that for the first sixty-five years of American film history, moviegoing
was occasional, rather than regular or habitual, for most African Americans,
and that, as a consequence, what we might call movie culture was not a
prominent feature of the lived experience of most African Americans for
most of the twentieth century.
Our interrogation of the relationship among region, race, and moviegoing
should, however, also involve reconceptualizing the relationship between
whiteness and moviegoing in the South. Legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris has
proposed looking at whiteness in American history as a form of property.
Inscribed in statutes and enabled by case law, the law’s ‘construction of
whiteness defined and affirmed critical aspects of identity (who is white); of
privilege (what benefits accrue to that status); and of property (what /legal/
entitlements arise from that status).’ One of the key ‘rights’ exercised in
relation to property is the right of exclusion:

The right to exclude was the central principle, too, of whiteness

as identity, for mainly whiteness has been characterized, not by
an inherent unifying characteristic, but by the exclusion of others
deemed to be ‘not white.’ The possessors of whiteness were granted
the legal right to exclude others from the privileges inhering in
whiteness; whiteness became an exclusive club whose membership
was closely and grudgingly guarded.44

Through the creation and enforcement of a separate and devalued cinematic

experience for African Americans and their literal exclusion from the places
of cinematic exhibition, Southern whites claimed the movies and moviegoing
as their property. Whether it was purposive in this respect or even rose to
the level of consciousness (which it probably only did when challenged),
the very act of moviegoing was for white Southerners an exercise of their
property right to whiteness.
If growing class awareness helped to fracture the black movie audience
in the South, the class-transcendent nature of whiteness suppressed class
difference as a variable in the experience of moviegoing for whites. What
even the poorest white cotton mill worker possessed and shared with the
mill owner was precisely what the most affluent African American lacked:
the property of whiteness. As Harris and others have noted, European

41
 g oing to the mov ies

ethnic difference in America has been assimilable into whiteness. What

the Russian or Italian immigrant eventually acquired—however problem-
atically—by coming to the U.S. was ownership of whiteness.
It is arguable that, as a region, both the black and the white South stood
in a different, more complicated, and, probably, more distanced relationship
to movie culture than other parts of the country. More than thirty years ago,
Thomas Cripps exploded the ‘myth’ of the Southern box office: Hollywood’s
disingenuous exaggeration of the size and economic importance of the
Southern movie audience in order to justify its marginalization of black
actors and its timidity in dealing with racial themes. Before air conditioning,
he argues, some Southern theaters simply closed their doors between June
and September. Movie theaters also competed not only against other forms
of indoor commercial leisure, but also against outdoor pursuits for much
of the year. In the 1920s a single large New York theater could take in
more in a given week than an entire good sized Southern city.45 As Greg
Waller points out, Depression-era government studies of rural life found
that most Southern farm families seldom went to the movies. He has also
noted that in rural communities in the South and elsewhere in the U.S.
what Barbara Klinger has called ‘extra-theatrical’ moviegoing may well have
been a much more prominent feature of movie culture than in more urban
communities.46
The role that movies and moviegoing played in many communities in
the South was mediated by a deep institutional suspicion of moviegoing
among members of the Protestant sects whose theologies encouraged
renunciation of secular values and adherence to codes of social behavior
as a sign of conversion. Norfolk, as examined by Terry Lindvall elsewhere
in this volume, may be the exception that proves the rule. This strand
of religious belief had a particularly strong hold among rural and urban
working-class white Southerners. There is reason to believe that religious
acceptance of moviegoing was an issue for all Southern exhibitors, and that
for many Southerners moviegoing fitted awkwardly into the fabric of their
social and moral lives.47 As late as 1966, an article in Christianity Today,
the magazine founded in 1957 by North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham
and circulated to more than 200,000 Protestant ministers and laypersons,
noted that ‘Christians, as a rule, do not attend the movies.’ 48
In response to a request for materials on local movie theaters and
moviegoing sent out to all public libraries in North Carolina, I was
contacted by a librarian in Burlington, N.C., a cotton mill town about 25
miles west of Chapel Hill. She asked if I would be interested in looking
at a 1934 day book kept by her grandmother, Bertha Burgess Frye, who
was then a 29-year-old cotton mill worker employed at the Cannon Mill

42
 r ace, r egion, a nd rusticit y

in Kannapolis, North Carolina Her husband, Henry, drove a truck for a

local heating oil company. Their daughter would be born the following year.
Each night before she went to bed, Bertha recorded the day’s events in a
small 4” × 3” leather daybook, a week filling each double page. As a part of
this chronicle, Bertha made note of every time she went to ‘the show,’ as
she and many other Southerners referred to the movies Bertha was an avid
moviegoer. Most weeks she went at least twice, although never on Sunday.
Sometimes, if there was no work for her at the mill, she saw two different
films in one day. Although Kannapolis had several theaters, she frequently
would travel to neighboring Concord or even the ten miles to the larger
city of Salisbury just to see a movie.
What was striking to me as I read through her account of everyday
life for that year is that even for someone for whom moviegoing meant a
great deal, particular films seldom registered enough to warrant a specific
mention, and only a few stars are noted. Even when specific films are noted,
they had to share these tiny pages with other aspects of everyday life:

Saturday, 6 January 1934: Went to town this evening got Howards

shoes and mailed them. Went to the show tonight at YMCA. Saw
The Gallant Fool with Bob Steele.

Saturday, 21 April: Took Ada to Concord to get teeth. Got Henry tie
2 shirts. Went to Concord to the show tonight saw The Big Shakedown
with Bette Davis and Charles Farrell.

Bertha’s day book reminds us that moviegoer and audience are not
ontological categories, that movies and moviegoing do not define subjectivity
or social identity.
For her book on British movie culture of the 1930s, Annette Kuhn
interviewed nearly one hundred people old enough to have been moviegoers
in the 1930s. She found that the films they remembered most vividly were
not those film historians have singled out as being the most popular or
most important. A number of her interviewees were, like Mrs. Frye, avid
moviegoers, but even their recollections of specific films were sketchy and
unreliable. Many of her respondents, however, remembered the social spaces
of moviegoing from their childhoods with remarkable specificity. Some
respondents could produce detailed mental maps of 1930s cinemas in a given
neighborhood, complete with ticket price differences, social particularities
(this one was where courting couples lined the back row), décor, sounds
and smells, and even the shops that surrounded them, despite the fact
that all of these cinemas had long since been torn down or converted to

43
 g oing to the mov ies

some other use. ‘For the majority,’ Kuhn observes, ‘going to the pictures is
remembered as being less about films and stars than about daily and weekly
routines, neighbourhood comings and goings and organizing spare time.
Cinemagoing is remembered, that is, as part of the fabric of daily life.’ 49
For the past thirty years or so in the U.S., the audience to whom movies
have mattered most are those of us who get paid to watch them, write about
them, and persuade our students of their importance It is we who have the
greatest stake in keeping movies at the center of social experience and at
the center of film history. Cultural historian James Hay comes at this issue
from a somewhat different perspective, but he, too, proposes a decentering
of the object of film studies, or at least its dispersal within a wider spatial
and social field. Such a redefinition of would begin ‘by considering how
social relations are spatially organized … and how film is practiced from
and across particular sites and always in relation to other sites. In this
respect, cinema is not seen in a dichotomous relation with the social, but
as dispersed within an environment of sites that defines (in spatial terms) the
meanings, uses, and place of “the cinematic.”’ 50
Ironically, film studies’ insistence upon the centrality of the experience of
particular films and the psychological and ideological effectivity of the filmic
text have helped to marginalize the ‘empirical’ dimensions of the experience
of cinema that might well have mattered most to most people for most of
film history: those associated with the social experience of moviegoing.

44
 2

Tri-racial Theaters in
Robeson County, North Carolina,
1896–1940
Christopher J. McKenna

T h i s c h a p t e r is a study of moviegoing in Robeson County, North

Carolina, from the beginnings of American cinema until the eve of
U.S. participation in the Second World War. Focusing on the social history
of moviegoing, it validates historian Lee Grieveson’s claim that cinema
historians are engaged ‘in delineating the multiple forces that have shaped
cinema and, in turn, the way cinema has participated in the shaping of
culture.’ Grieveson argues that such historical enquiries are part of a larger
‘history of cultural regulation’ which demands ‘that historians traverse other
histories—of class formation, sexuality, immigration, racial discrimination,
for example—to situate aspects of cinema history as parts of social, political,
and cultural history.’ 1 What insights or lessons can we find in an evaluation
of early moviegoing in Robeson County? First and foremost, Robeson
County matters because it contains physical artifacts (some still available)
that undeniably confirm the segregationist role that movie-houses served in
the Jim Crow South. Although most of the concrete vestiges of that dismal
era have largely disappeared through the removal of ‘Whites Only’ signifiers
such as store-window placards, distinct rest rooms and drinking fountains,
race-specific transportation and eating facilities, the psychological effects of
the color bar nevertheless remain, and these sites still resonate unpleasantly
for specific cultural groups even today.2 This may account for why, in 2003,

45
 g oing to the mov ies

the local Robeson community was virtually silent on the occasion of the
seventy-fifth anniversary of the region’s premier movie theater, the Carolina
Theater in Lumberton, when many of the region’s political and social elite
had been so active in executing and celebrating its painstaking and expensive
restoration two decades earlier. Since the 1980s, the Robeson community
has been increasingly affected by non-white political movements, and the
cultural dominance of its former key white participants has diminished as
those individuals have aged.3 In the eyes of more than a few Robesonians,
the Carolina Theater today no longer merits celebration. For many, indeed,
perhaps it never did.
Robesonian moviegoing also confirms the argument made by a number
of film historians, that movie audiences never responded universally and
identically to the siren call of motion pictures, nor did they react in the
same ways to the social event of moviegoing. Moviegoers were as much
constructed by what happened to them on the way to, during and after
viewing a film as they were by film content or by the phenomenological
effects of the film experience. In particular, it would be socially and
culturally myopic not to recognize that in the American South race, which
so profoundly affected everyday life, must have ranked high in any list of
factors affecting motion picture reception. Consideration of the artifacts
of Robeson County’s exhibition history suggests how multiple moviegoing
experiences can manifest themselves within multi-racial communities.
Historical moviegoing in Robeson County acts in particular as a prism
through which we can study the cultural experiences of the Lumbee Indians,
a group representing the fifth largest Indian people in the United States, the
nation’s largest non-reservation Indian tribe, and the largest Indian group
in the Southeast, particularly as they participated in mass-market social
entertainments with members of other racial groups.4 Very little work has
to date been done on the moviegoing experiences of Native Americans,
and while the Lumbees may not represent ‘typical’ Native Americans (if
such a thing exists), their moviegoing experiences, like their very cultural
definition, remained problematic.5 Although yoked to a Jim Crow social
order, the Lumbees’ racial distinctiveness could be difficult to determine at a
glance.6 Despite a century-long prohibition on mixed marriages, the region’s
long history of racial intermixing had marked Lumbees with a wide variety
of physical features and colouring that confounded stereotypical notions of
African, White, and Indian racial identity. Treating blood or skin ‘colour’
as a cultural determinant was a notion foreign to Lumbee conceptions of
social identity. When, however, they interacted with white business owners
in towns like Lumberton, where most of the county’s movie houses were
located, identity conflicts arose as Lumbees were forced to accept socially

46
 tr i-r aci a l the aters in robeson count y

limiting identity labels such as ‘Indian,’ or worse, the region-specific

derogatives ‘Croatan’ and ‘Cro.’
In a culture involving not one but two ‘subject’ minorities, racial
negotiations have historically fuelled the region’s cultural dynamics.
Lumbees especially interest cultural historians because their existence
challenges dualistic views of Southern racial ideology. As an ‘interstital’
people historically claiming social allegiance with neither blacks nor whites,
Lumbees and the tri-racial environment in which they have lived justify
ethnologist Karen Blu’s claim that ‘if Southern racial ideology appears rigid
and unyielding, its workings are far more flexible and complicated than has
generally been acknowledged.’ 7 As well as illuminating a particular social
experience of cinema, this chapter’s examination of the ways in which the
region’s racial complexities played themselves out within Robeson County’s
moviegoing spaces may encourage other historians to interrogate similar
‘exceptions to the rigid biracial system in the South’ in order to discover
what they have to tell us about the performative nature of race.8
The type of historical research documented in this chapter is informed
by Robert C. Allen’s call for film historians to challenge certain biases
that have crept into historical motion picture exhibition studies. Because
these biases oversimplify more complicated and contingent experiences
than those documented previously, Allen proposes ‘a more thoroughgoing
historiographic and conceptual decentering’ of reception studies, one paying
closer attention to the importance of factors such as ‘race, class, gender,
community, religion, urbanity’ and ethnicity on the social experience
of moviegoing.9 As Allen argues, race was the single most important
factor determining exhibition practices, and moviegoing experiences more
generally, in the American South. As we analyze the relationships between
race, popular entertainment, and public spaces, however, we must remember
that ‘race’ cannot be, nor ever has ever been, defined as a simple matter of
black and white. The experience of Robeson County ought to encourage
the use of more conspicuously multi-racial and multi-ethnic perspectives in
exhibition studies, since several racial groups faced distinctive ­segregationist
treatment and responded to segregationist treatment differently.
Located along the Carolina border in the state’s coastal plain, Robeson
County encompasses a population divided fairly evenly across three racial
groups (Caucasian, African American, and Native American).10 During
the period covered by this study, the white proportion of the county’s
population held steady at approximately 45 per cent, while the proportion
represented by blacks fell from 43 to 33 per cent as the Indian population
correspondingly rose to 22 per cent.11 Although the combined non-white
population in Robeson always outnumbered its white population, white

47
 g oing to the mov ies

residents held virtually all economic, political, and social power in this
rural farming region, principally by acting as leaseholders for non-white
tenant farmers. Until the 1930s, very few non-whites lived in Robeson’s
main towns, including the county seat, Lumberton, and the centre of the
area’s Indian population, Pembroke. Steadily growing numbers of non-
whites seeking motion picture entertainment, however, meant that theatre
managers had to decide how best to serve Robeson’s non-whites, whose
patronage must have tempted local exhibitors, particularly during tough
economic times.
From the earliest days of motion pictures, Robeson’s exhibitors
incorporated racial thinking into their attendance policies as well as
into the physical design of their theatres. As exhibitors struggled with
the complexities of implementing a kind of American ‘tripartheid,’ their
solutions included outright disenfranchisement for non-whites, race-specific
movie houses, midnight ‘race’ shows, multi-racial sites that required all
non-white groups to share a single segregated space, and finally, in the
mid-1930s, the ­ institutionalization of the ‘three-entrance’ theatre.12
The first itinerant motion picture exhibition in Robeson County occurred
on 27 May 1897, at a benefit for a local militia group in the Maxton armoury.
Four days later, it moved to what became (for approximately two decades)
the centre of cultural life in Robeson: Lumberton’s Opera House, a two-
storey, gabled, metal-clad structure that housed a stage and an auditorium
on its second floor and was located at the northernmost end of Lumberton’s
four-block business district. Although we know very little about its interior
appearance or even the date of its initial construction, we do know that
race relations influenced its physical composition. A preoccupation with
preventing race-mixing determined the first two generations of Robeson
moviegoing, leading to changes in physical exhibition spaces involving
multiple galleries, staircases, partitions, entryways, and ticket booths, and
resulting in physical site modifications that both reflected and executed
local race-based social policies. In 1908, six months after the Lumberton
Lyceum Bureau took over its management primarily for commercial movie
exhibition, an item in the local newspaper, the Robesonian, reported that:

Improvements are being made at the opera house which will add
greatly to the comfort and safety of its patrons. A stairway will be
built to the room on the left of the entrance and from this room an
entrance for colored people will be cut to Elm street [sic]. Another
stairway will be built to the gallery, making four stairways in the
front of the house, which will provide better means of entrance and
exit and will also provide for complete separation of the races …13

48
 tr i-r aci a l the aters in robeson count y

Segregation of white and black patronage was the likely focus of the
Opera House’s early remodelling efforts but we might also wonder what
complications these changes introduced.14 Clearly, one set of ‘non-white’
facilities was insufficient to ‘provide for complete separation of the races’
in such a racially complex site as Robeson County. Perhaps to avoid the
additional financial (and potentially social) costs involved in catering to
non-whites, many Robeson motion picture exhibitors excluded both blacks
and Indians by restricting theatres solely to white patrons. Having grown
up a Lumbee in the middle years of the twentieth century, Ruth Dial
Woods recalls that theaters often carried the ‘Whites Only’ signs common
to many Robeson County establishments.15 Mr. F.X. LeBeau, manager of
Lumberton’s third movie house, trumpeted the comparative advantage of
his site when, in his first public announcement of the virtues of his site at a
time when the town possessed at least three moviegoing options, he declared
that in the Star Theater, ‘none except white people will be admitted.’ 16
LeBeau’s bald interdict implies that other theatres, and possibly previous
managers of the Star, had catered to multiple racial groups. Evidence of
non-white interest in moviegoing in the early days of Robesonian exhibitions
proves that non-whites did go to the movies, and not always in segregation-
enforced settings like the Opera House. At least two early ‘colored’ theatres
operated briefly, probably catering to just African Americans, since in
Robeson County the label ‘colored’ typically signified ‘African American’
only. Newspaper archives record the existence of the A-Mus-U Theater, a
white-owned site opened in an old automobile garage in September 1914,17
and an unnamed ‘colored’ theater operated (but most likely not owned) by a
black man named Charley Morrisey in the African American neighborhood
referred to as ‘The Bottom’ in 1919.18 Moreover, perhaps to the chagrin of
local whites who fondly recalled youthful evenings attending its various
‘high-class’ shows, the Opera House itself was converted into a coloured
movie house for a few months in the fall of 1919, prior to its eventual
transformation into a hotel.19 Nevertheless, most evidence suggests that
until the early 1930s, non-white patrons were either prohibited by theatre
managers from attending ‘white’ houses, or else were relegated to second
class seating and late-night ‘colored’ show exhibitions.
It seems plausible that neither Robeson’s African nor Native Americans
acquired a taste for moviegoing through the region’s fixed-site theatres.
Instead, from late 1919 until well into the mid-1920s, most non-white
moviegoers were generally limited to the single exhibition option of
Community Service Pictures (CSP). A joint venture between various local,
state, and federal health organizations, these itinerant-style shows targeted
rural audiences by visiting schools, churches and fairs in the area, advocating

49
 g oing to the mov ies

2.1 Community
Service
Pictures’ Special
Announcement,
Robesonian, 21
October 1920,
shows separate
sessions in
segregated sites for
each of the three
main racial groups.

improved health and hygiene via films depicting ills common to agricultural
communities, such as dysentery, pellagra, and the boll weevil. Mixing
one or two educational reels in with four or five reels of family-oriented
entertainment, these shows offered many non-white Robesonians their first
regular exposure to motion pictures.20 Although they served a multi-racial
community, CSPs were not multi-racial events. The sponsors of the plan
realized that in Robeson County, they would have to divide their exhibition
capacity three ways in order to serve the county’s racial groups. The first
announcement for CSP exhibition shows included two specifically non-
white locations: ‘Union Chapel (Indian) and Shannon (Negro).’ 21 During
their roughly decade-long run, CSP exhibitions were publicized through
weekly advertisements containing similar racial markers to signify what
amounted to the county’s non-white motion-picture exhibition schedule.
The accounts that we have of these shows indicate that not only did
the dominant white racial group seek to separate itself from non-whites

50
 tr i-r aci a l the aters in robeson count y

through them, but also that African Americans and Indians might choose
deliberately to defend their respective ‘turf ’ from one another. Of the two
non-white groups, Indians tended to be more vocal, being ever more uneasy
about their position in the area’s cultural hierarchy. Across the region’s
socio-political, economic, and spatial topographies, Indians represented
the variable element within every racially charged situation, and since the
initial response of exhibitors was to force all non-white groups to share a
single segregated space (a move contrary to common custom in other social
events), inadequately segregated spaces could offend Indians to the point
of public protest, and even to threats of boycott or violence. Two weeks
after the initial announcement of CSP exhibition sites, a letter to the local
newspaper, unambiguously titled ‘Union Chapel is Indian,’ suggested that
improper racial coding of CSP announcements might result in unwonted
consequences. Thinking that Union Chapel had been identified as a Negro
site, the letter’s author warned that ‘if the show will be expecting to show
for coloreds they better not come. I hope the mistake will be corrected
before it comes.’ 22
News accounts of CSP’s shows not only demonstrate that all three
races attended movies in Robeson in one fashion or another, but also hint
at particular troubles facing all local movie exhibitors. In a nation largely
divided along two racial axes, Robeson County’s social and commercial
institutions faced the need to account for a third major racial group
in reasonably practical and not prohibitively costly ways. Social custom
required that three groups of racial identities be accommodated, and a
facility’s management and exhibition staff would be called on to prevent
‘deviant’ racial self-identifications. In spaces that could only physically
segregate two groups, contention arose over what facilities were made
available to Indians. As several theatres began to admit non-whites (if only
to their balconies), critical race-management issues arose, including whether
or not Indians could or would accept the ‘second-class’ treatment afforded
to blacks. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, when faced with such a choice,
many Indians chose not to go to such theatres at all, while some, like Ruth
Dial Woods, might try to pass themselves off as white. Some individuals
were forced into even more conflicted positions; the manager of one theatre
hired an Indian boy to point out ‘seating violations’ to the management.23
Doubtless the most unpleasant episodes in the racial negotiations
during exhibition attendance involved primarily black and Indian patrons,
for whom racial identity became a performative act albeit, perhaps, one
of defiance. Alternatively, identity might be determined in the eye of the
beholder, which could prove to be especially complicated in Robeson. In
daily practice, Lumbees characterized by particularly dark features may

51
 g oing to the mov ies

have been judged as black, and therefore steered to an ‘incorrect’ balcony

division. Light-skinned blacks may have been judged to be Indian. As
a result, balcony residents may have wondered (or worse) about some of
their neighbours. Finally, confusion might arise over the placement of
white patrons, too. Judge Henry A. McKinnon, for example, recalls that
once during his ‘high school days, ca. 1935–39, I had spent most of the
summer at the beach and was deeply tanned. I went to the Carolina for an
afternoon show, and the lady cashier directed me to the [colored/Indian]
door. Fortunately, I was with my classmate, Russell Beam, Jr., son of Dr.
Beam [one of the Carolina’s co-founders], and he vouched for me to get
into the white section.’ 24
If, in retrospect, such confusion has a comical element to it, daily
subjection to race prejudice was no laughing matter for non-whites. During
the 1930s, in particular, unhappiness concerning Indian placement in
facilities of all kinds exploded into public view. Contemporary sociologist
Guy Johnson noted that, by 1939, Robeson’s Indians were pursuing an
increasingly active resistance to attempts to push them out of their position
as ‘the middle caste in this triracial society.’ Suspecting that the ‘keystone
in this [caste system] is, of course, the white man’s determination not to
accept the Indian as his equal and, as far as possible, to put him into
the same category as the Negro,’ Johnson regarded movie houses as a
fundamental and unusually visible symbol of the region’s underlying racial
ideology. Johnson knew from firsthand observations that, as the late 1930s
approached, ‘if he [an Indian] attends a theatre, he has to choose between
one which provides a three-way segregation and one which seats him
with Negroes.’ 25 Either solution made many Indians uncomfortable, but
steady population growth in the Indian community, as well as increased
access to the towns in which movie houses were located, all contributed
to an increasing non-white patronage demand that commercial exhibitors
struggled variously to cater to, reject outright, or otherwise manage in a
socially acceptable manner.
When tripartite accommodation could not be made or was not available,
racial tensions resulted in an active battle for balcony space. In 1926,
Lumberton’s Pastime Theatre, the oldest nickelodeon-style theater in
Robeson and its primary commercial movie-exhibition site for fifteen years,
added a 140-seat balcony. Two years later, the opulent, two-and-a-half storey
Carolina Theatre opened a few blocks away, dooming the Pastime to serve
thereafter as a second-run house, open intermittently until 1950. Prior to
one of its periodic ‘re-openings’ in 1934, the Pastime Theatre advertised
a ‘balcony of 100 seats exclusively for Indians.’ 26 Only a few weeks later,
however, the theatre’s ‘entire balcony’ was advertised as being ‘for colored’

52
 tr i-r aci a l the aters in robeson count y

2.2 The newly

reopened Pastime
Theater in
Lumberton first
catered primarily
for Indians. From
Robesonian, 16
August 1934.

2.3 A few
weeks later
(Robesonian,
13 September
1934), the
theater changed
to cater mainly
for African
Americans,
prompting
considerable
Indian outrage.

people.27 Exactly what led to this seating-policy shift remains unclear, but
since Indians tended not to be town-dwellers in Robeson County, they
represented a less ‘regular’ or ‘weekday’ audience. Ernest Hancock’s mid-
1930s sociological study of the county noted that, according to the 1930
census, only six of the county’s 12,405 Indians lived in Lumberton town; in
other words, a mere 0.14 per cent of that racial group’s population could be
considered, in census terms, ‘urban.’ 28 Therefore, given the relative black and
Indian populations living in or near town, switching the balcony orientation
from Indian to black was probably an economically sensible step to take,
especially if we assume that Indians and blacks could not coexist easily in
the same balcony.29
Two weeks after the policy shift, the Robesonian printed a letter of protest
from an Indian named Hansel Holmes:

53
 g oing to the mov ies

I was in Lumberton with some other Indians recently and we went

to the show at the Pastime theatre, which was opened some time
ago as a theatre for the white and Indian people and no one else,
but now negroes [sic] are allowed in the indian [sic] department. We
are not going in there anymore. The theatre was working up a good
trade with Indian people, but we do not want to be mixed up with
the negroes. We couldn’t even get in that afternoon, for the house
was running over with negroes.
We have to work on the farm all through the week and could
come to the show only on Saturday, when many of the negroes are
in town all week and could go any time they get ready. We don’t
have to club up with Negroes and we don’t have to go to the show
at all. We won’t go in there any more as long as the negroes are
allowed to go.30

No responses to this letter appeared in the paper, and we can only speculate
as to how different racial groups reacted to Holmes’ letter, and what the
newspaper publisher’s motivations may have been in airing this grievance
publicly. Its appearance, however, demonstrates that some Indians, at least,
were sufficiently upset by perpetual co-equal treatment with blacks, and
disappointed at the failure to attain a more socially acceptable moviegoing
prospect, to risk publishing a race-inflected letter in a white-owned
newspaper because they were being denied an alternative to the experience
they probably faced at the town’s other exhibition site, the elegant Carolina
Theatre.
Confirmation of the Carolina’s policies comes, ironically, through a
photo of Walter S. Wishart, the original manager of the Pastime, and
a frequent contributor to the local newspaper.31 Wishart, who had left
Lumberton in 1917, announced in late 1931 that he was returning to reopen
the old nickelodeon-style Pastime, which had been driven out of business for
a time by the opening of the newer Carolina. When this initiative failed,
he landed work at the last remaining theatre in town during the Great
Depression, where he became the cashier and manager for the Carolina’s
‘colored’ (and, later, its ‘colored and Indian’) balcony.
This segregated balcony area was accessed by non-whites via a separate
door and staircase on the theater’s north side, and did not permit access into
the whites-only auditorium. Containing wooden partitions that physically
separated non-white groups from each another and from white patrons,
it represented a tri-racial space in which Indian and black patrons were
segregated yet still placed together via facilities that they alone shared.
Among the Carolina’s exhibition staff, Wishart and the ‘white’ entrance

54
 tr i-r aci a l the aters in robeson count y

cashier probably composed the front-line group most directly charged

with enforcing racial seating codes and with ensuring that non-white
patronage was funnelled up the separate staircase to a tri-sectioned balcony.
Nevertheless, possibly because of protests like Holmes’, and possibly because
the Carolina’s side door failed to provide for the ‘complete segregation of the
races’ desired even in the old Opera House, theatre managers in the county
understood that the Carolina was not a wholly tri-racial facility, since it
had only two entrances and only one ticket office. Having experimented
with many different segregationist alternatives, from the exclusion of
non-whites (at the Star and other venues), to ‘colored’ theaters like the A-
Mus-U (usually owned and operated by whites), to race-specific shows like
the CSPs, and to the relegation of all non-whites to separate and unequal
seating facilities, Robeson’s exhibitors took what must have seemed to be
the next logical step: to provide for complete racial separation in movie
exhibition facilities, all the way from the sidewalk to the seats.
Lumberton’s Riverside Theater, which opened in 1939, was the exemplar
of Robeson’s tri-racial exhibition separatism, but it was not the first to
experiment with multiple crow’s nests, balconies, and ticket-booths. By
1937, renovations at the Red Springs Theatre had spread the house’s 475
seats across a main floor and two balconies, while its patrons accessed
the theatre through one of its three separate entrances. This tripartheid
configuration appeared to pay off. The theatre manager reported that at
first ‘some of the Indians objected’ to the ‘separate seating arrangements for
the whites, Indians, and Negroes …’, but ‘more are beginning to attend.’ 32
The renovations in Red Springs may have been a response to the same
conditions that had provoked Hansel Holmes’ letter about the inadequate
balcony at the Pastime.
The renovations at Red Springs and its increasing business with Indians
may have been noticed by other exhibitors, particularly those in the town
of Rowland. Upon opening the restructured Rowland Theater in 1937, its
management proudly explained that the site’s configuration included

three entrances to serve three races. The main entrance, at the front
under a new marquee, will admit white patrons to the lower floor,
which has 338 seats. Another front entrance will accomodate [sic]
Indians, who have a section in the balcony, and a side entrance is
provided for negroes occupying another section of the balcony, which
has a total of 140 seats.33

This provides yet another instance in which a theatre’s main entrance and
auditorium seated twice as many white patrons as non-whites combined,

55
 g oing to the mov ies

2.4 The
Rowland Theatre
reopened in 1937
with three race-
specific entrances.
From Robesonian,
29 October 1937.

and shuttled all non-whites up to the balcony via separate entrances and
staircases.
Theatres in Rowland and Red Springs kept racial groups strictly segregated
once they had purchased their tickets, but their ticket booths nevertheless
exposed patrons to potential racial mixing. One final development remained:
to provide each race with its own ticket booth. That happened in the
county’s next major theatre project. Completed in April 1939, Lumberton’s
Riverside Theatre was, as long-time Lumberton lawyer John Campbell
remembers, ‘designed for this town.’ In describing its three ticket booths,
news accounts of the opening noted that the ‘downstairs of the theatre
building will seat approximately 500 patrons, with a gallery on the west
side … to seat approximately 250 colored patrons and a gallery on the east
side to seat approximately 250 Indians.’ 34 In order to educate the public
as to how these facilities were to be accessed in an appropriately tri-racial
fashion, Riverside management included segregated seating and ticket-
pricing information in their advertisements for about two months.

56
 tr i-r aci a l the aters in robeson count y

Six months later, however, perhaps because of a boost in out-of-town

attendance accompanying the harvest-time crowds unfamiliar with the rules
of the house, or possibly because non-whites had attempted to sit in the
auditorium, the management found it necessary to remind its patrons of the
house’s very deliberate human traffic control policies:

The Main Auditorium Is For The Exclusive Use Of Our White

Patrons At All Times …

The Indian Entrance Is To The Right Of The Theatre, And The

Colored Entrance Is To The Left.35

With the Riverside in place, local theatre managers had finally realized
the original Opera House modification goal of ‘complete separation of the
races.’
In retrospect, we can wonder why the Riverside’s management bothered
to reaffirm a seating policy that was no doubt common knowledge and
increasingly common practice since tripartheidism had become the rule
rather than the exception in the region, typified by the Robeson County
courthouse’s three sets of lavatories and drinking fountains. While many
of those tri-segregated facilities and their attendant control mechanisms no
longer exist, the movie-houses of Robeson County—oversized public spaces
like the Carolina which, along with churches, remain the most architec-
turally impressive buildings in the region—represent permanent, indelible,
and undeniable artifacts of tri-racial segregation. Robeson’s movie houses
reinforced, rather than challenged, cultural racial codes, even while their
owners suffered financially from additional costs in theatre construction
and maintenance as they sought to capture as broad-based a patronage as
possible.
These tripartheid sites, and the policies they introduced or reified,
suggest that exhibition histories need to examine more closely the traces
of multicultural and regional difference, and insert them into otherwise
dualistic scenarios of racial hegemony and resistance across the broad
history of film exhibition and reception studies. Robeson County’s example
represents a gloomy counterpoint, for instance, to the conclusions drawn by
Mary Carbine in her study of the ways in which black Chicagoans co-opted
movie exhibition space, resisting cultural elision by incorporating traditional
African American entertainment elements into an exhibition experience
produced primarily by whites for white consumption.36
Chicago and Lumberton were, however, two vastly different places, and
no such optimistic tale of cultural resistance can be told of Robesonian

57
 g oing to the mov ies

2.5 A race-specific multi-tiered

pricing structure accompanies this
advertisement from the Riverside
Theater for the film Topper Takes a
Trip. (Robesonian, 3 April 1939)

moviegoing. By 1940, everything in Robeson—every social event and public

location, from churches and schools to cafés and barbershops, from county
homes and prison camps to local shops and county fairs, from medical and
dental clinics for children to cemeteries and golf courses, from police and
health service personnel to libraries and sports clubs, from public restrooms
and telephone directories to 4H and home demonstrations clubs, and
from PTAs and Memorial Day committees to beauty pageants and want
ads—was segregated, indeed tri-segregated.
This narrative of theatre modifications in Robeson County demonstrates
how fully racial ideology determined theatre design there. In her 1994
study of movie theatre architecture, The Show Starts On the Sidewalk,
Mary Valentine acknowledged that movie theaters represent ‘a separate
architectural type, distinguished by program, emphasis, imagery, and
history; one must read [the movie house] as an architectural type, rooted

58
 tr i-r aci a l the aters in robeson count y

in popular culture with its own symbolic program.’ 37 Robeson County’s

development of three-entrance theatres reinforcing its tri-racial social code
lends Valentine’s claim a special resonance. In contrast to the Chicago
sites that Carbine describes, it is difficult to imagine how movie houses in
Robeson could offer performative racial alternatives to non-white patrons,
except for those patrons able and courageous enough to attempt to pass
as a member of a racial group with higher social status. These sites
fundamentally required a public affirmation of often-painful racial labels,
and represented the physical embodiment of a racial dogma developed
over centuries in a region that still struggles to negotiate racial difference
today. When we consider the lengths to which Robeson’s movie houses
were modified in order to perpetuate or respond to racial dogma, when we
recognize the potential economic and social costs facing each group as they
participated in Robeson County’s motion-picture exhibition (most obviously
the humiliating, second-class experiences endured by blacks and Indians),
and when we examine other exhibition histories in areas deeply impacted
by racial or ethnic divisions, we must be willing to acknowledge the more
disturbing narratives, and their unpleasant implications, alongside those
which may flatter liberal-humanist sensibilities.
What is perhaps most remarkable about moviegoing in the Jim Crow
South in general, and about Robeson County in particular, is not that
non-whites occasionally resisted attending segregated theatres, or that, as
in the case of Hansel Holmes, they might have tentatively voiced a public
protest over their treatment in them. Given the second-class status that
these theatres physically imposed on their non-white patrons through
architectural designs that forced them to perform racially defined roles in
order to participate in a leisure activity, the wonder is that they attended
these exhibition sites at all.

59
 3

The White in the

Race Movie Audience
Jane M. Gaines

I n her recent book, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, British historian
Carolyn Steedman refers to the difficulties of constructing an entire
society from a surviving relic, which in her case is a butter churn.1 Her
book is an ode to impossibility, a theorization of the conditions of historical
research in which we create a world out of a scrap, make something out of
the nothing that stretches before us when we first enter the archive. The
book is a boon to our resolve, a balm to our frustration. Yet some may
find it disturbing for calling attention to the way that we so confidently
bring into existence a world that never existed, or at least never existed in
exactly the way that we reconstruct it. For all that we can know about it,
our concerted efforts to find more sources to supplement existing sources
can do no more than produce the illusion of a more perfect recreation of
what happened in a past that we will never know.
Influenced by Steedman’s slightly heretical but nevertheless charming
and incisive meta-history, I began to think differently about the dog-eared
photocopies of bad microfilm copies of original documents in the George P.
Johnson collection at UCLA that I was then studying, under the assumption
that original documents can tell us something about what for us is the
crucial originatory moment: the moment of reception. In particular, I was
studying the questionnaire forms that Johnson, head of distribution for the
Lincoln Motion Picture Company, had sent to theatre owners and managers
who were likely to rent the Lincoln product, a new kind of feature film for
what was emerging as the ‘race film circuit.’ With his brother Noble and
several other backers, Johnson had started the company in 1916. By 1918,
when this questionnaire was circulated, they had produced three films: The
Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916), The Trooper of Troop K (1916), and

60
 the w hite in the r ace mov ie audience

The Law of Nature (1917). A night postal clerk in Omaha, Nebraska, George
promoted and booked these titles by day The questionnaire seems to have
been designed to assess the competition, to compare methods of advertising,
to evaluate the Lincoln service and, ultimately, to push their films. In
addition, George Johnson was promoting his brother as an emerging black
star who was then being featured in motion pictures produced by Lubin
and Universal as well as by the Lincoln Company.

3.1 Lincoln Motion Picture Company distribution survey form (1918) from Palace
Theater, Louisville, Kentucky. Source: George P. Johnson Collection, Department of
Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California-Los Angeles.

61
 g oing to the mov ies

Analyzing the form filled out with a flourish and returned by A.B.
McAfee, general manager of the Palace Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, I
noticed that this theatre, seating 625 people, was on West Walnut St. and
that the separate blanks for ownership and management were both filled out
‘colored.’ Obviously, the Palace was a good Lincoln customer. The theatre
had shown Trooper and The Law of Nature to ‘capacity’ crowds; Realization,
on its first run, had experienced a ‘good’ house, but this improved to
‘capacity’ on a return engagement. On line 7, where the form politely asked:
‘Do you cater to any colored trade?’, the respondent was given the options
‘partially’ and ‘entirely.’ McAfee responded that ‘yes’ the theatre did cater to
the ‘colored trade’ and, in the blank by ‘partially,’ wrote: ‘get some whites.’
Suddenly, I realized that although I had completed a study of American
‘race’ movies in the silent era, I had missed something interesting.2 This
one line on an eighty-year-old questionnaire (‘get some whites’) became
the fragment out of which, I began to believe, an entire world could be
constructed.
Steedman is right about the ‘nothing’ from which we create our historical
accounts. This is especially the case with the historical spectator whose
moviegoing is among the most ephemeral of phenomena to track; whose
1918 dental records might, indeed, be easier to find. Film scholars write
about historical spectators from the standpoint of not knowing—and being
unlikely ever to know—who these people actually were. The anonymity of
the object of our study, the spectator defined by our statistics, tells us next
to nothing. In spite of the certainty of never knowing, I find that I still
want to know who it was who in 1918 dared to go into a black movie house
to see an all-black cast film. And I do mean ‘dared,’ since in this chapter I
will be writing about the South where, as Gregory A. Waller told us in his
seminal study of the earliest African American nickelodeons in Lexington,
Kentucky, the taboos against ‘intermingling’ were the strongest.3
Many, of course, will pose the question: why study more white persons,
particularly given the impressive record of publication of new research on
the African American founders of race movies in this period? 4 The issue of
‘why white people’ takes on a new meaning when whites begin to thin out
in the audience and become anomalous. Situations of this kind underline
the fact that research and publication on race in America has over time
become strangely segregated. Black studies have been separated from white
studies in a way that parallels the segregation of the facilities we have been
examining. If truth be told, our research and publication is more segregated
than the lives of moviegoers living in the South in the early decades of this
century. And what of the companion question about who studies whom, a
question that resonates in American studies from within the U.S., where the

62
 the w hite in the r ace mov ie audience

racial identity of the researcher has been so carefully matched with that of
the subjects of study? Once again, Carolyn Steedman has thought through
the situation of the historian who seeks tell about those inaccessible others,
unreachable across class, race, and time, the historian who wishes to tell
‘somebody else’s story.’ 5 It is an ‘obscure desire,’ she says, one that ‘means
you understand—and write—the self through others, who are not like you.’ 6
We do resign ourselves to the conditions of the search for others whom we
know are nothing like us, but we start, of course, from the premise that we
are writing them and not us, even though there is no way to access them
except through us. Who I find will never be who was there, so the burden
is on us to ask why it is that we want to find whoever it is that we want to
have been there then. And this resolves itself, ultimately, into the question
of who it is that we want each other to be at this time in history.
There is one caveat here. Entering into the project of researching the
white who went to see race movies, I may have an image of whom I want
to find. But this would seem to contradict the entire reason for doing
archival research in the first place. As I define it, the reason for doing
historical research, the entire rationale for going to so much trouble, is
not so much to recreate a world as it is to uncover what I call ‘counter-
ideological phenomena,’ which has the power to change the versions of the
world that have historically held consciousness captive. A good example
would be Southern historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall who, some years ago,
documented references to the women and children who attended lynchings, a
phenomenon that significantly altered our image of the Southern community
en masse, and taught us an emphatic lesson about how much we rely upon
gender assumptions in the reconstruction of our image of the historical
past.7 The discovery of a significant number of black women who were, for
however short a time, managers of all-black theatres, should similarly alert
us to the subtle influence of the gender assumptions we all carry.
I would not wish to give the impression that there were no white people
in the history of race movies. White people were, in fact, everywhere—as
stockholders in the Lincoln and Micheaux Companies, as patrons of white
theatres who didn’t want to sit next to blacks, as local censors, as theatre
owners and managers, and, as Dan Streible tells us, in the case of the
black-owned Harlem Theatre in Austin, Texas, as projectionists before the
union was integrated.8 White people seem to have been everywhere except
as paying customers for race movies in the seats of black movie houses.
There are a few exceptional white supporters such as Harry Gant, Noble
Johnson’s childhood friend from Colorado Springs, cameraman on the
Lincoln Company films, and a few friends also in the race film business,
such as Richard J. Norman, owner of the Norman Film Manufacturing

63
 g oing to the mov ies

3.2 Noble Johnson and Harry Gant, Lincoln Company cameraman.

Source: George P. Johnson Collection, Department of Special Collections, Young
Research Library, University of California-Los Angeles.

Company in Florida, producer of The Flying Ace (1926), and a friendly

correspondent of Oscar Micheaux. But whites figure most predominantly
as the competition.
As George Johnson’s form, with the blank distinction between ‘colored’
and ‘white,’ tells us, the distinction between white and black-owned was
everything to the race film pioneer. His papers, especially the typescript
histories of the Lincoln Company and his brother Noble’s career, are full of
race designations, ‘white’ or ‘colored’ appearing in parentheses before or after
the names of various figures, telling this whole history in carefully raced
terms. I derive my term, the parenthetical white, from Johnson’s practice
of pencilling in the distinction. In the early years of both the Micheaux
and the Lincoln Company, there was a special category of whites—the
white audience who would, the producers believed, see their films. The very
notion of ‘respectable’ entertainment, an exhibitors’ code word for films that
would appeal to middle-class patrons, perhaps also, by implication in this
case, meant films designed to some degree to ‘play to whites,’ even though
these would be the films that never exactly did succeed in playing to a

64
 the w hite in the r ace mov ie audience

3.3 The Flying Ace poster (Norman Manufacturing Company, 1926).

Source: George P. Johnson Collection, Department of Special Collections, Young
Research Library, University of California-Los Angeles.

65
 g oing to the mov ies

3.4 The Ebony Motion Picture Company. Source: Library of Congress, Motion
Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.

white audience. What is remarkable here in the history of film exhibition

is the class of films that never found a segment of their audience because it
was an imaginary or hypothetical audience of receptive white people. For
the white audience that ‘race’ companies wanted was an audience that they
sought to convert to another point of view—the point of view not of black
people as a whole but of the aspiring, educated, industrious black—the
black middle class.
In her recent book on early black criticism in the black press, Anna
Everett notes Micheaux’s ‘evangelical approach’ to black cinema in these
years. In 1919, he wrote that without cinema produced by race men, ‘the
white race will never come to look upon us in a serious light, which
perhaps explains why we are always caricatured in almost all the photoplays
we have even the smallest and most insignificant part in.9 What I have
elsewhere called the ‘facializing mission’ of race movies was an attempt to
put sympathetic faces on respectable black characters, to show particularly
the men as honorable in the case of Lincoln, and in the case of Micheaux,
the women also as virtuous.10 Thus, for example, in the Lincoln production

66
 the w hite in the r ace mov ie audience

Law of Nature (1917), which the manager informed George Johnson ‘took on
like wildfire’ at the Palace Theatre in Louisville, Johnson is the father who
must rear the couple’s baby when his wife is lured to the city.11
Both Micheaux and the Johnsons were optimistic that they could
break into the white market. Perhaps this optimism was based on George
Johnson’s early achievement in renting out white theatres in Omaha,
Nebraska, and Micheaux’s success in selling his books to white farmers in
South Dakota and Iowa.12 Certainly, their early promotional efforts targeted
whites. Micheaux, for instance, advertised an ambitious marketing scheme
for smaller towns where the existing black film circuit did not reach. He
offered to mail advertising heralds for free to every resident listed in the
town directory and to advertise in the papers.13 Yet neither Lincoln nor
Micheaux ever penetrated the white market. The Lincoln Company was
out of business by 1921 and although Micheaux continued production until
1948, he increasingly produced popular genre films (musicals, urban crime
drama) solely for the race movie circuit.
My own position is oddly like that of aspiring race film producers in the
late teens and early 1920s. Like them, I want to find those white people who
would plunk down their money to see a new phenomenon—black ‘uplift’
drama. Their approach was aggressive ballyhoo. Mine has to be somewhat
more subtle. I have to work back and forth between the spectator I want
to find and the traces of the historical spectator who may have been many
things but was probably not what I am looking for at all. Thus, I come to
one of the other methodological divisions that defines our field—the relation
between the empirical and the theoretical spectator.14 As I work back and
forth between the document that points to ‘some whites’ at the Palace
Theatre in Louisville and the parenthetical white, the white in parenthesis,
I realize that there is something pristine about this formulation of whites
identified as white on paper—that is, paper whites. Without referring to
any particular people, it seems to encapsulate the race consciousness of the
period, exhibiting features of both the theoretical and the empirical. It is
abstract enough to refer to all white people yet offering somewhat more
precision in the descriptive modifier ‘paper,’ but the apparent precision turns
out to be a further abstraction. A ‘white on paper’ or a parenthetical white
is race, in theory, only in theory. Before encountering the frustrations that
I know will follow from not finding, knowing I will never really find,
the formulation gives hope in its abstraction as well as its precision. The
paper white trail encourages my illusion that I am discovering and not
creating the history of people who went to the movies. I am encouraged
despite knowing that I will never really know ‘who they were’ and why
they went.

67
 g oing to the mov ies

Thus painted into a corner, the aggressive researcher takes another tack.
When in doubt about the spectator, film scholars know to reconstruct the
conditions under which he or she viewed. In this case, the conditions of
the reception of race movies in the South would have been qualified by
the conditions of Jim Crow rule. The first defining feature of the white
race movie paper spectator is that he has transgressed the tawdry spirit of
Jim Crow.

The Jim Crow Condition

Segregation in the American South controlled whites as well as blacks. As
black exhibitor Clarence Muse observed in his book, Way Down South: ‘Jim
Crow law works both ways in the South and just as colored folks may not
mix with whites in places of entertainment, so also whites are prohibited
with equal sternness any social intercourse with their darker brethren.’ 15
Although whites were prohibited from going to the movies with blacks,
there are many indications that they did go. We have no idea whether this
was out of defiance or indifference. What we can say is that the system of
compartmentalization set up in the Jim Crow South worked because of an
internalization of ‘one’s place’ enforced by the ushers and managers who
policed the system. More interestingly, the invisible boundaries of time and
space conspired to create the perfect illusion of two distinct societies.
This was not, however, without some juggling and sorting. Actually, the
films themselves (white Hollywood product as opposed to all-black cast
films) worked in combination with theatre seating policies to sort people
out. It was never so simple as white films/white theatre, black films/black
theatre, however, as the chart I used in order to ‘locate’ viewers shows:

American Segregation Era Motion Picture Theatre Seating Chart

• whites to all-black cast film in a black theatre—fewer
• whites to white film in a black theatre—few, but the majority of cases
in a Jim Crow House
• whites to all-black cast film in a segregated theatre
• whites to white film in the black section (balcony) of a segregated
theatre
• blacks who preferred segregated white theatres (ie. who did not want
to sit with blacks only)
• blacks who only went to black theatres (preferably owned and
managed by blacks)

68
 the w hite in the r ace mov ie audience

As Charlene Regester has argued in her work on moviegoing in Durham,

North Carolina, the black theatre was a refuge for black audiences who
wanted completely to avoid the insults of the separate entrances and the
snooty ushers of the segregated white theatres.16 The Atlanta Independent, in
1920, urged patrons to ‘Go where you will not be jim-crowed.’ 17 What we
will need to ask about the white patron who went to the black movie theatre
is whether he too sought to escape the Jim Crow condition. The problem
here is that the question of this spectator forces us to see how very differently
the quarantine worked for the two groups. Although there was enforced
separation, whites would not have been legally banned from entrance to a
black theatre. Local custom was thought to be quite enough.
As Douglas Gomery observes in one of the most comprehensive
overviews of Jim Crow moviegoing so far published, where there were few
theatres in a Southern town, facilities were segregated by time.18 From the
notoriety of the ‘midnight ramble,’ where blacks came in after the white
screening, we have come to think that the late night show was the exclusive
purview of blacks. Midnight shows in the 1920s, however, were set aside
for whites as well as blacks. At the white-owned 81 Theatre in Atlanta,
Thursday night was ‘whites only.’ 19 There is evidence that around 1922, the
black-owned Attucks Theatre in Norfolk, Virginia had reserved Friday night
for whites to see black-cast films, ‘an opportunity for such white people as
were interested in colored shows to visit the theatre.’ 20
It goes almost without saying that these Southern theatres were segregated
by space. We know about the separate entrances and exits, and the reputation
of the ‘crow’s nest,’ ‘peanut heaven,’ ‘buzzard’s roost’ and ‘nigger heaven,’ has
been well established. What is so striking about the photo ‘The Opening
Night of the “Rex” Theatre’ in Hannibal, Missouri, on 4 April 1912, is the
apparent orderliness of the arrangement—the agreement that we sit here
and you there. The town pride is on view on this special occasion in which
young boys, possibly ushers, wear bootineers and some women wear hats.
The white crowd, facing forward, is oblivious to the black patrons in their
‘roost.’ They share the same film but not the same section of the house, at
such a distance from the stage and the center of the house. Blacks recede into
facelessness while some whites, those with privileged front row seating, have
faces. How innocently they show their faces to the camera. How innocently
they had learned their entitlement, the lesson that Lillian Smith described:
‘your skin color is a Badge of Innocence which you can wear as vaingloriously
as you please because God gave it to you and hence it is right and good. It
gives you priorities over colored people everywhere else in the world, and
especially those in the South, in matters where you eat, the theatres you go
to, the swimming pools you use, jobs, the people you love …’ 21

69
 g oing to the mov ies

3.5 Opening Night of the Rex Theater, Hannibal, Missouri (4 April 1912).

(Below): detail of the balcony. Source: Museum of Modern Art Stills Collection.

70
 the w hite in the r ace mov ie audience

In Mark Twain’s home town, however, and in other towns and cities
in the South, the race experience was not as orderly as the photograph
implies.22 Hannibal, in the formerly slave-holding section of a state that was
not entirely slave-holding, was the scene of throbbing tensions and dissatis-
factions. New research on interracial mingling in the South suggests the
permeability of the boundaries. It is reasonable to assume that the awkward
juggling of time and space produced some mistakes. One imagines a sleepy
white viewer dozing off during a late film and waking up at midnight to
find himself in the black show. Another, enamored of movies in general,
would just stay on after 11:00 pm to watch another show. A white might
be out of place under cover of dark; what interests me in this is the way
in which the dark of the race movie theatre offered the means to express a
desire to be out of place.

White Camp/Black Camp

In his introduction to A Separate Cinema: Fifty Years of Black Cast Posters,
Donald Bogle suggests that Oscar Micheaux talked white Southern theatre
managers and owners into showing his films at special matinées or at
midnight shows for ‘white audiences interested in black camp.’ 23 While I
have no quarrel with his assertion that black films for white people was
a special situation and finding, as we have, the Friday midnight show for
whites at the Attucks Theatre in Norfolk, I wonder about his definition of
camp. It seems to me that it is white camp that he should be talking about
and not black camp. Camp is, of course, always relational, contextual, a
question of when and for whom. In Esther Newton’s Mother Camp: Female
Impersonators in America (for me the locus classicus of the notion of camp),
incongruity, theatricality, and humor define camp.24 Camp ‘inheres’ not in
the thing itself or even in the person, but in the ‘tension’ between person
and thing, and always in relation to context.
So the problem is one of understanding at what point and for whom
all-black cast movies become camp. In the early decades of the century,
the situation of black films might seem to generate a multiplicity of
incongruities, beginning with the very idea of blacks being larger than life
on screen, filling out all of the roles. For blacks to be seen doing the things
that white people do—blacks as cowboys, doctors, dentists, and aviators,
blacks in unimaginable situations and circumstances—is incongruous (to
whites), unimaginable because as yet unimagined by a Jim Crow society.
Camp is about substitutions, and blacks not in their place is camp. What
race movie pioneers saw as ‘just like’ might have been seen by incredulous
whites as something out of place.

71
 g oing to the mov ies

The ‘when’ question in relation to the camp reception of race movies

is one for present-day audiences who, in my experience, have responded
in distinctly different ways, depending on their assumed racial make up.
Predominantly black audiences find more things to laugh at in race movies
from the silent era than white audiences, perhaps because they have both
more distance and more knowledge than whites. That is, they have more
inside knowledge, and this contributes to the distance, the knowledge-of-
black culture effect producing the ‘collision of interpretations’ that Noël
Carroll has theorized as the production of humour.25 But let us look at the
production of humor question historically. The bane of the existence of the
race movie ‘uplifters’ were, of course, the ‘chicken licking’ black comedies,
programmed so often and so offensively (to the black press) by whites who
owned and/or managed black theatres. It is significant that the Lincoln
Company produced no comedies and that Micheaux did not add comedy
until the sound era. Jacqueline Stewart discusses what she calls the ‘Black
people are funny’ assumption, epitomized by white-owned Ebony Pictures
and apparently endemic among white exhibitors who programmed black
theatres.26 We can also reverse this assumption, however, by asking how
white people were funny to those blacks who flocked to see the white
fare in race movie theatres—almost always second run features and action
pictures. In my new formulation, black camp is not what ‘interested’ whites
saw at midnight in Norfolk in 1922. They saw ‘white camp’ (camp for
white folks). Black camp—camp for black people—involves blacks looking
at white movies and thinking ‘what fools these white folks be.’ While
white audiences looking at Ebony Pictures comedies were encouraged to
take a ‘what fools these black folks be’ position, white audiences looking
at race (‘uplift’) movies might, given a ‘white camp’ sensibility, take a
different position, something like ‘what fools these black folks are making
of whites.’ This is, of course, given the white situations which these films
dramatized—and also given a sense of the incongruity of blacks in white
circumstances during this era of separation.
Eric Lott’s study of black face minstrelsy is among the most influential
work done in American Studies on the white working-class reception of all-
black entertainment. It is perhaps the doubleness of his thesis in Love and
Theft that has produced its utility, for the mixture of fascination, envy, and
self-derision he describes serves many purposes, not to mention the welcome
importation of a British cultural studies model into American Studies.27
Lott’s assertion that white working-class people did not live so comfortably
with their whiteness, after all, makes it possible to imagine a spectator whose
dissatisfaction verged on revolt and thus whose attraction to race movies
might just be not that they were black but that they were not-white.28

72
 the w hite in the r ace mov ie audience

But Lott’s thesis requires significant revision in its application to silent

film reception, and not just because race movies were never the popular
phenomenon that minstrelsy had been in the previous century. There are two
other caveats: Firstly, there is the wish-fulfilment behind the phenomenon of
the White Negro that so interests Lott, and builds to a degree on Norman
Mailer’s understanding of the hipster who ‘had absorbed the existential
synopses of the Negro’ and was so envious of black male sexuality.29
Although the phenomenon of jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow, who crossed
over to black society as much as he could, initially because he felt that he
never really fit into white society, offers a preferable example, even here,
the White Negro seems too much of an urbanite and not native to the
American South.30 It remains for us to discover a different kind of race
traitor, a concept opened up by new studies in white cultural recalcitrance
such as Mab Segret’s work on race traitors.31
The second caveat is that we would want to factor in the phenomenon of
movies (still) as an attraction in and of themselves, particularly in the early
part of the twentieth century. Beyond the minstrelsy effect, we would want
to look at the lure of the movies which brought wonders never before seen
to small towns as well as larger cities in the South. We would want to look
at a double attraction: the technology that made things move and people
doing things on the screen that they were not seen to do in everyday life.
(That is, for whites, blacks were not seen—yet—as aviators or detectives.)
This second part of the attraction, the things previously unseen part, leads
me to my modification of Lott’s ‘fascination,’ to a spectator motivated by
‘interest,’ a curiously curious person, about which we know only one thing:
He was a night owl.

Cross-Race Curiosity
New work on the history of curiosity has rescued it from the low opinion in
which it has been held in more traditional humanities research. The features
of this theory allow us to take curiosity-seekers seriously, to listen to their
discontent, to understand their appetite for empirical phenomena, and to
appreciate the way that they might themselves become curiosities.
There would be, argues Barbara Benedict, a visual dimension to the
transgression.32 Married to the idea of cinema’s curious spectator, this visual
transgressor would have been someone who dared to look and wished for
more where daring to look means wanting things to be different—perhaps
without even knowing it.33 The curious spectator is one whose empirical
appetite leads him to seek out counter-ideological phenomena—although
this is, of course, our term, not his.

73
 g oing to the mov ies

To go to see a race movie in the South in the 1910s, one would have
to be sufficiently curious about black life to cross town into the wrong
neighborhood, perhaps under cover of night. One had to dare to be in the
wrong place and to dare to look at the wrong things on the screen. The
crossing-over of this particular white spectator was almost certainly not
systematic enough to constitute what the race movie pioneers hoped for:
a cross-over audience. This dream would not become a reality for several
decades Not until the advent of race records would we see the phenomenon
of a popular culture performed by blacks and first popular with them being
picked up by white consumers.34 Thus, I want to stress the isolation of the
phenomenon that interests us—a one time crossing, perhaps, maybe not
followed by another. For the phenomenon of genuine fandom we would
need to look at genres and stars. Discussing a somewhat later period, after
the advent of sound, Arthur Knight suggests that the attraction of all-black
cast musical films for whites was that of ‘blacks as musical,’ a popularity
expressed as a preference for the genre over the black stars of the genre.35
Although the existing literature suggests that the first cross-over black star
was Sydney Poitier, my sense is that we need to look much earlier.

3.6 Noble Johnson, early ‘cross-

over’ star. Source: George P.
Johnson Collection, Department of
Special Collections, Young Research
Library, University of California-
Los Angeles.

74
 the w hite in the r ace mov ie audience

We may, in fact, need to look at the aborted ‘cross-over’ stardom of

Noble Johnson, hints of which are there in the 1918 survey. At the white-
owned Alamo in Washington, DC, where the audience was ‘partially’ white
and where The Law of Nature, the Trooper of Troop K and The Realization of
a Negro’s Ambition had done ‘BIG’ business, Noble Johnson was identified
as ‘the one best bet.’ Although I have no evidence of the relative popularity
of the Universal serials in which Johnson first starred, it is clear that films
such as The Red Ace and the eighteen-episode The Bull’s Eye (1918) were
marketed to a predominantly white audience, with the black audience an
added bonus following Johnson’s discovery by owners of black theatres,
who then advertised his performances in the black press. Pearl Bowser and
Louise Spence note this concerted effort to find black actors in white films,
producing them as stars through advertising even when they had minor
parts. Eddie Polo might have been the star of The Bull’s Eye, but when it
played at the white-owned Owl Theatre in Chicago in 1918, the theatre
ran an ad in the Chicago Defender: ‘COME AND SEE THE RACE’S
DAREDEVIL MOVIE STAR.’ 36 Indeed, one of the reasons for Noble
Johnson’s forced resignation from the Lincoln Company in 1918 had to
do with an early short-sightedness about the cross-over effect on the part
of exhibitors who thought that his appearance in Lincoln Company films
hurt the business they were doing with the Universal serials.37 In this short
period, roughly 1916 to 1918, we may find that Noble Johnson exemplified
an early kind of cross-over where white as well as black fans followed a star
from white product to black product and back again.
I hope here to have dramatized the position we find ourselves in,
between the theoretical attraction of the cultural studies paradigm with
its challenge to the system and the industry history that must find what it
finds. To add to our challenge there is the inevitability of always finding
who we want to find, invariably what we want each other to be at any time
in history. Despite this, and as an antidote to it, let there be no detail too
inconsequential in our attempts to tell a story that we can never completely
tell. Even after we determine that people went to the movies we may still
have no idea why they went and what they did with what they saw. As for
the white who went to race movies, I never did find him. Let me correct
this. I did find one, but I’m not sure that he counts. At least, he doesn’t
quite fit my theoretical profile of the curious spectator, the race traitor
who spontaneously learns to be critical of white culture at the juncture of
two cultures: as a white watching race movies with an all-black audience.
And this is to demonstrate the way in which our empirical spectator is
supplemented by, eclipsed by, and even may come to be supplanted by a
theoretical one.

75
 4

‘Sundays in Norfolk’
Toward a Protestant Utopia Through Film
Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1910–1920

Terry Lindvall

O n 5 May 1916, Variety reported that evangelist Billy Sunday’s arrival in

Kansas City for a seven-week revival meeting had had an immediate
economic impact on local picture houses: ‘His opening sermon drew an
audience of 37,000, while the theaters reported a slump in attendance.’ 1 A
similar assault on movie attendance occurred later the same year in Boston,
where Sunday drew 54,000 to the Tabernacle on his first day, and Variety
lamented that he was to be around for ten weeks.2 Well into the 1920s,
Variety frequently reported the baleful effect that evangelical missions led
by preachers ‘of the Billy Sunday type’ had on movie attendance.3
Sunday was, however, not only a symbol of the apparent competition
between moving pictures and mainstream, conservative Protestants. He was
also a remarkable indicator of an emerging symbiosis between them. In both
the style and structure of his own performances, and in his well-publicized
camaraderie with Hollywood celebrities, the conservative, saloon-fighting,
former baseball star provided middle-class Protestants with a demonstration
of how to embrace the new technology’s blend of entertainment, edification
and uplift. Sunday directly engaged the moving picture industry, both as
a consultant and as a moral guide for those who were hesitant to frequent
theaters. His embrace of movies as worthwhile amusements stood in
sharp contrast to his condemnation of the saloon, the dance hall and ‘the
rottenness … on the stage.’ 4 In several sermons, he declared that movies
were much more acceptable to Christians than the legitimate theaters which
had been corrupted by their content. The moving picture trade establishment

76
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

4.1 Billy
Sunday not
only endorsed
motion pictures,
he appeared in
one. Courtesy
of Library
of Congress
(Motion Picture
News 11:9, 6
March 1915,
p. 60).

noted his support as early as 1912. In a Motion Picture News column, reviewer
William Lord Wright listed several things to be grateful for during that
Thanksgiving season. Topping the list was ‘that evangelist Billy Sunday says
picture shows are all right.’ 5
As historian John Tibbetts has suggested, Billy Sunday and the movie
industry ‘preached’ to the same audience of the emerging, American middle
class.6 William McLoughlin, one of Sunday’s biographers, described a
typical member of this audience as being married with children, commuting
by car to work, spending leisure time at his lodge meetings, playing cards,
drinking an occasional glass of beer, and going to church regularly.7 Courted
by the movie industry, this same audience financed the transition from the
nickelodeon to the middle-class movie house of the 1910s and 1920s through
their ticket purchases.8
Norfolk’s local exhibition conditions support the arguments made by
Robert C. Allen and Russell Merritt for the existence of a bourgeois
audience actively attending nickelodeons before 1910.9 In 1908, Jake and
Otto Wells, proprietors of the most extensive film exhibition circuit in the
South, moved from Richmond to base their exhibition operation in Norfolk.
Viewed by the local press as upstanding and socially involved citizens, they
became a vital part of the middle and upper classes that brought together
social respectability and moviegoing.10 The management of the Colonial, a
vaudeville and moving picture theater, took out an advertisement in 1909
that thanked the ‘press, the public and members of the pulpit’ who had
been ‘good enough to openly compliment the character of our entertainment,
to commend its worth and merit and to comment with co-operative spirit
upon the class and volume of our patronage.’ 11 While such self-promotion

77
 g oing to the mov ies

could be an engaging strategy for attracting such an audience, Norfolk’s

theatres had already drawn considerable numbers of religious leaders and
their congregations into their environs, and apart from periodical upheavals
regarding amusements on the Sabbath, churches in Norfolk enjoyed a
remarkably accommodating relationship with the theaters.
Studies of the reception of silent American cinema have generally
focused on the social and economic constitution of movie audiences,
particularly those in urban centers. An emphasis on issues of class, race
and gender has been essential in identifying the contours of early movie
exhibition practices. A key variable missing from these studies, however,
has been religion, which was a determining factor in shaping the everyday
experiences of middle-class American audiences. In a 1932 study on the
Protestant church and moviegoing, University of Idaho Professor Carl D.
Wells articulated the contrast between these two institutions when he noted
that ‘the church has an immediate rural heritage while the movie has a
distinct urban heritage.’ 12 A contextual history of film must acknowledge
the dominance of Protestant perspectives on amusements, education, and
social life in the popular discourse of the silent film era.13 Local newspapers,
particularly in rural communities, testify to the impact of such concerns.
The nature of cinematic exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, for example, was in
large part constituted by religious communities and religious sensibilities.
In contrast to the prevailing historical accounts that have suggested that
the ‘most vociferous opponents of moving pictures were usually Protestant
clergymen,’ I shall argue that in smaller cities like Norfolk the churches
practiced a vibrant, progressive attitude toward the cinema in the period
from 1906 to 1926, and sought to harness the potential of filmmaking for
religious ends.14 In doing so, I hope to show not only that the boundaries
of spectator participation expanded into the religious realm, but that the
Church was itself a site of contested views about the nature and role of film
in the life and health of religious communities.
In 1910, Norfolk was a prospering, progressive Mid-Atlantic community
of over 67,000 citizens. It was a busy seaport city, a thriving small
metropolis that provided an all-year playground. Much like Gregory
Waller’s description of Lexington, Kentucky, Norfolk was a southern city in
temperament and attitudes, marked by a spirit of boosterism, a substantial
African American community (37 per cent of the population was black),
and a long-standing sense of being ‘southern.’ 15 By 1920 the population had
doubled, while the ratio of whites to blacks remained constant.16 Known as
the economic and cultural ‘gateway to the South,’ Norfolk was strategically
situated, both geographically and socially, to welcome the novelty of nickel
madness. As first and foremost a ‘Navy town,’ however, Norfolk was also

78
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

less flatteringly known as ‘the City of Vice’ and ‘the wickedest city in the
US.’ In a 1919 meeting considering the legislation of Sunday entertainments,
one speaker reminded the city council that because Norfolk was ‘a seaport
town,’ it faced ‘conditions that few other American cities had to contend
with,’ namely the saloons and brothels that served the naval base.17 At the
end of the nineteenth century, Norfolk contained an area known as ‘Hell’s
Half-Acre’ which spawned over 200 saloons, gambling parlors, brothels, and
‘social clubs.’ 18 In this community, moving pictures offered a conspicuously
more virtuous alternative to less wholesome amusements provided for young
sailors away from the moral constraints of home.
A significantly Protestant community, Norfolk hosted twelve white
and twenty-three ‘colored’ Baptist churches, eleven Episcopal churches
and missions, fifteen Methodist churches, nine Presbyterian churches and
congregations, and twelve ‘colored’ Methodist Episcopal churches in 1910.
Alongside three Roman Catholic churches and four Jewish congregations,
several other smaller Protestant sects existed. By 1920 the Baptists had
tripled the number of their houses of worship, the Methodist doubled
theirs, and other new congregations had appeared.19 Many of the mainline
churches joined forces through the ecumenical Church Federation of Norfolk
to coordinate the city’s religious and moral concerns, including Sabbath
showings and the ministry to military personnel.20 Often joining them in
dealing with social issues was the elite colored Interdenominational Ministers’
Meeting, whose concerns for uplift paralleled the Church Federation.
Norfolk’s social elite, and particularly its religious leaders, championed
the role of film in helping to stem a tide of what they saw as true
wickedness. In 1894, itinerant Prohibition preacher Sam Small launched
a reform crusade against vice-ridden neighborhoods and corrupt local
government. With the help of both black and white associations of the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Small and the reformers
castigated Norfolk’s city council, police corruption, and inadequate school
system, claiming that it was the only city in the nation with a population
over 5000 to have no high school, while eighty-one brothels were allowed to
operate within ‘the circle of the shadow of one church spire’ alone.21 Small’s
old-fashioned religious revivals, heavily spiced with politics, reportedly
‘drove his audiences at the Academy of Music theatre into righteous frenzy,’
and led the Drys into control of the city.
The location of Small’s revival in the Academy theatre was a precursor to
the growing collaboration of churches and the movie theaters. As historian
Charles Musser observed of the early days of the moving pictures, one ‘could
be a religious person and not only go to a vaudeville house, but one could
even find religious inspiration there.’ 22 In Norfolk, one was even likely to

79
 g oing to the mov ies

4.2 Judged by their formal attire in this cartoon, members of the social elite did
attend motion pictures. T.E. Powers, ‘Our Moving Pictures,’ The Virginian Pilot, 10
July 1910, p. 29.

worship in such houses. Throughout the period, church leaders appropriated

movie theatres for their own purposes, adapting the auditoria of theatres
for religious ends, and, to a degree, sanctifying the sites. Unlike the local
Aldermen, who complained of the nuisance of the use of phonographs for
attracting attention to the moving picture theatres on the main streets of the
city, Norfolk’s clergy seemed to embrace the motion picture as a potentially
positive alternative to the city’s more insidious vices.23 As Tom Gunning
has observed, American cinema’s transition from ‘attractions’ to narrative
involved an engagement with codes of morality and a ‘conscious movement
into a realm of moral discourse.’ 24
Secular and sacred cultures were remarkably intertwined during the early
part of the twentieth century. As early as 1906, ministers and exhibitors
in Norfolk were making common cause together: theaters and churches
frequently exchanged buildings in forging a mutually beneficial relationship.
Under the auspices of the Church Federation of Norfolk, various religious
services and social actions were held in local theatres between 1911 and
1921.25 Like opera houses at the end of the nineteenth century, several of

80
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

4.3 The Granby Family Theatre in Norfolk (1907). Courtesy of Sergeant Memorial
Archives. Norfolk Kirn Public Library.

the theaters, especially the Academy of Music, the Granby, the American,
the Colonial, and the newly constructed Wells Theater (1912), provided the
largest and most commodious auditoria in the city. As such they became the
main venues for everything from high school graduations to special religious
events, and it was not unusual for revivalists and preachers to proclaim their
messages at the best auditoria in the city.
During the season of Lent, exhibitors usually noted a slump in
attendance, as church-goers gave up various leisurely activities and pleasures
such as the movies.26 Those denominations such as the Episcopalians and
Lutherans that celebrated Lent, however, conducted noonday services for
businessmen at the Granby and American theatres, reportedly drawing

81
 g oing to the mov ies

4.4 The American Theatre (1913). Courtesy of Sergeant Memorial Archives. Norfolk
Kirn Public Library.

capacity crowds.27 The Brotherhood of St. Andrew recruited prominent

speakers, such as the Rt. Rev. A.M. Randolph of the Diocese of Southern
Virginia, to address the male business community at the noon devotions in
the Granby, considering it ‘advisable to obtain a larger auditorium than that
used heretofore.’ 28 Exhibitors seemed to realize that good public relations
during holy seasons would bear fruit in terms of future attendance.29
The theatrical venues attracted audiences not only because of their
spacious roominess, but also because of the dramatic backdrop they provided

82
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

for stirring or sensational sermons. In 1918, the itinerant evangelist C.E.

Heard of New York City intrigued his audience with his strategically
timed lecture at the American Theatre on ‘The Fall of Babylon’ soon after
D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance had played at the theatre.30 Seats were free and
he promised to take no collections. Evangelist Irwin D. Richardson also
appeared at the Colonial to speak on how the Great War was predicted
in biblical prophecy.31 Across the Elizabeth River in 1911, Pastor William
Burleigh of the Park View Christ Church preached on ‘The Sins of
Portsmouth, and How To Cure Them’ at the Orpheum Theatre.32
Churches often adopted theatrical methods to attract worshipers, even
with ‘posters advertising services at some hall or theatre,’ and others ‘luring
non-churchgoers’ through illustrated sermons.33 Not only did advertisements
for the theaters appear on the same pages as church news, but theaters also
advertised that they were sites for religious activities. In 1915, the Crosman
Theater announced that the Rev. Frank Pratt would speak Sunday nights
on such themes as ‘The Way Our Bible Came to Us.’ The Arcade promoted
Salvation Army evangelists, like Colonel John Dean who traveled to Norfolk
to lecture on crooked women and purity of living, while a citywide Baptist
revival occurred in the ‘sacred’ halls of the Majestic theater, where the
union services ‘were marked by intense feeling and deep spiritual power.’ 34
After their initial success, the revival meetings were relocated to the First
Baptist church, while the Majestic provided a venue for the Norfolk colored
Baptist conference’s ‘simultaneous campaign for the uplift and betterment
of its race.’ 35
Co-operation between church and theater even extended to conservative
evangelistic meetings and moral uplift. In 1908, Rev. Joseph Rennie
preached on ‘If Not Christ—Whom? Or What?’ at the Wonderland theater
while the theme of Rev. G.E. Booker from the Y.M.C.A. and Epworth
Methodist was ‘Self-Control.’ 36 The same year, the proprietor of Barton’s
Theatre permitted a fiery evangelist, Mr. Asher, to conduct services in his
variety theater:

This place of amusement, known to Norfolk citizens as a variety

house, where questionable women sing and others perform and allow
men to buy them drinks, was filled last night not by the usual type
of citizens that patronize the place, but by some of the best and
most prominent men in town. Up in the boxes ordinarily used as a
place where drinks are served … were gathered prominent citizens
and the women who sat beside them knelt in prayer and joined in
the singing of religious songs and hymns. It was a joyful sight to see
every man and every woman kneel for ten minutes on the dirty floor

83
 g oing to the mov ies

of this same place and beg God’s forgiveness for sin and promise to
mend their lives.

About forty men signed coupons declaring their intention of becoming

church members. Even James M. Barton, the proprietor, had his hands
uplifted, declaring that he would ‘get out of this business’ of salooning.37
Protestants were not the only ones to cooperate with the local theaters.
Roman Catholics promoted a St. Vincent de Paul Conference at the Victory
Theatre, with proceeds going to the unfortunate, ‘so that persons attending
this show can feel that a part of their admission price paid will go towards
relieving need and distress in Norfolk.’ 38 Mayor Albert L. Roper joined Otto
Wells and the elite of Norfolk in a mass meeting at the Colonial theatre to
raise money for Starving Children in the European Relief Fund.39 Not all
civic events involved the exhibition of pictures. At the American Theatre,
S. Frankel held what was called the first Zionist Meeting in Norfolk while
the Young Men’s Hebrew Association congregated at the Colonial.40
Many Norfolk churches incorporated cinema into their evangelism,
instruction and worship. As historian Kathy Fuller has pointed out,
traveling exhibitors such as Lyman Howe gained the imprimatur of
churches and other respectable social institutions to promote their wares,
and Norfolk was no exception.41 As early as February 1906, the conservative
South Street Baptist Church announced that it was exhibiting Edison
Moving Pictures, charging adults twenty-five cents and children fifteen
cents.42 Other churches followed a tradition of using illustrated sermons
with stereopticons, usually accompanied by hymn singing.43 The Passion
Play, the latest New York ‘spectacular sensation … from the hands of the
finest artists of France,’ was presented as early as 1907 to crowded houses
at the Lyceum Theatre, with local baritone soloist, C.S. Carr, rendering
hymns as accompaniment.44 When a film of the Oberammergau Passion
Play was advertised that season by the Colonial Theatre as ‘Sacred Drama,’
audiences were assured that there is ‘nothing in this grand performance that
will be sacrilegious or irreverent, or any pictures presented offensive to any
Christians of any denomination.’ 45
Missionary pictures were especially appealing, combining the biblical
injunction of the Great Commission with the novelty of the travelogue.46
In 1908 the Memorial Methodist Church coordinated with social ministries
to present films on preventing bubonic plague, fever and other ‘dreaded
maladies.’ 47 Two years later, the Disciples of Christ Church endorsed the
moving picture as a means to enable the church to understand the ‘heathen
rites’ of people it was evangelizing, when films secured by the Foreign
Christian Missionary Society were shown as part of a church lecture on

84
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

‘Strange People of Many Lands.’ 48 Dr. Adams at the Freemason Church of

Christ showed moving pictures ‘portraying in a vivid manner the manners
customs and habits of the inhabitants of the heathen world, showing how
they had been brought under the saving and sanctifying influences of the
Gospel of Christ and the number of preachers, doctors and professors have
been sent out by our missionary, who were converts to the Christian faith.
Some of these have been converted from cannibalism.’ 49
A 1914 newspaper advertising campaign admonishing readers to ‘Go
to Church Sunday’ was designed not to promote church attendance but to
prepare the religious community for the discovery of a series of religious
films produced by the International Bible Students’ Association, telling the
‘Story of the Creation.’ Under the banner of ‘Using Motion Pictures to Save
Souls,’ Otto Wells coordinated this free, four-week Sunday program at the
New Wells theatre, with special appeals to the church community. The
spectacle of ‘colored lantern slides, tinted moving pictures and synchronized
phonographic lectures’ sought to ‘harmonize science, history and the
Scriptures [in] a very plausible manner.’ 50 Its clerical sponsor, Charles Taze
Russell, believed that he had divine sanction for visual communication
through the Bible’s use of ‘parables and in the symbols of Revelation, which
are word pictures.’ Russell was one of many members of the clergy who
argued that that within a few years high school educators would be using
film to bring general knowledge of religious truth to all people with the
‘greatest efficiency.’ 51
The success of the Creation series at the Wells helped to generate interest
in the churches’ using films ‘for evangelism, outreach, and community
service.’ In 1914, the Calvary Baptist Church exhibited ‘Sacred films on
Sunday nights,’ such as Queen Esther or Joseph of Egypt, in what they
claimed was a ‘first in the South.’ 52 The church fully approved its use ‘for
evangelism, outreach, and community service, a pattern successfully tested
by churches in Chicago and New York City.’ 53 While local Blue Laws
forbade theaters from exhibiting their films on Sundays, the Cumberland
Street Methodist Church announced in February 1916 that it would show
moving pictures illustrating religious subjects at its Wednesday evening
services ‘for some time to come.’ 54 The same week, the Church of Christ,
South Norfolk, announced that on Sunday night, ‘in connection with the
services, feature films will be shown depicting the Life of Our Saviour,’
explaining that ‘while this is a new departure in church worship in the
East, the feature films are being widely used in the West, and are meeting
with popular favor.’ 55
The Christ and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, built in 1909–10, installed
a Moviegraph Stand and projector, along with a screening auditorium on

85
 g oing to the mov ies

its upper floors, to explore how moving pictures might preach messages.56
The parish house of Christ Episcopal Church, opened in December 1919,
had a large auditorium with a fully equipped moving picture booth and a
seating capacity of about 500 on its top floor.57 Methodist churches followed
recommendations set down by the 1919 Centennial Conference in Ohio and
incorporated ‘attractive programs’ for its series of Friday evening community
entertainments given in their churches.58 Interspersed with songs and
stories were Ford Weekly motion pictures, Burton Holmes travelogues,
Bray Pictographs and odd comedy pieces like ‘Honeymooning on $18.75’
and ice cream socials. Dr. E.L. Bain often would add a seven-minute talk,
with Mrs. Bain telling the children the stories. Inspired by his neighbor’s
experiment the year before, the First Christian Church inaugurated its own
‘annual open air movies’ out on the church lawn under the stars. The Greek
Orthodox Church conducted their services at the Arcade theatre, hosting a
viewing of The Life of Moses, as a means for both religious instruction and
civic sponsorship.59 Under the auspices of the Church Federation of Norfolk
and Roman Catholic Organizations, churches in Norfolk had undertaken
an active moving picture program by 1920.60 What is significant about the
variety of lectures and sacred concerts at the various theatres was a pervasive
sense that theatres enhanced the quality of life and virtue in the community.
If one could sing the Messiah, hear an evangelistic sermon or attend charity
benefits in a theater, then perhaps other activities in the same place were
not too profane.61
Religious leaders such as the Reverend Luther Tesh envisioned the
spiritual opportunities that film would provide for the church, arguing
that either the ‘Church or Devil [would] … Entertain [the] Young of This
Century,’ and that ‘If the people of God do not furnish that entertainment,
the devil will.’ The real question, Tesh and others believed, was who would
commandeer the available technology and sundry means to entertain
and instruct youth.62 Movies frequently provided didactic texts for local
ministers. Moving picture dramas on the evils of drinking and the problem
of the fallen woman took on local significance in the context of Norfolk’s
struggles with saloons and prostitution, as ministers would use the films as
material for their sermons.63 In 1914, Methodist minister J.A. Thomas used
movies as part of his sermon attacking the saloon.64 By enlisting ministerial
support for ‘social dramas,’ exhibitors could inoculate themselves against
charges that they were merely appealing to prurient interests. In 1917, for
example, the Rev. Thomas B. Gregory praised Idle Wives for being ‘true to
nature, men and women as they actually are in the world. Idle Wives takes
no text but it preaches a sermon greater than any that was ever heard in
a pulpit.’ 65 A cultural alliance between exhibitors, like the Wells brothers,

86
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

and various Protestant ministers developed, enabling them to pit their ideal
of uplifting and wholesome entertainment against exploitative alternatives.
In February 1916, when Norfolk was again seeking to clean up its suspect
streets, the Colonial Theatre focused attention on the plight of ‘these
unfortunates,’ the ‘magdalenes.’ 66
In 1918, Rev. H.R.L. Shephard declared that the ‘way in which the
cinema might be used for benefiting lost people is perfectly amazing to
anyone who has thought at all.’ 67 Films such as The Wanderer and George
Loane Tucker’s The Miracle Man, both bringing ‘uplift,’ took Norfolk by
storm in 1919.68 Such sermonic photodramas were viewed as a way of
drawing people to church. Some argued that ‘one of the developments of the
future will be the church cinema … where such films as The Miracle Man or
The Sign of the Cross are exhibited in churches.’ 69 In 1921 Lois Weber’s The
Blot, a film addressing the pitiful wages of teachers and preachers, received
high praise when it was shown at the Granby.70 An invitation to a private
showing was sent to all the lawyers, doctors, preachers, school teachers, and
city officials as an act of community service: ‘Throughout the story moves
the pity-impelling figure of a threadbare young minister of the gospel,
hopelessly underpaid and hopelessly in love with America.’ 71 Its central
message of the need for increased pay for poor clergy and educators did not
hurt the theaters’ campaign for positive public relations. Clerical support was
not restricted to dramas of uplift. In 1923, Methodist Episcopal Reverend
B.G. Houghton sent Harold Lloyd a handbill showing himself playing a
Lloyd picture whenever his church gave an entertainment, and informing
Lloyd that ‘we are using considerable of your pictures.’ 72
Whatever rhetorical fire sparked from church folk in Norfolk during the
first two decades of the twentieth century, it was rarely ignited by issues of
censorship. Near the end of the 1910s, the citizens of Norfolk noted that their
neighbors in North Carolina were considering censorship but, considering
themselves more sophisticated, resisted it themselves.73 Incendiary debate
over movies and over the social habit of going to the movies did not fully
materialize until the early 1920s, when both the modernist/fundamentalist
divorce in theology and numerous Hollywood scandals occurred.74 What
did stir the ire of the Norfolk faithful during cinema’s first two decades,
however, was the national issue of Sunday moving-picture exhibitions, an
issue rooted in an objection to Sunday being exploited as anything other
than a sacred day of rest.75 The resulting Blue Laws were attempts to exert
religious influence over social and economic relations in towns throughout
the country, especially in the South. As the early trade journals and
historians have documented, Sabbatarian campaigns focused on protecting
Protestant concepts of Sunday against the encroachment of amusements.76

87
 g oing to the mov ies

In the year of cinema’s invention as a public amusement, Bishops of the

Episcopal Church felt compelled to publish their view that the day of rest
and worship ‘cannot be disturbed without grave evils to the individual and
the family, to society and the State.’ 77 Similar sentiments were expressed
a decade later by Methodist minister John Wesley Hill, who complained
that ‘the red laws of riot, carnival and immorality’ had supplanted ‘the
blue laws of Puritanism.’ 78 The often strident, consistently unyielding call
for a ‘Blue Sunday’ underlay almost all local religious objections to the
cinema.79 Voicing the sentiments of the Methodist churches in Norfolk
in 1910, preachers issued a pastoral address on behalf of their female
constituency, deploring ‘growing tendencies to worldliness.’ They called on
other Methodists ‘to refrain from all participation in theatre-going and
card-playing, Sabbath desecration, and like worldly practices.’ The Norfolk
conference of the M.E. Church condemned what they saw as the creeping
growth of ‘worldly amusements’ that desecrated the Sabbath. Their emphasis
was clearly on the need to protect the sanctity of the Lord’s Day, rather
than on any religious opposition to cinema as such.80 Norfolk’s religious
community rarely protested the apparatus or content of moving-pictures.
Even when a controversial film like Traffic in Souls (1914) appeared, it was
framed as a ‘modern movie melodrama’ with a salutary ‘moral lesson’ that
particularly ‘prudish’ New York censors had sought to suppress. In fact, a
Norfolk critic found it ironic that the film had ‘attained considerable free
advertising on the strength of the New York censors’ action in forbidding
the presentation.’ 81
The prime object of Methodists in promoting the Christian Sabbath
in Norfolk was to educate public sentiment in ‘bringing Sunday work
down to the minimum of mercy and necessity, checking the Sunday
amusements and securing as great and thoughtful a day as possible.’ 82
Even as nickelodeons were proliferating in the Norfolk area, judges and
politicians were joining clergy in warning against all kinds of Sabbath
breaking. At the end of the second decade of the century, Presbyterians
and Baptists joined with Methodists to affirm their stance against Sunday
film showings. A Presbyterian pastor, ironically speaking at the Colonial
Theatre, declared that ‘The law of the Sabbath was written in the statute
book of Almighty God, Himself, and who shall dare to abrogate it.’ 83 The
same day, Rev. Sparks W. Melton, pastor of the Freemason Street Baptist
Church, spoke resolutely against opening picture shows in Norfolk on
Sundays, condemning the movement in no uncertain terms.84 In 1919, Rev.
Frank Robertson warned that ‘The project to throw open the doors of the
theatres may possibly conceal an ulterior design. If we let the bars down
to provide entertainment for the service men, have we any assurance that

88
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

things will not gradually widen until the first thing we know we shall have
a continental Sunday.’ A principal fear was that moviegoing would become
a commercial ‘wedge’ for a variety of amusement activities on Sunday.
According to Robertson, the real purpose of Sunday showings was not to
provide local service men with entertainment, but ‘to provide commercialism
with a chance to “pillage” on the Sabbath. They have six days in which to
make money, … and if they can’t make enough on those days they ought
to go out of business.’ 85 While, as Charles Musser has pointed out, some
exhibitors really did view ‘religious subjects as a crafty device to evade
Sunday blue laws,’ the fact that churches had been using theaters for Sunday
schools and special educational and revival services complicated the clergy’s
attitude toward the possibilities of exhibiting religious and educational films
for soldiers and sailors.86
Since movies were generally seen as a source of virtuous enlightenment,
the issue did not concern the moral vice of moving pictures, but whether
the Sabbath would be kept holy. By 1912, a survey of Ministers of the
Methodist Episcopal Church found that two-thirds of them went to the
theaters without regarding it as being sinful. They felt that ‘John Wesley’s
injunction leaving the amusement question to the conscience of individuals
was the wisest regulation for Americans of the twentieth century.’ 87 In
1920 one minister expressed the view that women parishioners preferred
not to hear sermons delivered against ‘modern shows because the majority
of them probably like to go.’ 88 For Norfolk clergy, however, an overriding
problem was how to minister to the military personnel during their free
hours of leisure. Numerous churches sought to attract entertain and uplift
the young people, especially the military men.89 The Cumberland Methodist
Church made a concerted effort to lure sailors with their big screen show
and provide moral uplift for the young men away from their homes. In
September 1917, the church showed Samson’s Betrayal to a group of sailors
ushered by the Methodist Church’s volunteer staff of young single women,
who ‘heavily laden with roses presented a flower to each man in uniform.’ 90
Other targeted audience groups included orphans, who were often invited
to free entertainment. The church made every Thursday night a gathering
place for the children and tired mothers of the community, where they
could see pictures of a high moral tone and also enjoy good music.91
Sunday movie showings were consistently rejected in Norfolk throughout
the 1910s, and the police demonstrated their willingness to arrest any
violators.92 In 1918, however, one local issue, the opening of the Red Circle
Theater on a local military base for the benefit of service men, ignited specific
community-wide arguments over the desirability of showing films to local
sailors and soldiers in order to keep them from more nefarious activities.93

89
 g oing to the mov ies

The Red Circle operated on the Sabbath with lecturers who gave illustrated
talks without charge. Such an educational tactic was deemed acceptable, but
not Sunday movies. A fierce debate among city council members centered
on whether Sunday amusements could be provided for the service men.
The moral and religious forces of Norfolk supported any city council
action ‘for the eradication of the evils complained of. The armory building
must not be used on Sunday for any purpose other than the holding of
illustrated talks on travel, health or “such other educational” lectures as may
be given from time to time. [But] Norfolk will not permit the opening of
any other place of amusement on Sunday in violation of the laws of the
state of Virginia.’ 94 The issue was well defined in an article that asked:
‘What is the moral difference between seeing a static or a moving picture?’
The editorial suggested that Sunday pictures would not draw people from
church. They found it ‘monstrous to suggest that the churches and the
cinematograph are two rival organizations competing as attractions for the
masses. Such a view is fundamentally irreligious. A man who wishes to go
to church will go there, whatever other ways of spending his time may be
open to him. A man who goes to church because he can go nowhere else
is not likely to derive any edification from his religious exercises.’ 95
Black clergy in Norfolk enthusiastically joined their white equivalents
in this protest, aligned in a common cause: both feared the danger of
introducing a secular wedge into the Christian community. Voicing their
opposition as a way of protecting the colored youth of the city, the ministers
gave their ‘support to those brave and wise white ministers who see an
“entertaining wedge” for the introduction of the “Continental Sunday.’ They
argued that this ‘wedge’ would ‘curse the Negro youth of Norfolk as well
as our white youth,’ because the Sabbath is intended for worship and if ‘the
church, the Sabbath school, the young people’s societies, the Y.M.C.A.,
the Knights of Columbus, the community Centre, reading rooms, and the
Red Circle theatre can not save him from sin, bootleggers and the red light
district, neither will the Sunday movie deliver him.’ 96 By 1922, however, a
liberalizing tendency that approved ‘uplifting and inspiring’ religious films
on Sunday had grown significantly stronger, and as far as the local newspaper
was concerned, the tide had turned against Sunday ‘blue laws.’ 97
In January and February 1920, Billy Sunday’s revivalist mission to
Norfolk was reported in detail in the local press. The Virginian-Pilot
covered pages of print with Sunday’s sermons and reports of every meeting
he held with community leaders. In his sermons, the popular evangelist
decried the demoralizing influence of card playing, dancing, the saloon and
some aspects of the legitimate stage, but he saw cinema as a ‘handmaiden
of religion,’ and an effective instrument of uplift and edification.98 His

90
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

name was even appropriated to recommend certain films. In a full-page

advertisement, Sunday recommended D.W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm
as a ‘sermon of the highest value.’ ‘The power of the moving picture,’ he
argued, ‘should be used to inculcate warnings and lessons that the world
needs … would that every story carried on the screen might have a lesson
as powerful, and as useful, a motive as praiseworthy.’ 99
Billy Sunday was no stranger to the entertainment business. Before
becoming a minister, he had been a professional ballplayer for ‘Pop’ Anson’s
Chicago Whitestockings. During his baseball career, he had a religious
experience in a Chicago rescue mission, and subsequently gave up baseball
to devote his life to preaching the Gospel. According to his biographers,
Sunday’s preaching style paralleled the energy and theatricality of actors.
One did not simply attend a Billy Sunday crusade; one experienced it,
watching it almost like a motion picture:

He races to and fro across the platform. Like a jack knife he fairly
doubles up in emphasis. One hand smites the other. His foot stamps
the floor as if to destroy it … No posture is too extreme for this

4.5 Billy Sunday to Mae West: ‘If you ever quit acting and wanted to, you could
be a sensation in the pulpit’ (1933). Courtesy Culver Pictures.

91
 g oing to the mov ies

restless gymnast. Yet it all seems natural. Like his speech, it is an

integral part of the man. Every muscle of his body preaches in accord
with his voice.100

Sunday was renowned for his friendly relations with Hollywood celebrities:
he was the brother-in-law of Essanay owner George K. Spoor, and an
acquaintance of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin,
William S. Hart and Cecil B. DeMille. In his 1917 Los Angeles crusade,
he played baseball against a team of motion picture personalities organized
by Fairbanks. Two years earlier, he had acted as technical advisor to director
Alan Dwan for Jordan Is A Hard Road a picture about an evangelist played
by Frank Campeau. According to Dwan:

We put up a huge tent over in Hollywood across from the studio

and filled it full of extras—not professional ones—just people off the
streets. Now, in the story, [lead actor Fred] Campeau is supposed to
harangue them about religion and make them come to God, but I
got Billy Sunday up there and he let them have one of his best hot
lectures, and I had about three cameras filming only the audience.
And pretty soon these people began to feel it, and the first thing
you know, they were crawling up the aisles on their knees, coming
up to Billy Sunday to be saved, hollering ‘Hallelujah’ and going into
hysteria. A terrific scene. No bunch of million-dollar actors could
have done it. You could see the frenzy in their faces. And after we cut,
he actually went on with the religious revival right there. Then I was
able to put Campeau up there and let him go through the gestures
of talking, cutting back all the time to these people I’d already shot.
The effect was astonishing.101

Sunday was viewed as an ally to the moving picture in attracting all

social and economic classes:

Billy Sunday dispenses religion. Yet is his audience confined to

Methodists? No, people of all sects and creeds jostle and elbow
their way into an auditorium to hear him. He mixes religion with
entertainment without distorting values. He preaches to you and
makes you like it. Whether or not you believe in his doctrines you
are impressed by what he says. The same effect is produced by the
skillfully handled religious picture. By ‘religious picture’ I do not
mean a palpable effort at preachment nor the dramatization of a
sectarian creed. I refer to a picture which derives its drama from

92
 film e x hibition in nor folk , v irgini a

some broad principle of religion to which all systems subscribe, such

as belief in the Divine Power, piety and morality.102

Sunday’s arrival in Norfolk in 1920 marked a culmination of Protestant

middle-class relations to film, and his famous sermon on ‘Amusements’
reaffirmed local Protestant attitudes toward moviegoing. His moral authority
on numerous subjects, including motion pictures, resonated with the
community. As a spokesperson for conservative Protestants, he augmented
the credibility of the motion picture industry, particularly in relation to its
more controversial stars such as Chaplin and the remarried Fairbanks and
Pickford, by appearing in publicity photographs and staging sports events
with them. His views mollified a cautious mass of conservative Protestants
and, perhaps unwittingly, enabled films to find an opportunity for Sunday
exhibition, even becoming a wedge for commercial exploitation.
A year and a half after Sunday’s visit, an editorial in the African American
Norfolk Journal and Guide echoed Sunday’s hot moral sermons, lambasting the
Tidewater community’s ongoing vice problems and castigating a spreading
menace of the ‘Red Light district,’ and ‘dance halls’ as doing ‘as much
harm as anything else.’ 103 Soon afterward, prominent black Baptist minister
R.H. Bowling decided to determine the most serious vices in Norfolk and
so polled his congregation. Of over 3600 votes cast, theater attendance came
in last of all the vices, with only 2 per cent selecting it as the most serious,
lagging far behind lying, bootlegging, gambling, and non-support of the
church. Movies were not even mentioned.104
Throughout the decades, churches had used and ‘sanctified’ theatre
sites for religious services, musical concerts, and old-fashioned revivals.105
Churches exhibited films in their own sanctuaries and integrated films
as sermonic material for uplift and education. Even after the evangelistic
apologetics of a Billy Sunday, changes were forthcoming after 1920, however.
The Hollywood scandals of the early 1920s, the drift of film content toward
the end of the silent era, the emergence of radio, a new medium favoring
the spoken word of Protestant preaching, and the escalating influence of
the Roman Catholic hierarchy in propagating moral standards in the public
sphere would ultimately foster a divisive relationship between all religious
groups and the film industry, and in part provoke the establishment of
the Production Code. Yet historically, as a contested site for articulating
its own mores and values, moving picture exhibition in the silent era in
Norfolk, Virginia, shared more in common with the dominant Protestant
establishment than has so far been imagined.

93
 5

Patchwork Maps of Moviegoing,

1911–1913 1
Richard Abel

I m agi n e you are a ‘picture fan’ in the textile mill town of Central Falls,
bordering Pawtucket (Rhode Island), in September 1912. You’re one of
several single young working women—a recent Polish immigrant training
on the looms in a nearby silk thread mill, a second-generation French-
Canadian operating the winding machines in a cotton mill weave room,
or a Jewish grocer’s daughter working behind the store counter on Pulaski
Square in the Polish neighborhood.2 You and several friends are looking
forward to going to the movies Saturday evening, 14 September, but you
haven’t decided where. After reading the Pawtucket Times the night before,
you know what’s playing at several downtown theaters.3 At the Music
Hall, there’s a variety program that includes The Unseen Enemy (by the
un-named D.W. Griffith), A Romance of the Coast, Live Wire, and a Pathé
Weekly newsreel. At the Star, there’s a special screening of Selig’s three-reel
Coming of Columbus, along with two other films and two vaudeville acts.
There you might even encounter some of the Italian immigrants (you may
want to, you may not), who live just across the river. But a new theater, the
Pastime, also is opening that day, and one of the four films scheduled is a
‘Bison feature,’ the two-reel Battle of the Red Men, plus several illustrated
songs. Which theater you choose could depend on several factors, but, as a
frequent moviegoer, you could count on the familiarity and relative quality
of the variety program at the Music Hall. Or you might be attracted just
enough by a ‘special feature’ like The Coming of Columbus, which you had
wanted to attend, but couldn’t, when it played in nearby Providence three

94
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

months earlier. Or you could simply be tempted by the novelty of a new

theater like the Pastime, whether you like westerns or not, especially since
you’ve heard that in the past it was a burlesque house.
This snapshot of a quasi-fictional moment in the everyday life of an
‘ordinary’ picture fan can serve to introduce some of the issues and debates
about movie audiences and moviegoing in the early 1910s. Unfortunately, no
study apparently exists in the USA comparable to Altenloh’s groundbreaking
1913 sociology dissertation, in which she sought to describe and explain the
large and still growing audience for moving pictures in Mannheim, a major
industrial city in Germany.4 In surveys of 2,400 people, she found that nearly
one third went to one of the city’s fourteen cinemas ‘once or even several
times a week.’ Not only did she come up with familiar reasons for that—low
admission price, the possibility of going ‘at any time one chooses’—but she
also posited others that would assume greater prominence in later theories
of modernity—for instance, cinema epitomized the ‘nervous restlessness’
that more or less synchronized modern leisure and work.5 For my purposes,
Altenloh extrapolated from her surveys ‘certain regularities’ about when and
how often various people went to the movies.6 Seasonal events such as holi-
days and unexpected variables such as weather impacted attendance, but the
most consistent factor was the weekly routine of different social groups. In
downtown cinemas, the lowest frequency of attendance fell on Fridays, partly
because that ‘traditionally [was] cleaning day in multi-room apartments, when
the women of the petite bourgeoisie and middle classes [were] busy with
domestic duties.’ 7 Yet in working-class faubourgs, the lowest frequency fell on

5.1 Mutual Movies ad, Minneapolis Journal, 3 January 1914.

95
 g oing to the mov ies

Thursdays, perhaps because money was tight just before the Friday payday.8
By contrast, attendance was highest at these outlying cinemas on Sundays,
whereas it was highest downtown on both Saturdays and Sundays.
Despite the lack of comparable studies, it is still possible to make some
conjectures about moviegoing in the U.S. during this period, as I have
tried to suggest in my opening quasi-fictional snapshot. For surviving
documents provide enough material (however mediated) to let us sketch the
spatial and temporal conditions of moviegoing in specific cities, summarize
the habits of particular groups of moviegoers, construct a map of ‘certain
regularities’ whose patterns could differ from place to place, and hazard
some explanation of those patterns. My own contribution to such a project,
admittedly daunting even if one focuses on just two or three years of the
transitional era, perhaps inevitably is a work-in-progress. But it does seek to
break new ground by drawing on sources other than the relatively familiar
discourse of the trade press, urban recreational surveys, and so on. Instead,
for the first part of this chapter, my primary sources are daily newspaper
ads, columns, and stories in selected cities (from New England to the Upper
Midwest), official local documents in those cities, and specific historical
urban studies. The second part relies on similar sources for the joint cities
of Pawtucket/Central Falls, including a recent study of immigrant working
women in the area and, most important, a long-lost weekly accounts book
from the city’s second largest moving picture theater.

Sketch Patterns of Exhibition

By now, it is no longer surprising to hear that, during the early 1910s, the
temporal conditions of moviegoing were not always the same from one city to
another or even within one urban center. But the range of differences could
be significant. In most cities, picture theaters tended to be open every day
of the week. In those such as Youngstown and Canton (Ohio), where ‘blue
laws’ forbade live entertainment on Sundays, vaudeville theaters and ‘opera
houses’ also turned into picture theaters on Sunday afternoons and evenings.
In New England industrial cities such as Lowell or Lynn (Massachusetts),
where similar laws were in effect, however, ‘Sunday concerts’ of moving
pictures were restricted to evening hours; yet in others such as Pawtucket,
there were no Sunday moving picture programs at all. Daily opening and
closing hours also varied widely. In some cities, downtown picture theaters
opened their doors in the morning and ran until late at night. Typical were
those that began their programs at 10:00 or 11:00 am: the Grand Photoplay
(Rochester, New York), the New Dome (Youngstown), or the Colonial (Des
Moines, Iowa).9 Among those with the longest hours were the Cameraphone

96
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

(Cleveland), which opened at 8:30 am, and the Empress (Toledo, Ohio),
which opened at 9:30 am (but 10:00 am on Sundays). Yet, in a surprising
number of cities, downtown theaters were open only in the afternoons
and evenings. In Lowell, for instance, all the theaters opened at 1:00 pm
and closed at 10:30 pm, Monday through Saturday. The same was true of
Canton, for vaudeville houses and picture theaters, as well as Minneapolis,
where the Seville opened at noon, the 575-seat Crystal at 1:00, and the
1,700-seat Lyric at 2:00. In Pawtucket, the Bijou, the Star, and the Pastime
had similar hours, but their doors were closed between 5:00 or 5:30 and
7:00 or 7:30 pm (dinner hours), except on Saturdays. Neighborhood picture
theaters, already numerous by the early 1910s, also had business hours that
varied considerably. Some, like the New Park (Minneapolis) and Namur’s
University Place (Des Moines), were open weekday afternoons as well as
evenings. Most operated only on weekday evenings, with added weekend
matinees, but not all of these were small and/or cheap, for they could include
elegant suburban theaters like the 1,200-seat Knickerbocker (Cleveland) and
650-seat Laurel (Toledo).
Other factors besides operating hours also affected when, where, and
how often people went to the movies. As late as 1912, a great number of
picture theaters across these regions still changed their programs daily, a
practice supported by the release schedules of licensed as well as independent

5.2 Advertisement for

‘Iowa’s Most Beautiful
Photo Play Theatre’,
Des Moines Register and
Leader, 4 December 1912.

97
 g oing to the mov ies

manufacturers, which now averaged four to five reels of film a day. This
was the case with downtown theaters from Youngstown to Des Moines,
even in newly constructed theaters like Youngstown’s 1,000-seat Dome
or Des Moines’ 650-seat Casino. It also held true for some neighborhood
theaters, again, like the New Park (Minneapolis) and University Place
(Des Moines). Yet as many, if not more, picture theaters changed their
programs less often, and sometimes staggered those changes for competitive
purposes. In Lowell, the Voyons changed its first-run licensed films on
Monday and Thursday, with an added special program on Sunday, whereas

5.3 Advertisement for the

Canton Odeon, Canton News-
Democrat, 1912.

98
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

The Jewel presented four weekly changes of first-run independent films. In

Pawtucket, the Star changed its programs on Monday and Thursday; the
Pastime, its programs on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. In Canton, the
Odeon (where recently I discovered that my grandfather played the clarinet
in a small orchestra) offered four weekly changes of first-run licensed films:
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with another new program on Sunday. In
Minneapolis, the Seville changed its independent first-run films on Sunday,
Tuesday, and Thursday; the Crystal did likewise, except its third change
came on Friday. In Des Moines, the Family and Golden, both independent
theaters, changed their films three times a week, but on alternate days. Yet,
whatever their frequency of changes, most of these theaters ran ‘continuous
shows,’ which encouraged the kind of ‘drop-in’ clientele familiar from the
nickelodeon period. Only a few picture theaters sought to present programs
more characteristic of ‘legitimate’ theaters, beginning and ending at set
times. One was Keith’s Bijou (Boston), where Josephine Clement ran five
daily shows of two hours each (changed twice a week), with licensed films,
a one-act play, classical music, and a short lecture. Another was the Lyric
(Minneapolis), where S.L. ‘Roxy’ Rothapfel initially ran four daily shows
of an hour and half each (also changed twice a week), with licensed films
and special musical arrangements.
In other words, the constantly changing variety package, averaging
an hour or so in length around 1911–12, still served as a major means of
attracting most moviegoers. The regularity of the variety program allowed
exhibitors to promote their more popular films in consistent ways: the
Orpheum (Cleveland) had its ‘good Essanay’ (usually a western) every
Sunday; the New Grand (Minneapolis), ‘Monday’s Biograph release’; the
Alhambra (St. Paul, Minnesota), a new Pathé Weekly every Monday; and the
Cozy (also Cleveland), its ‘Vitagraph night’ every Thursday.10 This kind of
promotion continued when multiple-reel films were introduced in 1912 and
1913: the Crystal (Minneapolis), for instance, presented its celebrated Kay-
Bee Indian pictures and Civil War films every Sunday through Tuesday; yet
the Unique (Des Moines) featured them on Friday and Saturday. On the one
hand, in many cities (certainly downtown, but even in some neighborhoods),
the variety program could draw a heterogeneous audience over the course
of a week or even a day, and give impetus to what Nickelodeon, in 1910, was
perhaps first to call ‘picture fans.’ 11 On the other, the routine patterns of
attendance that it encouraged also could differentiate those fans according to
their ‘taste’ for a particular brand of film or ‘personality,’ such as Essanay’s
Broncho Billy Anderson or Vitagraph’s Florence Turner. By contrast, in
seeking to ‘elevate’ the variety program or multiple-reel feature, the Keith
Bijou (Boston) and Lyric (Minneapolis) set out to attract a more exclusively

99
 g oing to the mov ies

middle-class clientele. Here, as in the Saxe brothers’ theater chain (which

acquired the Lyric in 1912), the ambiance of the theater served to lure
‘regular patrons.’ 12 For their ‘comfort and convenience,’ the Bijou offered
‘well-appointed reception room[s] … with checking facilities, writing desk
and telephone service,’ maid service, and a ‘men’s smoking room.’ 13 Among
its amenities, the Lyric had ‘a playground for the children with all kinds
of toys’ and a ‘rest room … for shoppers where hot tea and cocoa [were]
served by colored matrons after the matinee free.’ 14

Sketch Patterns of Moviegoing

Specific traces of moviegoers’ daily or weekly habits during this period are
more difficult to puzzle out. The trade press and moral reformers showed
great interest in who attended picture theaters and what kinds of pictures
were preferred, but paid less attention to where they went and when. Still,
tantalizing observations did crop up, especially about women and children,
because they came under greater scrutiny for enjoying the benefits of
increasing leisure time at the turn of the last century 15—yet few of those
confirmed the cliché that men predominated at downtown theaters and
women and children at neighborhood theaters.16 A 1913 survey of Waltham,
a small factory town on the western outskirts of Boston, showed that single
working women were more likely than men to attend downtown Boston
picture theaters once a week, probably on weekends.17 About the same
time, in Worcester, an industrial city farther west, a reporter complained
that women used picture theaters as lunchrooms: at noon: ‘half of the
women patrons [are] nibbling lunch biscuits, cakes, or sweet meals of
some kind.’ 18 Even earlier, ‘taking in the movies [had] become a regular
noon habit’ in Providence, but a local newspaper was surprised to find the
patronage included ‘a considerable number of prominent Providence [as well
as Pawtucket] businessmen.’ 19 According to recreation surveys, children
and adolescents everywhere remained frequent moviegoers. If, in New
Britain (Rhode Island), 50 per cent of school children went to the pictures
once a week, in Portland (Oregon), 90 per cent under the age of fourteen
attended at least once a week, and 75 per cent went at night.20 Moreover,
‘a considerable number of boys and girls under eighteen years of age’
(especially girls aged 16–18) went ‘unaccompanied by adults.’ 21 Indeed, more
than two-thirds in Cleveland were ‘unaccompanied’ at night.22 Yet no one
in that city seemed unduly alarmed because generally ‘young people [were]
well cared for while in the theaters’—as they were too at the Princess, in
Peoria (Illinois), where unattended school children allegedly received special
attention at afternoon screenings.23

100
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

Research on specific cities also can yield a better sense of the weekly
habits of moviegoing. Take Lynn (Massachusetts), for instance, a city
famous for its shoe factories and electrical works, with a 1910 population
of 90,000.24 Although divided into ethnic neighborhoods (Irish, French-
Canadian, Greek, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Swedish), this population was
concentrated in three-decker multi-family buildings and lodging or boarding
houses, most of them within a half mile of the main square.25 This partly
explains why moviegoers had no more than a half-dozen downtown picture
theaters from which to choose, all of which charged ten cents admission
and were open from noon or 1:00 to 10:30 pm, six days a week, except
for special screenings (mostly second-run films) from 5:00 to 10:00 pm
on Sundays. Using mass transit, of course, anyone who could afford the
fares also could go into Boston for weekend shows, much as did the young
working women of Waltham. Not unexpectedly, several of Lynn’s theaters
were huge: Central Square seated 1,500, and the Olympia, with its 3,200
seats, briefly may have been the largest in the world, until the Gaumont-
Palace opened in Paris in late 1911. Programs of first-run licensed films
changed just twice a week at the Olympia and Comique, as did programs
of first-run Universal films at the Central Square. Only in the fall of 1912
did Dreamland introduce a thrice-weekly change of first-run Mutual films.
In short, moviegoing in Lynn was relatively regimented in terms of time and
limited in terms of venues and subjects. If this encouraged moviegoers to
become fans of a particular brand or regular customers one day of the week
rather than another, special attractions featuring vocal performers could lead
them to prefer one theater over another. In late 1912, for instance, Geoffrey
Whalen was recognized as a ‘spellbinding’ lecturer at the Olympia, and Prof.
Hammon, a ‘well known picture talker,’ performed at the Central Square;
by contrast, ‘lifelike effects’ accentuated the pictures at the Comique, and,
as late as the fall of 1913, alternated with illustrated songs.26
For a sharp contrast to Lynn, take Toledo (Ohio), with a 1910 population
of 170,000, a city much more diversified in its industries (shipping, glass,
steel, automobile parts).27 In the early 1910s, Toledo had more than forty
picture theaters, with a dozen located downtown (of various sizes, and
charging from five to ten cents) and the rest spread out in secondary
shopping districts, industrial areas, and ethnic neighborhoods.28 There were
several in East Toledo, a Hungarian immigrant community, several more
close to a near south side Polish immigrant community, and far more in the
suburban residential area of South Toledo. At least four downtown theaters
appealed to working-class moviegoers by advertising in the leading labor
weekly, and one, the Hart, encouraged its readers to ‘get in the habit of
dropping in … when you are downtown.’ 29 Here, as already noted, was a

101
 g oing to the mov ies

much wider range of venues, operating hours, program lengths and changes,
and subjects to support a variety of picture fans. Yet an especially revealing
bit of evidence about moviegoing comes from an early 1911 contest sponsored
by the Toledo Blade, asking readers to submit short pieces of moving picture
criticism for weekly cash prizes.30 Initial announcements assumed a generic
reader, but several indicated that males were to be the chief contestants. Yet,
over the first three weeks, the majority of winners were young women, and
the final week’s ‘prizes [were] won by girls.’ 31 What pictures these women
(all apparently unmarried) saw and where they saw them hardly fit the
expectations of the trade press. Some did attend neighborhood theaters, on
the near south side (a Polish immigrant community) or in South Toledo,
but others saw their films downtown. This suggests that Toledo’s downtown
picture theaters appealed to young women as well as the working men
hailed by the Hart, whether they were lunching shop girls and typists or
weekend shoppers and pleasure-seekers. Moreover, three chose to write
about westerns, and not merely cowboy girl pictures. This further suggests
that surveys in which children and adolescents still preferred Wild West
pictures as late as 1913 were not off the mark, for young women apparently
shared those preferences.

Patchwork in Pawtucket/Central Falls

Finally, let me turn again to Pawtucket/Central Falls and one specific
downtown theater, the Star, whose weekly accounts book covers a two-year
period from December 1911 through October 1913.32 The information in
this rare document reveals much about the weekly operation of a relatively
large downtown cinema during this period in an industrial city in New
England. Although the weekly payroll for personnel (among which was a
small orchestra of union musicians) is only rarely included, and figured as
a lump sum (ranging from $80 to $155), other expenses are listed in some
detail.33 Here it is worth noting that a $10-a-week salary was well above
average for a young single working woman. Most costly was the building’s
weekly rent, which remained $76.93 throughout the period. Next was the
weekly film service fee, which initially ran as low as $10 (for older General
Film releases), later increased to $42 and then $55 (for Mutual releases),
and could reach more than $100, with special features. Then there was the
city’s aggregate weekly charge of $35 for a license and apparently the on-site
presence of a policeman and fireman (a police station was located within
100 yards of the theater). Another $10 to $20 each week went for posters
and newspaper advertising. A weekly average of $20 also went for electrical
lighting; during the winter months, the same amount could be spent on coal

102
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

for heating. Renting a piano cost $10 per month; liability insurance came to
$50 a year. The charges for maintaining or upgrading equipment could vary
widely: $15.60 one week for ‘repairs on machine,’ $30.15 another week for
tungstens, $120.18 for ‘mirror screen repairs,’ and $218 for a new Simplex
projector. Consistent low-cost items included cleaning supplies, towels,
railway express charges and tickets, telegrams, long distance telephone
calls, typewriter ribbons, stationary paper and envelopes, postage, and (my
favorite) tins of food for the house cats. Interestingly, the Star’s weekly
expenses generally exceeded its weekly receipts for nearly a year, until
October 1912—and the questions that discrepancy raises will be addressed
shortly.
By itself, this accounts book suggests little about the Star’s audiences and
their moviegoing habits. However, within the context of other sources—
newspaper ads and stories, local city records, and Louise Lamphere’s
study of immigrant working women in the area—its unique record of
daily receipts becomes more revealing. So, what information is available
about Pawtucket/Central Falls that could be relevant to an investigation
of moviegoing at the Star? Sometimes described as ‘the birthplace of the
American industrial revolution,’ Pawtucket was one of a series of Rhode
Island textile mill towns situated along the Blackstone River. With a
population of slightly more than 50,000 by 1910, it bordered the larger
city of Providence (nearly 400,000 people) on the south and Central Falls
(22,500 people) on the north.34 The largest immigrant groups initially were
English, Scottish, and Irish, and it was they, along with the later Germans,
who came to control most of the city’s manufacturing base and political
offices. Other groups soon followed: French-Canadians, Germans (among
them some German Jews), and Swedes (after 1875); Italians (after 1885);
Russian Jews, Poles, and Portuguese (after 1895); and Greeks, Syrians,
and Armenians (after 1905). Except for French-Canadians (concentrated
in woodworking jobs) and Swedes (heavily involved in machinists’ trades),
the more recent immigrants tended to be employed by textile companies
handling cotton and silk. An equal number of men and women worked
in such industries as cotton yarn and thread, braids and lace, and silk and
rayon piece goods; more men than women worked in dyeing and finishing
textiles, and more women than men, in knitting cotton, woolen, and
silk goods. Although most working women were young and unmarried,
according to Lamphere’s study of Central Falls, only Polish women tended
not to drop out of the labor force after marriage. By contrast, the sons
and daughters of earlier immigrants, by 1900–10, were taking up the new
clerical, teaching, and other white-collar jobs, many of which were in the
central business district.

103
 g oing to the mov ies

5.4 Pawtucket/Central Falls, Rhode Island.

Like most industrial cities at the turn of the century, Pawtucket was
relatively segregated according to ethnic neighborhoods. The wealthier
second- and third-generation English, Scots, and Germans, now defined
as ‘native-born Americans’ by the census office, tended to live in Oak Hill
(south of downtown), in Quality Hill (on the bluffs above the Blackstone
River east of downtown), and on the eastern outskirts, in Darlington.
French-Canadians and working-class Irish dominated Central Falls to
the north; Poles were concentrated in an area of Central Falls bordering
Pawtucket, along the river (their numbers had reached 2,500 by 1915);
Italians tended to congregate along the eastern edge of the river and to the

104
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

north in Pleasant View (there were about 1,000 by 1915); Russian Jews were
concentrated on the northern edge of Pawtucket 35 and also mixed into the
Polish neighborhood around Pulaski Square; other immigrant groups were
more scattered, but the Portuguese (there were 1,000 by 1915), Greeks,
Armenians, and Syrians seemed to migrate into and around the Italian
areas on the east side of the river. Most of the recent immigrant families
or single men and women (especially Poles) lived in tenement buildings
with multiple apartments or in older two-family dwellings. Many of these
were clustered near the textile factories along the river or in the area that
stretched from the Coats thread mills in Central Falls through Church
Hill west of downtown Pawtucket and into South Woodlawn, along the
railroad tracks. No matter where their tenement was located, according to
Lamphere,36 it was not unusual for recent immigrant workers (including
women) to walk a mile or more to their jobs, which suggests that they could

5.5 Downtown Pawtucket, c. 1913.

105
 g oing to the mov ies

walk into the downtown shopping district as well. Moreover, an extensive

network of trolley lines could ease the journey.
Pawtucket’s downtown formed a lop-sided ellipsis on the west side of
the Blackstone, anchored on the south and west by Main and Broad (the
central business district), on the east by High Street and North Main
(closest to the river), and on the north by Exchange Street, which curved
southwest to connect with Broad (near the old rail station). As in Lynn,
all of the city’s moving picture theaters were located within this area, and
adjacent to the main trolley lines: the Music Hall and the Globe on Main,
Keith’s Bijou and the Scenic on Broad, the Pastime on the corner of High
and Exchange, and the Star on North Main. Along with the 1,200-seat
Keith Bijou (the former Grand Opera House), the 900-seat Star was the
largest and best-appointed theater in Pawtucket; by contrast, the 500-seat
Pastime was located in a former burlesque theater. Owned and operated by
the Star Amusement Company, the Star opened on Thanksgiving Day, 1907,
in the renovated former Masonic Temple, for several years a warehouse for a
prominent downtown department store. The company was run by Walter S.
Davis, a former printer who operated several other theaters in Connecticut
and Massachusetts, and his recently widowed mother-in-law, Julia Reid,
described as ‘one of the most successful lady financiers throughout …
New England,’ who served as the company’s treasurer—in other words,
that accounts book was hers. Much like the other downtown theaters,
throughout this period the Star was open from 1:30 to 5:00 and 7:00 to
10:30 during the week, 1:30 to 10:30 on Saturdays (and noon to 10:30 on
holidays). There were no Sunday shows. Ticket prices normally were ten
cents for evenings (five cents for children) and five cents for matinees;
programs lasted approximately an hour and a half each and changed just
twice a week, on Monday and Thursday.37

5.6 Advertisement for the

Pawtucket Star, Pawtucket
Times, 23 November 1907.

106
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

For its first two and a half years, the Star offered programs of Motion
Picture Patents Company (MPPC) moving pictures and illustrated songs.
In April 1910, through an affiliation with the Keith circuit, the theater
switched to vaudeville and MPPC pictures, in parallel with the Bijou.
Surviving documents in Pawtucket shed little light on this change, yet
it is not unlikely that the Star was adopting the ‘pop’ vaudeville format
established the year before by Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor in their
theaters in New York City and elsewhere in the Northeast. Whereas Keith’s
big theater in nearby Providence (relatively accessible by trolley or train)
booked the top performers in ‘high class’ vaudeville, the Star offered less
expensive acts, accompanied by MPPC films. If this format was successful
at first, it certainly was not by the first weeks recorded in Julia Reid’s
accounts book, in December 1911. Within a month, according to newspaper
ads, the Star abandoned the ‘pop’ vaudeville format and, in its stead, began
to present special ‘state rights features,’ still accompanied by MPPC films.
This new format ran from January through August 1912, with mixed results.
Profitable weeks were few and far between and included the holidays of
Christmas and New Year’s, Decoration Day, and Labor Day. The only other
good weeks came in early February, when ticket prices were doubled for
a three-day screening of the five-reel Dante’s Inferno, and in March, when
a three-reel sensational melodrama, The James Boys from Missouri, proved
unusually attractive. Several other special multiple-reel films during those
months, from Kalem’s Arrah-Na-Pogue, specially lectured by Charles Edgar
Pelton, to Pathé-Frères’ Passion Play and Great Northern’s Temptations of
a Great City, also did well enough for the Star to come close to breaking
even. Most ‘specials,’ however, were disappointing. In March, the Durbar
in Kinemacolor was nearly disastrous (perhaps due to unusually hefty ticket
prices of twenty-five and fifty cents and a screening in Providence earlier
that week);38 in May, the response was lukewarm to efforts to rebook
Pelton as a lecturer for such second-run pictures as Selig’s Two Orphans
and Cinderella and Pathé’s In the Grip of Alcohol.
Beginning in early September 1912 (the moment I chose for my opening),
Davis and Reid changed their programming in two ways. First, they
reinstated vaudeville, but began booking more expensive acts; second, they
switched to the Mutual Film service. These were risky moves in that their
costs escalated and their only profitable weeks for the next month came from
scheduling General Film specials, including Selig’s The Coming of Columbus,
on the first two weekends. That the Star continued to lose money through
the middle of October meant that the more costly of those moves, the
vaudeville acts, simply could not justify the expense. But there was another
reason. In mid-September, the Pastime Theatre opened just two blocks

107
 g oing to the mov ies

5.7 Advertisement for the

Star Theatre, Pawtucket
Times, 4 January 1913.

away, on the north edge of downtown, with programs presenting five reels
of motion pictures, along with illustrated songs, and changed not twice but
three times a week. Moreover, the Pastime’s major attractions were multiple-
reel sensational melodramas that had been popular elsewhere months before
but had not yet played in Pawtucket: Bison-101 westerns such as Battle of
the Red Men and The Lieutenant’s Last Fight, ‘Copenhagen dramas’ such
as The Two Sisters and Almost a Tragedy, and Gaumont historical thrillers
such as Written in Blood. Within a month of the Pastime’s opening, Davis
and Reid must have cottoned on to the popularity of such films and, in a
blatant competitive move, once more switched their programming entirely
to moving pictures supplied by Mutual, which was distributing multiple-reel
as well as short films. Now the Star too could offer sensational melodramas
on a regular basis, beginning with Kay-Bee’s three-reel Custer’s Last Fight,
along with the new Keystone comedies. This move immediately proved
profitable, and by December, the theater’s receipts had more than doubled
(with profits averaging $100–$200 a week), sustained by a steady stream of
multiple-reel Indian pictures, Civil War films, and sensational crime films
such as The Auto Bandits of Paris—some of which reportedly provoked wildly
enthusiastic applause.39
For the next seven months or more, Reid’s accounts book indicates
that only once did the Star lose money and only twice did it take in less
than seventy-five dollars in profits.40 For the most part, the Star’s weekly
profits averaged an incredible $200–$300, except for two consecutive
weeks in January and another in mid-March when they reached $400, and
twice—once during the week that culminated in New Year’s, and again in
late March—when they topped $500. In January, the four-reel Resurrection,
starring Blanche Walsh, ‘packed [the theater] to the walls’ just as did such
sensational melodramas as Warner’s Tracked by Wireless, Kay-Bee’s The
Burning Brand, and Éclair’s French thriller, Tom Butler. In March, the hit
films had more topical subjects: Lieutenant Petrosino (which dramatized
the recent killing of an Italian-American detective in Italy), paired with

108
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

The Inauguration of President Wilson, and Shipwrecked in Icebergs (which

exploited the Titanic disaster of the year before). In May, personal one-night
appearances by Scout Younger the ‘Reformed Outlaw’ and the Thanhouser
Kid further added to the Star’s success. In August, shortly before the Bijou
reopened with programs exclusively of moving pictures, Davis and Reid
took another risk and contracted with Famous Players to supply the Star
with a regular schedule of three feature-length films a week, accompanied
by Mutual’s basic service of its own newsreel, Keystone comedies, and other
short films.41 Although this required a more frequent change in programs
(Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), the level of the Star’s receipts remained
about the same as before, and then began to decline slightly. Partly due to
the increased costs of renting Famous Players features, however, the weekly
average of profits declined even more, eventually falling to around $100. In
the midst of this change in program format, Davis and Reid also booked the
Italian epic, Quo Vadis?, for a full week in mid-September, running just two
shows a day and charging twenty-five to fifty cents admission. Although
the receipts that week totaled a record of nearly $2,000, 60 per cent of that
went to the distributor, George Kleine.
There may be no direct evidence of exactly who frequented the
Star Theatre and made it part of their everyday life, but its location,
programming, and other scattered bits of information are suggestive. In
late 1909, the business weekly, Pawtucket Chronicle and Gazette credited the
theater with having turned North Main Street into a ‘busy thoroughfare.’
What else may have made the street ‘busy’ is difficult to tell, beyond
what contemporary maps indicate were textile factories several blocks up
river, small office buildings, furniture stores, a police station and ‘Central
Garage,’ as well as tenements that began immediately north of the theater.
Although relatively distant from the central business district, where the
Bijou was located, the Star was still within two blocks or so of city hall,
the main post office, the city library, and the local telephone company.
More importantly, it had the advantage, along with the Pastime, of close
proximity to French-Canadian, Irish, Jewish, Polish, Italian, and other
immigrant neighborhoods (hence my choice of those three fictional young
women).42 That these groups were among the city’s biggest movie fans, and
probably formed a significant portion of the Star’s audience, is suggested by
the fact that, in 1913 and 1914, the only new cinemas opened just across the
city’s border in Central Falls: one on the western edge of the Polish and
Jewish neighborhoods; the other near an Irish neighborhood adjacent to the
Coats thread mills. Comprised chiefly of westerns, Civil War films, other
sensational melodramas (including French crime thrillers), and Keystone
comedies, the Star’s successful programming in 1912 and 1913 suggests

109
 g oing to the mov ies

a largely working-class audience (including many women), but certain

profitable films, according to the accounts book, exhibited a definite ethnic
appeal. Initially, that appeal was Irish, as in Kalem’s Arrah-Na-Pogue or
even Solax’s Dublin Dan, booked for New Year’s. More consistently, it was
Italian, and not just for ‘art films’ such as Dante’s Inferno and Quo Vadis?, but
for a variety of titles, from The Coming of Columbus to Lieutenant Petrosino
and Garibaldi, or a Sicilian Heroine.43 Finally, recent immigrants must have
frequented the Star enough for a reformist ‘Civic Theatre Movement,’ led
by a Congregational Church pastor in Central Falls, to select and screen
moving pictures in the theater on Sunday evenings, beginning sometime in
1913, in order ‘to educate and familiarize foreign speaking people with the
customs, principles, and institutions of our American life.’ 44
But what can Reid’s accounts book tell us more specifically about the
weekly moviegoing habits of these audiences? Again, indirect evidence is
available, if one does a little number crunching with the weekly receipts.
Between the beginning of January and the end of May 1913, weekly receipts
ranged from a low of $575 (in early February) to a high of $945 (in late
March), and averaged between $750 and $800. If one assumes that on
average each week the Star sold half of its tickets at ten cents (to adults
in the evening) and the other half at five cents (to children anytime, and
adults at matinees), an average of 11,000 to 12,000 tickets were sold each
week during those five months. Because some of those tickets may have been
sold to people attending more than once a week, of course, the Star’s pool
of regular customers may have been slightly smaller than that weekly figure
of 11,000 to 12,000. However, one can conclude that the Star probably was
attracting up to 15–20 per cent of the combined population of 75,000 people
in Pawtucket and Central Falls, and perhaps (although at this point this can
be only hypothetical) closer to a third or a half of the population residing
in the areas north and east of the theater—predominately, Poles, Italians,
Russian Jews, and other recent immigrants. How these ‘movie fans’ may
have been distributed by age—among children, adolescents, young male or
female workers, adult workers—or by social grouping—families, shoppers,
groups of young men or young women, couples—remains unknown.
And when exactly did all these fans of the Star tend to go to the
movies? In April 1910, the Providence Sunday Journal reported that the
noon hour was one of ‘three periods of the day when the attendance [was]
especially heavy’ at downtown theaters.45 In Pawtucket, however, the hours
of operation at the Star and other theaters precluded moviegoing at that
time. This left the weekday afternoons and evenings for what the Journal
called ‘regular playgoers,’ as well as Saturday, when the Star ran continuous
shows from noon to 10:30 pm. Not unexpectedly, the accounts book reveals

110
 m aps of mov ieg oing, 19 11–19 1 3

that Saturday consistently drew the largest crowds (from 15 to 25 per cent
of the weekly total), with receipts often double or triple those of any other
day. What is surprising is that the next highest days, in order, usually were
Thursday and Monday, precisely when the Star changed its programs, and
the lowest almost always was Friday.46 Not only did the Star’s fans tend to
make Saturday their principal day to go to the movies, but nearly as many
seemed eager to attend the opening day of their three-day runs. Throughout
the period of 1912–13, that pattern remained unchanged, except that
attendance increased dramatically, especially on the opening day of Mutual’s
first-run multiple-reel pictures and Keystone comedies. This routine only
deviated when an unusually popular film—e.g., Tracked by Wireless; Quincy
Adams Lawyer; In the Bishop’s Carriage (starring Mary Pickford)—drew
even larger audiences on Tuesday than on Monday. Indeed, the weekly
routine of attending the Star on Mondays, Thursdays, and/or Saturdays
was so ingrained that it persisted during the first months that the Star
booked Famous Players films, beginning in August 1913. Despite the change
this booking required, from three-day to two-day programs, audiences
continued to attend the Star in larger numbers on Thursday rather than on
Wednesday, no matter the film. Unfortunately, the accounts book breaks
off in October, and leaves unanswered the question of whether the Star’s
audiences eventually adapted to the new schedule and to a new routine.
Later newspaper stories and ads, however, do contain traces of further
changes at the Star. In early January 1914, Davis also took on the job of
managing the Bijou, which had the effect of making him and Reid the
dominant figures in Pawtucket’s moving picture business. Interestingly,
during the last four months of 1913, the Bijou had been competing with the
Star by offering two-day programs headlined by Warner’s Features (most of
them, however, running no more than three reels). As a result of his move,
Davis shifted the Famous Players features from the Star to the Bijou (and
dropped Warner’s altogether), opening the initial January performances with
Mary Pickford in Caprice. Whatever the alignment between the Star and
the Bijou, and the Keith circuit’s measure of control over either in late 1913,
this shift is suggestive. Apparently, Davis and Reid concluded that it had
been a mistake to book Famous Players features into the Star, hoping that
these film adaptations of prestigious plays and players would appeal, at such
low cost, to its nearby immigrant working-class neighborhoods. Instead, as
the Star’s receipts declined, they realized that the features would be more
profitable if screened in the city’s largest theater located centrally in the
business district, finally accepting Famous Players’ own assumption that
they were meant to attract a more middle-class clientele (from shoppers to
businessmen) or those aspiring to that class status (white collar workers).

111
 g oing to the mov ies

As for the Star itself, the Mutual service continued for several months into
1914, but then, in late March, the theater switched to Universal programs,
kicked off by a full-week run of Traffic in Souls (with three shows a day,
at fifteen and twenty-five cents a ticket). Reversing the usual patterns of
exhibition just this once, the Star extended its appeal for customers beyond
Pawtucket to Providence, where the film had not been screened. In short,
the Universal programs, heavy with sensational melodramas, allowed the
Star to continue catering to what seems to have been its usual clientele.
Certain variables—holidays, bad weather, unusually popular or highly
promoted films—produced anomalies, of course, in the daily receipts of
the Star’s accounts book. And the ‘regularities’ of the audiences’ perceived
weekly routine (like those of my fictional young women) still leave a host
of questions unaddressed: when were wage earners generally paid, if not
on Friday; what were the shopping hours for most businesses; did specific
ethnic groups attend the Star on particular days; when did children most
frequently attend, when did adults; when did women most frequently
attend, when did men; how did religious practices (Pawtucket and Central
Falls were predominantly Roman Catholic) affect moviegoing; what were
the attendance patterns at other Pawtucket picture theaters? Yet whatever
answers one might posit to these questions, they probably would not
contradict at least that one surprising conclusion about the eagerness of
the Star’s fans, in 1912–13, to see Mutual’s first-run multiple-reel films (and
Keystone comedies) on the very first day of their release. If so, that eagerness
would be an equally telling testament to the hold moving pictures now had
on working people’s weekly habits of planning and spending their leisure
time as the rare settlement house finding, in May 1912, that ‘the moving
picture show allowance [was] as much a part of the expense for necessities
as … the rent and the grocery bill.’ 47

112
 6

Next Year at the Moving Pictures

Cinema and Social Change in
the Jewish Immigrant Community

Judith Thissen

O n 22 March 1912, in the week that Loew’s Delancey Street Theater,

the first picture palace on New York’s Lower East Side, opened its
doors, a comic Yiddish weekly satirized the future of the Yiddish theater: a
jester, more precisely, a moving picture manager in the costume of a jester
(so we learn from the inscription on his collar) takes the Yiddish actors,
dramatists and the theatergoing crowd to the ten cent cinema. The title of
the cartoon—‘Next Year at the Moving Pictures’ (leshono habo’ bimuving
piktshurs)—makes a pun upon the wish ‘next year in Jerusalem’ (leshono habo’
birusholaim), a wish that Jews, then and now, exchange at the conclusion
of the Passover feast (seder) and the Yom Kippur service which entertains
the hopes that the Jewish people in Diaspora will eventually return to the
Land of Israel. The legend comments: ‘Moving picture manager: This way,
this way, Jews! Cheap, cheap, cheap! all stars for ten cents! (A scene from
next season, according to the prophecy of the best theater prophets).’
The cartoon not only hints at cinema’s far-reaching influence (clearly,
the moving picture manager—do we recognize Marcus Loew?—pulls the
strings), but also implies cinema’s ascending cultural and social currency in
the immigrant community of Eastern European Jews. The following years
indeed witnessed significant developments in the direction of the medium’s
broad acceptance. At first sight, it seems that by the mid 1910s, film
exhibitors in Jewish neighborhoods had successfully transformed the cinema
from a goyish entertainment scorned by the leaders of their community, into
a form of entertainment appropriate for Jews as much as for Gentiles—just

113
 g oing to the mov ies

6.1 ‘Next Year at the Moving Pictures,’ Groyser kundes, 22 March 1912.

as on the national level, cinema had been transformed from a cheap,

somewhat disreputable amusement into the nation’s favorite entertainment
pastime, suitable for Americans of all classes. However, a closer look at the
cartoon challenges this view. Cinema might have been accepted but it was
not necessarily respected, because the moving picture manager remains a
nar (jester). Worse yet, in the cartoonist’s view, everybody becomes a nar
by going to the moving picture theater.
This chapter discusses why, in the Jewish context, the cinema could
not but remain a contested site of Americanization. The community’s
self-declared leadership of newspaper editors, writers, labor organizers and
political activists felt a fundamental discomfort toward the film medium and
the Jewish involvement in the American motion picture business. Cinema’s
popularity among the Jewish ‘masses’ not only undermined their cultural
and moral authority, but, more importantly, also threatened the Eastern
European Jewish social hierarchy which they had transplanted to the New
World. The Jewish masses, for their part, took full advantage of American
democratic culture and sought to redress the traditional balance of power

114
 cinem a a nd soci a l ch a nge in the jew ish communit y

between the educated and the uneducated. It was in this context that the
cinema became an important arena for the articulation of a new social order,
in which the men of the books no longer pulled the strings.

Cinema’s Initial Reception

During the 1905–06 season, the first nickelodeons appeared on East
Fourteenth Street and the Bowery, the two main arteries of nightlife in
downtown Manhattan. The following year, five-cent movie theaters were
also opening up in the densely populated tenement district east of the
Bowery, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. One of the first film
exhibitors to venture into the area was Adolph Zukor. In late 1904, he
and his business partners launched a penny arcade on Grand Street. The
location was perfect: right in the heart of the ‘ghetto’ and next-door to
Jacob P. Adler’s Grand Theater. Two years later, the place was doing
‘a rushing business’ with ‘moving pictures that could be seen for five
cents.’ 1 Zukor’s success was rapidly emulated by other Jewish immigrant
entrepreneurs. The recession of 1907–08 further fueled the demand for
inexpensive entertainment and the concomitant expansion of five-cent
theaters specializing in moving pictures. Yiddish music hall managers,
who suddenly saw a falling-off of business because many of their regular
customers could no longer afford to pay a dime or a quarter for admission,
lowered their ticket prices and switched to film as their main attraction.
Others with no prior experience in the field also tried their luck in the
booming nickelodeon business. The Jewish masses eagerly incorporated the
muving piktshurs into their everyday lives. By mid-1908, Jewish working-
class neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn had the highest density
of motion picture shows in New York City.2
How did the community’s leadership respond to this cheap ‘American’
amusement invading the Jewish streets? Were the proliferating nickelodeons
perceived as a threat to the cultural or moral fabric of the Eastern European
Jewish immigrant community? An examination of the representations of
moviegoing that circulated in Yiddish-language newspapers might help us to
answer this question. Due to the relative weakness of traditional community
structures, the Yiddish press had developed into a major cultural, political
and social institution, an agent of Americanization and ethnic community
enhancement, and a powerful vehicle for radical as well as conservative
ideas.
Outstanding in this respect was the socialist Jewish Daily Forward
(Forvertz), which had become the most widely read Yiddish newspaper in
America under the editorship of Abraham Cahan.3 It was the principal

115
 g oing to the mov ies

organ of the Jewish labor movement and the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia.

A day-by-day examination of the Forward reveals that the paper largely
ignored the nickelodeon boom when it hit the Lower East Side during the
1907–08 season. Between the summers of 1907 and 1908, only a handful of
human interest stories covered the entertainment revolution caused by the
rapid proliferation of moving picture shows in the Jewish district.4 Over
the next year, the Forward became a little more interested in the cinema,
but it was not until the East Side mourned the first victim of the ‘nickel
madness’—the casualty of a balcony crash in a Rivington Street nickelodeon
in December 1908—that Cahan devoted an editorial to the muving piktshur
pletser, centering on the physical threats the storefront shows posed to the
masses of moviegoers:

The masses that are squeezed together in the tenements do not know
where to go during the cold evenings. In the gloomy buildings where
they sleep and have their sacred homes, there is no space to live. They
are forced to go outside. They cannot afford real amusement, so they
pass their time for five cents in a moving picture show. This business
is booming thanks to the sorrowful life of the masses. These places
are crammed like the rooms where they live. Who cares when this
human merchandise is crushed? One more person squeezed inside,
one more nickel earned. The result is that a railing is pushed and
that those who went inside to amuse themselves are taken out dead
or injured. Ah, woe to the masses of workers, how they live, how
they work, how they rest, and how they amuse themselves! Death
is lurking everywhere: in their work, in their food, in their sleep, in
their breath and even in their entertainment! 5

Neither Cahan nor his fellow socialists perceived the moving pictures as
threatening Jewish cultural identity. In fact, most early Forward reports on
moviegoing revolved around the economic consequences of the nickelodeon
boom, especially for the Yiddish vaudeville business.6 Significantly, cinema’s
ideological impact upon the Jewish working-class was not an issue at all,
although Forward articles devoted to the East Side picture shows frequently
underscored how spellbound audiences were by the events on the screen.
While Progressive reformers embraced the movies in their efforts to
Americanize immigrant Jews and their children, and while the American
Federation of Labor realized that socialist pictures could help the labor
movement and urged workers to boycott theaters that showed anti-labor
films, Jewish socialists failed to see cinema’s potential as an agency for
edification, acculturation or class struggle.7

116
 cinem a a nd soci a l ch a nge in the jew ish communit y

At the other end of the political spectrum, the conservative Tageblatt

and Morgen zhurnal also adopted a neutral stance on the new film
medium. Their targeted readers were predominantly (lower) middle-class
immigrants who were politically moderate and emotionally bound to the
Jewish way of life.8 This reading public included many small businessmen,
peddlers, storekeepers, contractors, and the like. Both papers played on the
traditionalism of these immigrants in the realm of religion and politics,
and hence supported the Orthodox and Zionist causes in their editorials.
At the same time, they served their readers’ upwardly mobile aspirations by
publishing the latest business news. While the Tageblatt and Morgen zhurnal
rarely captured the atmosphere of moviegoing on the East Side in human
interest stories, they provided extensive coverage of what was happening in
the motion picture business at large, on the national as well as on the local
level. For instance, they gave their readers up-to-date information about
such topics as the formation of the Motion Picture Patent Company and
the introduction of a new system for colored pictures.9 Both papers also
closely followed Mayor McClellan’s actions against the nickelodeons and
the exhibitors’ responses.10 Inclined to defend the interests of small Jewish
businessmen, they consistently rallied to the side of the film exhibitors in
times of crisis. After the fatal nickelodeon accident on Rivington Street, for
instance, both papers insisted on more stringent rules for picture shows, but
at the same time defended the proprietors of the theater, who were charged
with homicide.11 In the opinion of the Tageblatt, none other than the excited
audience was guilty of the deadly accident:

If the hot-heads that jumped down last Saturday [from the balcony],
would have left [the theater] quietly through the side-exits that are
indicated with red-lights which even a blind man can see, a lot of
trouble would have been spared. The managers wouldn’t have had
all the heartache and anxiety about an accident for which they were
not responsible.12

In fact, even the Forward did not accuse the proprietors of the Rivington
Street nickelodeon outright. With the usual share of socialist rhetoric,
Cahan concluded that the capitalist system alone was to be held responsible
for the accident.13
As these examples illustrate, a broad range of descriptions of East
Side picture shows, their owners and audiences circulated in the Yiddish
press—descriptions which sometimes contradicted each other, but generally
overlapped. What is striking is that, in sharp contrast with the reception of
the nickelodeon boom in the mainstream English-language press, the Yiddish

117
 g oing to the mov ies

press did not define the cinema as a contested site of Americanization.

Regardless of their orientation, almost no Yiddish newspaper article touched
on the subject of the moral influence moving pictures had upon immigrant
Jews. Until late 1909, this was not a subject for debate within the Jewish
immigrant community.

The Revitalization of Jewish Ethnic Identity

The popularity of moving pictures only became a source of concern at the
beginning of the 1909–10 season. All of a sudden, Yiddish newspapers
on the left and right felt the need to address what the Tageblatt would
later define as ‘di muving piktshur frage’ (the moving picture issue).14 The
immediate cause was the take-over of Adler’s Grand Theater by Adolph
Zukor and Marcus Loew. For several years, Zukor had operated a small
nickelodeon next to the 2000-seat playhouse, which was the first theater in
New York City especially built for Yiddish performances. For the Grand,
the pride of the East Side and the only Yiddish playhouse where literary
drama remained a visible part of the repertoire, to be turned into a movie
theater scandalized public opinion. Many immigrant intellectuals, Cahan at
the forefront, found it difficult to put up with the idea that their ‘Temple of
Art’ was falling in the hands of some uptown alrightniks (nouveau riches)
and moving pictures were to replace Jacob P. Adler starring in Gordin’s
Jewish King Lear. But both Cahan’s Forward and the theater unions were
defeated in their attempt to retain the playhouse for Yiddish performances.
In the first week of September 1909, brightly colored posters in Yiddish and
English announced that the Grand Theater (‘formerly Adler’s theater’) would
reopen as a five-ten-fifteen cent moving picture and vaudeville house.
The take-over of the Grand Theater came at a pivotal moment in the
relation between the Jewish community and the American mainstream. In
April 1908, the word had begun to spread in certain uptown, German-Jewish
circles that a new era was dawning in which ‘New York is about to repent
assimilation and seeks to be conservative in all things Jewish.’ 15 A month
later, at a conference of Jewish Charities, Louis Marshall, a prominent
member of the German-Jewish elite, offered a new perspective on Jewish
social life. The effort of Jewish communal institutions, he said, ‘should
be, not to strive for a minimum, but for a maximum of Jewishness.’ 16 The
following years would indeed be characterized by a revitalization of Jewish
ethnic identity in all spheres of Jewish social life: in the realm of education,
religion and philanthropy; on the work floor and in the realm of leisure.
The season of 1909–10 witnessed a course of events that marked a
turning point in the American experience of the Eastern European Jews.

118
 cinem a a nd soci a l ch a nge in the jew ish communit y

In particular, it was the year that the Jewish labor movement gained a firm
foothold among immigrant Jews. As the depression of 1907–08 came to an
end, tens of thousands struck for higher wages, shorter hours, and improved
working conditions. In November 1909, twenty thousand shirtwaist makers,
mostly young Jewish women, left their work to walk the picket lines. Five
months later, the ‘girls’ handed on the torch of Jewish labor activism to their
male colleagues in needle trades: in July 1910, 70,000 cloak makers declared
a general strike—the largest in the history of New York City. The labor
movement helped immigrant Jews to formulate a new sense of collective
identity and forge a more explicit place for Eastern European Jews in the
American public sphere. On the eve of World War I, the United Hebrew
Trades, a federation of Jewish unions, encompassed more than one hundred
unions with approximately 250,000 members.17
On the Lower East Side, the mobilization of the Jewish proletariat—as
Jews and as workers—was not only played out on the work floor. During
the 1909–10 season, Yiddish vaudeville, which had almost vanished from the
bills of five and ten cent theaters, made a remarkable come-back. Yiddish
music hall managers, who had switched to moving picture exhibition
during the depression of 1907–08, returned to their original format. In
their footsteps, local nickelodeon managers began to add more and longer
Yiddish vaudeville acts to their bills. Until now, they had used songs and
brief sketches merely as ‘fillers’ to amuse their patrons while the reels were
changed. The revival of Yiddish vaudeville might be understood as a grass-
roots response to the ‘Americanization of early American cinema’ (in Richard
Abel’s words).18 To counteract the increasing influence of mainstream
American culture via the film medium, Jewish immigrants demanded more
‘home-made’ entertainment on the bill of their neighborhood movie theaters.
As I have argued elsewhere, Yiddish vaudeville acts ‘reinforced feelings of
belonging to an ethnic community with shared values and pleasures, based
upon a communal language and history.’ More importantly, programmed
in between moving pictures, live entertainment in Yiddish shaped the
reception of these movies, thus reducing their Americanizing agency.19

Loew and Zukor: Goyim or Alrightniks?

The rise of nationalism within the American film industry not only gave rise
to sharp debates between immigrant Jews and the American host society
over the nature of ‘American’ cinema, but also led to internal conflicts over
cinema’s contribution to the Jewish experience in America. While never
expressly thematized, at stake was whether or not cinema could be made
compatible with a continued Jewish identity.

119
 g oing to the mov ies

Although the leading Yiddish newspapers disagreed about Adler’s

motives to sell the lease of the Grand Theater, there existed a virtual
consensus on the question of who was ultimately to blame for the fact
that the playhouse was lost for Yiddish performances. As the Grand
drama unfolded, Loew and Zukor were exposed as the true villains. At
the same time, however, the editors of the Yiddish dallies did not wish to
antagonize their readers by blaming upwardly mobile Jews for destroying
the community’s cultural heritage—the Grand Theater had been the home
of Yiddish literary drama almost since its opening in 1903—and, hence,
they carefully avoided revealing the Jewish identity of the Grand’s new
proprietors. At first, commentators insisted that the theater had fallen
into the hands of ‘American theater managers’ [my italics]. Eventually, the
Yiddish newspapers got so caught up in their efforts to hide the truth that
they stripped Zukor and Loew of their Jewishness. The leftist Warheit
repeatedly used the term goyim in association with the new proprietors of
the Grand. For instance, a few days before the reopening of the Grand
Theater, it described the people behind the moving picture company that
had secured the lease of the playhouse as ‘goyim’ and ‘Yankees.’ 20 Forward
readers too were made to believe that Gentiles had gained control over
the Grand.21 Even the Orthodox Tageblatt, which at first hushed up much
of the commotion around the take-over, eventually joined in with its
competitors.22
The Grand Theater affair was a moment of crisis in which attitudes
crystallized, defining a ‘we’ and a ‘them.’ So horrified were the editors
of the Yiddish newspapers by the realization that their authority over the
immigrant community was challenged by two proste jidn (people without
learning, taste or spiritual virtues), that they decided to repress this social
and cultural upheaval by redrawing the boundaries of the ethnic group.
They outlawed Loew and Zukor by defining them as ‘goyim’ rather than
‘alrightniks,’ the sneering Yinglish term that the East Side’s intelligentsia
normally used for the allegedly uneducated Jews who had done economically
well in America.23
How did the Jewish immigrant audience respond to the affair? There is
no indication whatsoever that they boycotted the new moving picture temple
on Grand Street. Jewish masses had embraced Yiddish vaudeville anew,
but without jettisoning the film medium. They liked the entertainment of
the American movies enough not to want to do away with them as an act
of ethnic correctness. Moreover, while sympathetic and responsive to the
message of ethnic solidarity, they did not oppose acculturation into the
mainstream. On the contrary: to many of them, Loew and Zukor were
role models of upward mobility, and the stories of their success functioned

120
 cinem a a nd soci a l ch a nge in the jew ish communit y

as Horatio Alger novels. Marcus Loew, in particular, presented the East

Side Jews with a symbol of Jewish success in America and an incentive to
pursue the American Dream. In 1913, he built the palatial Avenue B theater
on the very site of the dingy tenement in which he had been born. At
the time, Loew made a clear statement of his commitment to America by
commissioning a large patriotic painting for the proscenium. The painting
was a belated but unequivocal answer to the Grand Theater affair. Its
unmistakable message was that the Jewish road to success began at Loew’s
‘million dollar theater’ under the watchful eye of George Washington,
and not of Abraham Cahan’s. Radical dreams about a socialist revolution
were reduced to the image of the Revolutionary War (War of American
Independence). The cinema itself was the new battle field.

Fighting the Movies

In the years following the Grand affair, the Yiddish press responded to the
crisis in two ways. The Forward sought to provide the immigrant workers
with a suitable home-made alternative for the goyishe movies. Yiddish
‘legitimate’ drama, which the socialists had long considered the civilizing
agency par excellence for the uneducated masses, was in a deep crisis and
they therefore had to look elsewhere. Endorsing the revival of Yiddish
vaudeville seemed the solution, but the trouble was that, for years on end,
the Forward had treated it as a stupid and vulgar form of entertainment,
an appropriation of the wrong aspects of American culture. Cahan himself
had been the driving force behind several campaigns against the Yiddish
music halls. In the end, however, Cahan’s desire to maintain his leadership
position was stronger than his aversion to Yiddish vaudeville. In an attempt
to secure consent for the existing distribution of power, he decided to
incorporate—or rather ‘assimilate’—Yiddish vaudeville into the mainstream
of Jewish culture. In December 1909, the Forward began to promote Yiddish
vaudeville as an authentic expression of Jewishness (yidishkayt).24
While Yiddish vaudeville was legitimized by the Forward critics, the
cinema, for its part, was constructed as the new ‘low-Other’ and relegated
to the bottom end of the cultural hierarchy, a position which had previously
been occupied by Yiddish vaudeville. In the process, prostitution, white
slavery and loose sexual behavior—urban American vices that had been
associated with the Yiddish music hall business—became more and more
linked with moviegoing. From late 1909 onwards, the Forward frequently
reported about the moral dangers that the nickelodeons held for young
people. Short back-page news items with titles as ‘break into a home because
of moving pictures’ and ‘movies turn children into gangsters’ depicted local

121
 g oing to the mov ies

movie theaters as schools of crime where murder, shop-lifting, robbery and

holdups were illustrated.25 Highly sensational stories about the connection
between movie houses and prostitution made the front pages. On 13 May
1910, the white slavery hysteria gained momentum. The paper’s headline
screamed: ‘Don’t let your children go alone into the moving picture
houses: Mothers beg the Forward to save their children from ruin and
shame.’ 26 Articles highlighting the moral dangers of moviegoing were
also commonplace in the English-language press of the period, but in the
mainstream press, cinema’s critics often used these stories to illustrate the
need for regulation, arguing that if immoral movies could turn children into
criminals, moral subjects might just as well turn them into good citizens.
This type of reform discourse remained absent in the commentaries of the
Forward.
Cahan’s competitors shared his concern about the corrupting influence
of moving pictures, but they were less convinced that Yiddish vaudeville
was the right answer to the muving piktshur frage. Rather than offering an
alternative to the movies, they merely outlined the potential dangers of
the cinema to their readers. For instance, in an editorial entitled ‘Moving
Pictures and Children,’ the editor of the Orthodox Tageblat, warned parents
that the establishment of the National Board of Censorship offered no
guarantee that all movies were suitable to Jewish children.27 A remarkably
blunt example of the strategy to discourage moviegoing was ‘Abie’s moving
pictures,’ a series of cartoons published in the leftist Warheit in 1912. More
than any other Yiddish newspaper, the Warheit displayed the tendency
toward eye-catching illustrations typical of the American yellow press. Not
unexpectedly, then, the paper chose to fight fire with fire. The ‘Abie’s moving
pictures’ cartoons depict the misadventures of little Abie and Izzy after their
return from the picture show. The boys imitate what they had just seen at
the movies. Every cartoon concludes with a punitive ending, usually their
mother beating them. In the most revealing episode in the series, Abie and
Izzy harass their old grandfather after watching a Christmas movie, tearing
his beard like two pogromchiks. They want him to buy them Christmas
presents, but he drags his grandsons back home to read the Torah, accusing
them of behaving like converts to the Christian fate (geshmad).

Toward Acceptance?
The 1913–14 season marked a turning point in the battle between the
intellectual elite, amusement entrepreneurs and the moviegoing masses
over cinema’s position in Jewish immigrant culture: motion picture news
became a permanent feature in the Yiddish press. In October 1913, Israel der

122
 cinem a a nd soci a l ch a nge in the jew ish communit y

6.2 ‘Abie’s
moving picture’
cartoons,
Warheit, 1912.

yenki [sic], the theater critic of the Orthodox Tageblatt, launched Theater un
muving piktshurs, a Yiddish-language weekly devoted to the Yiddish stage
and the world of moving pictures. In January 1914, the Forward started a
regular film column entitled ‘Interesting facts about moving pictures.’ 28
Although both initiatives were short-lived, it was the beginning of a process
in which film news became integrated, little by little, in the weekly theater
pages of the Yiddish dailies.
Around the same time, the leading actors of the Yiddish stage began
to make moving pictures. In 1914, Jacob P. Adler, who had always prided
himself as an ardent promoter of ‘true art,’ starred in the title role of the
five-reel feature Michael Strogoff (The Courier to the Czar), the first production
of Popular Plays and Players. ‘Note the Jacob P.—this is the great Adler,
one of America’s foremost romantic actors,’ the company boasted in the

123
 g oing to the mov ies

Moving Picture World.29 That same year, his wife Sarah Adler made her film
debut in Sins of the Parents.30 A year later, Boris Thomashefsky, another well
known Yiddish theater star, set up his own production company to make
films based on Yiddish plays.31
It appeared that the traditional tastemakers, from Abraham Cahan to
Jacob P. Adler, had decided to go along with the tide. If moviegoing had
become a permanent part of Jewish immigrant life, then let the Forward be
respectful of this leisure habit. If the Jewish masses wanted to see the great
stars of the Yiddish stage for five or ten cents, then why not make movies
to satisfy their demand? Tellingly, however, when Michael Strogoff premièred
on the Lower East Side—of all places, at the Grand Theater (formerly
Adler’s)—Adler put a special notice in the Forward, warning the public
that he was only performing at the People’s Theater on the Bowery.32 An
unease with cinema was also still evident in the Forward ’s movie columns.
Whereas ‘What is going on in the world of the theater’ dealt exclusively
with the local Yiddish theater, ‘Interesting facts about moving pictures’
only related to what happened on a (inter)national level. The paper’s cinema
column never dealt with local news. No attention whatsoever was given
to films running in Jewish neighborhood theaters, to the openings of new
movie theaters on the Lower East Side, and the like. The cinema remained
something profoundly unheymish for Cahan and his staff.
As Yiddish theater historian Nina Warnke points out, the unease of the
community’s cultural elite with popular amusements like Yiddish vaudeville
and moving pictures was rooted in a ‘deep seated distrust of commercial
entertainment which was thought—by American social reformers as well as
immigrant intellectuals—to exploit working people’s need for cheap urban
recreation, to corrupt the innocent, and to break up family life.’ 33 There is,
however, also something else at work here. The ways in which the Eastern
European Jews responded to the cinema in America were structured by
deeper levels of ideology, and in particular by the ideology that Jews are
a People of the Book rather than a People of the Image. In exploring this
proposition, I am aware that I tread on dangerous ground. Jewish attitudes
toward visual culture in general, and the understanding of the Second
Commandment in particular, are sensitive issues and should perhaps be
left to colleagues in the field of Jewish studies.34 The problem is that these
scholars, who come from a profoundly text-centered tradition, have only
recently begun to explore the visual components of Jewish culture and have
focused their research almost exclusively on expressions of high art.35 It may
be a long time before they venture into cinema studies.

124
 cinem a a nd soci a l ch a nge in the jew ish communit y

Next Year in Jerusalem

‘Next year at the moving pictures,’ the title of the cartoon with which I
opened this essay, refers directly to a crucial moment in the history of the
Jewish people: the departure from Egypt, which the Jews commemorate
during the Seder, the home service on the eve of Pesach (Passover). In the
Diaspora, the Seder concludes with the recitation of the wish ‘Next year in
Jerusalem.’ 36 But that is not all there is to it. The Exodus was the beginning
of a journey that was to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land under
Moses’ guidance. Unexpectedly, this journey took forty years, in punishment
for their disobedience to Moses and to God.
The rebellion is recounted in Exodus 32–34.37 While Moses remained
at Mount Sinai to receive the tables of the Law, the Israelites at the foot
of mountain grew impatient. They doubted that their leader would return
and requested a visible god to lead them to the Promised Land. On their
request, Aaron created the statue of a calf out of golden ornaments willingly
donated by the people. By worshiping this calf, the Israelites rebelled against
their leader and directly transgressed the order of the Ten Commandments
to have no other gods but the Lord. After God revealed to Moses what
was happening, Moses came down from the mountain, caught the people in
the act of worshiping the calf with feasting and merriment, and in a burst
of anger smashed the tablets of the Law on the ground, thereby effectively
canceling the covenant with God. He subsequently obtained a pardon for
his people and carved the tablets anew. Thereafter, Moses led the Israelites
for forty years through the wilderness, until those who had rebelled and
worshiped the idol had died and a new generation had grown up, the
generation which was allowed to enter the Promised Land.
The cartoon depicts a man leading a crowd to a temple. Considering the
title and the time of publication (two weeks before Passover), there is little
doubt that the cartoonist alludes to Israel’s journey to the Promised Land.
In the American context, however, it is a moving picture manager who is
the liberator of Israel and leads the Jews through the wilderness of the New
World. Tellingly, the crowd is a crowd of actors and actresses, followed by
their fans—all dressed as jesters. To fully understand what this allusion
means in terms of cinema’s relationship to the process of Americanization,
we have to make yet another excursion outside the discipline of film
studies.
Despite the fact that the ‘guilty’ generation was not allowed to enter
the Land of Israel, the anxiety about yet another rebellion and lapse in
idolatry remained strong. In the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth and
last book of the Torah, Moses takes leave of his people, warns them of

125
 g oing to the mov ies

their frequent disobedience and lack of faith in God, and exhorts them
to fidelity. Deuteronomy is generally understood as the ‘book of law.’ It
recapitulates the main religious principles and legislation, including the Ten
Commandments, and insists on the absolute rejection of idolatry.38
Conventional wisdom holds that Judaism is suspiciously hostile to the
visual arts because of the Second Commandment. Artifactual evidence
amassed by archeologists, ethnographers and art historians reveals a
different reality. Alerted by this material evidence, Jewish historian Kalmen
Bland recently analyzed a number of medieval texts and concluded that,
throughout the pre-modern period, Jewish society affirmed the legitimacy of
Jewish visual images. As late as the sixteenth century, according to Bland,
‘neither Jews or Gentile ever understood the biblical law to be a prohibition
against the production, use or enjoyment of all visual images.’ 39 In his view,
it was not until the nineteenth century that German-Jewish intellectuals,
following Kant and Hegel, began to ascribe to Judaism a comprehensive
aversion to the visual arts.
In contrast to what is generally believed, Jewish opposition to visual
representation might well have been restricted rather than comprehensive.
There is, however, one mode of artistic expression that has long been
regarded unequivocally idolatrous: the theater. In the Talmud and later
writings, rabbis condemned the theater, which they associated with the
pagan worship of gods, the ‘theaters and circuses’ of the Romans, and later
with medieval mystery plays. Well into the nineteenth century, theatrical
performances were prohibited in Eastern European Jewish communities,
with the exception of the so-called purimshpiln.40 An examination of
this exception provides further insights into the rabbinical distrust of the
theater.
During the holiday of Purim (the ‘Jewish carnival’), young artisans
and yeshiva students, dressed as non-Jews and women, paraded down the
streets and performed sketches in courts of synagogues and in wealthy
Jewish homes—sketches that laced the biblical story of Esther with coarse
parodies of both the local dignitaries and the biblical heroes of the story.
In many respect, Purim resembled the medieval Feast of Fools and the
Renaissance Fastnachtspiel. However, while in the Christian context, the
carnivalesque (in the Bakhtinian sense of the term) was primarily about
freedom from official order and social status, in the Jewish context there
was more at stake. In Diaspora, as theater historian Michael Steinlauf points
out, ‘the characteristic reversals of the carnivalesque concern not only high
and low, but also inside and outside.’ 41 The unique danger of the purimsphil
in particular, and the theater more generally, Steinlauf argues, was that
it allowed Jews to let the ultimate Other, the non-Jew, inside them.42 In

126
 cinem a a nd soci a l ch a nge in the jew ish communit y

Eastern Europe, the potential social criticism embedded in the Purim

plays increased as the tradition was appropriated by the proste yidn, the
lowest social orders among the Jewish population; those men who, by the
norms of traditional Jewish society, were considered most like the goyim.43
Tellingly, nowhere was the rabbinical objection to theatrical performances
more vigorous than in the Russian Empire. In fact, legal prohibitions against
acting and unceasing efforts to contain it to Purim seriously hampered the
development of a professional Yiddish theater.
In turn-of-the-century New York, the Jewish immigrant intelligentsia
sought to make the Yiddish theater compatible with the spirit of Jewish elite
culture. Socialist intellectuals in particular were a driving force behind a
relentless campaign to uplift the Yiddish stage from its origins in folk theater.
Not theater per se, but historical operettas and spectacular melodrama—so-
called shund (trash) theater—was the object of their criticism. In the radical
press, they attempted to teach their ‘uneducated’ readers an appreciation
of true art (emese kunst), meaning literary drama.44 Popular theater was
condemned as purimshpil; shund plays were considered ‘nareshe zokhen far
‘n prosten theater bezukher’ (stupid things for the ignorant theater-goer).45
Typically, shund was depicted as a nar—which adds yet another layer of
meaning to the figure of the moving picture manager in our cartoon.
Rabbinic tractates regulating Jewish intercourse with Gentiles in the
socio-cultural sphere often played on a conception of ‘low’ and ‘Other’
against which to construct a Jewish difference. Similarly, the theater reviews
written by the Jewish immigrant intelligentsia frequently constructed the
popular theater as a ‘wrong’ American influence. Around 1900, Jacob
Gordin, a prominent socialist intellectual and the foremost writer of Yiddish
realist drama, defined the corrupting influence of the American stage on
the Yiddish theater as follows:

The American stage asserts itself in the growing belief that the most
important thing is not the play but who plays; not the literary value
but the degree of piquancy; not the content but the attractions; not
the idea but the accessories and the sceneries. Closely resembling
the American theater in its mercantile character, its unliterary
influence, and its exclusive management by speculators and gamblers,
the Yiddish theater, too is conducted mainly as a geschäft. To
gain profit, every attempt is made to attract the public, either by
sensational shows, or by pretended brilliancy of historical ‘trash,’
or by sentimental, tearful, pseudo-romantic ‘harrangue’—just as it
is done in the ‘serious’ theaters of uptown. Sometimes, however,
the practices of ‘less serious’ theaters are imitated, and the Yiddish

127
 g oing to the mov ies

public is treated to dramatizations of criminal cases, to exhibition of

limbs, to various stage effects and devices, or to coarse pugilistic and
athletic trickery.46

What strikes me most in this stab at the mainstream American stage and
the Yiddish popular theater is not so much the distrust of commercial
entertainment, but Gordin’s suspicion of the spectacular: ‘the most important
thing is … not the content but the attractions; not the idea but the accessories
and the sceneries.’ Clearly, as men of the Word (if no longer God’s Word),
the secularized offspring of the rabbinate remained opposed to a culture of
the Image. This helps to explain why the immigrant intelligentsia fought so
hard to bring literary drama on the Yiddish stage. It also helps to explain
why they vetoed cinema’s integration into the American-Jewish experience.
Within their belief system, the spectacle of the movies represented an almost
ontological threat to the survival of the Jewish people, and certainly to their
own position as newspaper editors, journalists and writers. Time and again,
the Yiddish newspaper editors sought to bring their readers back to the text-
centered tradition of the rabbis. In this respect it is significant that, unlike
American social reformers, immigrant intellectuals never came to consider
the movies as a possible means to uplift the Jewish masses.

Conclusion
Let us return a final time to the leshono habo’ bimuving piktshurs cartoon.
It was published during the month of Adar, in between Purim and
Pesach. What it basically represents is an Eastern European Purim parade.
Typically, Purim parades were headed by a loyfer (runner) dressed in the
costume of a medieval jester, just like the moving picture manager in
the cartoon.47 Purim plays were filled with reversals, mocking biblical
heroes and parodying local worthies. In the cartoon, the moving picture
manager—someone who is most like a goy, by the norms of the immigrant
elite—changes places with Moses, the man who the bible portrays as the
greatest of all prophets. In short, a proste yid is leading the Jewish masses,
instead of moyshe rabeyne (Moses the teacher).
In the Old World, the reality of everyday life under oppressive conditions
left little room for social and political action. Purim was an annual eruption
of carnivalesque freedom into the normative cycle of the Jewish year, but
it reinforced the existing social order more than it suggested alternatives.48
In the New World, where immigrant Jews lived separated from traditional
community structures and moral authorities, the carnivalesque could erupt
everyday and give birth to a culture of opposition. Street protests, rent

128
 cinem a a nd soci a l ch a nge in the jew ish communit y

boycotts and strikes were among the more obvious forms of collective action
that aimed at redressing social injustice.49 The popularity of moviegoing
among immigrant Jews, I would argue, was yet another public display of
participatory democracy. It was a carnivalesque revolt of the Jewish masses
against the persistence of long-standing social hierarchies, against the
elite’s efforts to maintain traditional distinctions that privileged the men of
the written word. Rather than be led by the immigrant intelligentsia, the
Jewish masses preferred the moving picture manager—alias the jester, the
very figure who turns the world upside down—to guide them on the way
to Americanization. That the moving picture temple represented the New
Jerusalem may have been a horror scenario for the community’s leadership,
but for the Jewish masses it proved to be a promising perspective, because
if Jerusalem was the cinema, then the Promised Land was just around the
corner, and thus much closer than either the socialist ‘land of milk and
honey’ or the Zionist dream of a return to Erets Yisra’el.

129
 7

‘Four Hours of Hootin’

and Hollerin’ ’
Moviegoing and Everyday Life
Outside the Movie Palace

Jeffrey Klenotic

R e s e a rc h on the history of urban film exhibition after the nickelodeon

has amply documented Hollywood’s efforts to add a normative
middle-class accent to the theater experience of an increasingly diverse,
cross-class audience.1 These efforts culminated during the cinema’s late silent
and early sound eras, when major studios invested heavily in the ownership,
renovation and construction of motion picture palaces.2 The picture palace
was typically found in downtown areas or prosperous suburbs. In both
locations, the key to success was access to established lines of mass transit
and proximity to ‘bright light’ centers of shopping and social activity. Unlike
the many smaller theaters it sought to eclipse, the movie palace assumed
no distinct tie to the ethnic, racial or class specificities of the immediate
community. Instead, palaces courted patrons from around the city, as well
as from smaller towns on the outskirts where luxurious picture houses were
seldom found. As Peter Stead has observed:

The big show-piece cinemas were built to pull in the fashionable trade
but they were not designed for the exclusive use of a social elite … To
attract the best patrons the movie-houses had to ape the conventions
and the standards of theatres and opera-houses but very quickly the
whole industry realized that the appeal of the movie palaces was not
unrelated to the fact that all customers had to be treated the same
and so they became temples of a new classlessness.3

130
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

As ‘temples of a new classlessness,’ picture palaces provided an intense

experience designed to attract the largest, most heterogeneous audience
possible. That experience began with the electric signage that lit up the
night while ticket-seeking patrons queued excitedly in long lines or lost
themselves in amorphous crowds. The experience then proceeded through
the exotic foyer where paintings and musicians occupied moviegoers waiting
for a show to finish, to reach the multimedia format of the entertainment
presentation itself—stage shows, short films, musical performances, ambient
or even atmospheric lighting, and a first-run feature film.
Inside the theater, patrons were ushered to seats and expected to uphold
polite standards of decorum. As Richard Testa discovered, employee manuals
instructed palace ushers to enforce decorum in a diplomatic manner:

If a patron is creating unnecessary noise say, ‘I beg your pardon, sir.

You are annoying those around you,’ and then leave immediately. (Do
not wait for an answer in this case as it might lead to an argument
and this is to be avoided at all times.) If the patron persists in making
a noise, call an executive at once. Intoxicated patrons, petting couples,
degenerates and morons should not be handled by you without first
calling a member of the management, unless the circumstances
demand immediate attention.4

Under duly monitored conditions, patrons were invited quietly to immerse

themselves in the film experience, which worked with the opulent,
stunning architecture to hold them ‘in the dark somnambulism of celluloid
fantasy.’ 5
Perhaps the most important aspect of the picture palace formula was
the policy of complete and uniform customer service. Staffed nurseries
were provided for families with children. Theater employees were trained
to treat patrons as royalty and to show no favoritism or familiarity toward
any individual moviegoer. This was because managers ‘believed that if
service staff members held conversations with some people, other patrons
would feel less important; the goal of management was to make everyone
feel that they were as valued a customer as everyone else.’ 6 Staff were
instructed to be ‘Salesmen of Happiness,’ and in keeping with the ‘chain
store’ model of American Big Business in the 1920s the happiness they
sold was predicated on giving standardized service for money.7 Where in
earlier times a moviegoer might have known the proprietor of the theater
and her or his family, who might have also served as staff, now there was
a quasi-personal ‘exchange’ relationship. If the social experience of some
forms of urban moviegoing had once been informal and prone to vary by

131
 g oing to the mov ies

neighborhood, the new style picture palace was not only ‘a vision of wealth,
a touch of royalty,’ but also a ‘reprieve from community.’ 8
When viewed as a prominent landmark of social progress and architectural
grandeur in 1920s America, and taken as a powerful symbol of Hollywood’s
own capacity for progress and transformation, the movie palace casts a long
shadow in cultural memory and historical imagination. Maggie Valentine,
for instance, contends that ‘movie palaces replaced nickelodeons the way
talkies replaced silent movies—quickly and irrevocably.’ 9 Palaces did not,
however, constitute the typical moviegoing experience of the 1920s. It is
important to keep in mind how rare movie palaces were, and how often
they may have operated at less than full capacity, even at the height of what
has often been perceived as the ‘movie palace era.’ As Richard Koszarski
has documented, ‘Film Daily Yearbook noted sixty-six major first-run houses
in 1927, only seventeen of which grossed as much as $1 million annually.
It would appear that a great many Americans were still patronizing
neighborhood and subsequent-run houses.’ Miriam Hansen makes a similar
point, estimating that picture palaces amounted to roughly 5 per cent of all
American movie theaters between 1915 and 1933.10
Although movie palaces projected a social vision of classlessness and
upscale egalitarianism, the actual experience of class mixing remained
limited, as Roy Rosenzweig found in his case study of workers and
leisure in the industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts: ‘many working-
class people continued to view movies within their own neighborhood
theaters, which more closely reflected the behavior patterns, conditions,
and ownership of the early movie days.’ 11 The neighborhood vitality that
Rosenzweig found in some Worcester theaters has been echoed by more
recent research on Depression-era moviegoing by Thomas Doherty, as well
as by studies on film exhibition in 1920s and 1930s Chicago, where both
European immigrant and African-American audiences maintained largely
insular modes of neighborhood moviegoing, drawing on residual traditions
of cultural practice.12
Given the diversity of audiences and moviegoing experiences represented
in the growing scholarship on the social history of exhibition, it seems
important not to identify the cinema’s institutional and cultural development
only in terms of ‘forces of standardization.’ 13 This chapter’s case study of
moviegoing at the Franklin Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts, seeks to
contribute to our understanding of the meaningful role that non-dominant
forms of film exhibition continued to play in the everyday lives of many
Americans who found themselves on the economic and cultural outskirts as
a result of their structural positioning within marginalized working-class,
racial and ethnic spaces. My study focuses on the late 1920s and early

132
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

7.1 The Franklin Theater, c. 1940.

1930s, arguably the peak of the movie palace phenomenon, in the hope
of illuminating vestigial moviegoing practices otherwise eclipsed by the
shadow of these palaces. In the process, I hope to capture a sense of the rich
social experience that we might overlook if we were to define exhibition in
Springfield during this period exclusively in terms of a ‘movie palace era.’
Theoretically, this study assumes that like all acts of cultural consumption,
moviegoing is part of a wider process of social communication; it is a
sign.14 Like all signs, what going to the movies communicates, what it
means or can mean for those who practice it and through their social and
interpretative competencies encode and decode it, is fundamentally subject
to multi-accentuality, the property by which a sign carries the potential to
signify multiple, even contradictory, meanings contingent on the conditions
of its use.15 The meanings that audiences produce for and through the
activity of moviegoing take shape as a consequence of physical, economic,
social, and discursive contexts that are subject to varying ideological
interests and intersect in variable ways to form historically specific
conditions of reception. While these conditions can and should be analyzed
for what they tell us about the interpretive processes of specific audiences in
relation to particular films,16 it is vitally important to recognize that these

133
 g oing to the mov ies

conditions are themselves a meaningful part of the cultural experience of

moviegoing as it has been practiced over the past one hundred years. Our
understanding of the intersection of film history with the wider history of
American society and culture is greatly enriched by taking into account
the variable, yet still structured, ways in which Americans have used
their local movie theaters and made sense of their countless moviegoing
experiences.17

Parameters of Springfield Movie Exhibition

Where in Springfield could one see a movie between 1926 and 1932?
What types of theater ownership were evident? How much of the overall
exhibition market fell into each type? These questions can produce a
snapshot of the full range of movie exhibition in Springfield that will give
context to the specific case of the Franklin Theater, which first opened
in 1929 in the middle of this period. Equally important, answering these
questions will heighten awareness of the empirical complexities—not to
mention the theoretical and ideological ones—that emerge in the search
for even rudimentary forms of generalization about the social history of
moviegoing.
At the start of 1926, Springfield had twelve theaters that presented
movies. These were, in ascending order by seat capacity, the Cleveland
(350), the Garden (500), the Grand (690), the Strand (746), the Bijou (900),
the Phillips (900), the State (900), the Jefferson (1,036), the Fox (1,444),
the Broadway (2,200), the Capitol (2,200), and Poli’s Palace (3,000).18 Of
these, all but two were devoted to screening motion pictures as the primary
attraction. The two exceptions were the State, devoted to burlesque but
occasionally home to scandalous films of a sort ‘banned in Boston,’ and Poli’s
Palace, where feature films regularly shared the bill with live vaudeville. If
the State is excluded due to the extreme rarity of its films, the remaining
eleven theaters provided a total 13,966 seats. Mean seat capacity was 1,270
seats. Four theaters exceeded the mean, seven failed to reach it.
By 1932, the total number of theaters showing movies had increased
to sixteen. One theater, the Cleveland, had gone out of business but five
new theaters had opened. In addition, the State had new ownership and in
September 1931 switched from burlesque to a movies-only policy.19 Overall,
the movie exhibition market in 1932 included: the Pine Point (386), the
Garden (500), the Grand (690), the Strand (746), the Franklin (800), the
State (900), the Bijou (900), the Liberty (960), the Jefferson (1,036), the
Arcade (1,100), the Phillips (1,200), the Fox (1,444), the Broadway (2,200),
the Capitol (2,200), Fox-Poli Palace (2,500), and the Paramount (3,200).

134
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

Together, these sixteen theaters provided 20,762 seats. Mean seat capacity
was 1,298; five theaters stood above the mean while eleven fell below it.20
What types of ownership were represented among these theaters and
did the pattern change? In 1926, Springfield had one theater integrated
into a national, studio-owned chain: the Fox Theater, owned by the Fox
Theater Corporation. In addition, there were two theaters that were part of
two different regional chains. The Broadway operated under the Goldstein
Brothers Theater Corporation, which controlled several theaters throughout
New England and was owned by Springfield residents Samuel and Nathan
Goldstein. Poli’s Palace was part of a New England chain of vaudeville–
picture houses owned by Sylvester Poli of Connecticut. Springfield also had
a budding local chain. The Winchester Amusement Corporation had been
formed in 1925 by local residents Harry Cohen and Louis Cohn, who at
that time owned the Phillips and Jefferson theaters respectively. By 1926, the
chain had grown to four, as the previously independent Strand and Garden
theaters joined the fold. Finally, the remaining theaters in the city—the
Bijou, the Capitol, the Cleveland, and the Grand—were independent, non-
chain operations.
We can begin to gauge the prominence each type of ownership had
within Springfield in 1926 by tallying the number and percentage of movie
seats in each category: National chain = 1,444 seats (10 per cent); regional
chain = 5,200 seats (37 per cent); local chain = 3,182 seats (23 per cent); and
non-chain = 4,140 seats (30 per cent).
By 1932, ownership patterns had changed considerably. The city no longer
had any regional chain theaters, as these were absorbed by Hollywood studios
during the normalization phase of vertical integration that commenced after
1926. Hollywood’s real estate in the city thus grew larger, at least in the
downtown business district, which is where the studios made all their
acquisitions. Warner Bros. introduced Springfield to sound pictures in 1927
at the Capitol, then bought that formerly independent theater themselves
in 1929. Fox Corporation, which already owned the Fox, bought Poli’s
regional circuit and thereby added Poli’s Palace to its holdings, changing
the theater’s name to Fox-Poli’s Palace in 1928. In 1929, Publix bought the
Goldstein chain and so acquired the Broadway. That same year, Publix also
constructed the city’s largest theater, the Paramount.
At the level of local ownership, Winchester Amusement added another
theater in 1928, when it built the Liberty, which joined the Garden, the
Jefferson, the Phillips, and the Strand as part of the Winchester chain of
neighborhood theaters (all but the Garden were located outside downtown,
and the Garden itself sat close to the south side of downtown, which was
home to a large Italian-American community). The number of locally owned

135
 g oing to the mov ies

independent theaters grew as well, from four to six. The Bijou and Grand
remained independent, the former downtown and the latter in an outlying
neighborhood. In addition, three new independent theaters were built.
The Pine Point (1927) and the Franklin (1929) went up in two separate
neighborhoods, while the Arcade (1931) was constructed downtown. The
State, also downtown, was purchased by a local independent owner and
converted from burlesque to movies in 1931. The independent Cleveland
Theater was no longer in business, having closed in 1927.
By 1932, then, the relative distribution of movie seats by type of
ownership was greatly altered: National chain = 11,544 seats (56 per cent);
regional chain = 0 seats (0 per cent); local chain = 4,442 (21 per cent); and
non-chain = 4,776 seats (23 per cent).
The changes between 1926 and 1932 can be summarized as follows:

1926 1932
Movie theaters: 11 16
Total seats: 13,966 20,762
National chain seats: 10% 56%
Regional chain seats: 37% 0%
Local chain seats: 23% 21%
Non-chain seats: 30% 23%
Mean seats: 1,270 1,298
# Above/below mean: 4/7 5/11

These figures document the overall growth that occurred in Springfield’s

exhibition market, and point to the centrality of moviegoing as a form of
leisure during this period. The numbers also show the redistribution of
seats as a result of increased national chaining, lending support to Gomery’s
finding that regional chains were important precursors to national chains
and that ‘when Hollywood came to bid and buy, the founders of these great
[regional] operations sold out.’ 21
At the same time, there is evidence of the persisting importance of
local chain and independent movie theaters. Although the percentage of
seats owned by local chain and independent theaters decreased slightly, the
actual number of these theaters increased from eight to eleven. Vertical
integration apparently did not close off local interest in theater ownership,
although studios did capture and control a majority share of the city’s total
available seats. This control was accomplished by buying and renovating, or
constructing from scratch, the largest first-run houses in the city, all located
downtown. Hollywood laid claim to, and sought to make normative, a new

136
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

‘movie palace era’ in Springfield, a flattering development, perhaps, to a

city staking its own claim to cosmopolitanism. What remains of interest,
for present purposes, is determining to what extent, and in what possibly
divergent ways, moviegoing at the growing number of local theaters—in this
case the Franklin Theater in Springfield’s North End—was integrated into
the social experience of everyday life in surrounding neighborhoods.22

The Transformation of Springfield

Before one can hope to know what it was like to attend a neighborhood
theater, let alone begin the even more humbling task of understanding what
this activity might have meant in the subjective experience of people, it is
first necessary to consider what it may have meant to live in a particular
neighborhood. To ask, ‘What did it mean to go the Franklin Theater?’
would minimally seem to require as a prerequisite an answer to the question
‘What did it mean to live in Springfield’s North End?’ This question might
itself be less daunting if the North End existed in a social and historical
vacuum but, of course, it did not. Indeed, we can begin to comprehend the
subjective meanings of life in the North End only after we have a general
understanding of the social, cultural and economic history of the broader
city within which North Enders located their identities and defined their
senses of place and community.
Springfield sits in Western Massachusetts, about sixty miles south and
west of Worcester and a hundred miles west of Boston. In the 1920s the
corporate city encompassed thirty-three square miles of land, just under
half of which was farmland or woodland.23 The full length of Springfield’s
western border was formed by the Connecticut River. The city’s central
business district became most densely concentrated along the middle of
this riverfront. City neighborhoods eventually fanned out from the central
business district in northerly, easterly and southerly directions. From the
heart of downtown, near the river, it was approximately six miles to the
eastern border of the city, and about 2.5 miles to either the northern or
southern borders.
According to historian Michael Frisch, Springfield changed from small
New England town to industrial city between 1840 and 1880.24 During
the following fifty years, the city experienced its greatest growth. In 1880,
Springfield’s population numbered 33,340. By 1900, it reached 62,059. By
1920, total population had doubled again, reaching 129,614. During the
1920s, roughly 30,000 residents were added, and population in 1930 stood
at 158,129. Growth was so steady that in 1923 the Springfield City Planning
Board envisioned a population of 225,000 by 1940.25 That projection never

137
 g oing to the mov ies

materialized—indeed, estimates for the Depression years of the early

1930s showed a population decline of roughly 10,000—but Springfield had
nonetheless grown at a rate nearly three times faster than comparably sized
cities in New England, and by the 1920s had become the third largest city
in Massachusetts, behind Boston and Worcester.26
Nationally, there were sixty-eight American cities that the 1920 census
found to have a population of more than 100,000, and Springfield was one
of forty-three to fall between 100,000 and 250,000. In terms of the number
of people living within what the census specifically designated as the ‘urban
district’ surrounding a city, Springfield ranked above many cities with higher
total populations. As H. Paul Douglass reported in his 1926 social survey,
‘Springfield ranks fifty-first in size among American cities, but thirtieth if
the aggregate urban population of which it is a center is considered.’ 27
The engine driving Springfield’s rapid urbanization was industrialization.
The railroad system that was developed during the 1830s and 1840s made
downtown Springfield the principal rail gateway between New England and
the rest of the country; by the 1920s over a hundred trains passed through the
city each day. The railroad was a large industry itself, employing thousands,
but it also facilitated the growth of other manufacturing interests, both
downtown and in outlying districts. By the turn of the century, Springfield
had over 500 manufacturing plants. Many were small machine shops, but
there was also a diversity of large-scale industries that served as important
sites of employment into the 1920s and 1930s (unlike some New England
cities, Springfield’s economy was never dependent on textiles).28 In his social
survey of the city in the 1920s, Douglass classified the employed labor
force as follows: Manufacturing and mechanical industries—46.8 per cent;
Trade—13.9 per cent; Clerical occupations—12.7 per cent; Domestic and
personal service—9.9 per cent; Transportation—7.5 per cent; Professional
service—6.3 per cent; Public service—2.4 per cent; All other occupations—
0.5 per cent.29
Urbanization and industrialization accelerated immigration, and although
city directories from 1920 to 1932 consistently reported 75 per cent of
the population to be ‘native born,’ this figure obscured the fact that a
large percentage of the native-born were second-generation immigrants.30
According to Douglass, ‘the displacement of the original stock by the
children of foreign or mixed parentage has proceeded until this element
nearly equals the purely native one.’ By 1920, 35.9 per cent of the city’s
total population was ‘native white of foreign and mixed parentage,’ which
combined with 24 per cent foreign-born meant 60 per cent of city
residents were first- or second-generation immigrants. Douglass classified
the composition of this 60 per cent into (rounded) percentages: 13 per cent

138
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

7.2 A map of Springfield showing the ‘social quality’ rankings put together in H.
Paul Douglass’s church survey of 1926.

Irish, 10 per cent British (English, Scotch, Canadians of English heritage), 9

per cent Italian, 9 per cent French Canadian, 6 per cent Hebrew (primarily
Russian and German), and 13 per cent other (Polish, Greek, Syrian,
Armenian, Lebanese, Swedes, Chinese). African Americans accounted for
2 per cent of the total population.31
As the size of the ‘new stock’ grew, its composition changed. In 1890,
the Irish constituted nearly half the total foreign-born in Springfield, but
by 1920 they constituted only 18 per cent of that population. The fastest
growing groups of foreign-born were from Southern and Eastern Europe,
with Italians jumping from 1.9 per cent in 1890 to 14 per cent in 1920, and
Russians increasing from 1.4 per cent to 12 per cent. Polish, Greek, Syrian,

139
 g oing to the mov ies

Lebanese, Armenian, and Turkish immigration also increased dramatically

during this period.32 From the perspective inscribed in the Spring field
Church Survey, the new patterns of immigration created confusion and were
cause for concern. If the city’s ‘old stock’ Anglo-Americans had grown
resigned to the Irish, despite that group’s ‘never having come to an entirely
good understanding, so far as culture and civic ideals are concerned, with
the original New England stock,’ by the 1920s, the larger and more difficult
problem had become ‘the changed character of foreign population with
its increasing preponderance of elements much more remote in tradition
and culture from the ideals and standards which the city developed for
250 years.’ As Frisch puts it, ‘an older leadership that had helped turn
government and business into an engine of growth now feared that they
were losing control … and that this powerful engine now could be turned
against them as different hands reached for the throttle.’ 33
Whatever retrograde feelings of cultural stress the ‘old stock’ experienced
by the 1920s as a result of Springfield’s transformation, the city as a whole
remained committed to growth. In fact, Springfield was caught in an intense
drama of relative standing in which increasingly regional and national
frames of cultural and economic reference became the yardstick by which
local self-definition was measured. Frisch explains:

Cities like Springfield were subject to what has to be called a kind

of frantic peer pressure in the competition for survival and growth
in industrializing America. Keeping up with the Worcesters and
the Hartfords (and pulling far ahead of the Northamptons and the
Westfields) was not just a matter of status—it seemed a matter of
survival. And as the city grew, so did its frame of reference: a piping
system that might have seemed appropriate in one year suddenly came
to appear provincial and pedestrian the next.34

Driven in part by this ‘frantic peer pressure,’ Springfield entered a boom

of institutional building after World War I. Historian Frank Bauer has
chronicled the numerous public works construction projects that were
initiated at enormous expense in the name of enhancing Springfield’s
cosmopolitan image. The construction of the ornate Memorial Bridge over
the Connecticut River in 1922, for example, cost the city three million
dollars.35
In the domain of non-public institutional building, city businesses such
as Massachusetts Mutual Insurance and the Federal Land Bank moved
into massive new structures that testified architecturally to the grandeur of
Springfield’s new status among cities in New England. Downtown movie

140
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

theaters such as the Broadway (Paramount-Publix), the Capitol (Warner

Bros.), and Poli’s Palace (Fox) were bought by major studios in the late
1920s and underwent extensive renovations that upgraded their architectural
status and as a bonus made way for talking pictures. In September 1929
Springfield’s image as a cosmopolitan ‘big city’ that had truly arrived was
capped off by the construction downtown of the 3200-seat Paramount
Theater at a cost of nearly 1.2 million dollars.

Springfield’s North End as Context for Moviegoing

Less than two months after the Paramount premièred to great fanfare
downtown, a new 800-seat movie house opened rather furtively in the
North End, at a cost of only $45,000 dollars.36 The Franklin was built less
than one mile north and east of the Paramount, on the other side of a
wide line of Boston and Albany railroad tracks that marked the boundary
between downtown and North End.37 To understand the meanings that
may have been contained in and expressed through moviegoing at the
Franklin, it is necessary to grasp the cultural logic and social geography
of the North End. By describing the sense and sensibility of everyday life
there, and then drawing out the social dimensions of theater experience at
the Franklin, it becomes possible to see how permeable the border could be
between a neighborhood movie theater and its surrounding community. In
fact, what seems most precisely definitive about life in the North End was
that it afforded scant reprieve from community—not in the home, not in
the school, not in the streets, not in the stores, not in the movies. Despite
its many deprivations, or perhaps as a consequence of them, what the
North End at its best had to offer was a social environment—and theater
experience—marked by openness, familiarity, reciprocity, spontaneity,
outgoingness and informality.
The grand architectural boom that hit downtown in the 1920s did not
spill over to the North End, but the more fundamental changes that had
occurred in the city certainly made a dramatic impact. The North End
became a densely condensed microcosm of wider patterns of industri-
alization, urbanization and immigration. A highly industrialized, polyglot
urban space that presented an inescapable heterogeneity, the North End bore
the full intensity of Springfield’s historical transformation and symbolized
its most dramatic changes, more so perhaps than any other part of the
city except the central business district. Not surprisingly, social perceptions
of the North End sometimes evinced the ambivalence, fear, anxiety and
concern that many residents felt about the ‘new’ city itself. This perception
of Springfield’s changing social geography is deeply etched into Douglass’s

141
 g oing to the mov ies

Spring field Church Survey, which ranked the North End ninth out of the
city’s eleven districts in overall ‘social quality.’ 38
The North End was the initial stop for many immigrants—some with
neighborhood sponsors—newly arrived to the city. In the 1920s its population
of roughly 21,000 residents was 35 per cent foreign born, compared to an
average of 23 per cent across all districts in Springfield. An additional 41 per
cent of North End residents were native born of foreign or mixed parentage.
The predominant ethnic groups were: 1) Russian Jewish, 2) Irish, 3) Polish
Jewish, and 4) Greek. There were a significant number of Syrians, Russians
(non-Jewish), African Americans, and Chinese.39 Given its relatively high
proportion of first generation immigrants, the North End had the second
highest level of English language illiteracy in Springfield (more than twice
the mean for all districts), with 6 per cent of its residents unable to read
or write in English.40
Unlike downtown, which had the highest rate of intra-district mobility
in the city, residents of the North End tended to inhabit the same dwellings
for good lengths of time, and the North End had the lowest rate of intra-
district mobility in Springfield. As Douglass observed, the North End
‘shows a very much smaller than average number of changes within a district
in which few homes are owned, perhaps reflecting the racial conservatism
of the Jewish population, which does not change without reason.’ 41 The low
number of address changes may also be attributable to the predominance of
extended family living arrangements, common in the North End even into
the 1920s and 1930s. As Mary Annese remembers of her old North End
neighborhood, ‘Kids got married, they stayed home … They’d go live up in
the attic.’ 42 Douglass reported 5.5 persons per dwelling in the North End,
compared to an average of 4.88 across all eleven city districts.43
Given the North End’s diversity, the tendency of families to stay in the
same residences over time meant strong inter-ethnic bonds could be forged
between families living in the same tenement or neighborhood. While
inter-ethnic relationships between children might, in the end, weaken
the insularity and endurance of ethnic and religious traditions within a
particular family, these relationships afforded opportunities for children
to share cultural traditions and leisure time experiences with each other
in productive ways. Former North End resident Richard McBride,44 for
example, recalls that:

When I was growing up, the family that lived upstairs was Schwartz;
I’ve never forgotten them. They were a Jewish family, a real Jewish
family, and they had a couple of kids that were part of our group …
And I used to love their holidays, because I used to love matzo, matzo

142
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

crackers, and we’d get them and cover them with peanut butter. And
then above the Schwartzes lived a family, I can’t remember if they
were Polish or Italian, but they spoke a foreign language. They spoke
English too. They had one boy. We were never gangs, we were groups,
and we played together.45

He adds:

At that time you made your own sports, you played your own. In
school, you played normal playground games, because that was all the
land that was available and generally, it was paved or concrete asphalt.
But you played there. You didn’t have big parks and recreation. You
had ball games, but they were always pick-up ball games on empty
lots around the town. [We] and the eighth graders down, we had to
make our own sports.46

The lack of park space identified by McBride was partly a consequence

of the North End’s saturation with multiple family homes and tenement
housing, with some single family homes in the mix, as well as its status as
a heavily industrialized zone of the city. Indeed, only the downtown area
ranked lower on the Survey’s index of industrialization.47 With the Boston
and Albany train station and freight house located on its southern edge,
the North End was home to many industries that relied on the railroad for
obtaining raw materials or shipping out finished goods.48 From the cultural
perspective of Douglass’s Survey, industrialization in the North End ‘created
undesirable conditions for human habitation’ that went hand-in-hand with
the low level of fortune that marked districts with dense ethnic populations.
‘In general,’ Douglass concluded, ‘the degree of industrialization corresponds
very closely to the areas occupied by population of foreign-born antecedents
or by Negroes. The most American districts are least industrialized,
indicating the general ability of the American population to get away from
undesirable environment.’ 49
However, as Richard McBride’s earlier comments indicate, an environment
perceived as undesirable by some on the outside is not necessarily experienced
or defined as such by those who inhabit it. To be sure, industrialization put
limits on the amount of park and recreation space available to North Enders,
but residents still found space—if only on porches, stairwells, street corners
and city lots—for social interaction and creative cultural production. Within
the North End, the cultivation of inter-ethnic, peer group consciousness
was a tangible asset, particularly in an environment defined by pervasive
scarcity. From this perspective, the privatized, status-oriented way of life

143
 g oing to the mov ies

found in ostensibly better parts of the city would be a decided liability. As

Mary Annese remembers:

We lived down in the ‘ward,’ and that was from Armory Street all the
way down to Main Street and … all the way down Chestnut street.
That’s what they called the ‘ward.’ Then, from Armory Street up, I
don’t know what they called it … I guess they were the ones who
thought they were a little better than the rest of them. And down in
the ‘ward,’ there were Jews, there were Blacks, there were Chinese,
there were Poles, French, Irish, … Greeks, Italians, and I’ll tell you,
everybody helped each other, but not up on the hill … There were a
lot of good people there, but they weren’t as outgoing.50

Clearly, one could not live in the North End without encountering
culturally divergent languages, traditions and practices, and at their best,
residents remained open to mixing and sharing these resources in creative,
reciprocal and outgoing ways. Such openness and creativity made a virtue
of necessity and helped address problems of scarcity—of money, food,
space, and time. Everyday life in the North End thus provided conditions
amenable to the maintenance of residual cultural practices and linguistic
traditions, as well as to the expansion of new cultural horizons through
inter-ethnic exchange and a sharing of common problems attendant to
everyday working-class life.
In this type of community context, the numerous saloons and ethnic-
based social clubs that sprung up in the North End, as well as front
porches, tenement stairwells and the streets themselves, could be mobilized
as ‘alternative public spheres’ where people might gather to explain, validate,
escape and transcend the shared experience of cultural dislocation and
displacement brought about by immigration and conditions of wage labor.51
It is also quite possible that the social space of the Franklin Theater, a space
emerging from within the cultural logic of the community itself, could have
been mobilized to serve these purposes as well.

The North End’s Franklin Theater

The 800-seat Franklin Theater was a free-standing, single-story, plain
brown brick structure with modest architectural detail on its façade. It
had a concrete floor and offered only floor-level seating.52 The theater was
located near the geographical center of the North End, on Chestnut Street
just north of the intersection with Franklin Street. It sat adjacent to Kasser
Israel Hebrew Church and was surrounded by a variety of small businesses,

144
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

manufacturing industries, single and multiple family homes, and tenement

apartments. Boston and Albany’s railroad lines and freight stations were less
than one-half mile due south of the Franklin.
Although the theater was near a temple and a variety of small
neighborhood businesses, it was also just a few blocks north of Congress
Street, considered one of Springfield’s major vice areas by political leaders
and social reformers. In fact, the day before the Franklin first opened, the
Spring field Daily News reported the comments of Independent mayoral
candidate Charles W. Louis, who criticized incumbent Mayor Ferris C.
Parker for having ‘permitted Congress Street vice and crime to become
a notorious and disgusting municipal landmark.’ 53 Given the theater’s
proximity to Congress Street, it seems unlikely that residents living outside
the North End would have attended the Franklin very often, if ever. Rita
Soplop, for instance, who lived just above the North End in the Brightwood
district, remembers that the Franklin ‘was restricted, so we didn’t go there
… To us, it was in kind of a bad section, we thought, [so] we stayed within
our own.’ 54
The Franklin was licensed to Barbara and Wadie Semanie, who both
came to America from Lebanon and settled in Springfield, where they met
and married.55 The theater’s building permit, filed in April 1928, identified
the ‘owner’s address’ as 823 Armory Street, which the 1928 Spring field City
Directory listed under Barbara Semanie. Armory Street was 1.5 miles east
of the Franklin and formed the eastern boundary of the North End. The
1928 Directory listed a separate residence for Wadie Semanie—The Liberty
Apartments at 250 Liberty Street. This residence afforded an easy walk to
the theater, less than one-half mile away. After 1928, Barbara Semanie was
listed with Wadie as residing at 250 Liberty. Another Semanie, George,
lived nearby at 310 Liberty Street. Mary Annese remembers that Semanie
family members staffed the theater, although she cannot recall exactly which
family members worked there because ‘there were so many of them there,
the Semanie family was a big family.’ 56
The Franklin advertised only sporadically in city newspapers, and by far
the most concentrated burst of advertising came the first two weeks after the
theater opened. At that time its small ads typically carried the slogan ‘Any
Seat 10c Any Time’ and promoted ‘continuous’ shows from 1–10:30 PM with
‘programs changed daily.’ Audiences were further informed that the theater
was ‘Locally Owned and Managed’ and had ‘Sound Tone Installed.’ 57
The Semanies no doubt wanted to get their business off to a smooth start,
but the Franklin’s opening was met by protest from Springfield’s Central
Labor Union. On 25 October 1929, a ‘Special Notice’ appeared next to the
Franklin’s advertisement in the Spring field Daily News:

145
 g oing to the mov ies

Do not be mislead by barkers and rumors that the Franklin Theater

is unfair to organized labor. Persons found guilty of circulating
such literature will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The operators of this theater are members of the ‘Knights of Labor,
Inc.,’ a recognized labor organization. We wish to thank our many
friends and patrons for their continued support during the circulation
of false statements sponsored by unfair business methods of a union
committee.58

In a district as heavily industrialized and unionized as the North End,

the Central Labor Union’s actions against Franklin owners Barbara and
Wadie Semanie could have resulted in disastrous consequences, as would be
the case two years later, in 1931, when the Union mobilized protests against
Max Tabackman’s use of non-union projectionists at the State theater in
the downtown district, thereby helping to ensure Tabackman’s ownership
of the theater would be short-lived.59
As indicated in the ‘Special Notice,’ however, the family-operated
Franklin claimed affiliation with the Knights of Labor, at one time a
national federation of labor assemblies, particularly known for gender-
inclusive and gender-neutral policies, whose history in Springfield pre-dated
the formation of the Central Labor Union in 1887.60 By the 1920s, the
more aggressive and better-organized Central Labor had become the most
powerful labor organization in Springfield, but it was perhaps still possible
for the Semanies to demonstrate allegiance to labor through affiliation with
the once-prominent Knights of Labor.61 Although it remains unclear exactly
how (or even whether) an accord was reached, the Franklin’s success in
defusing the ‘unfair to labor’ allegation lodged by the Central Labor Union
is perhaps suggested by the disappearance of the ‘Special Notice,’ which
stopped running in subsequent editions of local newspapers.
In 1929, the Franklin was the only theater in Springfield to offer
daily program changes, and in this it may have encountered some of the
difficulties common to a type of theater known in the trade papers as ‘the
daily grind.’ As Paul Seale points out, vertical integration meant that studios
focused their run-zone-clearance distribution pattern around urban first-
and second-run, chain-owned theaters, a move that signaled the studios’
willingness to reduce their role serving ‘daily grinds’ in favor of only the
greenest of urban pastures.62 This situation put ‘daily grinds’ in a precarious
position in terms of securing enough film product to meet the demands
of everyday program changes, forcing them to rely on the output of small,
independent, ‘Poverty Row’ studios to supplement the larger studios’ ‘B’
pictures and, subsequent runs of ‘A’ pictures, if they were allowed to procure

146
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

them. Additionally, an urban exhibitor with strong ethnic patronage could

use an occasional foreign-language film, tailored to the local audience, to
help meet the demands of everyday program changes.
Nonetheless, the writing was on the wall for the ‘daily grind,’ as the
stranglehold that vertical integration achieved over film distribution coalesced
with the worsening effects of the Depression to make daily program changes
impossible to sustain. It is not surprising, then, that in 1931 the Franklin
switched from seven daily program changes to four programs per week, with
changes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Soon thereafter, the
Franklin also raised prices to fifteen cents for children and twenty cents
for adults, with weekday matinée tickets for children and adults priced at a
flat rate of ten cents. By 1932, ticket prices had changed again, stabilizing
at fifteen cents for adults and ten cents for children.
The typical program at the Franklin consisted of two feature films, a
comedy short, a serial, a newsreel, and other short subjects such as cartoons
and travelogues. A review of feature titles advertised in the Spring field
Daily News between 21 October 1929 and 26 November 1932 suggests the
theater’s favored genres were the marriage melodrama (such as Virtuous
Husbands, Obey Your Husband, which was promoted as ‘a dramatic story
of modern marriage,’ and Seed, which was billed as ‘the inside story of
married life’), the gangster picture (such as The Gangster, The Perfect Crime,
Bullets and Justice, and Smart Money, the last of which starred Edward G.
Robinson), the comedy drama (such as Ladies Must Play, Girls Gone Wild
and Chiselers of Hollywood), and the western (such as The Big Trail, starring
John Wayne, and One Way Trail, with Tim McCoy).
Broadway-centered musicals, so popular at downtown Springfield’s
first-run movie palaces during the early sound era, were almost totally
absent from the Franklin’s programming schedule. A definitive reason
for the absence of Broadway-centered musicals remains elusive, but one
possibility may be that such musicals were simply not targeted toward, nor
very appealing to, the North End audiences that typically gathered at the
Franklin.63 To fill out its schedule of features, the Franklin periodically
programmed pictures of special ethnic and political interest to the North
End’s immigrant, working-class patrons. Indeed, within one month of its
grand opening, it was the only theater in Springfield to have shown Guilty,
‘a German special production,’ and Russia, which depicted the ‘overthrow
of Csarism’ and was accompanied by a comedy short featuring ‘Toots and
Gaspar.’ Likewise, the theater showed the occasional silent film of enduring
interest to North Enders, as was the case on 1 April 1930, when Chaplin’s
Gold Rush (originally released in 1925) was screened.
In addition to a regular program of film entertainment, the Franklin also

147
 g oing to the mov ies

offered a variety of raffles and merchandise giveaways, beginning in early

1930. These practices were adopted by all neighborhood theaters located
outside downtown in attempt to gain advantage over the city’s first-run and
second-run theaters in the competition for the patronage of neighborhood
moviegoers. At the Franklin, promotions were offered Monday through
Thursday, which most likely were the theater’s slower nights for box office.
Thus, Monday night was ‘vanity ware night,’ Tuesday night was ‘gift night,’
Wednesday night was ‘china night,’ and Thursday night was ‘bargain night
at reduced prices combined with country store.’ 64 Live turkeys and chickens
were raffled in conjunction with Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas
holidays. As Richard McBride recalls, such promotions were often tied
to neighborhood businesses, and the merchandise given away often had
immediate use value: ‘They used to raffle off turkeys around the holidays,
or they’d raffle off gift certificates for Santos market down the street. You
could get $5 or $3 or $2 gift baskets of stuff. They gave away just about
everything … [including] pencils, they gave away a lot of pencils … Two
pencils would last you a year at school.’ 65
While promotions like China Night and Vanity Ware Night might be
taken as signs of the cinema’s larger stake in promoting consumer culture as
a whole, these practices may also be understood, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms,
as being rooted in the cultural habitus corresponding to the working-class
experience of economic necessity. For Bourdieu, the experience of economic
necessity produces a ‘popular’ cultural disposition marked by an insistence
on the practical utility of cultural goods, on the ‘affirmation between art and
life, which implies the subordination of form to function.’ 66 Although this
disposition might possibly have applied to the manner in which working-
class audiences related to particular films, it may have also helped shape
the relation between working-class audiences and particular movie theaters.
Because giveaways at the Franklin were directed toward a neighborhood
audience for whom there was little reprieve from the experience of scarcity
and necessity, a free turkey, perhaps in combination with the china plates
on which to serve it and the silverware with which to eat it, represented a
tangible, objective measure of the cultural use value of moviegoing at the
neighborhood theater, as opposed to moviegoing at the first-run, studio-
owned movie palace. What the neighborhood theater lacked in formal
architectural niceties, it may have made up for in functional terms by
becoming a locus of distribution for material goods helpful in the ongoing
struggle with economic necessity.
The pursuit of a complete set of china or silverware may have reinforced
the consumption ethic being promoted through the mystique of the
tastefully arranged ‘ensemble’ that was cultivated in advertising discourse

148
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

of the 1920s.67 The articulation of an ‘ensemble’ mentality to moviegoing

undoubtedly served the neighborhood theater owner’s objective of securing
repeat attendance, as moviegoers pursued the goal of completing a set of
china or silverware. Nonetheless, working-class moviegoers may have made
sense of the giveaways less through an ‘aesthetic’ disposition emphasizing
the formal qualities of the distributed merchandise, than through a ‘popular’
disposition that transposed economic necessity into the cultural virtue of
‘getting more for your money.’ On this basis, it would not be uncommon
for giveaways to become the prime reason for attendance. Indeed, Mary
Annese recalls ‘a lot of people went cause they were trying to make a set of
dishes,’ a sentiment echoed by Richard McBride, who points out that ‘lots
of people would go pay the dime and go watch the travelogue, or whatever
it was, and maybe one of the pictures. If it was lousy they’d leave, they got
their plate, you know?’ 68
On some occasions, merchandise giveaways moved beyond the realm
of practical utility to add an air of informality and interactivity to the
immediate moviegoing experience at the Franklin. Richard McBride recalls
how the dropping of a china plate or saucer could precipitate widespread
audience response. As he puts it,

The women were always given these plates, and invariably, they
might go in and get a dinner plate, a saucer, a cup, a soup bowl, a
cake stirrer, and invariably, you’d listen during the movie, and all of
the sudden you’d hear ‘crash,’ where someone had the plate on their
lap [and dropped it], … and everybody would clap, yeah, yeah, one
down, or that’s the third down, cause generally it was never one it
was two or three. Sometimes if the theater didn’t have a big crowd,
they’d replace it, you’d pick it up, so the sweeper didn’t have to sweep
it, and take it on the way out the owner or manager would replace
it. Lots of times, they would say ‘break this you don’t get another,
because I only got so many.’ 69

McBride also describes how the raffling of bags of candy could reinforce
a sense of collectivity among hungry audience members, who as a group
shared the winner’s rewards: ‘For the kids, they had these candies with the
candy corn in them or the milk balls, and everybody would get a ticket and
they’d [theater staff] stand up and call these tickets off. And if you had
the number you’d go up and get it, and of course if you got it, about once
around the crowd and it was all gone.’ 70
While feature films and merchandise giveaways no doubt had great
appeal for both adults and children at the Franklin, it was the serial shorts

149
 g oing to the mov ies

that held the greatest attraction for child audiences, who often attended
the theater in groups on Saturday afternoons.71 As Richard McBride
remembers,

Most of the time, the group at that period of time, the seventh or
eighth grade, we’d all walk to it [the Franklin], a whole crowd, and as
we’d walk along, a couple more would join us, and sometimes you’d
end up walking and there’d be 12, 15, 20, 30 even. And for the good
ones, we’d say ‘come on, this is going to be a good one,’ [maybe one
that] Richard Arlen played in. I’ll never forget those serials, there was
always boat chases in there. It was quite a thing … [Neighborhood]
theaters were the thing, because you got so much for the money.
And then you’d go back home, and then that night, or during the
week, you’d sit on the stoops at night after supper and talk about
the movies, as to what went on, and what’s the serial now. [We’d
say] ‘this is what’s going to happen,’ ‘no it ain’t, you’re wrong,’ and
everybody had their ideas, because they knew they were going to get
another 15 episodes, and they’d always start another one, about 8 or
10 episodes into this one, so you always got two going, one almost
finished and a new one starting.72

McBride also points out that the serial film’s low production values
provided children with another kind of enjoyable game—trying to spot
continuity errors:

They didn’t put that kind of money into making them. We’d always
like to watch to see if we could find, ah, all of the sudden it’s a
sedan being chased by the cops, then all the sudden you’re looking
at a touring car being chased by the cops. We used to always try to
pick out the mistakes. That was the fun, trying to find the mistakes,
as well as watching the pictures.73

While the film interests of child audiences centered on the use value of
the serial form for generating public discussion and youthful games, it was
also true that the informal social environment provided by the neighborhood
theater itself contributed greatly to the overall pleasures of their moviegoing
experience. As McBride remembers, the Franklin gave great value for the
money because ‘you generally got about four hours of hootin’ and hollerin’
… especially if there was too much lovey-dovey in the movie.’ He also points
out that ‘everybody always sat in one area … And you’d always hear, “you
savin’ that seat?” “Yeah.” “Who for?” “No you’re not!”’ 74

150
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

During the early years of the Depression, the Franklin’s child audiences
found innovative ways to secure admission. Mary Annese points out that,
during the Depression, children of working-class families often did not have
money for movies. She remembers, however, that ‘they would go down to
the railroad tracks, and some of the factories would leave their copper out
in the field. And then they’d light a match to it so as to get all the coating
off the copper, and you know, after the fire went down, you’d pick up a few
pennies there to get to the movies.’ 75
Another common strategy was to search for discarded milk bottles to
return for deposit value, which could be used to fund a couple of children’s
admission to the theater. Once inside, these children could take advantage
of the darkness of the theater and the sympathetic attitude of attendants
by popping open the fire doors, thereby admitting other children from the
group into the theater. As Richard McBride describes this practice:

In the early thirties, salaries were not big … Store bought milk
bottles were five cents a deposit, so you were always trying to find
milk bottles. You’d probably get one or two [kids] who you’d give
money, everybody would chip in, you know, 2 or 3 cents here or there,
and they’d go in the theater and go down the side aisles and they’d
hit the safety doors. The doors would pop open, and when they did
a whole mess of us would run in. You might get caught, you might
not, but you didn’t consider it would be too bad. That was part of
the game. And of course the attendants knew … [The theater] had
attendants because it was dark. You didn’t have all the big lights on
the doors that said exit so that you could read a newspaper ten feet
away, ‘cause it wasn’t required. You had doors, and the painted exit
across the doors. [The attendants] had flashlights, but they were busy.
[Sneaking in] used to be a game, but they knew it! They all knew.
We’d go out, and we’d always say, ‘thanks a lot for the free movies.’
They knew, they knew what was going on! 76

It is difficult to imagine such practices having been possible, let alone

knowingly tolerated, at Springfield’s ‘better’ theaters, where good lighting,
carefully managed ushering, and daunting architecture set conditions for
a more controlled and formal accent to the moviegoing experience. But at
the Franklin, the material features of the theater, combined with the close
relation of the owners to the North End community, provided structural
conditions amenable to formation of a public sphere marked by unpredict-
ability, informality, familiarity, reciprocity, and even an openness toward
‘illegal’ social practices born from economic urgencies magnified by the

151
 g oing to the mov ies

Depression. The cultural logic of the North End spilled into its movie
theater: a scarcity of money creatively addressed by hunting for copper down
by the railroad tracks or by sneaking in a theater; a scarcity of food solved
by mixing peanut butter and matzo crackers or by passing around a bag of
candy won at the theater; a scarcity of private space ameliorated by taking
pleasure in sharing one’s porch, or the streets themselves, with neighbors
to talk about movies and other happenings.
Like the North End itself, the Franklin became an important landmark
in the cultural geography of the city. It helped mark a unique, if
marginalized, space. It also helped mark time; serials parceled out in a
rhythm that prompted neighborhood kids to look backward and forward
with excitement and anticipation. ‘Dish nights’ and other giveaways
dutifully counted the days and nights of the week as well as any clock
or calendar. Beyond this, as a form of consumption, moviegoing at the

7.3 One week’s
programming at the
Franklin theatre, 9–15
May 1937.

152
 ev ery day life ou tside the mov ie pa l ace

Franklin not only captured and communicated the status and informal
social conditions of the North End, but also served as a type of creative
expression as well. The porch stoops, empty lots, streets and spaces of the
neighborhood were articulated to the physical and cinematic space of the
Franklin itself, and together these became the imaginative and expressive
medium out of, and into which were carved the shapes and meanings of
everyday life.

Conclusion
Springfield’s North End was a largely insular, if not homogeneous, working-
class environment marked by heavy industrialization, extensive multi-family
housing, a large and diverse ethnic population, a vice district, a high level
of English language illiteracy, and high rates of juvenile delinquency relative
to the city’s ‘better’ districts. For better or worse, it was a microcosm
of the intense changes behind the ‘new’ industrial city and had all the
characteristics of an area of low ‘social quality,’ at least as defined by
Douglass’s Spring field Church Survey.
Given these community conditions, it would have been unlikely for
residents outside the North End to attend the Franklin Theater, although
as Mary Annese points out, children from other neighborhoods occasionally
patronized the Franklin ‘if grandma brought ‘em or something like that.’ 77
By the same token, although North Enders certainly had occasion to
attend the ‘better’ movie theaters, especially as adults, they were perhaps
likely to choose the Franklin as their primary theater, supplementing this
with visits downtown when they could afford it. Still, from the standpoint
of the working-class experience of economic necessity, which according
to Bourdieu produces a cultural disposition that defines cultural value in
pragmatic and often quantitative terms, the ostensible ‘added values’ the
movie palace provided in terms of architecture, service, and status might
have held little attraction. Richard McBride, for instance, recalls:

We liked the local theaters ‘cause you would get so much more!
Sometimes you went to the big ones, and you’d get a new Pathé, or
RKO, or whatever, and you’d get maybe a travelogue of what the
movies to come, and then you’d get a cartoon, one cartoon, and then
maybe a double feature if they had double features there, or maybe a
real class ‘A–1.’ And that was it! Two and a half hours and you were
out of there. Where if you went to the local ones, you generally got
about four hours …78

153
 g oing to the mov ies

With local ownership, low prices, continuous shows, films tailored to

the surrounding community, and an unpredictable and informal theater
environment, the Franklin was the site for a mode of moviegoing and
theater experience that was more open to residual working-class and ethnic
traditions of interactive sociability than was the formal and privatized mode
of film reception often found at movie palaces. Although the normalization
of vertical integration did influence the Franklin’s programming, helping
to force a shift from daily changes to four changes per week (dropping
down to three changes per week later in the 1930s), the theater’s overall
operations were hardly standardized according to the normative dictates of
the movie industry.
The moviegoing experience at the Franklin was not a ‘poor imitation’ of
the experience found at a studio-owned movie palace, nor was it a defining
realization of an ‘essential’ neighborhood theater experience. It was, simply,
a uniquely meaningful and distinctly accented mode of reception that took
root in palace shadows and grew in accord with the social geography and
cultural dispositions of Springfield’s North Enders.

154
 8

Cinemagoing in the United States

in the mid-1930s
A Study Based on the Variety Dataset

Mark Glancy and John Sedgwick

T h roughou t the 1930s, the entertainment industry trade journal

Variety published extensive information on the North American
exhibition market in each of its weekly issues. The ‘Pictures’ section of
Variety included weekly box-office reports from as many as 200 cinemas in
30 cities.1 The cinemas included were mainly ‘first-run’ venues with a large
seating capacity, but there were also some smaller, second-run and specialty
cinemas. The reports were organized by city, and they provided general
comments on the trading conditions, audience preferences and promotional
strategies seen in each city during the previous week, as well as more specific
reports from a selection of the city’s cinemas, indicating the box-office
results for the week, and listing the items on each cinema’s programme.
In the 1930s, the standard running time for a cinema programme was just
under three hours, and programmes could include one or two feature films,
a live stage performance, cartoons, newsreels, short films, as well as ‘bank
nights’ or ‘giveaways.’ 2 Variety’s comments on these programmes would
consider if one half of a double feature was regarded as a greater attraction
than the other, whether the stage show interested audiences more than the
film, or if in fact it was the bank night or a newsreel that drew the crowds.
The overwhelming impression given by the reports is that the cinemagoing
experience was seldom if ever limited to a single film in this era. Rather,
the cinema offered a diverse range of attractions and entertainment forms,
in which a single feature film might be a secondary or even an incidental
consideration.

155
 g oing to the mov ies

Altogether, the array of information available in Variety constitutes a

valuable historical source, and one that offers a highly revealing and often
fascinating glimpse into both the film industry and its audiences during the
Depression era. That it remains largely unexploited by scholars is most likely
due to the density of information in each issue as well as the manner in which
it is presented on the page; it is not easily or readily digestible. This paper has
been designed as a pilot study of the Variety data, demonstrating the range
of information available and how it can be used. However, even within our
designated time frame, October 1934 to October 1936, it is not within the
scope of the study to utilise the reports from all of the 200 cinemas and all
of the 30 cities. Instead, we have drawn data from tables that were published
monthly in Variety, which presented a selection of the data from the previous
four weeks. These tables offer a condensed and more easily digested overview
of each month’s box-office activity, and they include reports from 100 first-
run cinemas in 23 cities across the United States plus another four cinemas in
Montreal, Canada.3 In addition to the weekly box-office grosses, the Variety
tables also list each cinema’s seating capacity, admission price range and its
record box-office ‘high’ and ‘low.’ These cinemas and attendant statistics
are listed in Appendix One. This condensed sample of the data involves a
substantial body of information: the 104 cinemas represented in the tables
played 967 films on 8,694 separate programmes during the twenty-five
month period.4 In addition to the tables of data, we have also drawn upon
the weekly textual reports for further information on exhibition conditions
and practices, at least insofar as they relate to the data sample, in order to
offer a fuller picture than that provided by the box-office grosses alone.
The data will be used here to investigate four aspects of cinemagoing
during the Depression. The first centres on audience preferences and film
popularity, although it will be argued that, even with extensive box-office
data, judgements in this area often require careful qualification. The second
is a consideration of the diversity of films shown in these mainstream
cinemas, with particular attention to the presence of foreign films and
the extent to which the major Hollywood studios dominated this sector
of the exhibition market. It should be noted that the specific time period
chosen for this study, October 1934 through October 1936, coincides with
a concerted campaign by one foreign producer, Gaumont-British, to market
its films in the United States, and the data sample offers one means of
assessing the success of that campaign. The third concerns the practice
of ‘double billing,’ which proliferated in the early 1930s. Of the 8,694
programmes recorded in the dataset, 6,384 are single bills and 2,310 are
double bills, and we will consider which films played on double bills and
the circumstances in which they were paired.5 The fourth aspect is the use

156
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

of live stage shows to accompany feature films in cinemas. In the mid-1930s,

this remained a common feature of cinemagoing in the first-run cinemas
of major cities. Approximately 18 per cent of all programmes in the sample
combined a feature film with a live stage show, and the Variety data offers an
opportunity to examine the nature and success of this now largely forgotten
aspect of Depression-era exhibition practices.6

The Validity of the Data

Given that there were approximately 15,000 cinemas operating in the U.S.
during the mid-1930s, and that most films received between 2,000 and
10,000 bookings, it is clear that the dataset sample for this pilot study is a
highly select one.7 It includes reports from just 104 cinemas, and only 14 per
cent of the films (134 films) in the sample have more than twenty bookings,
while 55 per cent of the films (533 films) have ten or fewer bookings. Hence,
questions as to the validity of the sample should be addressed. On what basis
can a survey of cinemagoing practices and preferences at such a small sample
of cinemas be said to represent the cinemagoing experiences of Americans
more generally? The answer lies in the fact that the cinemas in the sample
represent a large proportion of the first-run sector of the exhibition market.8
The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. calculated
that in 1941 there were approximately 450 first-run cinemas in cities with
over 100,000 inhabitants, and so the sample represents approximately one-
quarter of the cinemas in this sector.9 These cinemas were at the top of
the exhibition hierarchy. They tended to be located in the most populous
areas, typically on the main streets of city centres, and they tended to be
the largest cinemas. They played films first, they played them exclusively
(within their area), and they charged the highest admission charges. As this
profile suggests, they were not entirely typical as cinemas and they had some
distinctive exhibition practices; for example, they were more likely to have
live entertainment and less likely to have double bills. However, the size and
scale of this market, and the large number of patrons that it drew, make
it an important one to examine and understand. In regard to cinemagoing
preferences, the fact that Variety focused its reports on this sector of the
market is itself revealing. These showcase cinemas provided the first test of
a film’s popularity before it went on to subsequent runs (the ‘second-run,’
‘third-run’ and so on) in cinemas that tended to have fewer seats, to charge
less for an admission, and to be located away from the main streets and in
outlying neighbourhoods or small towns.10
The pattern of popularity experienced in the set of first-run cinemas
and reported in Variety would not necessarily be replicated exactly in the

157
 g oing to the mov ies

lower orders of cinemas. Sedgwick’s study of cinemagoing in Britain during

the 1930s noted distinctive patterns of preferences between metropolitan
and regional audiences, and in particular between audiences attending
cinemas in London’s West End and those attending cinemas in Brighton
and in Bolton. It was noted, too, that the lower-order cinemas exhibited
films not seen in the higher-order tiers.11 Maltby’s study of American
cinema audiences also suggests that the notion of a single ‘undifferentiated’
audience is a misleading one, and that audience preferences were fragmented
along class, gender and geographical lines. The divide between rural and
metropolitan tastes is said to have been particularly pronounced, with
a wide gap existing between the preferences of metropolitan audiences
attending first-run cinemas on Broadway and those of provincial American
audiences.12
Yet the reports in Variety do not promote the notion of a single,
homogenous audience, and they came from much further afield than
Broadway and New York City. The cities in the data sample include the
five largest cities in the United States (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Detroit and Los Angeles) and also much smaller cities such as Birmingham,
Indianapolis, New Haven, St. Louis and Tacoma. All regions of the country
are represented, and in fact divergent tastes are readily apparent in the data.
Nevertheless, the fact of local, regional and other distinctions in taste is
not sufficient to explain the overall level of popularity of a film. Or, to
put it differently, films that were the ‘hits’ of their day needed to perform
extremely well across the first-run sector, and it is apparent that, for the
greater part, those films that did so were also relatively popular amongst
audiences attending lower-order cinemas. This can be demonstrated with
reference to the studio ledgers unearthed by Glancy and Jewell.13 Among
the figures reported in the Eddie Mannix (MGM), William Schaefer
(Warner Bros.) and C.J. Trevlin (RKO) ledgers are ‘domestic earnings
figures’ that represent the sum of all exhibition revenues received by these
studios for each of their films. These revenue figures included all earnings
accrued by the studios from every stage of exhibition and throughout all
regions of the United States and Canada. An analysis, comparing the Variety
dataset grosses and the ledger grosses for all MGM, RKO and Warner Bros.
films released in this period, indicates a very strong correlation between the
two sets of figures, from which it is possible to conclude that, in the vast
majority of cases, films that proved popular in the first-run market were
similarly popular across all exhibition sectors.
The issue of the validity of what was reported in Variety should also be
addressed. Were the figures reported each week truly an accurate measure of
the gross earnings of films? That question simply cannot be answered with

158
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

absolute certainty. However, there is an apparent emphasis on accuracy in

the reports: projected grosses were reported in each weekly issue and then
followed by confirmed grosses in the following week’s issue. Furthermore,
and as argued elsewhere, some confidence can be taken by the fact that
the trade treated Variety with respect. It told a story about the relative and
absolute popularity of films that accorded with the experience of those
whose livelihood was bound up in the film business. This is most important,
because without such veracity it seems highly unlikely that Variety would
have continued to serve as the industry’s principal trade publication.14

Film Preferences
The weekly box-office reports in Variety offer a rich source of information
for reception studies centred on the tastes and interests of local audiences,
as well as studies centred on the reception of stars, genres or individual
films across different locales. The value of the source lies not only in the
financial figures themselves, but in the textual reports that accompany them.
It is these reports that reveal the influences behind the figures, and the
comments regularly discuss local pricing strategies, promotional campaigns,
critical views expressed in the local press, and the age, class and gender
of those attending a film. For example, the success of The Gay Divorcee in
Cincinnati was said to stem, at least in its first week, from the excellent
reviews the film received in the local papers.15 In Brooklyn, The Crusades
was reported to have benefited from endorsements by local ministers, who
had been given a special preview screening of the film and then urged their
congregations to see it.16 A Midsummer Night’s Dream was reported to have
had limited success in St Louis because ticket prices were set as high as
$1.50 and ‘locals won’t pay top price.’ 17 In Kansas City, The Story of Louis
Pasteur did not attract a sizeable audience because the biopic was ‘too classy
for this town’ 18 In Minneapolis, The Painted Veil was a hit because audiences
considered its star, Greta Garbo, to be a ‘Scandinavian luminary,’ but in
Birmingham the same picture failed because ‘Garbo doesn’t mean anything
here and this film means less.’ 19 As some of these comments indicate, there
was a remarkable gap in regional tastes; a gap between ‘classy’ metropolitan
audiences, who paid ‘top price’ for biopics, adaptations of Shakespeare and
exotic melodramas, and the more provincial audiences, who preferred their
entertainment to be decidedly less expensive and less exotic. This divide is
particularly apparent in the reception given to the populist dramas of film
star Will Rogers, whose homespun values and common sense celebrated
the virtues of small town, middle-America. His films were merely routine
releases in eastern cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and

159
 g oing to the mov ies

Washington, D.C. Yet the further west and south they travelled, the more
their fortunes improved. In Birmingham, Rogers was actually the city’s
top star, and his In Old Kentucky and Steamboat Round the Bend were by
far the two top-earning films of the period in this city.20 He had a similar
status in cities such as Indianapolis, St. Louis and Tacoma. In these cities,
as in Birmingham, the preference for Rogers’ films was accompanied by
a predilection for Westerns, the family entertainment of Shirley Temple’s
films and the small-town dramas Ah, Wilderness and The Country Doctor.21
More sophisticated fare, meanwhile, did not last long, and metropolitan
favourites such as Chaplin’s Modern Times and the costume drama The
Barretts of Wimpole Street had a much more limited drawing power in these
smaller, provincial cities.22
A comparison of local and national film preferences is one of the
interesting opportunities the data offers. However, the comments that
accompany the box-office reports consistently indicate that levels of
attendance were governed by an array of factors, some of which had no
relation to a single film’s individual qualities or popularity. The notion
of ‘audience preferences’ thus becomes problematic, or at least in need of
careful scrutiny and qualification. Box-office takings in individual cities
were often reported to have been affected by competition from alternative
entertainment forms such as circuses, sporting events and state fairs. Games,
giveaways, bank nights and raffles, on the other hand, were said to attract
audiences who otherwise were reluctant to attend, not least because the first-
run houses offered prizes as substantial as a new car and, in one instance at
least, a fully furnished four-bedroom house.23 Good and bad weather was
frequently reported to have affected box-office either positively or negatively.
And establishing audience preferences is further complicated by the fact that
a single feature film was often only one item in a programme that had other
attractions. Even minor items such as short films were sometimes said to be
the primary attraction for audiences. The most notable example of this was
a film made of a boxing match between heavyweights Max Schmeling and
Joe Louis. The match took on a particular significance because Schmeling
was representing Nazi Germany while Louis was a black American, and the
short film, which circulated in the week after the match, was reportedly a
more important draw than the feature films it preceded.24 In some instances
newsreels were also cited as significant attractions for audiences. A March
of Time segment on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, for example, was
said to have garnered considerable interest, and in some cinemas more
interest than the feature films it accompanied.25 It was exceptional, though,
for such short items to be cited as a more significant attraction than the
feature film. Much more frequently, the issue of a single film’s popularity

160
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

was clouded by its inclusion on a programme with another feature film or

with live entertainment.
On their own, most feature films simply could not fill these capacious
theatres for several showings a day throughout an entire week-long
engagement, and so they were often paired with other features or with live
entertainment. However, there was a distinct minority of films that needed
little or no support. These were the top-earning films, and, as Table One
indicates, it was common for these films to enjoy runs of several weeks
in a single city. They rarely appeared on double bills during their first-
runs, and when they did it was usually in one of the smaller cities. In
the larger cities, an additional feature simply was not necessary to draw
audiences. Paradoxically, these top-earning films were actually more likely
to appear on programmes with live entertainment. This is because they
played in the largest cinemas of New York City and Chicago, and many
of these venues regularly featured live entertainment, regardless of the film
that was showing. Outside of these cities and that type of venue, they
played without the support of a live show. San Francisco, for example, had
engagements recorded in twenty-two of the twenty-four sample cities for a
total of seventy-nine weeks. It never appeared with live support and it only
played on a double bill during an unusually long three-week engagement in
Denver. Similarly, Top Hat had engagements recorded in twenty cities for
a total of fifty-four weeks. It appeared with live entertainment only during
its three-week engagement at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, where
the stage show was a regular feature, and it played on a double bill only
once, in Tacoma. The exceptional popularity of such films is evident in the
fact that a small number of films took a disproportionately large amount
of the box-office. The ten top earning films, for example, represent only 1.0
per cent of the films in the sample, but they account for 7.5 per cent of the
box-office gross for the period; and the fifty top earning films represent
just 5.2 per cent of the films in the sample but they took 25.3 per cent of
the total earnings.
The most popular films in the sample have some striking similarities.
All of the ten top-earning films are either costume dramas or musicals,
and the film that earned more than any other, San Francisco, belongs to
both categories. The popularity of costume dramas was not reliant upon
any single studio or set of stars. Those that rank among the fifty top-
earning films of the period, as listed in Table One, include a wide array
of performers and were produced by several different studios. If there is
a dominant strand of the genre, it is the tasteful or ‘culturally elevated’
strand, represented by such films as Mutiny on the Bounty, Anthony Adverse,
David Copperfield, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Gorgeous Hussy, The Barretts

161
 g oing to the mov ies

of Wimpole Street, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina and A Tale of Two Cities
These were films that were set within a relatively modern historical period
(the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries), and films that were either adapted
from canonical literature or centred on the lives of key historical figures.
Another type of costume drama, centred on medieval or ancient times, and
favouring spectacle over literary values, was far less prominent, as is evident
in the poorer performance of films such as Cleopatra, The Crusades and The
Last Days of Pompeii.26 In contrast to the costume drama, a large measure
of the popularity of the musical can be attributed to the phenomenal success
of a single star team. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made five films at
RKO during this time period. Four of their films (Top Hat, Swing Time,
Roberta and Follow the Fleet) appear among the ten top-earning films in the
sample, and the other (The Gay Divorcee) is not far behind. These distinctly
contemporary, witty and sophisticated musicals, which combined singing
and dancing, were broadly popular across audiences and in all regions.
MGM’s three-hour extravaganza, The Great Ziegfeld, was another musical-
in-costume that was exceptionally popular. The operettas of Grace Moore,
and Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy were also successful, but none
was in quite the same league as Astaire and Rogers.
Only two other stars came close to matching Astaire and Rogers. One
was Clark Gable. Altogether, Gable’s films earned more than those of any
other star in the sample period, but this was partly the result of the sheer
number of films that he had in cinemas over these twenty-five months.
They include the highly successful costume dramas San Francisco and
Mutiny on the Bounty, the romantic dramas in which he starred with Jean
Harlow (China Seas, Wife Versus Secretary) and Joan Crawford (Forsaking All
Others, Chained), and a few new releases that must have been considered
commercial disappointments (After Office Hours, Cain and Mabel, The Call of
the Wild). They also include re-releases of three of his earlier films (Dancing
Lady, It Happened One Night and Men in White). The latter are particularly
noteworthy as there were only twenty-five re-releases in the data sample,
and the fact that three of Gable’s films were chosen for re-release offers
another sign of his box-office standing. The other leading star was Shirley
Temple, and she too made an impact at least partly as a result of the sheer
volume of her films. Over the twenty-five months, she starred in no fewer
than eight new releases, some of which were markedly more successful than
others. This was an era in which audiences were able to see their favourite
stars in several films each year, and they were apparently willing to pick
and choose among the films.
With costume dramas and musicals as the most consistently popular
genres, it appears that escapism was a key aspect of cinemagoing for most

162
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

people in this period. Indeed, it is notable how very few of the most
successful films bear any significant traces of the harsh economic climate of
the 1930s. Among the 50 top earning films, those that come the closest are
Frank Capra’s Broadway Bill and Mr Deeds Goes to Town, the Warner Bros.
crime drama G-Men and the comedies Modern Times and My Man Godfrey,
but their engagement with contemporary concerns is oblique at best.
Nevertheless, the decade is often characterized as one in which a significant
number of films engaged with social issues and problems, and did so in a
realist manner.27 Many of the films chosen by historians to demonstrate
this view were notably poor performers within the data sample. The grosses
for both Fury, the story of small town prejudice and injustice, and Black
Fury, the story of a labour dispute, fell short of $250,000. So, too, did the
gross for Bullets or Ballots, another Warner Bros. crime film. The Informer,
John Ford’s account of ‘the troubles’ in Ireland, and the political drama The
President Vanishes fared even worse, with grosses below $200,000. Our Daily
Bread, meanwhile, was almost uniquely unpopular and grossed only $51,250.
This film, directed by King Vidor, centres on an impoverished young couple
who struggle to work a farm as a collective. It was shown throughout the
country, but it had the dubious distinction of ranking among the lowest
grossing films in almost every city it played. It is apparent that such films
were perhaps the least representative of audience preferences in the period,
as social relevance and box-office failure invariably went hand in hand.

Film Diversity
In some respects the data sample may seem to cover a narrow range of films.
Not only does a disproportionately large amount of the earnings go to a
minority of very popular films, but, as Table Two indicates, the vast majority
of earnings are attributed to films made by the major Hollywood studios.
Altogether, the sample includes 741 films made by MGM, Paramount,
Warner Bros., RKO, Twentieth Century-Fox, Fox, Columbia, Universal
and the independent American companies that produced for these studios
and for United Artists, and these films account for 94.6 per cent of all of
the earnings recorded in the sample. However, there is greater diversity
than this figure would seem to suggest, because the remaining 5.4 per cent
of earnings was derived from 226 films made by a further 52 production
companies. Double billing undoubtedly facilitated this diversity. As Taves
has argued, the proliferation of double billing in the early 1930s created a
demand for feature films that the major studios could not fulfil, and that
demand was met by smaller studios.28 This is borne out by the data sample,
which includes films produced by Republic (twenty-five films), Monogram

163
 g oing to the mov ies

(twenty-four), Chesterfield (fifteen), Mascot (thirteen), Invincible (eleven),

Liberty (ten), Atherton (eight), Buck Jones (four), Majestic (three), and an
additional twenty-five companies that had only one film listed. These films
rarely appeared on single bills. For the most part, their entrance into the
first-run market was a result of the need for ‘second features.’ This was
particularly true in the smaller cities, where double billing was much more
common and engagements were shorter, thus intensifying the demand for
additional films.
Foreign films also benefited from double billing. The Department of
Commerce reported that 190 foreign films were released in the United States
during 1935 alone, and that German and ‘Spanish’ films were the leading
imports.29 Very few of the films from non-English speaking countries appear
in the data sample, but when they do it is always as one feature within a
double bill. The Swiss travel documentary Wings Over Ethiopia was released
in the month that Italy invaded Ethiopia, and curiosity about the conflict
enabled the film to garner engagements on double bills in eleven cities. The
intriguingly titled Legong: Dance of the Virgins was actually an anthropo-
logical documentary from the Dutch East Indies, and it played on double
bills in three cities. The German film Mädchen in Uniform and the Mexican
film She-Devil Island were in the sample only by virtue of (separate) one-
week engagements on double bills. Of course, a distinct market for foreign
films and for ‘poverty row’ films existed beyond the first-run cinemas, and
their appearance in the data sample is only sporadic and marginal. Yet
it demonstrates the increased exhibition opportunities offered by double
billing, which appears to have opened at least some of the first-run sector’s
cinemas to a wide range of films.
British films benefited from double billing to a much greater extent than
other foreign films. Of the seventy-five British films in the data sample,
thirty-one played only on double bills, and in fact many had their original
running time cut to facilitate this.30 Other British films were much more
significant releases, which played widely and mainly as single features.
London Films was the most successful of all British companies, and The
Scarlet Pimpernel, with data sample earnings of nearly $335,000, was by far
the top-earning foreign film of the period, followed by the same company’s
The Ghost Goes West (with $255,000) and Things to Come ($205,000).31 It is
notable, though, that these films took an unusually large share of their
earnings from their highly successful New York City engagements. The
Scarlet Pimpernel earned a staggering $162,500 in the two weeks that
it played in Radio City Music Hall, but that level of success was not
maintained throughout the country. In fact, those earnings represented 49
per cent of the film’s earnings throughout the country, whereas the average

164
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

film took 21 per cent of its earnings from New York. The Ghost Goes West
took 44 per cent of its gross from four weeks at New York’s Rivoli Theatre,
and Things to Come took 37 per cent of its gross from three weeks at the
Rivoli. It is also notable that, beyond New York City, these films were most
likely to be held over for additional weeks in large cities such as Boston,
Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, while engagements elsewhere
did not last for more than a single week and yielded comparatively small
sums. In the divide between metropolitan and provincial tastes, British films
landed firmly on the metropolitan side.
London Films held a relatively privileged place among the British
production companies seeking access to American audiences. Its films
were released through United Artists, a major American distribution firm,
and that ensured that they received a high profile and extensive playing
dates. Yet the company produced only eight films within this period, and
so its impact was limited. Gaumont-British had much more ambitious
plans. It intended to release most, if not all, of its British-made films in
North America, and in 1934 it established its own American distribution
company to facilitate this. Some success in this endeavour is apparent: no
fewer than twenty-four Gaumont-British productions appear in the data
sample, and many of these played in one of New York City’s largest first-
run houses, the Roxy Theatre. There, in one of the country’s largest and
most lucrative venues, films such as the Alfred Hitchcock thrillers The 39
Steps and The Secret Agent, the musical It’s Love Again, the futuristic drama
Transatlantic Tunnel, the historical adventure film Rhodes of Africa and the
melodrama Little Friend were popular enough to be held-over for a second
week, and each earned between $60,000 and $80,000 in this venue alone.
These notable successes undoubtedly helped the company to gain playing
dates further afield, and the films all showed in major venues throughout
the country. A familiar pattern emerged, however, in which the box-office
takings dropped markedly outside of New York City and particularly in the
smaller and more provincial cities. The company’s other films, meanwhile,
did not enjoy such wide releases and were more likely to be seen on double
bills wherever they did play. This intermittent success was clearly not enough
for Gaumont-British, which ceased film production in 1937.32 Nevertheless,
it is apparent that for a time in the mid-1930s the company was able to
release more British films in the United States than any other company,
and to distribute them widely. In doing so, Gaumont-British came close
to matching Hollywood’s Columbia and Universal studios (in both total
revenues and per-film averages), and achieved a status that was far above
the ‘poverty-row’ level. The same cannot be said for the other British
companies, including major concerns such as British International and

165
 g oing to the mov ies

British and Dominions, which, by any measure, languished at the bottom

of the rankings.33

Double Billing
The question of how to attribute the earnings of a programme that includes
two feature films is a difficult one. One option would be to attribute
the earnings to both films, on the grounds that audiences saw both, and
earnings levels are meant to reflect the size of the audience. However,
this method would double the revenue recorded for some programmes and
thereby distort the true levels of earnings within the data sample. A second
option rests on the notion that double bills were formed by combining a
popular ‘A’ film with a more obscure ‘B’ film, and that, because audiences
were primarily drawn to the ‘A’ films, all or most the earnings should be
attributed to the ‘A’ film. This combination of ‘A’ and ‘B’ films is evident in
some double bills. For example, the only double billing recorded in the data
sample for MGM’s San Francisco was in Denver, where it was accompanied
by another MGM film, The Three Godfathers, which had a much lower level
of earnings and played most of its engagements as a double feature. It
therefore seems reasonable to assume that audiences in Denver were drawn
primarily to see San Francisco and that the earnings should be attributed
accordingly. However, in many other instances the ‘A’ and ‘B’ divide is not
so clear. For example, The Three Godfathers also played on double features
with RKO’s The Witness Chair, Columbia’s Meet Nero Wolfe and Warner
Bros.’ The Case of the Velvet Claws, and it is impossible to determine which
might be the ‘A’ or ‘B’ film in these cases. All of these films played most but
not all of their engagements on double bills, and they were usually paired
with similarly low-profile films. The majority of double billings, in fact,
seem to be various combinations of what Taves refers to as ‘shaky A films,’
‘programmers’ from major studios, and ‘B’ films from smaller studios.34 That
is, most double bills did not have a strong and weak component, but were
combinations of relatively weak films. Hence, the third option, to divide the
earnings evenly between the two films, seems to be the fairest and most
appropriate method of dealing with double bills, and it is the one that we
have adopted here.35
Gomery states that the ‘trend for double features’ began in 1930 as a
result of economic hardship. In the year following the Wall Street crash,
and as the economy spiralled downward, the public were increasingly less
inclined to spend money on a leisure time activity such as cinemagoing
unless they were offered the greater value of seeing two films for the price of
one.36 By 1934, the number of cinemas that regularly showed double features

166
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

was estimated to be between 50 per cent and 75 per cent.37 Within the data
sample, it is apparent that practices varied widely and were set according
to local conditions. In the smaller cities, such as New Haven and Tacoma,
double billing was the norm within the first-run sector, and single features
were a rarity. In larger cities, double billing was used selectively and to
support films that were not perceived to fit clearly into either the ‘A’ or ‘B’
category. The fact that Variety often reported on double bills by commenting
on which film was the greater attraction is indicative of this uncertainty.38
Many of the very largest cities, meanwhile, did not have double bills at all
within the first-run sector. Exhibitors in Chicago, Minneapolis, New York,
Philadelphia and Washington, DC, held to mutual agreements that banned
double billing in these venues. One reason for this was that the practice
increased costs for the exhibitor, who had to pay for two films rather than
one, but another and perhaps a more important reason was to protect the
special quality of the first-run cinemas, which were meant to be movie
palaces rather than bargain cinemas. Audiences paid a higher admission
fee to attend these cinemas and they may have welcomed the change of
pace that a single-feature programme provided. This is evident in the fact
that, although double bills were appreciated as a good value, there were also
many objections to them.
A survey conducted by Warner Bros. in 1936 indicated that 78 per cent
of those polled preferred single bills, and an array of complaints about
double bills explained this preference.39 Among them was the length of
programmes, some of which were extended to four hours in order to include
a second feature. Conversely, there were complaints that some programmes
were kept within three hours by cutting the films to the point where they
became noticeably ‘jerky.’ It was also said that ‘a good picture is invariably
coupled with a bad one’ This complaint did not necessarily refer to the
aforementioned divide between ‘A’ films and ‘B’ films, but could also reflect
the often haphazard method of pairing films. Audiences complained that
the films on a double feature did not ‘match’ one another.40 This complaint
was voiced separately by exhibitors, who pointed out that films were not
planned as double bills at either the production or distribution stage, to
ensure that they would complement one another on a single programme.41
Instead, they were often combined simply on the basis of availability. Thus,
odd pairings abounded. Within the data sample, these include double bills
that combined The Informer with the society farce Going Highbrow; Fritz
Lang’s Fury and the children’s musical Let’s Sing Again; Robert Flaherty’s
documentary Man of Aran with the crime serial Charlie Chan in Paris; an
adaptation of Dickens’ Great Expectations and the dating agency comedy
Bachelor Bait; and the German film Mädchen in Uniform with Dealers in

167
 g oing to the mov ies

Death, a documentary expose of the munitions industry in the First World

War. As intriguingly odd as some of these combinations appear to be, it is
plain to see that an audience paying to see one of the films was unlikely to
find the other as appealing. Of course, the Warner Bros. survey also found
a minority of 22 per cent who favoured double bills, and one commonly
cited reason for preferring them was that second features replaced vaudeville
stage acts in many venues. Or, as one patron put it, ‘If you only have only
one feature at the movies you’ll have vaudeville, and vaudeville is lousy.’ 42

Live Acts
Many of the theatres in the data sample had been built as vaudeville houses
rather than as cinemas, and in earlier decades films had been only one item
on programmes dominated by vaudeville acts. Films then gradually pushed
the vaudeville acts off the programmes. By the mid-1930s the decline of
vaudeville was frequently discussed in the trade papers, and it was termed
the ‘orphan child of show business’ by Variety.43 One major factor was the
expense of live entertainment, which many venues could not afford in the
depression. Another factor was said to be that vaudeville had relied upon
the same material and formulae for too long, and the familiar range of
acts, including acrobats, magicians, comedy sketches, dancers, vocalists,
impersonators and animal acts, was said to have lost its appeal.44 The most
significant factor, however, was undoubtedly the advent of ‘talking pictures,’
which allowed films to take up vaudeville’s staple entertainments: spoken
comedy, tap-dancing, and music in a variety of forms. Films could not
duplicate the excitement of a good live performance, of course, but they could
record the best performances of some of the world’s greatest performers.
They could be distributed more widely than even the most extensive stage
tour, and they could do all of this at less cost to the exhibitor.
Many of the most popular films of this period borrowed from vaudeville
even as they replaced it. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, for example,
began their careers (separately) in vaudeville, and their films typically
foreground their status as stage entertainers. While the films do not adhere
to a ‘revue’ format, they nonetheless offer a variety of entertainment forms,
including a range of singing and dancing styles as well as comedy in the
form of both verbal ‘gags’ and situational sketches. Moreover, the stage is
frequently foregrounded within their films. Swing Time, for example, begins
with a shot of the proscenium arch in a large theatre. On stage, a team
of dancers can be seen, but it is a long shot from the perspective of the
theatre audience, and so it is difficult to discern the individual performers,
or even to see that Astaire himself is leading the team. This opening shot

168
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

thus offers only the limited vantage point of an audience watching a stage
performance. The shots that follow demonstrate the advantages of cinema.
They offer not only much closer views of Astaire, but they also allow the
audience to see the spaces backstage and in the dressing rooms, and they
reveal musical performances that are private (or ‘integrated’ into the film’s
story). Furthermore, the subsequent stage performances are freed from the
constraints of the proscenium, once again demonstrating the privileged
position available to the cinema audience. The only blatant reference to
vaudeville comes in the very first lines of dialogue, in which an ageing
magician stands just off-stage complaining that his act has been cut from
the show because it was ‘too old-fashioned.’ He attempts to perform a card
trick for a stage hand, but the stage hand is too captivated by his close
view of Astaire dancing on stage to notice the old-timer’s routine. It is a
brief scene, but the camera’s backstage view, the stage hand’s privileged
position, and the notion of new and old entertainment forms can serve as
a succinct demonstration of the decline of vaudeville and the triumph of
musical cinema.
Another key film of this period, the musical The Great Ziegfeld,
demonstrates a different type of self-consciousness toward vaudeville.
The film seems designed to satiate the audience’s appetite for staged
entertainment. As a ‘biopic’ of the showman Florenz Ziegfeld, it offers
a veritable history of popular staged entertainments, at least within its
subject’s lifetime. It begins with carnival attractions and culminates on
Broadway with the spectacular Ziegfeld Follies stage show, and throughout
it features all manner of acts and performances. It is essentially a very long
and varied ‘revue’ programme, and one that is linked together rather thinly
by the biographical story line. Its extraordinary 170-minute running time
may have been a canny strategy on the part of MGM, which produced
the film. Very little time was left for anything else on the programme. An
abbreviated newsreel, a cartoon or a trailer may have been possible, but
there certainly could not have been a stage programme or second feature.
And that, of course, meant that the box-office earnings would not have to
be shared with any other attraction. It is clear that audiences did not feel
cheated, though, as The Great Ziegfeld earned one of the top grosses of the
period, and in fact its fifteen-week engagement at the Carthay Circle in
Los Angeles was the longest recorded in the data sample.
Even if vaudeville was being eclipsed in the mid-1930s, it was not yet
time to sound the death knell for live entertainment in combination with
films. One of the most striking aspects of the data sample is the extent
to which live entertainment was still used as an accompaniment to film
screenings in the 1930s. Of the 104 cinemas represented in the data sample,

169
 g oing to the mov ies

45 were what Variety referred to as ‘combination houses,’ or theatres that

combined live and film entertainment on the same bill. For the most part,
these were the largest theatres in the largest cities. The two largest, New
York’s Radio City Music Hall and the Roxy, had approximately 6000 seats
each, and each regularly combined film and stage shows. The stage shows
were a key part of their identity and appeal, and they were also crucial
to the theatres’ ability to draw in thousands of patrons at advanced prices
and for several daily shows. Of the other New York venues in the sample,
the Capitol (5,486 seats) and Paramount (3,664) had live shows in most
but not all weeks, while the Center (3,700), Strand (2,758), Rivoli (2,092)
and Rialto (750) theatres never did. A similar pattern held in other large
and medium-sized cities, with the larger venues more likely to offer live
entertainment and the smaller venues very rarely offering it. In the smaller
cities ‘combination houses’ were rare, and cinemas offered a ‘double bill’ of
two feature films rather than combining stage and screen entertainments.
Even in these cities, however, the occasional live performance could be
extraordinarily successful. Throughout the country and in cities large and
small, the appeal of live entertainment in combination with films was often
remarkably strong.
In some rare instances, live performances were tailored to fit with or to
celebrate a film. This was reserved for the most important releases, such as
Top Hat, and it was done only in the grandest venues, such as Radio City
Music Hall. There, Top Hat was preceded by a stage show that featured a
projected backdrop of the film’s title designs, a recreation on stage of the
film’s ballroom set, dancers in top hats and tails, and an all-male choir with
twenty-four members singing the film’s signature song, ‘The Piccolino.’ 45
In most other instances, if a strong ‘A’ film was accompanied by a live
attraction, it would not be a particularly prominent one. When MGM’s
Wife Versus Secretary was shown at the Loew’s State in New York City, for
example, Variety commented that the ‘strong screen fare’ meant that the
theatre was offering only a ‘routine’ live programme.46 It was the weaker
‘A’ films and ‘B’ films playing as single features that needed to be coupled
with a strong live programme in order to improve or maintain audience
numbers. One particularly notable example of this concerns Paramount’s
The Scarlet Empress. Directed by Josef Von Sternberg and starring Marlene
Dietrich, The Scarlet Empress is now considered a classic film, but when it was
first released in the autumn of 1934 it met with dismal box-office returns.
It was not held over for a second week in any of the thirteen engagements
represented in the data sample, and it earned its four highest box-office
grosses in the cities where it was accompanied by a stage show. In one of
those cities, Pittsburgh, the Stanley Theatre postponed its engagement of

170
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

the film for several weeks, waiting until it could book a stage show that
would ‘carry’ the film through its one week engagement. Hence, The Scarlet
Empress was screened on a programme that also included a variety show
led by the popular Fred Waring Orchestra, and the box-office gross for the
week was a remarkably high $26,000. This would make it seem as though
The Scarlet Empress was one of the leading attractions in Pittsburgh during
the 1934–6 period, and yet according to Variety, it was the live act that
drew audiences to the theatre that week and the live act that compensated
for the ‘100 minutes of dull celluloid.’ 47
While traditional vaudeville was seldom seen as a key attraction in the
mid-1930s, stage shows led by a prominent ‘headline name’ often drew
remarkable results. These appearances could add considerably to the venue’s
overhead costs. Top-rated performers such as Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and
Milton Berle were able to earn between $7,500 and $15,000 for a one-week
engagement, as well as garnering a percentage of the box-office takings.48
Exhibitors were willing to pay such sums only during the weeks in which
the main feature film was thought to be a weak attraction. Pittsburgh
offers further examples of the effect that prominent live acts could have
in cinemas, as well as examples of the way in which ‘combination houses’
operated outside of New York City. The two largest venues in Pittsburgh,
the Penn and Stanley theatres, regularly used headline acts to support
minor feature films. As Table Three indicates, this strategy was at times
highly successful. Films such as Behold My Wife, Exclusive Story, Hide Out,
Dangerous, O’Shaughnessy’s Boy, Sequoia and Hands Across the Table, which
had a much lower profile in other cities, were among the twenty top-
earning attractions in Pittsburgh during this period, and in each case a live
performance was credited with drawing the crowds. When more prominent
films played in these theatres, however, stage shows were not usually offered
and there was no need for shows with an expensive ‘headline’ act. A
similar pattern is also seen in other major cities, and Table Four and Table
Five demonstrate the impact that live performances had in Detroit and
Minneapolis, respectively. Live appearances by performers such as Amos
‘n’ Andy, John Boles, George Burns and Gracie Allen, the Marx Brothers,
Stepin Fetchit, Ed Sullivan, and the orchestras led by Cab Calloway, Eddie
Duchin and Guy Lombardo, were able to draw audiences to see films that
did not fare nearly so well on their own.
Many of these performers had begun in vaudeville, but by the mid-1930s
they were known primarily for their work in radio and films. That they
could return to the stage as vital support for struggling film exhibitors is one
indication of the cross-fertilization that allowed vaudeville, radio and film to
intermix and evolve. At this point, radio was of course much more important

171
 g oing to the mov ies

to their drawing power than vaudeville. Radio ownership doubled over

the course of the decade, and although there was initially some suspicion
and hostility in Hollywood toward the new medium, by the middle of the
decade the relationship between film and radio had become a mutually
beneficial one.49 Nationally syndicated radio programmes promoted and
publicized film stars and the latest film releases. Films such as Paramount’s
The Big Broadcast of 1936 and The Big Broadcast of 1937 portrayed the
backstage operations of a radio station and offered the dramatic rationale for
a succession of comedy and musical acts. Crucially, they also gave audiences
the opportunity to see the performers they normally only heard. There was
also at least one instance of a syndicated radio programme forming the
basis of a touring stage show that played in cinemas. This was the ‘Major
Bowes Amateur Show,’ an amateur talent contest hosted on the radio by
Major Bowes. The winners of the radio competition were placed in Bowes’
stage revues, which toured the country playing in combination houses.
These stage shows were essentially amateur vaudeville hours, featuring the
usual mix of singers, tap dancers, magicians and comedians, and yet they
drew audiences into cinemas in a manner that standard vaudeville no longer
could. They could even support ‘B’ films playing as a single feature in a
major venue.50 Their popularity was so remarkable that in 1935 the shows
were also filmed as ‘short subjects’ so that they could be distributed more
widely and to smaller venues.
The persistence of vaudeville—albeit in various guises—is one of the most
notable characteristics of this period of cinemagoing, but the combination
houses were always searching for new and different acts. Among the
many other stage acts that preceded film screenings in this period were
acrobats, roller skaters and, for a brief time, some venues even tried staging
badminton or basketball games before showing a film.51 These were short-
lived phenomena. Nevertheless, they offer further evidence that notions of
what constituted an evening’s entertainment at the cinema continued to
include a surprisingly wide array of different attractions in the 1930s.

Conclusion
Today, Variety continues to offer its readers information on box-office
grosses in North America, but its reports focus entirely on the national
level and little (if any) attention is given to individual cities or to specific
cinemas. This is undoubtedly appropriate in the contemporary context.
Audiences today usually go to the cinema to see a single film rather than a
programme of attractions. The majority of cinemas lack individual character
and a distinct identity. And films are promoted through national rather

172
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

than local campaigns. In the 1930s, by contrast, there was apparently little
interest among Variety’s readers in national box-office grosses; the box-office
earnings that were reported so carefully each week were not added together
to form a national gross. The national level simply was not important.
Rather, it was important to report what was happening in individual cities
and cinemas, and how audiences were responding to specific programmes,
promotions and pricing strategies. The cinemagoing experience itself varied
widely, even at the local level, and the task of Variety was to report on the
success or failure of any number of variations. Thus, the reports allow film
historians to observe changes in industry and exhibition practices, to study
the context in which films were shown and how that changed over time,
to assess audience preferences and compare the tastes of different cities or
regions, and, of course, to examine the journey of a single film as it makes
its way across the country and through various exhibition contexts. Its focus
on a representative selection of the exhibition market means that the Variety
dataset is not a comprehensive source. Yet it is a remarkably detailed and
informative source and, to date, it is one that has been largely overlooked
or under used.

Table 8.1 The fifty top earning films in the data sample
A ranking of the fifty top earning films, based on all of the earnings recorded in
the data sample, with indications of how many engagements were recorded, the total
number weeks that each film played, and the number of weeks that it appeared on a
double bill and the number of weeks it appeared with a stage show.

Weeks Weeks
Sum of all No. of No. of on a with a
Film box-office cities weeks double stage
(Studio, director, year) earnings played played bill show Top-billed stars
1 San Francisco 1,147,650 22 79 3 0 Clark Gable
(MGM, Van Dyke, 1936) Jeanette
MacDonald
2 Top Hat 1,132,550 20 54 1 3 Fred Astaire
(RKO, Sandrich, 1935) Ginger Rogers
3 The Great Ziegfeld 966,700 22 66 0 0 William Powell
(MGM, Leonard, 1936) Myrna Loy
4 Swing Time 964,650 21 48 6 8 Fred Astaire
(RKO, Stevens, 1936) Ginger Rogers
5 Mutiny on the Bounty 939,100 21 53.5 0 0 Clark Gable
(MGM, Lloyd, 1935) Charles Laughton

173
 g oing to the mov ies

Weeks Weeks
Sum of all No. of No. of on a with a
Film box-office cities weeks double stage
(Studio, director, year) earnings played played bill show Top-billed stars
6 Roberta 873,650 19 51 0 10 Irene Dunne
(RKO, Seiter, 1935) Fred Astaire
7 Follow the Fleet 806,600 20 47 0 0 Fred Astaire
(RKO, Sandrich, 1936) Ginger Rogers
8 Anthony Adverse 793,000 20 47.5 0 1 Fredric March
(WB, Leroy, 1936) Olivia De
Havilland
9 David Copperfield 738,450 23 48 2 2 W.C. Fields
(MGM, Cukor, 1935) Lionel Barrymore
10 Love Me Forever 731,900 21 43 3 9 Grace Moore
(Col, Schertzinger, 1935) Leo Carrillo
11 One Night of Love 711,300 21 47.5 5 8 Grace Moore
(Col, Schertzinger,1934) Tullio Carminati
12 The Gay Divorcee 661,500 21 41.5 2 3 Fred Astaire
(RKO, Sandrich,1934) Ginger Rogers
13 China Seas 644,900 23 45.5 0 0 Clark Gable
(MGM, Garnett, 1935) Jean Harlow
14 Rose Marie 634,100 22 44 0 0 Jeanette
(MGM, Van Dyke, 1936) MacDonald
Nelson Eddy
15 The Barretts of Wimpole St 623,700 21 40 0 5 Norma Shearer
(MGM, Franklin, 1934) Fredric March
16 Broadway Bill 620,850 22 41 8 6 Warner Baxter
(Col, Capra, 1934) Myrna Loy
17 G-Men 613,650 23 39 3 8 James Cagney
(WB, Keighley, 1935) Ann Dvorak
18 Modern Times 608,270 18 40.5 5 0 Charles Chaplin
(Chaplin, Chaplin, 1936) Paulette Goddard
19 Lives of a Bengal Lancer 605,200 22 37 1 6 Gary Cooper
(Par, Hathaway, 1935) Franchot Tone
20 My Man Godfrey 605,050 22 45 12 1 William Powell
(Uni, La Cava, 1936) Carole Lombard
21 The Gorgeous Hussy 598,450 23 48 9 4 Joan Crawford
(MGM, Brown, 1936) Robert Taylor
22 Mr Deeds Goes to Town 591,150 21 48.5 10 2 Gary Cooper
(Col, Capra, 1936) Jean Arthur

174
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

Weeks Weeks
Sum of all No. of No. of on a with a
Film box-office cities weeks double stage
(Studio, director, year) earnings played played bill show Top-billed stars
23 Mary of Scotland 589,800 21 34 7 6 Katharine
(RKO, Ford, 1936) Hepburn
Fredric March
24 The Big Broadcast of 1937 567,950 20 32 5 5 Jack Benny
(Par, Leisen, 1936) George Burns
25 Under Two Flags 567,150 21 33 1 3 Ronald Colman
(TCF, Lloyd, 1936) Claudette Colbert
26 Belle of the Nineties 564,825 19 31.5 1 3 Mae West
(Par, McCarey, 1934) Roger Pryor
27 The Broadway Melody of 530,400 22 43 0 0 Jack Benny
1936 Eleanor Powell
(MGM, 1935)
28 Wife vs. Secretary 529,300 23 39 2 2 Clark Gable
(MGM, Brown, 1936) Jean Harlow
29 The Littlest Rebel 527,800 21 29.5 7 4 Shirley Temple
(TCF, Butler, 1935) John Boles
30 Libeled Lady 517,275 19 43 13 0 Jean Harlow
(MGM, Conway, 1936) Myrna Loy
31 Poor Little Rich Girl 512,450 22 35 9 7 Shirley Temple
(TCF, Cummings, 1936) Alice Faye
32 The Green Pastures 509,350 21 34 5 0 Rex Ingram
(WB, Connelly & Oscar Polk
Keighley, 1936)
33 The Little Colonel 507,800 19 27 1 5 Shirley Temple
(Fox, Butler, 1935) Lionel Barrymore
34 Show Boat 505,950 20 45 4 1 Irene Dunne
(Uni, Whale, 1936) Allan Jones
35 Forsaking All Others 503,145 21 39 2 2 Joan Crawford
(MGM, Van Dyke, 1934) Clark Gable
36 The Little Minister 500,500 19 30.5 2 11 Katharine
(RKO, Wallace, 1934) Hepburn
John Beal
37 His Brother’s Wife 492,850 23 34 8 1 Robert Taylor
(MGM, Van Dyke, 1936) Barbara Stanwyck
38 Becky Sharp 490,550 20 33 1 2 Miriam Hopkins
(Pioneer, Mamoulian, Frances Dee
1935)

175
 g oing to the mov ies

Weeks Weeks
Sum of all No. of No. of on a with a
Film box-office cities weeks double stage
(Studio, director, year) earnings played played bill show Top-billed stars
39 Naughty Marietta 488,450 20 44 3 6 Jeanette
(MGM, Van Dyke, 1935) MacDonald
Nelson Eddy
40 The Country Doctor 486,350 22 32.5 2 4 Dionne
(TCF, King, 1936) Quintuplets
Jean Hersholt
41 Anna Karenina 485,400 21 34 1 1 Greta Garbo
(MGM, Brown, 1935) Fredric March
42 A Tale of Two Cities 481,200 21 33 1 0 Ronald Colman
(MGM, Conway, 1936) Elizabeth Allan
43 Little Lord Fauntleroy 476,300 21 31 6 2 Freddie
(Selznick, Cromwell, Bartholomew
1936) Dolores
Barrymore
44 Curly Top 475,500 21 33 3 0 Shirley Temple
(Fox, Cummings, 1935) John Boles
45 No More Ladies 474,050 22 39 4 6 Joan Crawford
(MGM, Griffith, 1935) Robert
Montgomery
46 Strike Me Pink 466,600 20 37 2 0 Eddie Cantor
(Goldwyn, Taurog, 1936) Ethel Merman
47 Trail of the Lonesome Pine 450,250 21 36 5 5 Sylvia Sidney
(Par, Hathaway, 1936) Henry Fonda
48 Les Miserables 447,600 15 30 2 3 Fredric March
(TC, Boleslawski, 1935) Charles Laughton
49 The Bride Comes Home 446,650 21 26 6 7 Claudette Colbert
(Par, Ruggles, 1936) Fred MacMurray
50 Captain Blood 444,650 22 34 2 1 Errol Flynn
(WB, Curtiz, 1935) Olivia De
Havilland

176
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

Table 8.2 The leading production companies

A ranking of the leading production companies in the data sample, based on the sum
of all box-office earnings.

Percentage of Average box-

Studio/ Box-office total box-office Number of office per film
Rank Production company total ($) earnings releases ($)
1 MGM 23,179,352 19.14 107 216,629
2 Paramount 19,631,855 16.21 131 149,861
3 Warner Bros. 17,526,849 14.47 123 142,495
4 RKO 13,715,798 11.32 82 167,266
5 Twentieth Century-Fox 8,250,675 6.81 45 183,348
6 Fox 8,210,000 6.78 60 136,833
7 Columbia 7,875,432 6.50 89 88,488
8 Universal 6,623,519 5.47 69 95,993
9 Goldwyn (UA) 3,121,066 2.58 9 346,785
10 20th Century (UA) 2,677,500 2.21 8 334,688
11 Gaumont-British 1,805,935 1.49 24 75,247
12 Reliance (UA) 1,201,950 0.99 6 200,325
13 London Films (UA) 1,021,925 0.84 8 127,741
14 Republic 908,355 0.75 25 36,334
15 Chaplin (UA) 608,270 0.50 1 608,270
16 Pioneer (RKO) 582,175 0.48 2 291,088
17 Selznick (UA) 476,300 0.39 1 476,300
18 Pickford-Lasky (UA) 395,450 0.33 2 197,725
19 Principal 366,850 0.30 5 73,370
20 Monogram 311,690 0.26 24 12,987
21 Gainsborough 272,190 0.22 8 34,024
22 Mascot 270,750 0.22 13 20,827
23 Roach (MGM) 266,175 0.22 3 88,725
24 British & Dominions 252,300 0.21 7 36,043
(UA)
25 Hecht-MacArthur 195,767 0.16 3 65,256
(Paramount)
26 Liberty 143,985 0.12 10 14,399
27 Atherton 122,850 0.10 8 15,356

177
 g oing to the mov ies

Percentage of Average box-

Studio/ Box-office total box-office Number of office per film
Rank Production company total ($) earnings releases ($)
28 Invincible 93,700 0.08 11 8,518
29 Chesterfield 79,650 0.07 15 5,310
30 British International 77,000 0.06 12 6,417
31 Van Beuren 73,800 0.06 2 36,900
32 Select 68,966 0.06 3 22,989
33 Mr & Mrs Martin 68,750 0.06 1 68,750
Johnson
34 Lianofilm 67,085 0.06 1 67,085
35 Howard B Franklin 64,450 0.05 1 64,450

35 other companies 503,550 0.42 48 10,491

TOTAL 121,111,913 100.00 967 125,245

178
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

Table 8.3 The top attractions in Pittsburgh

The top attractions in Pittsburgh, ranked by local earnings and with a comparison to
national ranking.

Film/ Local Local National Local Weeks Live artist/

studio earnings ranking ranking cinema played headline name
G-Men $52,500 1 17 Stanley 2 Folies Bergere
(WB)
Anthony Adverse $47,500 2 8 Stanley 2 none
(WB)
Mutiny on the Bounty $44,200 3 5 Penn 1 none
(MGM) Warner 2 none
Green Pastures $35,300 4 32 Penn 1 none
(WB) Warner 1 none
Behold My Wife $34,500 5 217 Stanley 1 Jack Benny
(Par)
The Gorgeous Hussy $33,000 6= 21 Penn 2 none
(MGM)
San Francisco $33,000 6= 1 Penn 1 none
(MGM) Warner 1 none
Top Hat $33,000 6= 2 Penn 2 none
(RKO)
Rose Marie $32,700 9 14 Penn 1 none
(MGM) Warner 1 none
The Great Zieg feld $32,500 10 3 Penn 2 none
(MGM)
Broadway Melody of $31,500 11 27 Penn 1 none
1936 Warner 1 none
(MGM)
Exclusive Story $31,000 12= 215 Stanley 1 Jack Benny
(MGM)
Hide Out $31,000 12= 210 Penn 1 Ted Lewis
(MGM) Orchestra
China Seas $30,500 14 13 Penn 1 none
(MGM) Warner 1 none
Dangerous $30,000 15= 176 Stanley 1 Major Bowes
(WB)
O’Shaughnessy’s Boy $30,000 15= 242 Stanley 1 Major Bowes
(MGM)

179
 g oing to the mov ies

Film/ Local Local National Local Weeks Live artist/

studio earnings ranking ranking cinema played headline name
Devil Dogs of the Air $28,500 17 106 Stanley 2 none
(WB)
Sequoia $28,000 18 251 Penn 1 Eddie Cantor
(MGM)
Hands Across the Table $27,600 19 114 Stanley 1 Guy Lombardo
(Par)
Swing Time $27,000 20= 4 Stanley 1 none
(RKO) Penn 1 none
Follow the Fleet $27,000 20= 7 Stanley 1 none
(RKO) Warner 1 none

Table 8.4 The top attractions in Detroit

The top attractions in Detroit, ranked by local earnings and with a comparison to
national ranking. All of the films played as the single feature film.

Film/ Local Local National Local Weeks Live artist/

studio earnings ranking ranking cinema played headline name
The Littlest Rebel $60,000 1 29 Fox 2 Molasses’n’
(TCF) January
Roberta $54,000 2 6 Fox 2 none
(RKO)
Curly Top $53,000 3 44 Fox 2 none
(Fox)
In Old Kentucky $50,000 4 81 Fox 2 vaudeville
(Fox)
Life Begins at Forty $49,500 5 97 Fox 2 Dorsey Brothers
(Fox)
The Country Doctor $49,000 6 40 Fox 2 Phil Baker
(TCF)
Love Me Forever $47,900 7 10 Fox 2 none
(Col)
San Francisco $45,000 8 1 United 4 none
(MGM) Artists
Mutiny on the Bounty $44,500 9= 5 United 3 none
(MGM) Artists
Private Number $44,500 9= 58 Fox 2 Eddie Duchin
(TCF)

180
 cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

Film/ Local Local National Local Weeks Live artist/

studio earnings ranking ranking cinema played headline name
King of Burlesque $40,000 11 123 Fox 2 Clyde Beatty
(TCF)
Poor Little Rich Girl $39,500 12 31 Fox 2 Ed Sullivan Unit
(TCF)
His Brother’s Wife $39,000 13 37 Michigan 1 NBC Radio Unit
(MGM)
Modern Times $38,800 14 18 United 3 none
(Chaplin) Artists
Libeled Lady $37,500 15 30 United 3 none
(MGM) Artists
Charlie Chan in $36,000 16 262 Fox 1 Cab Calloway
Shanghai
(Fox)
Anthony Adverse $35,500 17 8 United 3 none
(WB) Artists
The Little Minister $35,000 18 36 Fox 2 vaudeville
(RKO)
The Bride Walks Out $34,000 19= 168 Michigan 1 Major Bowes’
(RKO) Amateurs
Rhythm on the Range $34,000 19= 53 Michigan 1 Bob Ripley Unit
(Par)

Table 8.5 The top attractions in Minneapolis

The top attractions in Minneapolis, ranked by local earnings and with a comparison to
national ranking. All of the films played as the single feature film.

Film Local Local National Local Weeks Live artist/

studio earnings ranking ranking cinema(s) played headline name
Roberta $34,000 1 6 Orpheum 2 none
(RKO)
The Bride Comes Home $32,000 2 49 Minnesota 1 Burns & Allen
(Par)
One Night of Love $30,500 3 11 Orpheum 2 none
(Col)
San Francisco $29,000 4 1 Minnesota 2 none
(MGM)
Libeled Lady $28,000 5 30 Lyric 2 none
(MGM)

181
 g oing to the mov ies

Film Local Local National Local Weeks Live artist/

studio earnings ranking ranking cinema(s) played headline name
Minnesota 1 none
Top Hat $27,800 6 2 Orpheum 2 none
(RKO)
Broadway Bill $27,500 7 16 Orpheum 2 none
(Col)
My American Wife $27,000 8= 170 Minnesota 1 Eddie Duchin
(Par)
Trail of the Lonesome $27,000 8= 47 State 2 none
Pine Minnesota 1 none
(Par)
Follow the Fleet $26,500 10 7 Orpheum 2 none
(RKO)
Goose and Gander $26,000 11 221 Orpheum 1 Folies Bergere
(WB)
Swing Time $24,500 12 4 Orpheum 2 none
(RKO)
Mr Deeds Goes to $23,500 13= 22 Orpheum 2 none
Town
(Col)
My Man Godfrey $23,500 13= 20 Orpheum 2 none
(Uni)
Cain and Mabel $23,000 15 178 Minnesota 1 John Boles
(WB)
The Great Zieg feld $22,500 16 3 Minnesota 1 none
(MGM)
State 1 none
Wife vs Secretary $22,000 17 28 Minnesota 1 none
(MGM) State 1 none
The First Baby $21,000 18 522 Minnesota 1 The Marx
(TCF) Brothers
The Gay Divorcee $20,000 19= 12 Orpheum 2 none
(RKO)
Two in the Dark $20,000 19= 370 Orpheum 1 Wayne King
(RKO) Orchestra
Walking on Air $20,000 19= 216 Orpheum 1 Folies Parisienne
(RKO)

182
 Appendix:
The sample cinema set for the period October 1934 to October 1936.

Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best

range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Alabama Birmingham Publix 2,800 30–40 743,950 No 117 Steamboat 8,700 3,000 Steamboat 8,700 1
Round The Round The
Bend Bend
Empire Birmingham Acme 1,100 25 only 285,100 No 112 Devil Dogs 5,500 1,300 Mr Deeds 7,300 2
Goes To Town
Strand Birmingham Publix 800 25 only 187,000 No 135 In Old 3,000 500 In Old 4,250 1.5

183
Kentucky/ Kentucky
Keeper Of The
Bees
Boston Boston RKO 2,900 25–50 1,690,625 Yes 144 Folies 38,000 3,100 Folie 58,500 2
Bergeres Parisienne
Unit/Hot Tip Unit/Walking
On Air
Memorial Boston RKO 3,212 25–55 1,509,180 Occ. 89 Top Hat 40,000 5,000 Top Hat 111,200 5
Metro- Boston Publix 4,331 35–65 2,803,200 Yes 112 Jack Benny/ 49,000 2,500 Paul Lukas/ 58,000 2
politan Private Worlds Trail Of The
Lonesome
Pine
cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Orpheum Boston Loew’s 2,900 25–55 1,529,450 No 126 Mutiny On 24,000 6,000 San Francisco 67,900 4
The Bounty
State Boston Loew’s 3,700 30–55 1,501,550 No 151 Barretts Of 24,500 4,000 San Francisco 55,000 4
Wimpole Street
Albee Brooklyn RKO 3,245 25–50 1,301,500 No 138 Swing Time 25,000 2,500 Swing Time 43,000 2
Fox Brooklyn Independent 4,075 25–50 1,479,100 Occ. 141 stage show/ 29,000 8,900 stage show/ 72,500 3
One Night Of One Night Of
Love Love
Metropolitan Brooklyn Loew’s 3,618 25–50 1,658,500 Occ. 115 Eddie 36,000 13,000 San Francisco 85,000 6

184
Cantor/
Transatlantic
M-G-R
Paramount Brooklyn Publix 4,156 25–65 1,581,500 No 102 Captain Blood 40,000 5,600 Captain Blood 65,000 2
g oing to the mov ies

Strand Brooklyn WB 2,870 25–50 565,200 No 198 Show No 13,000 2,500 Show No 31,000 3
Mercy/$!000 Mercy/$!000
A Minute A Minute
Buffalo Buffalo Publix 3,489 30–65 1,566,000 Occ. 113 Ted Lewis 25,000 5,700 Ted Lewis 25,000 1
Orch/Ladies Orch /Ladies
In Love In Love
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Century Buffalo Publix 3,076 25 only 643,350 No 204 Don’t Turn 10,000 3,200 Robin 14,300 2
‘em Loose/Old Hood Of
Hutch El Dorado/
Widow From
Monte Carlo
Hippodrome Buffalo Publix 2,089 25–40 742,500 No 146 David 22,000 3,100 David 13,500 2
Copperfield Copperfield
Chicago Chicago Publix 3,861 35–75 3,652,000 Yes 97 Veloz and 59000 14,000 stage show/ 95,900 2
Yolanda/ Belle Of The
Bride Comes Nineties

185
Home
Oriental Chicago Publix 3,217 25–40 1,805,600 Yes 111 Vaudeville/ 27,600 10,300 vaudeville/ 27,600 1
One-Way One-Way
Ticket Ticket
Palace Chicago RKO 2,500 25–55 2,280,300 Occ. 80 Swing Time 34,700 5,900 Top Hat 141300 6
State Lake Chicago Jones 2,734 20–35 1,375,400 Yes 107 Vaudeville/ 19,200 9,800 vaudeville/ 19,200 1
Iron Man Iron Man
UA Chicago Publix 1,696 35–65 1,523,500 No 47 Mutiny On 28500 7,000 Great 95900 5
The Bounty Zieg feld
Albee Cincinnati RKO 3,317 35–42 1,377,950 No 108 Follow The 26,000 5,500 Libeled Lady 32,000 2
Fleet
cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Keith’s Cincinnati Libson 1,500 30–42 547,300 No 98 Flirtation 10,500 2,100 Flirtation 15,000 2
Walk Walk
Lyric Cincinnati RKO 1,432 35–42 503,900 No 107 Night At The 16,000 1,800 Night At The 16,000 1
Opera Opera
Palace Cincinnati RKO 2,614 35–42 1,171,900 No 103 San Francisco 22,000 3,750 San Francisco 36,000 2
Denham Denver Cooper 1,392 25–50 659,500 Occ. 110 Belle Of The 16,000 1,000 Cleopatra 22,500 2
Nineties
Denver Denver RKO 2,525 25–50 899,900 No 115 Mutiny On 15,000 4,000 Mutiny On 15,000 1
The Bounty The Bounty

186
Orpheum Denver RKO 2,600 25–50 732,400 Occ. 118 Ben Bernie 16,000 2,000 San Francisco 31,500 3
Orch
/Romance In
The Rain
g oing to the mov ies

Paramount Denver RKO 2,096 25–40 319,925 No 160 Bride Of 7,000 1,000 Bride Of 9,000 1.5
Frankenstein Frankenstein
Fisher Detroit Publix 2,975 30–40 85,350 No 37 David 6,200 3,100 David 6,200 1
Copperfield Copperfield
Fox Detroit Independent 5,500 25–55 1,929,600 Yes 78 Cab 36,000 12,000 Littlest Rebel 60,000 2
Calloway
Orch /Charlie
Chan In S’pore
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Michigan Detroit Publix 4,038 25–55 1,852,200 Yes 86 NBC Radio 39,000 10,000 NBC Radio 39,000 1
Unit/ His Unit/His
Brother’s Wife Brother’s Wife
UA Detroit Publix 2,070 25–55 656,800 No 45 Mutiny On 20,000 3,500 San Francisco 45,000 4
The Bounty
Apollo Indianapolis Fourth 1,171 25–40 327,950 No 59 Steamboat 9,800 1,300 Steamboat 19,900 3.5
Avenue Round The Round The
Bend Bend
Circle Indianapolis Monarch 2,638 25–40 318,350 No 99 Swing Time 10,500 1,900 Swing Time 14,700 2

187
Loew’s Indianapolis Loew’s 2,431 25–40 517,050 No 112 Mutiny On 14,000 2,500 Mutiny On 19,600 2
The Bounty The Bounty
Lyric Indianapolis Olson 1,896 25–40 724,800 Yes 83 Major Bowes’ 14,000 5,000 Major 14,000 1
Amateurs/ Bowes’
Pepper Amateurs/
Pepper
Main Street Kansas City RKO 2,500 25–40 1,046,000 Yes 99 Folies 25,000 3,000 Top Hat 38,000 3
Bergere
Unit/Case Of
Lucky Legs
Midland Kansas City Loew’s 4,000 25–40 1,222,345 No 101 China Seas 24,000 2,400 San Francisco 47,500 3
cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Newman Kansas City Publix 1,800 25–40 800,100 No 108 Belle Of The 18,000 2,700 Both Belle Of 25,000 2
Nineties The Nineties
and Goin’ To
Town
Uptown Kansas City Fox 2,045 25–40 460,375 No 108 Steamboat or 11,000 1,200 Steamboat 19,400 3
Poor Little Round The
Rich Girl Bend
Carthay Los Angeles Independent 1,518 55–165 298,800 No 2 Great Zieg feld 19,500 8,100 Great 201,600 15
Circle Zieg feld
Chinese Los Angeles Fox 2,020 30–55 982,080 No 129 Modern Times 26,230 4,200 Modern 37,530 2

188
Times
Down Town Los Angeles WB 2,500 30–40 655,800 No 131 Captain Blood 14,500 2,200 Captain Blood 27,500 3
Hollywood Los Angeles WB 2,758 30–55 768,760 No 100 Roberta 15,000 2,200 Dodsworth/ 33,000 3
Case Of The
g oing to the mov ies

Velvet Claws
Panatges Los Angeles RKO 2,812 25–40 669,250 No 134 My Man 23,700 1,500 My Man 45,200 3
Godfrey Godfrey/
/ Yellowstone Yellowstone
Paramount Los Angeles Patmar 3,347 30–55 1,922,160 Occ. 105 Eddie 33,860 8,400 Big Broadcast 56,200 3
Cantor/Paris Of 1937
In Spring
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
RKO Los Angeles RKO 2,916 25–55 807,700 No 99 My Man 20,300 2,600 Top Hat 42,000 4
Godfrey
/Yellowstone
State Los Angeles Fox 2,422 30–55 1,311,700 No 139 Mutiny On 24,300 5,100 Mutiny On 38,900 2
The Bounty The Bounty
Capitol Manhattan Independent 5,486 35–110 3,665,300 Occ. 64 Mutiny On 75,300 7,000 David 235,000 5
The Bounty Copperfield
Center Manhattan Independent 3,700 25–110 564,500 No 21 Ah, Wilderness 37000 6,000 Thanks A 86,000 4
Million

189
Paramount Manhattan Publix 3,664 35–85 3,264,900 Yes 60 Cleopatra 68,000 8,500 Big Broadcast 156,600 4
Of 1937
Radio City Manhattan Independent 6,200 40–165 8,952,500 Occ. 78 Top Hat 134,000 48,000 Top Hat 348,000 3
Music Hall
Rialto Manhattan Publix 750 25–65 411,200 No 26 Lives Of A 21,800 5,000 Lives Of A 39,200 2
Bengal Lancer Bengal Lancer
Rivoli Manhattan Independent 2,092 35–99 2,692,800 No 39 Modern Times 74,500 10,200 Modern 230,500 6
Times
Roxy Manhattan Independent 6,000 25–65 3,492,910 Yes 90 Stage show/If 62,500 16,000 Sing Baby 141,800 3
You Could Sing
Only Cook
Strand Manhattan WB 2,758 35–85 2,366,900 No 57 G-Men 61,300 6,500 Anthony 200,000 5
cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s

Adverse
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Lyric Minneapolis Publix 1,126 20–25 224,400 No 112 Kelly The 7,000 900 Libeled lady 10,000 2
Second
Minnesota Minneapolis Publix 4,024 25–55 477,000 Occ. 37 Burns and 32,000 6,500 San Francisco 29,000 2
Allen/Bride
Comes Home
Orpheum Minneapolis Singer 2,600 25–40 1,095,000 Occ. 100 Folies 26,000 2,200 Roberta 34,000 2
Bergere Unit/
Goose And The
Gander
State Minneapolis Publix 2,290 25–40 761,900 Occ. 110 Major Bowes’ 17,000 2,500 China Seas 19,800 2

190
Amateurs/
Redheads On
Parade
Capitol Montreal Famous 2,603 50 only 841,950 No 200 Lives Of A 18,000 3,000 Lives Of A 28,000 2
g oing to the mov ies

Players Bengal Lancer Bengal Lancer

Loew’s Montreal Loew’s 3,200 50 only 995,100 Occ. 149 John Boles/ 20,000 6,000 John 20,000 1
Public Enemy’s Boles/Public
Wife Enemy’s Wife
Palace Montreal Famous 2,582 50 only 929,800 No 105 Mutiny On 16,000 6,000 San Francisco 60,200 7
Players The Bounty or
Roberta
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Princess Montreal CT 2,200 50 only 788,800 No 160 Modern 15,000 3,000 Modern 34,500 3
Times/Guard Times/Guard
That Girl That Girl
Paramount New Haven Publix 2,373 35–50 695,600 Occ. 178 Belle Of The 11,000 2,400 Belle Of The 14,500 2
Nineties Nineties
Poli’s New Haven Loew’s 3,005 35–50 955,900 No 189 Mutiny On 15,000 2,700 Great 19,300 2
The Bounty Zieg feld
Sherman New Haven WB 2,076 35–50 601,100 No 193 Flirtation 12,000 2,600 Follow The 15,000 2
Walk Fleet

191
Aldine Philadelphia WB 1,416 35–55 618,300 No 35 Dodsworth 19,000 2,700 Dodsworth 44,500 3
Boyd Philadelphia WB 2,338 35–55 1,388,700 No 83 Anthony 31,500 6,500 Anthony 71,500 3
Adverse Adverse
Earle Philadelphia WB 2,728 40–65 1,650,800 Yes 112 Eddie 31,000 9,500 Eddie 31,000 1
Cantor/One Cantor/One
Exciting Exciting
Adventure Adventure
Fox Philadelphia Independent 3,457 40–65 1,875,200 Occ. 81 stage show/ 35,000 8,000 Vincent 75,500 4
Thanks A Lopez
Million Orch/Private
Number
cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Roxy Philadelphia Independent 4,683 35–75 310,800 Yes 9 Jack Benny/ 43,800 26,000 Jack Benny/ 43,800 1
Woman In Woman In
Red Red
Stanley Philadelphia WB 3,009 35–55 1,486,800 No 84 San Francisco 31,000 7,500 San Francisco 85,000 4
Penn Pittsburgh Loew’s 3,487 25–50 1,506,400 Occ. 103 Ted Lewis 31,000 4,000 Top Hat 33,000 2
Orch /Hideout
Stanley Pittsburgh WB 4,000 25–50 1,722,500 Yes 103 Jack 34,500 3,200 Folies 52,500 2
Benny+Mary Bergere
Livingstone/ Unit/G-Men
Behold My

192
Wife
Warner Pittsburgh WB 1,800 25–40 496,600 No 192 San Francisco 11,000 1,000 Mutiny On 16,200 2
The Bounty
Broadway Portland Parker 1,956 25–40 556,050 Occ. 125 Libeled Lady 11,500 2,500 Libeled Lady 24,100 3
g oing to the mov ies

Paramount Portland Hamrick- 3,066 25–40 611,650 Occ. 133 Marx Bros./ 10,800 3,300 Curly Top 17,000 2
Evergreen Ten Dollar
Raise
UA Portland UA-Parker 962 25–40 580,100 No 63 Mutiny On 10,700 2,400 Mutiny On 34,400 6
The Bounty The Bounty
Albee Providence RKO 2,394 15–40 762,350 Occ. 131 Top Hat 17,000 2,300 Top Hat 39,000 2.5
Majestic Providence Fay 2,262 15–40 775,550 No 187 Anthony 13,000 3,800 Curly Top/ 20,000 2
Adverse SilK Hat Kid
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
State Providence Loew’s 2,500 15–40 1,149,900 Occ. 160 Great Zieg feld 23,500 5,000 Great 33,500 2
Zieg feld
Strand Providence Independent 1,500 15–40 751,899 No 192 Klondike 14,300 2,000 Trail Of The 16,800 1.5
Annie/Her Lonesome
Master’s Voice Pine
Ambassador St. Louis Fanchon 3,018 25–55 158,500 Occ. 21 Belle Of The 16,000 4,000 Belle Of The 31,000 2
and Marco Nineties Nineties
Fox St. Louis Fanchon 5,036 25–55 171,500 Occ. 14 County 18,000 6,000 One Night Of 40,000 4
and Marco Chairman Love

193
Missouri St. Louis Fanchon 3,516 25–40 94,700 Occ. 31 stage show/ 6,000 3,000 stage show/ 12,000 2
and Marco Marines Are Marines Are
Coming/ Coming/
Strange Wives Strange Wives
Shubert St. Louis Fanchon 1,710 25–40 160,000 Occ. 23 Gay Divorcee 15,000 6,000 Lives Of A 26,000 2
and Marco or Lives Of A Bengal Lancer
Bengal Lancer
State St. Louis Loew’s 3,050 25–55 233,000 Yes 14 David 17,000 8,000 Chained 32,000 2
Copperfield
Golden Gate San Francisco RKO 2,800 30–40 1,460,800 Occ. 80 Eddie 34,000 9,000 Top Hat 58,400 3
Cantor/Last
Outlaw
cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Orpheum San Francisco Independent 2,900 30–40 806,050 No 104 One Night Of 20,000 2,000 One Night Of 68,000 8
Love Love
Paramount San Francisco Fox 2,735 30–40 1,205,800 No 152 San Francisco 28,000 6,000 San Francisco 67,000 3
Warfield San Francisco Fox 2,657 35–65 1,893,600 Occ. 109 Forsaking All 29,400 4,750 Libeled Lady/ 54,000 4
Others Sitting On
The Moon
Fifth Ave Seattle Hamrick- 2,420 25–40 936,525 No 105 Rose Marie 17,200 3,800 San Francisco 35,600 3
Evergreen
Liberty Seattle Jenson 1,800 15–35 542,300 No 109 Broadway Bill 12,200 1,700 Mr Deeds 82,700 14

194
& Von Goes To Town
Herberg
Music Box Seattle Hamrick- 970 25–40 411,950 No 99 Roberta 9,100 1,800 Roberta 28,500 6
Evergreen
g oing to the mov ies

Paramount Seattle Hamrick- 3,000 25–35 594,650 Occ. 193 French 12,800 2,300 Gorgeous 17,300 2
Evergreen Folies/Annie Hussy/Star for
Oakley The Night
Music Box Tacoma Hamrick- 1,500 15–35 444,357 No 206 San Francisco 8,000 2,600 San Francisco 11,800 2
Evergreen
Roxy Tacoma Jenson 1,200 25–35 422,837 No 168 China Seas 9,000 2,800 Broadway Bill 12,400 2
& Von
Herberg
 Price Box-office Regular Best wk’s Worst Best Best
range over the live acts? Films Best week’s box-office wk’s box- Best run run box- run
Cinema City Affiliation Seats (cents) period ($)a (yes/no) screened film/act ($) office ($) film/act office ($) weeks
Columbia Washington Loew’s 1,000 25–40 486,200 No 97 In Old 8,000 2,000 In Old 14,500 2
Kentucky or Kentucky
Baboonab
Earle Washington WB 2,240 25–70 1,929,500 Yes 110 Jan Garber 26,000 6,000 Jan Garber 26,000 1
Orch/Mr Orch/Mr
Deeds GoesTo Deeds Goes
Town To Town
Fox/Capitol Washington Loew’s 3,433 25–60 2,326,500 Yes 106 Vaudeville/ 30,000 15,000 Stage show/ 56,500 2
Rendezvous Naughty
Marietta

195
Keith’s Washington RKO 1,500 25–60 1,014,100 Occ. 77 Top Hat 24,500 2,500 Top Hat 68,500 5
Palace Washington Loew’s 2,700 25–60 1,724,500 No 68 Gorgeous 28,000 9,000 San Francisco 54,000 3
Hussy or
Mutiny On
The Bounty

Total 282,674 121,112,628

Sources: Film Daily Yearbooks for 1936 and 1937; International Motion Picture Almanac for 1936–7 and 1937–8, Variety, weekly for the period.
Notes:
a. Money values for Montreal are expressed in U.S. dollars.
b. The makers of the documentary animal drama Baboona, Martin and Osa Johnson, were present during the week of the film’s screening.
cinem ag oing in the united states in the mid- 19 3 0 s
 9

Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts,

and Lily White Palaces
Desegregating the Motion Picture Theater

Thomas Doherty

O n 28 October 1963, nine years after the United States Supreme Court
ruled that separate but equal school systems were inherently unequal,
Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy addressed the annual convention
of the Theater Owners of America. Kennedy called on the exhibitors to
abolish all kinds of racial segregation practiced in American movie-houses.
‘I know that there are pro-segregationists among you—theater owners
who question the government’s right to regulate the way you conduct your
business,’ he acknowledged, implying that in his mind, at least, the right
of the Department of Justice to regulate this particular business conduct
was a settled issue. Yet he came to persuade, not browbeat, and tempered
the prospect of federal coercion with a flattering call to civic responsibility.
‘Even where community opinion is opposed to integration, theater owners
have found that they can safely desegregate as long as they do so in unison
with their competitors,’ he pointed out. ‘You, as influential and responsible
men in your community, are well qualified to be leaders.’ At the close of
Kennedy’s remarks, scattered among the polite applause, the sounds of low
hissing and angry boos rumbled up from the audience.1
To think of the great battles over equal access to public accommodations
during the civil rights era is to conjure up images of stoic activists forcibly
claiming seats in diners, classrooms, and city buses. Yet no less than
other racially restricted areas, the communal space of the motion picture
theater—where white Americans and black Americans might sit shoulder to
shoulder partaking not of food but of film—was a resonant site of conflict

196
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

in the campaign for integration. Besides shedding light on a dark corner

of American history, to recall the struggle over something as seemingly
innocuous as shared spectatorship also illuminates the always tight and
tangled kinship between Hollywood and American culture.
Viewed through a racial lens, motion picture exhibitors in America had
traditionally practiced three distinct color-coded policies, each arrangement
reflecting the idiosyncracies of local law, custom, and history. In some
regions, enforcement was casual and haphazard; in others, sternly monitored
and fiercely enforced.
First, strictly segregated venues on both sides of the color line duplicated
the legal and social apartheid of the culture at large, with separate and
unequal status in architecture and programming alike. For blacks, the
so-called race houses, all-black theaters catering to an all-black clientele,
located largely but not exclusively in the South, exhibited a program of
marginal independent films featuring an all-black cast in rotation with
mainstream Hollywood films that had long since ‘played out’ in priority
white markets.2 For whites, the grand motion picture palaces of the
classical Hollywood era screened prestigious A pictures while enforcing
a lily-white policy that denied admission to 10 per cent of the audience
pool. The exclusions and delays in programming are well remembered by
a generation of African American motion picture fans. In Chuck Berry
Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll (1987), a documentary celebration of the life of
the classic rocker, Berry stands in front of the Fox Theater in St Louis,
Missouri, and recollects how, as a child during the Great Depression,
he and his father had been refused entry to a first-run screening of A
Tale of Two Cities (1935). ‘It took two years to come to our theater in our
neighborhood,’ Berry snarls.3
The second strategy was what might be called ‘the house divided,’ where
segregated seating was cordoned off for African American audiences, often
in the balcony (referred to as ‘Jim Crow roosts’ by civil rights activists, and
‘nigger heaven’ in the vernacular). Stamped tickets, designated entranceways,
and alert ushers prevented black patrons from trespassing into the off-limits
white sections on the ground floor. For 500-seat movie-houses in small
markets, the restricted balcony was the ‘difference between profit and loss,’
a lucrative arrangement that reconciled Jim Crow and good business sense.
‘It is impossible to operate successfully in the Deep South—in a small
town—without the revenue from a colored balcony,’ an exhibitor admitted
in 1957. ‘Say what you please, but when your box office is closed and you
are counting your money, it is impossible to identify the Negro share of
the receipts—so now we let them walk upstairs for a reduction of 15 cents
and all is well.’ 4

197
 g oing to the mov ies

9.1 Separate entrance, separate seating: an African American moviegoer climbs

the stairs to the ‘Jim Crow roost’ in a motion picture theater in Belzoni,
Mississippi, 1939.

Sometimes too the segregation was by time not space, with a special day
or screening time designated for ‘colored audiences.’ In another variation, if
a Hollywood film were thought to possess special ‘Negro appeal,’ exhibitors
reserved extra seats in normally white sections of the house to accommodate
the anticipated overflow audience. ‘This sort of piffling relaxation of Jim
Crow policies in segregated theaters used to be quite common and was
supposed to forestall Negro protest,’ recalled a commentator in the Crisis,
the official weekly of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), in 1953.5
The third option—a colorblind admissions policy—was practiced by a
small subset of nominally integrated theaters outside the South, though
these venues too were often de facto segregated because of custom, pricing,
or housing patterns.
Unfortunately, precise statistical information about the patterns of racial
restriction in motion picture spectatorship is elusive: what is customary is
seldom noted.6 In 1963, writing for Variety, pioneer film historian Robert
J. Landry, one of the few trade-wise commentators consistently sensitive to

198
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

racial issues, labeled ‘theaters which relate to Negro patronage’ as ‘one of the
little-known and least reported segments of the American motion picture
exhibition industry.’ Landry lamented the fact that ‘nobody seems to possess
any data on the total number of (a) Negro-only situations, (b) Negro-balcony
situations, and certainly not as to (c) Southern communities in which there
are no film theaters of any sort to which Negroes have admission.’ 7
Only when a curious anomaly in segregation practices erupted did the
Hollywood trade press take bemused notice. For example, in Memphis,
Tennessee, two first-run movie palaces, the Warner Theater and the Strand,
each practiced different kinds of normative segregation, both in accord with
local custom. Whereas the all-white Strand was totally segregated, the 2000-
seat Warner Theater maintained a ‘colored gallery’ of 300 seats. In 1952,
when RKO released a special newsreel compilation of the championship
bout between Joe Walcott and Rocky Marciano, the notorious Lloyd T.
Binford, head of the Memphis Board of Censors, forbade the film to be
shown to the racially mixed audience at the Warner Theater but okayed it
for the all-white Strand.8
The film also played unimpeded at the all-black Daisey Theater on Beale
St. ‘The censor [Binford] said we couldn’t show the fight picture here because
of our colored gallery,’ said the perplexed manager of the Warner Theater,
who had lost his booking to the Strand despite being the higher bidder.9
Watching an evenly matched interracial dual in an interracial venue—even
a segregated one—was judged too combustible for comfort by the censors.
Of course, among the countless galling humiliations and sometimes
lethal consequences of Jim Crow, the denial of equal access to Hollywood
cinema ranks low on the scale of injustice. Yet the emotional residue of
this ritualized reminder of subaltern status seems to have rankled with a
special force. Few African American memoirs of the segregation era fail to
mention a moviegoing experience where embarrassment at the images being
projected on screen is matched only by the humiliation of gaining access to
them. ‘But most of all, I remember that we had to sit upstairs, in a balcony
section set aside for “Coloreds.” We called it the Buzzard’s Roost, and I
hated it,’ recalled civil rights activist John Lewis of his boyhood in Troy,
Georgia. ‘It was an insult to have to sit up there. I felt it intensely. To this
day I rarely go out to the movies. The memory of sitting up in that balcony
is just too strong.’ 10
In 1955, Antoinette S. Demond shared a searing motion picture memory
in a poignant article entitled ‘On Sitting’ written for the Crisis. A
Northerner studying at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Demond
was introduced to the codes of Southern moviegoing while enjoying a night
out on the town in the early 1940s. After her date purchased the correct

199
 g oing to the mov ies

tickets, the couple walked to their designated seats—but not through the
theater lobby:

We went half way down a cobblestone alley and walked up five flights
of stairs to the small gallery situated above the main floor, above the
mezzanine, above the balcony. I have no recollection of the film. I
felt so bitterly ashamed to be sitting there. I felt ashamed too that
other Negroes in the gallery were so conditioned to sitting there that
they did not seem to feel the same shame I felt.11

But even as Nashville’s swank motion picture palaces were forcing African
Americans to enter via the fire escape, the rising expectations wrought by
World War II were overturning the venerable seating arrangements that had
been standard exhibition practice since the dawn of cinema. Emboldened
by the egalitarian credo that fortified the national mobilization against two
racist regimes overseas, the crusade for racial integration accelerated in the
postwar era: in professional baseball, which integrated in 1947; in the armed
forces, which integrated in 1948; and, not least, in a series of Hollywood
social problem films which foregrounded the evils of racism: Pinky (1949),
Home of the Brave (1949), No Way Out (1950), and Bright Victory (1951). By
the early 1950s, the spectatorial status quo was also being challenged by
court decrees, state laws, civil rights activists, and—eventually—the motion
picture industry itself.
On 17 May 1954, the debate over equal access to public space reached
a tipping point with the landmark Supreme Court decision in the case of
Brown v. the Board of Education at Topeka. Despite the mandate to act ‘with
all deliberate speed,’ the implications for American culture radiated out
slowly, in motion picture theaters very slowly. Not until the close of the
1950s did the connection between public education and public entertainment
begin to rewrite the codes of Jim Crow exhibition.
In the immediate wake of the Brown decision, Variety consulted the
NAACP and found that ‘no theatre segregation cases are pending anywhere
in the country’ nor were any contemplated: ‘Theatre men in the South are
sitting tight for the time being. In most states segregation is decreed by state
law. Should exhibiters terminate [segregated seating], they would be subject
to prosecution under these statutes.’ 12 The state of Virginia, for example,
required anyone operating a theater or other public hall to segregate the
races; patrons who refused to take assigned seats were charged with a
misdemeanor offense.13
For the motion picture industry, the event that placed the issue of
segregated spectatorship into heightened relief was the crisis over public

200
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957.14 A critical

mass of media attention—newspaper headlines, magazine features, and, most
vividly of all, television images showing terrified black schoolchildren beset
by howling white mobs—forced a belated confrontation with the decision
of 1954. Compelled at last to act, President Eisenhower sent in National
Guard troops and, in a nationally televised address on 25 September 1957,
the executive branch finally put its enforcement authority behind the
Supreme Court decision At the center of the storm, the connection between
the preservation of Jim Crow culture and the power of American cinema
was highlighted by an exhibitor in Little Rock who showed his colors by
booking D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
To be sure, in the broad scheme of things, and within this venomous
and violent milieu, motion picture theaters were tangential arenas of combat.
In many communities, they enjoyed a kind of benign neglect—insulated
from on-site protests, almost like unofficial safe houses. Husbanding their
resources and focusing their firepower, the NAACP and other civil rights
activists concentrated on acquiring the more valuable entry tickets to
education, employment, and housing. As late as 1959, civil rights activist
Marian A. Wright bracketed motion picture theaters with golf courses and
parks as ‘fringe areas of the segregation problem.’ 15
Even so, by the 1950s, segregated spectatorship could no more operate
under the cultural radar than segregated schooling, housing, or employment.
The same postwar media focus that spotlighted the sorry options for
African Americans on the Hollywood screen also directed attention towards
the status of African Americans before the Hollywood screen. As an
added incentive—or provocation—motion picture theaters contained two
additional sites of volatile social interaction: rest rooms and concession
stands. In short, along with other monuments to Jim Crow culture, it was
inevitable that motion picture theaters would be given a due measure of
regard by the civil rights movement.
Once the battle was joined, the level of protest against segregated seating
and the relative ease or difficulty of the transition to integrated spectatorship
varied depending upon the location of the theater. As if switching over a film
title on a marquee, some communities adapted readily, almost imperceptibly,
with no fanfare or nasty incidents. Other communities fought as fiercely for
Jim Crow at the box office window as at the school-house door.
In most Northern and ‘border’ states, desegregation proceeded
quickly, smoothly and unobtrusively, well in advance of coercion from the
Department of Justice or federal legislation. In 1952, New York passed a
state law forbidding discrimination in public accommodations. In 1954,
theaters in Washington, DC, desegregated so quietly and completely that

201
 g oing to the mov ies

local civil rights activists were unaware that a goal they were even then
organizing to achieve had already been attained. A bemused columnist for
the Interracial Review interpreted the sudden open door policy as a reaction
to a postwar phenomenon more disturbing to exhibitors than civil rights.
‘Since juvenile delinquents have been wantonly slashing theater seats with
sharp instruments, annoying other customers, necking, dropping their
bubble gum here and there, and causing minor riots on occasion …,’ he
wrote, ‘I am convinced that movie theater managers are hoping that Negro
patronage will improve the low moral, cultural and aesthetic climate now
prevailing in many of their battered and tarnished establishments.’ 16
Of course, the year-round roosts of Jim Crow in the Deep South housed
the main sites of contention and witnessed the most serious action. There
the campaign to desegregate motion picture theaters occurred in the wake
of, and appropriated the tactics of, the campaigns to integrate restaurants,
department stores and other public facilities: boycotts, pickets, and sit-ins.
In time, as the civil rights campaign gained momentum, the tactics grew
more aggressive. Protesters went limp, staged mass sit-downs in front of
theaters, locked arms to block entrances, and forcibly entered theatrical
spaces 17 Interestingly, civil rights activists almost never disrupted an actual
screening, as if to impede the viewing of the desired spectacle would be
a unforgivable transgression. The opposition, however, did not practice the
same restraint. Before theaters, as elsewhere, protestors endured scuffles,
beatings, and intimidation. ‘We came down to the theater to buy tickets,’
a white member of the Congress of Racial Equality testified after a stand-
in at a theater in High Point, North Carolina. ‘We were refused. When
people started hitting us, we stood there and took it.’ 18 In Savannah,
Georgia, robed Ku Klux Klansman first picketed and then tear-gassed the
interior of a recently integrated motion picture theater, closing it down for
several days.19
The theater-specific agitations began in earnest in 1961, after the
widespread and successful deployment of sit-in tactics against downtown
stores and diners in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1959–60. The protests gained
steady momentum over the next year, reached a crescendo of intensity in
the summer of 1963, and, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
ultimately achieved total victory. That the actions paralleled the arc of the
administration of John F. Kennedy is not coincidental.
The preferred protest tactic for activists targeting motion picture theaters
was a clever variant on the sit-in appropriately dubbed the ‘stand-in.’
Whereas the sit-in was stationary and stubborn, the stand in was mobile
and active. ‘Under the theater stand, participants line up in single file,
approach the ticket window, and request tickets admitting Negroes to any

202
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

seat in the house,’ Variety explained in 1961, noting that the technique was
‘characterized by the quiet approach’ wherein protesters ‘infiltrate the ticket
queue.’ 20 After being refused service, the activists would then return to the
back of the line and repeat the process. The stand-ins clogged lines, confused
ticket sellers, frazzled ushers, angered moviegoers made late by the delays,
and in general disrupted the smooth flow of a schedule-sensitive business.
Stand-ins were especially widespread in college towns, where the
combination of a progressive student body and a vibrant motion picture
scene created hotbeds of protest against Jim Crow seating in Austin, Texas;
Lexington, Kentucky; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.21 Sometimes,
white students fronted for black classmates by buying two tickets and then
attempting to enter the theater with their black companions.22 Conversely,
black students would buy tickets to the colored balcony for their white
companions.23 Black students who defiantly sat in the segregated main
floor would be arrested for trespassing; upstairs, their white allies who
defiantly sat in the colored balcony would be arrested for refusing to vacate
seats reserved for blacks.24 In some college towns, harried theater managers
bowed half way to the protests by permitting African American students to
enter the main floor in a ‘controlled’ integration policy limited to ‘students
only,’ providing they presented a valid student identity card.25
University faculty followed in the footsteps of their undergraduates. In
Durham, North Carolina, hundreds of professors from Duke University and
the all-black North Carolina College joined together to picket and stand-
in at segregated theaters. In a resolution issued to the press, the professors
declared: ‘Recognizing racial segregation and discrimination in all forms
as morally indefensible, contrary to democratic principles and harmful to
American prestige, we the undersigned members of the faculties of Duke
University and North Carolina College, jointly express our interest in, and
our support of, our students and others who peacefully demonstrate against
the practice of segregated seating in the Center and Carolina Theaters here
in Durham.’ 26
Though any Jim Crow theater offered an affront sufficient to attract
protest, activists slyly targeted theaters playing films whose themes resonated
with the cause. In 1957, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the local branch of
the NAACP urged a boycott of movie houses after an African American
minister had been ordered to a segregated balcony at a preview screening
of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). ‘The humiliation of
segregation should certainly not be at our own expense,’ said an NAACP
official, who linked one flight from bondage with another. ‘To attend
segregated theaters in Greensboro, particularly during the showing of
The Ten Commandments, would be a sacrilege.’ 27 Likewise, when King of

203
 g oing to the mov ies

Kings (1961) was playing at the segregated Tower Theater in Dallas, Texas,
students from nearby Southern Methodist University seized the occasion
to picket the theater and stage stand-ins because, said a theology student
from SMU, the life of Christ expressed their basic convictions.28 Another
opportune protest erupted in Louisville, Kentucky, when the all-white
Brown Theatre booked Porgy and Bess (1959), the Sam Goldwyn production
of the George Gershwin play. Fifteen members of a local Negro youth group
ordered tickets over the phone and then showed up to seek admission. All
were turned away, whereupon pickets paraded in front of the theater with
signs reading ‘All Negro Cast’ and ‘This Theater Admits No Negroes.’ 29
Not incidentally, Hollywood released its own transparent statement on
racial tolerance and segregated seating in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), the
popular motion picture version of Harper Lee’s classic novel. The centerpiece
sequence of the film, set in the South in the 1930s, depicts the trial of a
black man falsely accused of rape. The southern courtroom on screen is
conspicuously segregated—whites sweltering on the ground floor, blacks
sweltering in the balcony—a mise en scène that mirrored the set design in
at least some of the theaters playing the film.
The drive-in theater, the exhibition innovation most associated with the
1950s, presented a unique problem for segregationists and civil rights activists
alike. Initially, the novelty of the phenomenon opened a brief window of
opportunity in the wall of Jim Crow. ‘Among the “new” audiences which
drive-ins are said to be creating, one large segment is represented by
Negroes,’ Variety reported in 1949. ‘In many sections of the south where
segregation in regular houses is strictly enforced, the rule is not applied to
ozoners Because of this, Negroes flock to the open-air theaters which are
attractive deluxe affairs as compared to the second-rate flickeries generally
available to them.’ 30 In 1954, an NAACP official concurred, noting that
‘to avoid humiliation or segregation, most Negroes in Las Vegas [Nevada]
sit in their cars to see a movie—the drive-in theater being the only place
where they can be certain of non-segregation.’ 31
Though caught unaware by the motor vehicle violations, Jim Crow soon
closed the loophole. By the end of the decade, drive-ins in the Deep South
were as segregated as the hardtops and no less vehement about staying that
way.32 Civil rights activists responded by mounting a suitably vehicular form
of protest against drive-in segregation—what might be called a ‘drive-in’
at the drive-in—by organizing caravans of black motorists to drive to
segregated drive-ins and attempt to gain entrance.33 Predictably, drive-ins
in Dixie also mimicked the racial policies of the hardtops by devising an
automotive version of the colored balcony: a segregated parking section for
blacks.34

204
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

The other major exhibition trend of the postwar era tended to be as open-
minded in seating policies as film programming. Catering to a clientele of
university students and urban intellectuals, the art house also cultivated
an un-American sensibility in admissions. ‘Should you consider some form
of entertainment the legitimate theater will sell you a ticket,’ reported the
Interracial Review in 1955. ‘So will a few movie houses that feature foreign
films and carefully selected Hollywood products. Other houses will not
admit you.’ 35 Though forced by state law to abide by Jim Crow, art houses
in the Deep South bristled against segregation and often defied it at the
first opportunity.
Exemplifying the independent spirit of the art house was a feisty
exhibitor named Maggie Dent, the manager of the New Rialto Theater in
Durham, North Carolina, a venue serving the emergent cultural oasis of
the Research Triangle area. Aligning her democratic principles with her
cinematic sensibilities, Dent proudly declared that as of 27 May 1963, the
New Rialto was the first integrated theater in Durham. ‘I’ve thought from
the beginning that a successful art house in this area needed the additional
attendance from the North Carolina College students and faculty and that
of the Negro professional cultural, and art groups,’ she wrote in Variety;
‘This in addition to the decided views I have that any public business, so
run, should be open to anyone … and that I have always thought segregation
and discrimination based on race [or] religion were morally and constitu-
tionally wrong.’ With financial support from local cinephiles—faculty
members from surrounding universities made $100 contributions—Dent
managed to refurbished the venue and open her establishment as a shining
example of business-wise community relations. ‘The fund-raising, the many
congratulatory calls and letters I have received,’ Dent commented, ‘indicate
to me that because we wanted to integrate and [became] the first theater
to do [so], we will have a more interested and faithful patronage than we
otherwise would have had.’ Ever optimistic, she concluded that ‘Except for
the bomb threats … our integration proceeded quietly.’ 36
Though the civil rights campaign concentrated its forces on venues in
the Deep South, the protests in Dixie were sometimes coordinated with
actions against prominent Northern theaters—integrated venues owned by
national circuits that practiced Jim Crow in affiliated theaters south of the
Mason Dixon line. On 12 February 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality
chose Abraham Lincoln’s birthday to organize marches on theaters in
San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York.37 Picketing of integrated
theaters in the North owned by chains that maintained segregated theaters
in the South seriously embarrassed big-name corporations seeking to
cultivate a progressive profile. ‘Racial picketing in Northern situations

205
 g oing to the mov ies

assumes a considerably broadened political implication,’ commented Variety

meaningfully. ‘Theatermen don’t like it at all.’ 38
Yet no motion picture theater, north or south, ever welcomed picket
signs obscuring the marquee and repelling potential moviegoers. After all,
the movie-house had always represented itself as a zone of comfort and
escape from the tensions and controversies of the outside world. Any unrest,
disruption, hassle, or unpleasantness at the box office window diminished
the allure and depleted the profits.
The unfavorable publicity and economic effects from pickets, stand-ins,
and other civil rights protests ultimately persuaded the executives of the
national theater circuits and even the managers of many locally owned
venues in the South to negotiate a surrender. In the major cities of what
was not yet the late twentieth-century ‘New’ South, political and business
leaders seeking to attract northern companies and international investment
saw racial segregation—or rather the well-publicized agitation against
racial segregation—for what it was: bad for business. Bankers, real estate
developers, and other community leaders understood that to resist the rising
tide was to be swept under. Hoping to avoid further economic costs and
social upheaval, they decided to integrate motion picture theaters—but
quietly, with a minimum of fuss.
The preferred method of unobtrusive integration was first implemented
in the civil rights flashpoint of Nashville, Tennessee. In 1959–60, Nashville
had been the scene of an incendiary series of sit-ins and boycotts aimed at
downtown department stores, restaurants, and drug stores. After months
of bruising conflict and huge financial losses for businesses, the city finally
surrendered. Having won that battle, local activists moved on to another
contested arena: public accommodation. Remembering the humiliations of
the Buzzards Roost in Troy, Georgia, movement leader John Lewis, then an
undergraduate at Fisk University, set his sights on motion picture theaters.
‘And this time we would not be sitting in,’ Lewis promised. ‘This time we
would be standing.’ 39
The Nashville stand-ins targeted the downtown Loews and Martin
Theaters, the city’s flagship motion picture palaces. Descending in force, and
emboldened by the previous sit-in successes, dozens of veteran protesters were
arrested for standing-in. A harried theater manager blustered that ‘there is no
chance of a change of policy concerning the seating of Negroes,’ but in order
to avoid a protracted and costly struggle, city fathers in Nashville opted for
a discreet capitulation on this next civil rights front.40 What would turn out
to be an unconditional surrender, however, had to be negotiated in secret.
In April 1961, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering began with the
quiet introduction of a single black couple into audiences at selected

206
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

screenings. Then, after a few days, the number of couples was gradually
increased. For protection, the first couples were shadowed by plainclothes
white policemen, and all of the pioneering moviegoers were chosen for
their well-mannered deportment and respectable attire. So as not to alert
segregationists and precipitate an ugly incident, the plan proceeded without
any advance publicity, with local police and media cooperating in the silent
conspiracy.
The plan went off without a hitch—whereupon, after having
surrep­titiously integrated the theaters, the city announced that the theaters
had, in fact, been successfully integrated. ‘If a responsible, conservative,
propertied leadership of a southern city gets together and decides to end
racial segregation in film theaters, apparently what happens is simplicity
itself. Overnight, Jim Crow “tradition” is abolished!’ enthused Robert J.
Landry in Variety. ‘[Nashville] has successful[ly] desegregated its film
houses without publicity, without announcement in advance and without
one single reported “incident.”’ 41 With so easy an implementation and so
happy an outcome, the Nashville plan would become a model for social
change in other southern cities.
Monitoring the situation from further South, Atlanta was next to
emulate the prudent Nashville example. The city hosted three midtown
first-run theaters (the 1000-seat Rialto, the 1000-seat Roxy, and the 2200
Loew’s Grand), none of which admitted blacks. Located about a mile
from downtown, the 4400-seat Fox Theater maintained a 174-seat colored
balcony, which was closed in 1961 in response to the agitation for integration.
Thereafter, Atlanta theaters were 100 per cent segregated.42
As in Nashville, Atlanta’s civic leaders had planned to sneak an advance
guard of black moviegoers into theaters and then announce the news of
integration as a fait accompli. Also according to the Nashville precedent,
the conspirators had hoped to secure the cooperation of the police and to
keep the local newspapers quiet. However, in April 1962, the Atlanta Journal
broke the news that Negro couples were soon to be infiltrated into the all-
white venues downtown.
With the secret exposed, community leaders and civil rights activists
braced for a backlash against the now transparent scheme. After the
plan was put in operation, however, Variety described the anticlimactic
outcome:

Then, Monday [14 May 1962] the Negroes made their move.
According to plan—and agreement—two showed up at each of
the four designated theaters, Loews Grand, Fox, Rialto, and Roxy,
purchased tickets and entered. They were not treated any differently

207
 g oing to the mov ies

than any other ticket purchaser. Their arrival time (3 o’clock) was
the same at all four houses and, as noted, there were no ‘incidents,’
the bugaboo that haunts a Southern locality any time such a move
is made.43

Thereafter, African American patrons faced no restrictions and the plan

proceeded progressively to outlying theaters in the suburbs. ‘Just when
it looked like the matter of integrating Atlanta’s motion pictures had
developed into a stalemate, the move was made, without fanfare, fuss or
feathers and became a fait accompli without “incidents,”’ concluded the
pleasantly surprised Variety.44
‘Controlled integration’—the quiet introduction of African American
couples into low-attendance matinées, followed by gradually increasing
numbers at prime screening times—became the method of choice for big
cities eager to avoid trouble and get the necessary unpleasantness over with
as quickly as possible.45 Negotiated by interracial Community Relations
committees, conducted in harmony with a close-mouthed press and a
cooperative police department, the tactic of controlled integration made a
potentially explosive situation seem matter of fact and inevitable.
Meanwhile, offstage, the federal government was encouraging the
transition, though with a velvet glove rather than an iron fist. As a
concession to Confederate pride, the Department of Justice held back
from coercive action and permitted localities to ‘voluntarily desegregate’—a
charade perhaps, but an expedient one. Southern communities ‘take more
kindly to desegregation if it is clear that the principal sponsors of this
move are respected local businessmen,’ counseled the Motion Picture Herald
‘Opposition would assuredly be more vocal—and perhaps even violent—if
disaffected elements got the notion that any element of federal pressure
were involved.” 46
Not that civic responsibility and progressive impulses were the main
motivations. Unlike the small town neighborhood theater, the big city
theaters paid for the privilege of racism. Whereas segregated seating in a
small theater with one ticket window and one entrance could be a low-
maintenance, cost-efficient enterprise, a large metropolitan theater with a
‘colored balcony’ needed to maintain a level of racial etiquette befitting the
palatial surroundings. Employing separate cashiers, ticket-takers, and ushers
to operate a ‘black shelf ’ (as it was called) cost an estimated $100 to $200 in
added weekly wages in 1961; yearly overhead could run an additional $5,000
to $10,000.47 Moreover, the returns on the investment were proportionally
diminished because black patrons typically paid only half as much for their
tickets as white patrons (fifty cents for adults, fifteen cents for children).48

208
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

If integration in some major cities of the Deep South proceeded relatively

smoothly, negotiated by interracial community groups and backed by city
fathers, white moviegoers in other communities, especially in smaller cities
and rural hamlets, were more stubborn about relinquishing their reserved
seats. The ‘controlled integration’ schemes depended upon the anonymity of
the metropolis; in a tightly knit community, such infiltration tactics would be
an open secret. ‘Neighborhood theaters, generally, are evading integration,’
Variety conceded in 1963. ‘Catering to residents in the immediate vicinity,
with race prejudice harder to sterilize, these situations hope to remain
segregated, and for the time being are playing a waiting game.’ 49 Even at
that late date, the high profile integrations in some big-name Southern cities
were not yet commonplace.50
In fact, as the civil rights movement gained adherents and momentum,
and as protests became more volatile and aggressive, some Southern
theater managers and their white clients dug in their heels. An exhibitor
in Durham, North Carolina, retaliated against the stand-ins by closing his
segregated balcony and forbidding admittance to all blacks ‘in view of the
obvious fact that our separate facilities for Negro patrons are no longer
acceptable to many.’ 51 In Thomasville, North Carolina, over forty African
American protesters were jailed for blocking the entrance to the town’s
only motion picture theater, a segregated venue with a colored balcony. The
manager counterattacked by declaring that Negroes might take seats on the
ground floor but that the price of admission would be five dollars Likewise,
whites who wished to sit in the colored balcony would also be charged five
dollars. The normal admission price was under one dollar 52
But like their colleagues in the big cities, many small town theater
owners wanted only the peace and quiet that drew crowds inside rather
than gawking at the pickets outside. ‘I don’t know what would happen if I
opened the entire theatre to Negroes, and I don’t know what would happen
if I don’t,’ moaned the manager of a 400-seat theater in Oxford, North
Carolina. ‘I’m just a small businessman.’ 53
The self-styled spokesman for such small businessmen was Motion
Picture Herald, the exhibitor-oriented weekly serving the independent
theater owner. Founded in 1930 by Martin Quigley, a guiding hand behind
the Production Code, and edited either by Quigley or his son until the
magazine folded in 1972, Motion Picture Herald mixed conservative values
and commercial interests, ladling out moral probity with no-nonsense advice
on exploitation stunts, advertising campaigns, and concession-stand items.
It sought to nurture a homey sense of community among independently
owned neighborhood theaters (‘nabes’ in trade parlance) located in small
towns and urban enclaves across the nation. The issue of segregated

209
 g oing to the mov ies

spectatorship was sensitively registered—or rather not registered—in its

pages.
Though priggish on matters of screen content, the Quigleys were reliable
advocates of progressive social policies, not least equality for African
Americans. The problem they faced was that a goodly portion of the
journal’s subscriber base resided in the South. As a result, throughout the
1950s and early 1960s, as the civil rights movement simmered and boiled
over, the news and editorial pages of Motion Picture Herald were studiously
silent on the issue of segregated spectatorship. ‘Better Theaters,’ a monthly
feature that lovingly celebrated the lavish interior designs of motion picture
palaces, also failed to note racial restrictions in the architectural blueprints.
By 1963, however, even Motion Picture Herald could no longer ignore the
financial-cum-moral quandary facing certain of their subscribers. Gently at
first, and with increasing boldness as the months wore on, Martin Quigley,
Jr. advised theatermen to open their doors to any customer, black or white,
with the necessary dollars.
In coaxing exhibitors towards integration, Quigley’s initial editorial
comments are case studies in mealy mouthed equivocation. ‘In many places
the theater owner finds himself as an unwilling bystander caught in the
middle of the race struggle,’ he reflected in June 1963, ignoring the fact
that the theater owner who practiced segregation had already placed himself
smack in the middle of the situation. Quigley suggested that exhibitors put
their fingers to the wind and play a waiting game:

The best thing a theater owner can do is to open up channels of

communication with opinion leaders in his community. In this way
he will be prepared, if an emergency should arise, to work with the
moderates on both sides and find acceptable answers.54

But where Quigley was equivocal, hardcore segregationists were determined

and single-minded. Nothing less than the coercive intervention of a federal
government worried about more than the equal protection clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would compel racist
theater owners to serve all comers. As the summer of 1963 loomed, and
as emboldened civil rights protesters organized to call in the marker on
a dream deferred, the shadow of Jim Crow threatened to undercut the
reputation of the U.S. in its long twilight struggle against communism.
On both the international and domestic front, the Kennedy administration
viewed racial segregation as more than a public relations débâcle: it cut to
the very core of American moral capital in the Cold War.
Characteristically, this most media-savvy of presidents was acutely

210
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

conscious of the geo-political backfire from motion picture segregation.

‘Kennedy, according to associates, sees the Negro-only balconies and no-
Negro one-floor theaters on the hominy grits circuits as possibly triggering
violence,’ commented Variety in its trademark blend of glib rhetoric and
blunt analysis. ‘The Kennedy administration is avowedly frightened that
with summer recess from the schools the nation may be disgraced by
race riots, a political liability in the United Nations and in the ideological
war with Soviet Russia.’ 55 In the spring of 1963, as police dogs and fire
houses were being unleashed on Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights
demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, as the contradictions of American
life were being broadcast on national television and transmitted overseas,
the face of Jim Crow was the best propaganda trump card the Soviet
Union held.
Foreseeing a long hot summer of violent protests, the Kennedy adminis-
tration held two meetings in order to, as an official White House press
release put it, ‘examine some aspects of the difficulties experienced by
minority groups in many of our cities in securing employment and equal
access to facilities and services generally available to the public.’ 56 Among
the businessmen in attendance, motion picture exhibitors were singled out
and double teamed by the two Kennedy brothers, first by Robert, then by
John.
On 27 May 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called together
at the White House executives from forty theater chains representing
80 per cent of Southern operations. In the sternest terms, he urged the
exhibitors to desegregate voluntarily. ‘It was evidently made clear that
the government—though it asked for no promises and gave none—would
look favorably on those [exhibitors] who followed the “straight road” to
desegregation,’ reported The Film Daily. ‘No alternative was presented, it
is understood.’ 57
The Attorney General informed the exhibitors that the administration’s
pending civil rights bill—the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of
1964—would contain a public accommodations provision requiring theater
circuits to desegregate. The Motion Picture Herald reminded any readers in
need of a lesson in law and the motion picture business that ‘the distribution
of film to theaters has been held by the courts to be interstate commerce;
hence, theatres are clearly involved’ 58
The exhibitors got the message. Kennedy’s blunt warning resulted
immediately in what one theater owner delicately referred to as ‘certain
crystallized results.’ Within days, an estimated twenty-five to thirty theaters
had voluntarily desegregated. Theaters throughout Virginia—within easy
driving distance of the Department of Justice in Washington, DC—quietly

211
 g oing to the mov ies

took down their segregation signs ‘with no notice or comment but with no
ill-effect.’ 59
On 4 June 1963, RFK’s instructions were seconded by the President
himself, who included theatermen in a closed meeting with prominent
business executives also attended by Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and the
Attorney-General. Suddenly eager to please, the theatermen presented the
Kennedys with a lengthy list of recently desegregated theaters. According to
a motion picture executive in attendance, once the press had been ushered
out of the meeting, the president argued for theater desegregation in a
‘most persuasive’ manner and reaffirmed the administration’s commitment
to equality. The ‘temper of the meeting,’ reported an exhibitor, was ‘general
endorsement’ of the president’s goals.60
As if on cue, another powerful voice rallied behind the full court press
from the Kennedy administration. For decades, Variety had confined its
comments on Jim Crow to snide asides about colored balconies and Dixie
obtuseness. After the signals from the Kennedy brothers, however, it pub-
lished a rare editorial, set off in black borders and headlined with a blunt
imperative: Desegregate. ‘Why all the timidity?’ the show business bible asked.
‘The dangers [of desegregation] are slight and perhaps imaginary. Such is the
moral to be drawn from those Dixie cities which have so far been “bold”
enough to sell tickets to all who approached the box office.’ As usual, the
ethical argument was laced with a commercial sweetener stressing ‘the practi-
cal dollars and sense reasons for making a gesture to an important segment
of the audience by doing everything possible to remove the section[al] dis-
advantage with its symbolic affront.’ 61 After all, in the age of television, an
African American family could watch white folks on the home screen without
enduring the humiliations of Jim Crow seating to watch white folks on the
big screen.62 Quite simply, in the postwar buyer’s market, exhibitors no longer
had the luxury of picking and choosing among their customers
Though so far only rhetorical, the pressure emanating from the
Department of Justice and the White House had a measurable effect.
‘Quickened by recent demonstrations and Federal government pressures,
the pace of desegregation of film houses in Southern cities has apparently
increased,’ reported Variety in June 1963, adding self-reflexively that ‘where
two years ago, and less, it was streamer news in Variety that Nashville had
removed the racial restrictions at the box office, this has now become, if
not commonplace, at least a repeated decision.’ 63 That autumn, the trade
weekly noted with satisfaction that ‘only in cities of the real “deep south”
are balconies for colored still found.’ 64
Yet despite growing pressure from the Kennedy administration, despite
the progress of high profile integration in Nashville, Atlanta, and other big

212
 desegr egating the motion pic t ur e the ater

southern cities, and despite the regular appearance of platoons of disruptive

stand-in demonstrations, motion picture segregation in the deepest regions
of the Deep South was still tenacious and difficult to uproot.65 In August
1963, a progress report on theater desegregation prepared for Congress
by the Department of Commerce found much cause for optimism—some
former southern flashpoints such as Kansas City, Missouri, Memphis,
Tennessee, and Houston, Texas had lately integrated fully and peacefully.
Nonetheless, high-profile cities in a four-state belt comprised of Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia continued to resist the general trend.
‘No efforts have been undertaken to desegregate theater facilities, legitimate
stage, or cinema in Birmingham, Alabama,’ reported the survey. Similarly,
theaters in New Orleans ‘still operate on a segregated basis, and there has
been no move to change this situation.’ 66
What changed the situation was another Kennedy-related pressure: the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. Stricken by the assassination, Martin
Quigley, Jr. penned a forthright and emphatic editorial. ‘President Kennedy
directly and through his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, did
everything he could to encourage theatres in the United States voluntarily
to cease discriminatory admissions policies,’ Quigley wrote. ‘The President
helped exhibitors and their communities to realize that a merchant—such
as a theater operator—must treat all patrons equally.’ Remembering the
shameful outbursts after Robert Kennedy’s speech to the Theatre Owners of
America less than a month earlier, Quigley argued that ‘it is a bitter memory
to recall that a minority booed the Attorney General’s calm exposition of
the effects of racial policy on theatre admissions at the Theatre Owners of
America dinner.’ By way of eulogy and tribute, he declared that ‘the best
service exhibitors can do in memory of a great President is to push on in
an orderly and intelligent fashion toward the goal of nondiscriminatory
admission in every theater in the land.’ 67
Yet far more important than the transformation of attitudes within the
motion picture industry was the new law on the books. In the wake of
the Kennedy assassination, the United States Senate finally mustered the
political will to pass civil rights legislation that had for years been bottled
up in committee or blocked by filibuster. On 1 July 1964, the passage of
the Civil Rights Act made denial of equal access to public accommodations
illegal throughout the land. It ended the charade of ‘voluntary desegregation’
and spelled out the legal consequences of defiance. Southern theaters—
palaces, nabes, and drive-ins—had no real option now but to comply with
the public accommodations section of the law.
In even the most virulent of segregationist outposts, federal law forced
a decisive change Among the die-hard citadels of Jim Crow seating was

213
 g oing to the mov ies

the city of New Orleans, which had steadfastly refused to heed Kennedy
administration calls voluntarily to desegregate. ‘Pressures are believed to
originate in Washington with the Attorney-General and a desire to eradicate
one conspicuous southern city holdout, but New Orleans so far just won’t
budge, Kennedys or no,’ Variety reported in a front page story published just
two weeks before the Kennedy assassination.68 With a law on the books and
an executive branch with the will to enforce it, the new Johnson adminis-
tration compelled New Orleans—and any other defiant district—to budge.
‘Negroes testing the new Federal Civil Rights Law Monday [6 July 1964]
found doors opened at previously all-white downtown and nab theaters,
drive-ins, restaurants, and hotels,’ Variety reported in a front-page follow-up
published the week after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.69
So transformed was the cultural atmosphere and so rigorous the
enforcement regime that nationally owned chains felt no need to send out
special instructions to guide local theater managers. ‘None are necessary,’ said
an executive. ‘All our people will obey the law.’ Asked about the possibility
of a recalcitrant local theater manager offering wildcat resistance on his own,
the same executive promised, ‘If that happens, he won’t be our manager
very long.’ 70 Later that summer, the Congress of Racial Equality, which
monitored the compliance of theaters and other public accommodations,
confirmed that no theater had refused to abide by the law. By the end of
1964, as the result of an at-times mysterious and usually uncommemorated
change, Hollywood motion pictures were living up to their time-honored
billing as universal entertainment for the American public.
Today, as with so many customs and codes of the Jim Crow era, the
rituals of segregated spectatorship—separate entrances, colored balconies,
and race houses—are remembered, if at all, as the primitive folkways of
a remote and inscrutable past. Yet more than most battles of the civil
rights era, the campaign to integrate motion picture audiences has faded
from popular memory. Given the provenance of the images projected on
the Hollywood screen, breaking through the turnstiles of the local Bijou
might have been expected to exert a special evocative power and photogenic
attraction. At the time, perhaps, the reputation of the motion picture theater
as a romantic refuge for nuzzling couples may have caused civil rights
activists, wary of defying a social taboo sterner than shared spectatorship,
to fight one battle for equality at a time. In the years since the fight to
gain admittance to motion picture theaters may also have seemed trivial
compared to the weightier and more deadly campaigns for education and
voting rights. Doubtless too the preeminent presenter of the pictures of
American history—Hollywood itself—has been reluctant to recall that
moviegoing was not always an all-American activity.

214
 pa r t i i

Other Cinema
Alternatives to Theatrical Exhibition
 10

The Reel of the Month Club

16mm Projectors, Home Theaters and
Film Libraries in the 1920s

Haidee Wasson

S t u di e s of exhibition and reception have demonstrated the crucial role

that movie theaters, changing technologies, practices of distribution,
regulatory efforts, popular discourses, and other forces play in shaping the
wider cultural meaning of films and the experiences of audiences who watch
or otherwise engage them. Articulating the broad field in which questions
of culture claim their due alongside studies of form and aesthetics, this
scholarship maps the transformation of film-as-medium into cinema, a
complex of social, cultural, industrial, and aesthetic phenomena. Histories
of particular theaters, analysis of emergent public spheres, and investi-
gations of projects to control film audiences enhance our understanding
of the dynamics endemic to showing, watching, thinking about, debating,
and otherwise making sense of movies. Thinking through the multiple
factors that constitute the matrix of film exhibition and reception helps us
to understand better the conditions of modern vision generally—whether
linked to celluloid, video, print, computers, painting or other visual forms.
As the fluidity among these media increases, work on the socio-cultural
dynamics of moving images will only become more indispensable to the
vibrancy of film, cultural, visual, and media studies.
By and large, research focusing on film exhibition and reception has
tended to position the movie theater as the primary nexus or fulcrum for
such histories. The best of this work demonstrates that movie theaters are
complex sites, interwoven with the struggles that constitute the socio-
political contests undergirding public life and leisure more generally. Movie

217
 g oing to the mov ies

theaters, this work inveighs, are not autonomous entities nor are they simply
venues for the transcendental appearance of films but rather serve both to
reflect and enact varied ideas about race, class, gender, and of course, about
cinema itself.1 Individual films are but one element in what we think of as
the institution of cinema; they exist inside and never outside the currents
of history. Movie theaters—semiotically dense spaces and regulated zones
of public life—are another such element.
While there can be no doubt that the movie theater occupies a privileged
and crucial position in the history of cinema and its institutions, the precise
place of the theater on a much wider map of film exhibition and reception
needs to be more fully considered. Recent work on contemporary exhibition
argues persuasively that, since the mid-1980s, movie theaters function as
multi-mediated entertainment zones, dedicated not just to films but to food,
video games, and shopping. When considering the life cycle of particular
films, movie theaters now function as expensive advertisements for, and
indices to, future consumption of moving images in the more lucrative
media that constitute the composite technology of television: broadcast,
cable, video and DVD.2 Such theaters are but temporary way stations in the
long, widely disseminated life of movies. Arguments such as this nuance
our understanding of cinema by reorienting us away from thinking about
the movie theater as the primary organizing site for the performance of
cinematic texts and its attendant rituals, and sending us on a sprawling
search through video stores, mail-order catalogues, satellite systems and,
most importantly, homes.
When thinking about earlier phases of film and media history, one
of the reigning conceptual dichotomies that underscores the place of
the movie theater in our understanding of exhibition and reception is a
division between what is termed theatrical and non-theatrical exhibition.
This split depends on some reasonably straightforward assumptions: the
primary destination of films for the bulk of the medium’s life has been
large, darkened auditoria where audiences pay to watch projected celluloid
images. The shape and size of the screen is generally standardized, as is the
quality of image, sound, seating and over-priced refreshments.3 Films, we
assume, are in fact made to be shown in precisely such venues. As a result,
it is also widely assumed that theaters are the natural home for movies.
In short, there is a widely held tacit agreement that, on the whole, film
has historically happened first and foremost in commercial movie theaters.
Thus, the cultural experience of watching movies, when considered at all,
has consequently been understood as coincident if not coterminous with the
event of theatrical projection. All other venues are considered secondary,
tertiary, and residual, supplying diminishing returns on film’s primary remit.

218
 the r eel of the month club

Non-theatrical, then, tends to refer to everything that does not satisfy this
ideal—movies that are shown or happen everywhere else. The term performs
a seemingly limitless task, as it designates not only a vast range of films
(among them instructional and educational shorts, stag films, feature-
length religious films and sometimes Hollywood features) and indexes an
equally expansive set of spaces (including boardrooms, department stores,
union halls, classrooms, and homes). In short, I suggest that the ‘non’ of
‘non-theatrical’ should strike us—after even the smallest amount of due
consideration—as notably non-sensical, a term stretched so thin as to hinder
rather than help understanding.
Dividing the history of exhibition and reception by invoking the categories
of theatrical and non-theatrical inevitably designates a vast range of film and
cultural practice in the negative, defining it first by what it is not. This
split enforces a highly constructed and powerful industry-sanctioned norm,
successfully secured since the second decade of cinema, and forwarded by
self-described educators, filmmakers, amateurs and Hollywood moguls alike.
By defining movie theaters as the central and primary stage for moving
image performance and experience, the American film industry effectively
stabilized a diverse field. It established the norms by which a whole
medium would be measured, providing one of many formidable barriers to
entry which served to limit challenges to its oligopoly. The theatrical/non-
theatrical split has also, to repeat, been upheld by film scholars, who have
overwhelmingly focused on excavating the history of commercial movie
theaters rather than the ostensibly less important but far more numerous
other sites of exhibition. This focus on movie theaters must be understood as
a sensible beginning to what is clearly an inchoate but expanding interest in
moving image cultures and practices. This work investigates the histories of
what are widely understood as authoritative institutions and their norms. As
such, it makes good sense. Yet, as Barbara Klinger and others have noted,
there is also a certain lag or resistance among film scholars, in particular,
to accept the changing conditions for moving image aesthetics, distribution
and exhibition. Many cling to a dated and industry-sanctioned hierarchy:
darkened theaters, filled with projected celluloid, still constitute the film-
ideal. Watching moving images on televisions or VCRs or DVD players
involves a troubling deterioration of cinema-proper.4
There is an emergent body of work scratching away at this hierarchy,
exploring the ways in which the entertainment industry, the home, and
activities such as collecting transform our baseline understandings of what
cinema is and where it happens.5 Yet, despite these important strides, there
remain some noteworthy ellipses requiring fuller consideration. While the
relatively recent fact that VHS and DVD rentals have eclipsed box office

219
 g oing to the mov ies

revenue serves as a lightning rod for those of us interested in the current

cinema, I want to assert that cinema’s past is equally in need of such reconsid-
eration. Indeed, long before the VCR, DVD and the internet, portable film
projectors participated in an equally fundamental transformation of what
it meant to watch, think about, write about, love and hate movies. For
instance, one 1933 study issued by the Department of Commerce reported
190,000 ‘non-theatrical’ projectors were in use, including home sets.6 When
compared to the roughly 17,000 to 18,000 commercial movie theatres
operating in this period, this figure provides a striking counter-example
to the film circuits dominated by Hollywood, gesturing toward a network
of distribution and exhibition that was potentially ten times bigger. The
sheer size of this network requires careful tempering as it includes a range
of film gauges, rental systems and exhibiting institutions, not to mention
films that were silent and sound, short and long, international and domestic.
It nonetheless serves as a poignant reminder of the arguably innumerable
ways in which moving images—Hollywood and other—have long found
their ways into a vast range of spaces, necessarily requiring us to rethink
the ways in which cinema itself has long been part of an everyday common
sense about what it means to see in the spaces between movie theaters. That
is, the fact of 190,000 film projectors, issuing images in homes, museums,
school, hospitals, prisons, libraries and so on, constitutes a dramatically
under-considered venue for the generation of a common sense about the
place of moving images in everyday life, a common sense that has long been
generated not just in movie theaters but also just about everywhere else.
This chapter maps out a series of questions that mark the beginnings
of an effort to break up this vast field of film practice. It is a small part of
a larger project that seeks to explore the specific institutional and material
networks of 16mm technologies of exhibition, the dominant technological
infrastructure for what I will provisionally refer to as ‘extra-theatrical’
film exhibition and reception. For over fifty years, portable 16mm film
projectors provided a means by which the industry-dominated standard
of 35mm film gauge and theatrical moviegoing was circumvented and
perhaps circumscribed. This constitutes a qualitatively different mode for the
generation and elaboration of film culture, one that has long been standard
and taken for granted. Accepted knowledge about 16mm-as-exhibition
apparatus is implicated most clearly in the widespread institutionalization of
moving images after World War II. Despite its roots in nationalist wartime
strategies, this was an international cultural network, through which ideas
about nation, good and evil, coexisted with ideas about film as art, history,
and education. Many of our most basic concepts of cinema were generated
within such networks.

220
 the r eel of the month club

Yet, the significance of 16mm as idea and practice begins long before the
war, and resides in an equally important set of generative ideas and practices
that pre-exist the standardization of the gauge in 1923, and were catalyzed
by its rapid spread throughout the interwar period. On the one hand, 16mm
was central to a range of utopian discourses about images-on-demand, access
to yesterday’s films (repertory), alternative film networks based on open
exchange, aesthetic exploration, and political debate. On the other hand,
this enthusiasm for new ways of thinking, writing, and watching movies was
also coincident with very particular and often class-based discourses about
moral uplift, disciplined behaviors, and affirmative consumption. 16mm
became the preferred gauge for an ascendant cultural force seeking to wrest
mass media away from its threatening populist and commercial power, to
tame cinema by campaigning for better films, specialized audiences, and a
repertoire of prescribed methods and manners for engaging movies.7 These
histories are much larger than can be tackled here. Nevertheless, as a way
of demonstrating the rich and suggestive trajectories of one piece of these
histories, this chapter addresses the ways in which 16mm was imagined
early on in its development as a new revolution less in institutions of public
or civic purview and more in the tasteful, safe, and ordered salon of the
middle-class American home.

A New Reel Monthly

In the fall of 1927, William Ganz announced the formation of the Reel of
the Month Club, a subscription service promising regular and timely motion
pictures of the world’s key news events ‘almost’ as they happen. Once
monthly a film that had been carefully selected for what was termed ‘quality’
and ‘relevance’ would appear on that magically abundant site—the home
doorstep—alongside the milk, newspapers, packages and envelopes that
constituted the day’s mail. In theory, these films would be eagerly watched
by the growing body of home movie fans and then promptly placed on
the library shelf, alongside the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the leather-bound
Shakespeare, and the family photo album, as part of the ordered and tasteful
home library.
Ganz had been in the film business since 1919, but his most recent
ventures, including The Reel of the Month Club and Peerless Cine News
(promising ‘Highlights from the News, the World in Your Home’) had
taken a particular turn.8 Spurred by the proliferation of 16mm projectors
and films facilitating movies in the home, bolstered by the recent vogue for
simultaneity encouraged powerfully by radio and inspired by the marketing
genius of The Book of the Month Club (1926), Ganz sought to accelerate

221
 g oing to the mov ies

an ongoing and lasting trend in film culture. Like his contemporaries,

he attempted to use the mail and the ascendant empire of advertising,
newspapers and middlebrow magazines to broker a key shift in how movies
would be packaged, sold, circulated, and seen. Ganz tried to make the mass
medium of the movies into a polite and edifying activity, transforming
cinema into a consumable object for the leisured and affluent middle class,
providing an evening’s entertainment away from the roaring crowds of the
picture palace or the neighborhood theater by relocating it to the inner
sanctum of the bourgeois salon and, eventually, the home library.
From surviving evidence, The Reel of the Month Club was never the
sweeping success Ganz imagined. It does, however, provide a compelling if
humble index to a much larger shift brought about by the spread of portable
film projectors and the domestication of cinema. Until the introduction of
the 16mm standard, the field of home movie-making and watching was a
small field of hobbyists, amateurs and elite enthusiasts.9 From 1923 onward,
16mm-as-apparatus effectively consolidated, coordinated and accelerated
these activities, and during the 1920s, home movie theaters moved from the
relatively small domain of the hobbyist to the expanded discursive realm
of the mass media.10 Like the concurrently and similarly transforming field
of radio, format standardization, techniques of mass marketing, equipment
automation, and direct address to the home and to women made home
movie theaters viable as a mass mediated and commodified ideal. Ganz’s
business was intimately tied to these shifting conditions, as well as to the
more general ways in which electrified home entertainment was taking root
across a range of media forms: radios, phonographs, and of course, movie
projectors.
Sixteen millimetre technology was an amalgam of cameras, projectors
and film stock, introduced in 1923 by Eastman Kodak, world leader in the
manufacture of celluloid. The gauge was bolstered by industry agreements
established with Bell and Howell, prominent film equipment firm, and later
with Victor-Animatograph, a leading stereoscope manufacturer.11 A rebuff
to the dominance of Pathé’s 28mm system, and a contemporary of the same
company’s 9.5mm system, 16mm reduced the costs of previous formats,
continued to increase portability, and maintained the non-flammability
of its rival formats by exclusively using Eastman acetate stock. Previous
literature on the emergence of 16mm technologies has focussed on the
changes introduced by the new gauge to ideas and practices of filmmaking.12
Yet, the idea of 16mm exhibition or self-operated theatres—as distinct
from amateur or do-it-yourself movie-making—had a far greater and more
lasting impact, spreading quickly both nationally and internationally. By
1930, the new gauge was associated with a feverish enthusiasm for the

222
 the r eel of the month club

10.1 Catalogue
for Kodak’s 16mm
Kodascope Library
Service (cover, 1930).
Note that mother is
operating the projector
and thus orchestrating
the show.

promise that it would extend the cinematic frontier everywhere. Commercial

film libraries proliferated to deal in the new gauge. A vast library of titles
was made available through an international rental and purchase system:
Bell and Howell’s Filmo Library, Kodak’s Kodascope Library, Pathé’s
Pathéscope Library and a series of smaller agencies entered the fray. By
1928, an estimated 22 such libraries targeted the American home.13 These
libraries functioned occasionally as stand alone rental agencies, but mostly
made use of department stores, drug stores, camera shops, and mail order
systems, creating vast networks of moving image circulation and exchange.
Listed subjects ranged from slapstick to animation, travel, sports and nature
films—clearly reflecting a middlebrow disposition. Titles ranged from the
offerings of defunct production companies to films that had only recently
concluded their theatrical runs. For instance, Kodascope Libraries had

223
 g oing to the mov ies

10.2 An
advertisement
for Pathégrams,
Pathé’s short film
service. The text
emphasizes the
variety and the
‘sparkling’ nature
of the monthly
subscription
service. (Movie
Makers, 1930).

contracts with Paramount, First National, the U.S. War Department, Fox
Films, Warner Brothers, and even rival Pathé. It also circulated films from
long-departed production companies such as Biograph, Triangle, World,
Mutual, and Essanay.14 Films were often chosen explicitly for their propriety
and advertised as quality films, appropriate for all family members.15
Specialty services were also founded within these larger lending libraries,
designed to accent the simultaneity indexed earlier by the Reel of the Month
Club. These services were designed to bring connectedness and timeliness
into the home film market, turning the parlor into a window on the world.
In the presidential election year of 1928, as a part of the Pathégrams series,
Pathé advertised ‘glimpses of the Democratic and Republican candidates
… See your favorites in public and home life. Know and understand them
better through their “action” before the lens.’ 16 Kodak Cinegraphs were
similarly designed to provide recordings of ‘the most important events of

224
 the r eel of the month club

the world as they take place,’ keeping spectators in touch with current
world news events.17 These films were often shorter than regular standard
rentals, making them more affordable for outright purchase. They were,
then, also an important element of the next stage in the gradual expansion
of extra-theatrical moving images into the middle-class home, not just in
the form of exhibited moving images but also in the form of the home
film library. As the Cinegraph catalogue read: ‘Most Cinegraphs you will
want to buy and keep permanently—just as you collect worthwhile books
for your library.’ 18
In terms similar to modern discourses attached to home computers and
home theaters, Cinegraphs crafted their films as purveyors of a privileged
form of knowledge and experience. Advertisements positioned Cinegraph
films as a transparent link to distant and past events that could now be
dramatically ‘lived’ and ‘relived’ in the home. One ad for the World War
Movies read:

A vast panorama of war … now revealed with stark realism. This is

not a motion picture in the usual sense. It is a chapter of your life
brought back to live over again. […] Words simply cannot describe
these pictures. You must see them to appreciate them … They
will become priceless ‘heirlooms’ to be passed on in any family …
increasing in value as years go by.19

Kodak sold a new kind of historical experience, one brokered by rolls of

celluloid and stored on a shelf alongside other ‘great adventures of modern
times’ in the form of books, magazines, and photo albums. Cinegraphs
were sold as valuable items for the home library—precious objects to be
collected and cared for—an integral part of a proper family’s pedigree,
suitably enhancing the family’s wealth, in part, by expanding their worldly
knowledge-as-visual experience. Moving pictures of the world-in-the-home
were likened to the virtues of the library, a comprehensive store of living
knowledge whose very possession and endurance through time increased
the virtues of family and home. Kodak designed a cinema notably distinct
from that of the commercial movie theater. Rather than public, ephemeral
and entertaining, they crafted a domestic theater infused with precisely the
opposite characteristics: private, familial, enduring and educational. While
the home was clearly being linked to the world through discourses of
relevance and simultaneity, these quintessentially modern ideas about rapid
time and diminished space were counter balanced by the prospect of moving
images whose value—under the protective shelter of the home library—not
only endured but appreciated over time. In short, moving images were sold

225
 g oing to the mov ies

as a means by which the changes wrought by modern life would be made

slower, safer and more easily contained.

Hollywood Homes
The enthusiasm for 16mm as a domestic technology was not only the purview
of technology and celluloid manufacturers such as Kodak or diversified
global media companies such as Pathé. Hollywood also noticed the growing
field. The recent reorganization of industry structure surely facilitated this
interest. The 1920s was a period in which film production interests began
to merge aggressively with film exhibiting interests, forming vertically and
horizontally integrated corporate structures. Indeed, there was a noteworthy
increase of investment among the film, recorded music, radio and publishing
industries as well. As Donald Crafton has noted, the movie industry by 1929
‘had become a huge tentacular structure with healthy interests across media
forms, and with equally close ties to the paradigmatic shifts ushered in by
electricity conglomerates.’ 20 The American film industry had made clear
material and imaginative connections with corporations that had set their
sights on capitalizing on the growing affluence of American homes and the
synergistic value of cross-media entertainment networks.
In 1930, Variety declared that these collective ventures into the 16mm field
constituted the next entertainment revolution.21 Estimating that 200,000
American homes were already equipped, the trade paper predicted that there
were at least two million more homes that could afford to be efficiently
served by 16mm film libraries. With traditional modesty, the industry organ
exclaimed that through 16mm ‘the film industry sees itself in a position to
dominate the entire peoples of the world’—bypassing theaters and directly
targeting people everywhere else.22 Synchronized sound also came quickly
to home units, shadowing trends in theatrical exhibition. That Christmas,
Variety reported that 48 ‘Home Talker Sets’ were available for consumer
purchase.23 Film libraries followed suit. In 1930, Bell & Howell’s Filmo
rental service announced the addition of 120 German films produced by
Ufa, available in silent or sound-on-disc version. Sound-on-film rentals were
available from 1934 forward, shortly after the introduction of its Filmosound
projector.
Despite the hyperbole attached to 16mm homes, its position as the
specific tool of Hollywood’s home conquest was, it must be said, never
realized. Indeed, the utopian home-life of 16mm was relatively short-lived,
swept away by the introduction of 8mm in 1932 and the rise of television
shortly thereafter. Concerns about unauthorized copies of films that might
serve to weaken the functional monopoly of movie theaters on admission

226
 the r eel of the month club

revenue also persisted. The enthusiastic energies attached to 16mm migrated

to other locations. It became the primary gauge for schools, churches,
libraries and universities from the mid-1930s forward. Yet, throughout the
1920s, 16mm held brief if frequently maniacal promise of forever changing
home entertainment. It is to the specificities of this promise that I now
turn.

Electric Domestic
The 1920s witnessed sizable changes both in the middle-class American
household and in federal policy pertaining to the home. The elevation
of the single, self-owned family dwelling as the standard currency of
economic policy begins in the first years of this decade, providing the basic
building blocks for the massive suburbanization we tend to associate with
the post-war period. Home ownership was refashioned as the generative

10.3 This advertisement

for a ‘home-talkie’ unit
featured ‘America’s
foremost entertainers’
and ‘operatic stars’
appearing in the parlor
every night, a pre-
televisual idea about
liveness and simultaneity.
(Movie Makers, 1930).

227
 g oing to the mov ies

site of American nationhood in presidential speeches and publications,

­conceptualizing the home owner as the epitome of individual prosperity
and moral accomplishment. The American Dream was grafted onto the
American Home giving birth to the notion of the ‘Dream House.’ 24 It
was through idealized figurations such as the Better Home and the Dream
House that material changes to the American home took on fuller meaning:
electrification, central heating, hot/cold indoor plumbing, convenience
foods, and electrical appliances constituted highly visible elements of a
widely disseminated and highly commodified domestic ideal.
The new and better dream house was also inseparable from the gendered
economy of the household. Taylorist principles were matched with the
automation of domestic labor through the electrical home appliance in a
series of widespread discourses that linked efficiently run homes to the
moral rectitude of the consuming housewife.25 These discourses formed
most fully and were spread most widely in women’s magazines such as
The Delineator, Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies Home Journal, and Good
Housekeeping, on the pages of which one could find prescriptive literature
about cooking, sewing, beauty and shopping alongside ads for electric stoves,
vacuum cleaners, phonographs, radios, encyclopedias and—importantly—
home movie theaters.26 In one typical campaign, seen widely in Kodak’s
own literature but also in its national advertising campaigns, Kodak simply
imported its ‘You push the button, we do the rest’ slogan—previously
used to sell its cameras—and attached its projectors, crafting images of
calm housewives showing movies to enraptured children, husbands and
houseguests. In short, the home movie projector attained solid footing in
the popular imaginary through pictures that were consistently circulated
in mass-distributed magazines (and newspapers) throughout the period.
In the pages of women’s magazines, these machines became resolutely
gendered.27
In venues such as Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, movies in
the home and home theaters were inextricably linked to discourses about
automated, efficient homes and housewives. To be sure, the home movie
theater was an industry ideal not to be mistaken for an empirical reality.
The prices of home movie systems were prohibitive even to the affluent
middle class of the period, comparable to top-of-the-line home theater
systems today.28 Yet, it is clear that companies such as Kodak initially set
out to market movies and projectors as part of the contemporary explosion
of electrical appliances and domestic euphoria endemic to the period. A
contemporary study by advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, which held
the Kodak account from 1928 onwards, confirms the presumed link between
prosperity, gender, electrified appliances and movies in the home. The

228
 the r eel of the month club

10.4 ‘A click of the

Switch…’ Kodak
promised to automate
home theaters by
making projectors easy
for mother to operate.
(Ladies Home Journal,
April, 1927).

survey co-articulated camera and projector ownership with the acquisition

of toasters, radios, vacuum cleaners, coffee pots and stoves, as well as other
Kodak equipment. According to this one and admittedly very partial study,
J. Walter Thompson concluded that the owners of home motion picture
equipment were predominantly women, who consistently owned more home
appliances than owners of all other photographic equipment (e.g. point-
and-shoot cameras).29 This at least confirms that there was an identifiable
industry-sanctioned idea about home movie systems in general. Cameras
and projectors were being gendered as feminine, a configuration that is
markedly different from the ways in which, as Barbara Klinger’s work has
demonstrated, the technophilic and masculinized home theater unfolds in
contemporary discourses.30
The idea of movies in the home was a beneficiary of the ascendant
means and methods of the modern, electrified, commodified home. Their
appearance in the burgeoning body of middlebrow women’s magazines

229
 g oing to the mov ies

alongside other domestic appliances is but one symptom of this. Yet another
is the way in which the film projector-as-machine and the growing body
of films were marketed. In short, watching movies in the home was also
linked to the discourses addressing middle-class homemakers, and their
ascribed need to differentiate themselves by selectiveness of consumption,
announcing prosperity through particular strategies of home decoration that
made active use of culture-as-object.
In her discussion of the Book of the Month Club, Janice Radway
has argued that culture was being transformed throughout the 1920s
into a ‘characteristically modern business,’ employing speed, quantity, and
efficiency and geared toward increasing consumption. The proliferating
objects of culture reflect the growing preoccupation of the middle class to
accumulate and display the signs of upward mobility, education, prosperity,
and refinement. The ideal home became a site dense with the signs
of accumulating knowledge and erudition. Books, for instance, became
standard elements of the middle-class home, not only as the gears for good
reading habits but as objects imbuing the home with the status offered by
literature, whether they were read or not. One critic of the time described
the books circulated through the Book of the Month Club as ‘furniture
books,’ due in part to the founder’s insistence that all of his books be
leather bound in order that they look good on shelves. Their outward
appearance was as or more important than anything written or read inside
their covers.31
For films, these Bourdieu-inflected strategies of distinction hold a
particular twist as the titles available for rental and purchase did not
necessarily share the readily accepted and respectable status of literature,
poetry or history. Nor did film watching easily call forth the appeal of the
book to nineteenth-century ideals of the slow, meditative or the private.
Moreover, the grey metal cans that held these films did predictably little
to compensate for these supposed shortcomings. Thus, arranging films
in the home was harnessed to the indices associated with other objects
of edification. The unsightly film can was made discreet and respectable
by placing it in faux-leather book casings, thus facilitating its smooth
integration with its more visually appealing brethren on the book shelf.
Kodak, along with other companies, sold a range of faux-leather bindings
and other such tasteful storage devices. Resonating with the contempo-
raneous trend to subsume the technological apparatus of the radio and turn
it into furniture, large entertainment centers were crafted to house both
films and projectors, and sometimes screens. In 1927, Kodak marketed ‘The
Library Kodascope,’ an expensive oak unit in ‘moderne’ style that allowed
for regular projection or self-contained viewing (rear-projection). Happy

230
 the r eel of the month club

10.5
Advertisement
for Kodak’s
line of film
furniture,
making cinema
harmonious
with modern
domestic décor.
(The Cine-
Kodak News,
March 1930).

couples and sometimes families were shown gathered around small and
smaller screens, sometimes as small as roughly 6 × 6 inches. Such diminutive
screens were easily obscured by the furniture meant to conceal them. More
discreet and less expensive versions of the Library Kodascope were designed
to sit on tables, and were often pictured beside books, or neatly arranged
to compliment other household objects.
The problem of where to house the unsightly projector was only
magnified by the problem of where to place the large and awkward film
screen. While budget screens or no-frills units were sold that could easily
collapse and be hidden in a closet, another model paired a film screen with a
card table. Entitled The Kodacarte, the table was hinged on one side, quickly
swinging open to provide ready access to a mobile projector’s wares. More

231
 g oing to the mov ies

sleek were upscale screens that were permanently and conveniently mounted
but obscured by tasteful tapestries or pastoral scenes that pulled down like
a blind to quickly reveal or cover a frequently used and centrally located
screen. In the context of the idealized home, the modernity of cinema’s
machine—projectors, films and screens—was muted by ideals of contained,
safe, and enduring domesticity, its threatening powers subordinated to a
feminized moral housekeeper equally schooled in the efficient operations of
other domesticated, commodified machines. Images of family togetherness
persisted throughout these pictures, reaffirming a bourgeois sociality,
markedly distinct from the sprawling, polyglot and charged crowds of the
public movie theater.

Enduring Vestiges
Anne Friedberg, Tom Gunning, Anna McCarthy, Vanessa Schwartz,
Barbara Klinger, Michelle Hilmes and many others have implored film
and media scholars to rethink the phenomena deemed relevant when
investigating the current and the past of film and television as both aesthetic
media with distinct formal properties but also as experiences, spaces, and
technological and material networks. Examining the home theater of the
1920s and 1930s suggests interesting departures from contemporary domestic
film cultures, implicating home theaters less in amateurism and cinephilia
and more in a set of discourses about the modern home, automation, and
domestic rituals of affirmation—and in a set of ideas about turning the
home inside out without threatening its privileged and autonomous site.
Moreover, movies in the home were presented as an ideal to the growing
body of women magazine readers, linking home theaters unmistakably
to discourses of efficiency, gendered labor, and moral housekeeping. Film
programming as home entertainment was shaped as women’s work.
Marketing films to the home in the 1920s belies a certain anxiety about
importing moving images into the increasingly central site for announcing
moral propriety and individual success under capitalism and its commodified
home stage. Screens were only welcomed with ambivalence, carefully
directed away from the lurid and sensual appeal of the popular movie theater
and made safe by reassuring images of feminized oversight and general
containment. Commercial film libraries attempted to connect that home
and those screens to an ever-expanding world, but they did so clearly within
the constraints of a particular cultural stance, crafting films as news or as
educational objects that maintained value through time—clearly differen-
tiating them from the ephemeral pleasures of public entertainments. The
home became one of the many sites imagined as a generative mechanism

232
 the r eel of the month club

for a new kind of film audience, familial or individual—brokered by the

efficiently laboring ‘lady of the house.’
The commercial film library (similar to Blockbuster today) was the
imagined and material stage where the cinematic world came together and
was stored, reorganized and redistributed along specific logics to newly
atomized film audiences. The home film library further privatized these
activities, linking them firmly to the familial and the domestic. Seeing
and saving films in the home was likened to the function of reading and
collecting books. The film library was designed as a way to rein in the
world of news, entertainment and travel, connecting home viewers to
audiences, places, events, natural wonders and even historical periods far
away. Long before the director’s cut and the ‘collector’s edition,’ the home
film library of the 1920s reflected the attempt to negotiate the position of
film within a rapidly transforming and highly gendered domestic arena,
in a manner that presaged some of the debates surrounding television by
20 years.
The idea manifest in The Reel of the Month Club was clearly a prescient
one, applied effectively today by companies such as Netflix, WalMart,
Blockbuster and others. The application of this idea has transformed cinema
into a phenomenon that primarily addresses a domestic audience, even as
the spectacular and the global are increasingly central themes of mainstream
film culture. The Reel of the Month Club marks a telling cultural ideal
in a much earlier incarnation of domestic film culture, embodying the
vestiges of preceding domestic entertainments such as stereoscopes, and
bearing relevance for the impending arrival of television. To be sure, images
from everywhere have long been reorganized by institutions of domesticity,
whether still or moving, educational or entertaining. More pertinent for this
discussion is this: homes have long mattered for making sense of cinema.
Elaborating precisely how they matter for cinema is a major and necessary
project on the horizon.32
During the 1920s, the idea of a monthly film in the home coincided
with contemporaneous changes to home entertainment, signaled by the
transformation of a range of media into electrified commodities: radios,
phonographs, and film projectors. Watching and owning these films was
co-articulated with class-specific ideas about edifying leisure, gendered
labor, and consumption as a sign of (in Bourdieu’s term) ‘distinction.’ Also
relevant was a noteworthy increase of the domestic address by Hollywood
and other film technology industries through amateur and fan magazines,
novelizations, radio programs, star product endorsements, and other movie-
related material artifacts. Inquiring about cinema—exploring other domestic
entertainments and media forms—provides one of the many starting points

233
 g oing to the mov ies

for future work. Consulting the vast body of television scholarship will, of
course, be another.
Examining domesticity in the context of cinema is important for several
reasons. The home theater has long been crafted as the counterpoint to
public commercial moviegoing. Each shaped the other and thus tells us
much about the way in which industry discourses (including but not limited
to those of Hollywood) have long negotiated the integral links between
public and private moving image realms. Organizations such as the Reel of
the Month Club also index a period during which the ephemeral moving
images of the movie theater were transforming into enduring and material
objects, integrated alongside other objects of domestic life and commodity
culture. This phenomenon resonates loudly with current DVD trends,
providing continuity to this practice but also key points of departure from
it. Lastly, it is clear that as the American film industry became increasingly
organized, the home early on became at least a faint but visible blip on the
emergent radar charting the explosion of residual markets for film product.
For all of these reasons, homes matter for making sense of cinema. This
basic fact will only be amplified as emergent technologies continue to
privatize cinema and spread the signs and experiences of moving images
throughout both imagined and real domestic spaces.

234
 11

Early Art Cinema in the U.S.

Symon Gould and the Little Cinema
Movement of the 1920s

Anne Morey

T h e archaeology of pre-World War II art cinema in the United States

has remained largely unexplored. One reason for this neglect is the
understanding that the content of such a cinema was largely European and
is thus best studied in the context of a particular film’s national cinema.
Another is the belief that American art cinema institutions could not come
into full existence before the monolithic control of the studio system was
broken by the effects of the 1948 Paramount Decree. Suggesting that any
understanding of art cinema must comprehend institutional structures as
well as a set of textual practices, David Bordwell argues that the post-Second
World War appearance of art cinema in the United States is attributable to
Hollywood’s diminished control of its own market.1 Steve Neale also implies
that art cinema is typically understood relationally, with the structuring
binary being that of Hollywood v. non-Hollywood film practice.2 Both
Bordwell and Neale suggest the existence of a kind of prehistory of the art
cinema, but it is not of major interest to them because it does not appear
to be continuous with postwar practice—if only because the institutional
landscape is so radically different on either side of the Second World War.
Yet not only did the pre-war American art cinema exist, in the shape of
what was then known as the ‘little cinema’ movement, but it also has much
to tell us about a long-running dissatisfaction with both Hollywood films
and exhibition circumstances in the 1920s and 1930s.
To be sure, even viewed exclusively as an exhibition context, the little
cinema movement in the United States did not influence the rest of the

235
 g oing to the mov ies

industry, in part because its heyday was very brief, running only from 1925
to 1929, with an afterglow that ran, in some communities, into the 1930s.
Little cinema is a collateral relative of later American art cinema rather
than a direct ancestor, because the movement was effectively ended by the
coming of sound. Moreover, from the standpoint of showcasing American
filmmaking, the little cinema movement never resulted in particularly
close cooperation with American avant-garde filmmakers or with amateur
filmmakers working outside of Hollywood. While its theaters welcomed
works such as Manhatta (1921, Sheeler and Strand), such films were simply
not numerous enough to represent a distinctive piece of the market, a
segment that was anyway later captured by museum film collections such
as that of the Art Institute of Chicago or the Museum of Modern Art
in New York. Yet what was distinctive about the little cinema movement
was an urgent (if unpopular) understanding of an underserved audience, in
some instances ‘movie-phobes,’ who could be claimed for the right kind of
cinema.
The little cinema movement is thus of greatest value to the film historian
in representing a socially significant manifestation of public revolt against
mainstream filmmaking. While movements for children’s matinees or the
dismantling of collusive economic structures such as block booking and
blind selling were similar outbreaks of consumer dissatisfaction in the 1920s
and 1930s, the little cinema movement attracts our attention because, as
Bordwell suggests of art cinema generally, it unites both textual practices
and institutional structures in a way that many other rejections of Hollywood
did not. The little cinema, in other words, used some of Hollywood’s
own products against it (older films were opposed to newer ones). It also
systematically opposed German, French, and Soviet filmmaking styles to
domestic narrative practices, and it combined this textual critique with the
promotion of distribution and exhibition structures that explicitly rejected
Hollywood’s business methods.
The National Board of Review’s correspondence files in the New York
Public Library manuscripts division reveal that it was the clearinghouse
for most American efforts associated with the little cinema or little theater
movement from 1922 through the 1930s. Appeals for information and
assistance, usually taking the form of letters requesting information on
the location of hard-to-find foreign films or American comedies, came to
the Board from as far afield as Denver, Colorado and Beaumont, Texas.
Entrepreneurs or film enthusiasts in relatively more sophisticated Cleveland,
Ohio and Newark, New Jersey considering the establishment of little
cinemas would frequently write to the Board for advice. In turn, the Board
would trumpet their successes in its house organ and exchange cooperative

236
 sy mon g ould a nd the lit tle cinem a mov ement

advertising between The National Board of Review Magazine and program

notes or leaflets distributed by the little cinemas. On occasion, the Board
would hold meetings in successful little cinemas in New York and its
environs; sometimes it would be the only avenue through which to find a
print of an important foreign film, such as Siegfried (1924, Lang). Even a
hardened veteran of the Film Society in London such as Iris Barry found
herself needing to consult the Board for help in locating prints of films
once she took up her curatorial duties at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York.
The National Board’s centrality makes it necessary briefly to contextualize
its philosophy of film-going and filmmaker/audience relations. The National
Board was an artifact of Progressive Era interest in the social role of
entertainment in a modern urban environment. From 1909, when it was
founded, to 1915, when it changed its name from the National Board of
Censorship, the National Board of Review cooperated closely with the
film industry (then more or less concentrated in New York), hoping to
demonstrate that self-regulation was a method by which the film industry
might avoid national and local censorship. Despite the absence of any legal
authority to regulate film content, Daniel Czitrom notes that ‘by 1914 the
N.B.C. [National Board of Censorship] claimed to be reviewing 95 per cent
of the total film output of the country: it either passed a film, suggested
changes, or condemned a movie entirely.’ 3 In 1915, however, the turmoil
over The Birth of a Nation divided the membership of the Board, and the
Supreme Court decision authorizing prior restraint of films (Mutual v. Ohio)
laid the judicial groundwork for a series of attempts to control film content
by figures outside the film industry, some of whom were, unlike the Board,
notably unsympathetic to it. 1915 also saw two other significant institutional
changes in the film industry. The court decision against the Motion Picture
Patents Company effectively dismantled the Board’s local industrial partner,
while production facilities had, of course, already been gradually moving
westward to Hollywood, and the resulting consolidation of film production
in California also diminished the Board’s sense of connection to the film
industry.
In some respects, the Board’s new lack of authority did not become
completely evident until 1922, when, as Mike Budd observes, ‘industry
leaders withdrew their support from the National Board of Review and
formed … a new self-regulatory organization,’ the Motion Pictures Producers
and Distributors Association (MPPDA).4 Nonetheless, the National Board
might have found itself in a political backwater by the early 1920s even
without this array of court decisions. Francis Couvares argues that the
career of the Board demonstrated considerable contrast between liberal,

237
 g oing to the mov ies

metropolitan (specifically New York) film culture and that of the more
conservative interior. As early as 1913, Couvares notes, ‘the Motion Picture
Exhibitors’ League of America condemned the National Board of Review
for passing pictures that predictably ran into trouble with local police
or censoring committees and voted instead for state censorship as the
only means of guaranteeing exhibitors a measure of peace in their home
communities.’ 5 In part, of course, the discrepancy in viewpoint visible in
this example between that of the Board and a trade association stems from
a conflict between definitions of film as, on the one hand, a new, popular
art form that must be given room to mature, and, on the other, a national
commodity that must be rendered inoffensive in order to fit a wide variety
of local communities immediately.
While the most urgent manifestation of the friction between New York,
and, say, Dubuque, Iowa was what was or was not considered censorable in
each community, there were other manifestations of divergence that might
be categorized as significant differences in taste. In short, there was dispute
over acceptable films, and, beyond that, dispute over pleasurable films.
David Pratt and Mike Budd have investigated the American reception of
the films of the ‘German Invasion’ of the early 1920s, and, since a number
of those films (preeminent among them The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920,
Wiene]) become the enduring fodder of little cinema movement film
programmers for the remainder of the decade, it is worth discussing their
findings briefly. Pratt examines the reviews meted out to a wide variety of
German films appearing in American cities in 1921 and argues that films
such as Caligari, Deception (1920, Lubitsch), Shattered (1921, Pick), and The
Golem (1920, Wegener) found virtually no purchase among audiences outside
the country’s largest cities or a few smaller cities, such as Milwaukee, with
notable concentrations of German-Americans.6 Pratt discounts the influence
of systematic anti-German sentiment fostered by organizations such as the
American Legion as the cause of disaffection with such films. Rather, he
argues that even when American distributors such as Samuel Goldwyn
made an effort to place these films, they simply did not find favor with
audiences in the less populous and less cosmopolitan segments of the market
that provided the majority of Hollywood’s revenues. More crucially, Pratt
notes that the initial urban success of Passion (1919, Lubitsch) proved to be
punishing for the films that followed it, inasmuch as it caused an increase in
film rental rates, later generating considerable resentment among exhibitors
who wanted a box office draw commensurate with their expenses and the
risk they were taking by exhibiting a foreign novelty.7 These observations
introduce one of the first leitmotifs of the little cinema movement, namely
that would-be operators will have to control costs ruthlessly.

238
 sy mon g ould a nd the lit tle cinem a mov ement

Budd puts the difficulties Caligari encountered outside New York in

1921 in somewhat more general terms when he observes that ‘although the
advertising apparatus attempted to recuperate its difficult modernist qualities
in various ways, and although the film received substantial publicity, it
remained too transgressive to succeed within the commodity culture.’ 8
What Caligari did do, however, was attract the notice of commentators who
typically ignored film, garnering reviews and commentaries in periodicals as
far afield as the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.9 Budd focuses
his attention particularly on the sympathetic review received by Caligari in
the house organ of the National Board of Review, Exceptional Photoplays,
because it exposes what he sees as the National Board’s reduction in power
from a body with significant authority over what could be released to an
organization with no power beyond the encouragement of particular kinds
of film taste. As Budd puts it, ‘By 1921, its power quickly diminishing to the
symbolic, the board began more explicitly to shift what was left of its cultural
capital away from Hollywood toward an international canon of artistic
films, which would include but not be limited to Hollywood productions.’ 10
While there is considerable justice in Budd’s categorization of the interests of
Exceptional Photoplays as increasingly directed toward foreign films, I think
it is possible to overstate the sense of loss the Board may have felt over its
waning power. Its more active, political role was to some extent wished upon
it, and, since it always viewed itself as a clearinghouse for any organization
hoping to secure the betterment of the cinema, it could hardly have hoped
to operate in anything more than a mild, advisory capacity.
What does need to be acknowledged is the Board’s consistent opposition
to censorship, the steadfast belief in selecting and presenting excellent, even
daring, cinematic work at the price of offense, and concern with underserved
audiences, such as children. We might also note that the emphasis on the
daring is unexpected, given the Board’s allies. The organization yoked
together, loosely and at times uneasily, such disparate groups as the
Daughters of the American Revolution, the Parent-Teacher Association, the
Church and Drama Association, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ,
assorted trade unionists, sociologists, and public figures such as Fannie
Hurst. The range of interest and attitude displayed there is simply enormous.
Finally, it should be noted that the Board’s opposition to censorship was
grounded in a fervent belief in the primacy of the well-prepared citizen’s
right to choose and to shape his or her entertainment, which, of course,
made support of the little cinema movement a natural extension of the
Board’s other endeavors.
As a consequence of the Board’s large variety of interests, the little
cinema movement was only one method of securing better films and better

239
 g oing to the mov ies

audiences pursued in the pages of Exceptional Photoplays, at conferences,

and in its correspondence with groups such as women’s clubs and church
groups. Indeed, precisely because the Board was interested simultaneously
in religious filmmaking, junior matinees, helping to support character
education through film programs, developing museum collections of film,
and the like, the little cinema movement was perhaps starved of some of
the attention it might otherwise have received. The Board, in other words,
never had the unitary (and more purely aesthetic) agenda of a ciné club in
France, or the Film Society in London, and this may be one of the reasons
that the little cinema movement became rather attenuated by the end of the
decade. Nonetheless, the Board presented itself as a prime mover in little
cinema circles from 1922 onward. As Wilton Barrett, executive secretary
of the Board, observed in a letter to A.W. Newman of the Little Theatre
of the Movies in Cleveland, ‘The National Board, as you know, is greatly
interested in the Little Photoplay Theatre movement and properly so, since
we sponsored this movement many years ago [presumably in the pages of
Exceptional Photoplays] and were the first here in New York to undertake
private invitation showings of unusual films in order to build up a nucleus
audience.’ 11
The major figure outside the National Board of Review associated with
the first appearance of a little cinema in New York was Symon Gould, and
his efforts will accordingly be the focus of the remainder of this chapter.
New York remained the epicenter of the movement, able to support more
than one such theater when many communities found it difficult to develop
even one. Gould began a recognizable ‘little cinema’ with a subscription
repertory program at the Cameo Theatre at 42nd Street and Broadway
beginning in 1925. Because the Cameo Theatre was featured (under the alias
The Century Theatre) as a representative case in a volume of the Harvard
Business Reports dedicated to the film industry,12 we know a certain
amount about the ins and outs of the business done by Gould. The B.S.
Moss Company initially owned the theater, which, owing to its location,
was conceived at the time of its construction in 1920 as an obvious venue
for premières of first-run pictures. From 1923, the theater gradually ceased
to play that role as distributors gave the pick of new titles to theaters more
closely allied with particular film producers.13 It experienced a further loss
of business attendant on still greater consolidation in the film industry and
competition from bigger, newer theaters in the same part of town. Gould
then stepped into the breach with his repertory program for the 500-seat
theater and succeeded in increasing the weekly revenue, which was typically
$3,000 over the previous, unmentioned average.14 In a letter to the National
Board of Review, Gould claimed total attendance figures of 1,500 to 3,000

240
 sy mon g ould a nd the lit tle cinem a mov ement

for his first showings late in 1925.15 Moreover, demand was evidently stiff
enough to sustain prices that started at twice those the Cameo had charged
for its pre-Gould program ($1.00 to $2.75).
Gould’s organization, the Film Arts Guild, then maintained a relationship
with the Cameo until 1927, when, as Howard T. Lewis delicately observed,
‘the … Theater became affiliated with a large chain of theaters located in the
Atlantic seaboard states, [and] the entertainment policy … reverted to …
showing the best American films available, including wherever possible the
first-run showings of films produced by a large motion picture company for
which the theater chain served as a distributing outlet.’ 16 This policy change
evidently occasioned a drop in gross revenue for 1927, suggesting that the
Cameo had a loyal following and that the change disappointed its regular
customers. Later the same year the management reversed itself again and
went back to European films, but not necessarily to revivals or the selections
made by Gould’s organization. Lewis’s list of the reasons undergirding the
last policy change is revealing: ‘In relation to other theaters in the chain,
the Century [Cameo] Theater was much smaller in size; it maintained a
program without vaudeville; it drew its audience from an ever-changing
public [in other words, it was not the neighborhood theater of a particular
population]; and it did not share the common name of the chain.’ 17 In effect,
showing contemporary imported silent films was the best option for the
theater owing to size, location, and, I suspect, the patronage established by
Gould’s organization. Gould evidently then moved operations to the Times
Square Theatre for Sunday showings of Film Arts Guild programs, but this
was clearly a stopgap, being considerably less elaborate than the subscription
programs at the Cameo had been.18
The loss of the relationship with the Cameo in 1927 clearly did not quench
Gould’s ambitions. Evidently the success of his programming emboldened
him to enter theater construction. Gould’s desire for more complete control
of a theater dedicated to film revivals was realized with the erection of the
Film Guild Cinema on Eighth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
The architect of the 500-seat cinema was the Viennese Friedrich Kiesler,
who probably came to Gould’s attention through his connections with the
Theatre Guild, the Neighborhood Players, or the Provincetown Players,
who invited him to New York to exhibit contemporary European theatrical
design in 1926.
Kiesler’s designs may have smacked of pretentiousness, but his
conception of the first purpose-built little cinema in New York suggests
that the organizers of the little cinema movement were not only rejecting
contemporary film texts. In an article in The National Board of Review
Magazine (the retitled Exceptional Photoplays), Herman Weinberg elaborated

241
 g oing to the mov ies

on the new conception of the temple to film art, clearly intended as a

distinct contrast to the film palaces otherwise available on Broadway and
elsewhere in New York:

Everything which belongs to the stage, which is extraneous to the

purpose of a motion-picture theatre, which is false, pseudo-arty and
merely precedent, has been abolished by him. The proscenium has
been done away with. The seats are arranged in ‘stadium fashion’ so
that there does not exist a sea of dark silhouetted heads between the
spectator and the screen. The screen is the center of attention since the
auditorium is not festooned with coloured lights and the architectural
lines of the auditorium are determined by the position of the screen
in that they converge with the screen as the apex of a triangle whose
other two sides are formed by the two walls. Radical changes and
improvements have been made in projection. The music has been
hidden and subdued, to allow a subjective emotional contemplation.
… Even the facade—at once—gives the function of the building in
which the screen has been used, i.e., its colour scheme being black
and white—the fundamental colours of cinema.19

This wholesale rejection of the glories of the movie palace may surprise
us now, but it was hardly unique to Gould and Kiesler in the 1920s and
1930s. Clearly, what irritated the little cinema organizers was distraction
from the film as film; hence their rejection of anything that smacked of the
stage or even conventional theater design. Nothing was to come between
the viewers and their films, neither the dead hand of the theatrical past,
nor the architectural distractions of the movie palace such as twinkling
lights resembling stars in the ceiling, nor fellow cinephiles. In effect, the
ideal little cinema experience was one of pure, even private, engagement
with a primarily visual medium. Weinberg even used the word ‘hidden’
of music, which suggested that it too was an unwelcome visual feature, a
stray from some other medium with the unwanted power to detract from
the experience of cinema as such. Gould evidently experimented with
exhibiting films in total silence even before the move to 8th Street, offering
his audience in 1926 ‘nine reels of Dostoievski’s ‘Raskolnikov’ done by the
Moscow Art Players. With the stillness of the tomb.’ 20
Finally, the theater’s exterior signaled the artistic purity of the new
medium, its color scheme the severe but modern black and white. Kiesler’s
architecture insisted on film’s autonomy and freshness (the theater’s
association with art moderne, for example, rather than the faux-archaic
design of Grauman’s Chinese Theater or the many Egyptian-style theaters

242
 sy mon g ould a nd the lit tle cinem a mov ement

that were the rage in the 1920s). Arguably, his austere art moderne design
was more foreign than were Chinese or Egyptian theaters, which had
been thoroughly domesticated to American tastes. Kiesler’s work, on the
other hand, arrived with the whiff of Bauhaus or late Viennese Secession
architecture, and, as we shall see below, appeared to some observers
designed to appeal most to cultural groups maintaining strong affiliations
with European developments.
In his discussion in The National Board of Review Magazine, Harry
Alan Potamkin made the motivations for the rejection of movie palace
architecture more explicit than Weinberg did. In ‘The Ritual of the Movies,’
Potamkin described the organization’s roots in a movement designed to
return participation in commercial leisure back to audiences:

In the building of these large temples and cathedrals—and I say

they are rightly called temples and cathedrals—everything has been
done to merchandise the show. … Have they improved the pictures?
They have done things to the stage show which is part of the ritual.
They have done things to the basement: into the women’s room there
may have been introduced a Helena Rubenstein demonstration of
preparations, cosmetics; in the men’s room there may have been set
up billiard tables and demonstrations of golfing. … Everything has
been done to inveigle the audience, and it is my contention that not
until the audience ceases being part of the ritual does it become an
audience.21

Potamkin wanted to see the anodyne and ancillary attractions (or

distractions) of the movie palace replaced with films that demanded and
received complete audience attention.
Like the Film Guild Cinema, the Lenox Little Theatre similarly touted
its rejection of characteristic theater architecture: ‘The Lenox Little Theatre
will be happily free from all the oppressive trappings of the typical motion
picture “palace.”’ 22 Sadly, the circular did not elaborate on the particular
trappings that oppressed, but informality and neighborliness appeared to be
the other watchwords. Possibly the sheer scale of the movie palace offended,
as may have the prospect of attending films with too heterogeneous a
downtown audience. What is fascinating about these remarks, however, is the
unexpected return of concern about the venues of film exhibition. Received
wisdom suggests that the appearance of the movie palace starting in 1910
incontrovertibly signaled film’s arrival as a middle-class entertainment and
moved the locus of external attempts at control from theater to narrative.
Here, however, we find a variety of commentators expressing a desire to

243
 g oing to the mov ies

take back from the chain retailer not only the film narrative, but also the
film theater itself.
Gould’s theater architecture evidently became a bone of contention in the
overcrowded field of Manhattan little cinemas, which would, by 1929, include
the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the 55th Street Playhouse, the Little Carnegie,
the Greenwich Village Theatre, and the Little Picture House, along with
others in outlying communities such as Brooklyn and Newark. As early as
1928, the competition may have verged on the cutthroat, as a letter from
Alfred Kuttner (secretary to the Exceptional Photoplays committee of the
National Board) to Montgomery Evans of Film Associates suggests:

New York City seems to have reached the saturation point as regards
little theatres, and there is practically no new film material available,
while too many repeated showings of Caligari, The Last Laugh, etc.,
are immediately razzed by the critics and the public. … The 55th
Street Theatre as well as the St. George Theatre in Brooklyn are
running at a steady loss. There has also been an unfavorable local
development. Gould has broken ground in West 8th Street for a
new theatre. Frederick Kiesler, Viennese Architect of considerable
reputation, has designed an entirely new form of cinema house, which
having [been] carried out will have a novelty appeal for the public and
especially for the Jewish intelligencia [sic] which will undoubtedly
draw the crowds away both from the Greenwich Village Theatre and
from the Fifth Avenue Playhouse.23

In this climate of scarce film resources, limited audience numbers

(particularly in the summer months), and too plentiful theaters, Gould’s
attempt to introduce architectural novelty appears to have been well
calculated. In considering the many factors that brought about the end of the
heyday of the little cinema movement, one must note the remarkable mutual
hostility expressed in the correspondence of these showmen. There was
typically much jockeying for position as the innovator of the movement, the
first exhibitor of a given picture, the originator of more complete program
notes, and the like—all of which points to both the prestige and precari-
ousness of the enterprise. Gould proved to be exceptionally resourceful,
linking his project to as many other satellites of the little cinema movement
as he possibly could. Starting in 1928, he positioned himself as the American
distributor of the modernist British film magazine Close Up. This strategy
may have signaled the failure of his hopes of developing his own little
magazine devoted to cinema at the same time it manifested Gould’s
allegiance to European film movements and perhaps also to a critical coterie

244
 sy mon g ould a nd the lit tle cinem a mov ement

that rejected Anglophone cinema, both European and American. As Anne

Friedberg observes, ‘Close Up remains distinct from its French predecessors
because of its strong distaste for the Hollywood film.’ 24 Although Gould
may have subscribed to that philosophy personally, he did not program his
theaters in accordance with that approach, but wherever he could emphasize
the European, he did.
When it became clear that the obvious plums of German cinema, the
darling of all little theater operators, had been presented to audiences too
many times (as Kuttner complains of above), Gould went further afield to
more obscure works such as Slums of Berlin (1925, Lamprecht), which he
retitled and edited for American tastes. He turned this effort on his part
into the occasion for a meditation on the differences between American and
German viewer psychology:

In presenting ‘Slums of Berlin’ at the Cameo commencing this

Sunday, the Film Arts Guild makes no claims of another ‘Variety’
or ‘The Last Laugh’ for it. ‘Slums of Berlin’ is an average German
program film and it will be interesting to note to what extent the
usual New York public will favor a foreign motion picture built,
to an appreciable degree, along the usual sentimental lines of the
Hollywood product, with the exception that when it touches life its
interpretive realism is uncompromising.25

Gould likewise pioneered thematically unified retrospectives, built around

the work of a single director or even a single star, as in the case of Emil
Jannings, whose brief American sojourn Gould thus capitalized upon.
And even though Gould was in some respects the most dogmatic of
all New York little cinema managers about the necessity of showcasing
the artistic and the unusual, American films of note consistently had a
place in his programs, including Blood and Sand (1922, Niblo), Salome
(1923, Bryant/Nazimova), The Sea Hawk (1924, Lloyd), Humoresque (1920,
Borzage), Beau Brummell (1924, Beaumont), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1920, Robertson), which suggested a range of interests outside the lasting
fascination with both the foreign and domestic work of Ernst Lubitsch.
Gould’s approach to American film suggests that the little cinema was a
place for important films of whatever origins to be kept in circulation in
the days before organized museum collections, which did not appear in
the United States until the mid-1930s. Again, this trend runs counter to
much of the contemporary lore of the film industry, which dismissed the
economic value of its vaults until television revealed what might be made
of them. Gould harbored hopes that the Film Arts Theatre would in fact

245
 g oing to the mov ies

serve as museum and ‘asylum for superb foreign films which we are so
eager to deport the moment they arrive.’ 26
Gould’s ability to see ways in which to package and repackage his
product was impressive. It became clear to a number of shrewd observers
by the end of the 1920s that the capture stream for the little cinema might
well prove to be the children’s matinée. Children were a still underserved
audience that all agreed must be served, and they were relatively easy to
program for. The sense that Europe was not yet producing innovative
sound films and that its best silent films had been tapped out may have
caused programmers to look again at American films of note, particularly
comedies. More to the point was the support of the National Board, which
was increasingly turning its attention to ways and means of serving the child
audience. By the beginning of the 1930s, we find the Little Picture House
and the Lenox Little Theatre both addressing themselves primarily, if not
exclusively, to the child audience, typically with retrospectives of suitable
American fiction films, documentaries, and educational films.
Gould saw the trend and in 1929 produced a slick flyer and series of press
releases trumpeting the formation of a Junior Film Guild, clearly designed
to appeal to the membership of the Board, which had been informed for
many months about the prospects for junior matinées at regular theaters.
In the same year he also formed a Science Film Guild, which, somewhat
mysteriously, proposed to show La coquille et le clergyman (1927, Dulac,
and mistakenly translated as The Coquette and the Clergyman on the flyer)
as a ‘psychoanalytical production.’ Perhaps somewhat desperately, Gould
was attempting to create carefully segmented subscription audiences; sales
of seats by subscription were particularly effective for capturing children,
whose parents wanted something for them to do every Saturday morning or
afternoon, and who could be given subscription books as gifts by relatives.
But Gould was also reasoning by analogy from the success of the recently
instituted Junior Literary Guild, which did for the child reader what the
Book-of-the-Month Club was doing somewhat more pretentiously for the
adult reader. If the Book-of-the-Month Club in part promised to expose
its subscriber to the fiction he or she should be reading but was too
undisciplined to go out and get otherwise, the Junior Film Guild promised
to keep the juvenile audience away from the films it should not be seeing, a
major concern of the subscribers to The National Board of Review Magazine
during this period. And, as further evidence for the thesis that the children’s
matinée became the capture stream of the little cinema movement, there
was Gould’s clever play upon the anxieties of parents: ‘If you have taken
the time and trouble to listen to a “speakie,” most of which purvey “crook”
language, musical comedy slang, off-color talk or banal theatricalities, you

246
 sy mon g ould a nd the lit tle cinem a mov ement

will agree that the talking film has nothing to offer to the psychology of
the child except corruption of a highly penetrating quality.’ 27 Little cinema’s
desire to remain in the silent film era is thus made to betoken moral as
well as artistic purity.
Gould’s interest in children’s matinées did not signal the abandonment of
adult fare, as the simultaneous formation of the Science Film Guild attests.
As late as November 1929, he approached his patrons with a solicitation to
become shareholders in an organization of National Film Art Guilds, whose
board of directors was headed by novelist Theodore Dreiser. Investors would
receive shares of stock, ticket books (including tickets to Junior Film Guild
shows) and various other rewards.28
The files of the National Board of Review do not reveal the fate of this
attempt to raise capital for the National Film Art Guilds, but Gould’s
adaptive strategies of packaging films and segmenting audiences may have
been running out of steam. The creation of both the Junior Film Guild and the
Science Film Guild suggests, however, a major trend in the evolution of the
little cinema movement, a progression from the aesthetic to the institutional,
with the emphasis shifting from film text to exhibition circumstances. Little
cinemas were initially motivated by a desire to see films other than the typical
Hollywood fare, even in an environment of Hollywood’s making, such as the
Cameo Theatre. By the end of the little cinema movement, that wish had
been transformed into the hope, however forlorn, of maintaining exhibition
structures outside of Hollywood’s purview and aesthetically opposed to
Hollywood’s practices of merchandising and distraction.
In some respects, the lack of indigenous art films made this shift in
emphasis from text to theater inevitable. Without an adequate flow of
films, product differentiation inevitably followed from novel exhibition
circumstances rather than from textual innovation. As Budd’s comment
about the failure of Caligari within early 1920s American commodity culture
suggests, even the European art film could not succeed in a vacuum. The
film texts of the little cinemas were simply less autonomous than competing
Hollywood fare—they required able showmen to fit them into an appropriate
framework. Gould, therefore, might best be understood as a throwback to
the showmen of nickelodeon days, who had considerable discretion in the
ordering of films within an evening’s program, the provision of program
notes to audience members, and even the editing of films (think of his efforts
with The Slums of Berlin in this context). Gould’s outlook and architectural
program, together with his fervent insistence on the film medium’s freedom
from the claims of theater, music, and other art forms, also suggest that the
most important artists of the little cinema movement, America’s first art
cinema, were in fact the exhibitors rather than the filmmakers.

247
 12

Free Talking Picture—

Every Farmer is Welcome
Non-theatrical Film and Everyday Life
in Rural America during the 1930s

Gregory A. Waller

I n 1932, as part of the marketing of its 16mm projectors and its Filmo
Library of motion pictures, the Bell & Howell Company released a
directory of available films ‘in the field of Agriculture,’ claiming that
‘many individual agriculturalists, who to an increasing extent are adding
the 16 mm. movie projector to the radio, iceless refrigerator, and similar
up-to-date furnishings of the modern electrified farm home, will find the
directory decidedly useful.’ 1 The electrified farm home-as-movie theater
may have been just another advertising executive’s pipe dream, but Bell &
Howell was not totally off base: the 1930s saw the increased availability of
16mm films and equipment, the circulation of a significant number of films
concerned with agriculture, and the existence of a sizable rural audience for
film exhibition.2 To get a better sense of this audience, the motion pictures
they watched, and the producer/distributors who serviced this market, I
will look outside both Bell & Howell’s electrified farm home and the local
movie theater in search of other exhibition sites where ‘agricultural’ motion
pictures were publicly screened in rural America.3 In so doing, I hope to
contribute to several histories of the 1930s that in significant ways remain
to be written: histories of free shows and target audiences, of the place of
the movies in rural everyday life, of the discourse concerning commercial
and government-sponsored film production and distribution, of the ways
that rural America was represented in film for rural Americans, and of the

248
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

12.1 Advertisement for a Free Show in

Campbellsville, Kentucky, in 1940.

non-theatrical film industry during an era when it underwent particularly

substantive transformation and growth.4

Moviegoing and Rural America

This chapter’s focus on non-theatrical venues and what were in period
parlance called ‘free shows’ is not intended to underestimate the cultural and
social importance of the Depression-era Main Street movie theater, a venue
that I have examined at some length elsewhere.5 Theaters were intimately
connected with what sociologists J.H. Kolb and Edmund de S. Brunner of
the ‘President’s Research Committee on Social Trends’ called in 1933 the
‘villageward trend of rural life.’ By this they meant that improvements in
transportation and communication technologies had increasingly made the
village or small town ‘the center for much of rural social life.’ That center
was marked by its many ties to the urban/national scene, including the
increasing presence of chain stores—and, of course, by the movies screened
in those local theaters that remained in business despite the costly conversion

249
 g oing to the mov ies

to sound and the deepening Depression.6 In such theaters, audiences

might have experienced Hollywood’s take on the agricultural, whether in
homespun fare such as State Fair (1933) and Chic Sale’s shorts for MGM,
animated barnyard antics, B-westerns concerned with the property rights of
beleaguered individual ranchers, small town-iana like the Andy Hardy series,
or the parched-earth drama of The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The principal
concern of this chapter, however, is to examine how, apart from Hollywood
productions or Pare Lorentz’s acclaimed New Deal documentaries, rural
America figured in or became a target audience for motion pictures.
Depression-era exhibition practices and programming strategies at small-
town theaters can be charted, at least partially, through advertisements in
local newspapers. There is, however, little information available about how
frequently townspeople, farmers, and other rural residents actually attended
the movies. One valuable source is a 1935–36 federal Works Projects
Administration (WPA) study of family income and expenditures that relies
on data collected by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Bureau
of Home Economics from more than 14,000 families in a range of sites
across the nation. Although this multi-volume ‘Consumer Purchases Study’
has certain obvious limitations and biases—most notably, it takes ‘families’
to mean only native-born, ‘unbroken’ families that have not received
government relief (thereby omitting the poorest people in rural America),
and it considers African American families only in the South—it remains
noteworthy both for how it conceptualizes moviegoing as a type of purchase
and also for the conclusions it offers about the leisure-time consumption
patterns of certain farm families in the mid-1930s.7
The Bureau of Home Economics placed adult and child attendance at
the movies (together with plays, fairs, spectator sports, circuses and dances)
under the category of ‘Paid Admission.’ This, in turn, was a subdivision of
‘Recreation,’ which also covered expenses related to non-spectator games
and sports as well as to radio, musical performance, toys, photography, and
pets. By this rubric, ‘farm families … spent less than did the urban for
recreation,’ particularly for moviegoing, ‘perhaps because the bright lights of
the moving picture theaters were less temptingly near and perhaps because
other forms of recreation were preferred’—hardly a surprising finding.8 Thus
we learn, for example, that no more than one-third of the farm families
(again, meaning white, native, unbroken families not on relief) in the rural
Ohio-Pennsylvania region attended movie theaters, and those that did
spent an average of $2.00 annually on admissions, while Chicago families
of comparable income spent $11.00.9
Correlating region, race, and economic status with moviegoing, this mid-
Depression survey also pointed to certain distinctions among non-urban

250
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

consumers. Nationally, motion picture admissions accounted for almost

one-third more of the recreational dollars spent in small cities and villages
than in farm regions where, at all income levels, far fewer families used
their discretionary income on moviegoing.10 Some 59 per cent of the farm
families surveyed in Iowa and Illinois reported some expenditure for movie
admissions, ranging from $3.00 a year for families in the $750–999 annual
income bracket to $14.00 a year for families making $4,000 annually.11
Attendance rates were lower in the South: 50% of the white farm families
and 20% of the African American farm families (whether sharecroppers
or independent ‘operators’) in North Carolina and South Carolina bought
tickets to go to the movies. Smaller annual amounts allocated for moviegoing
across all income groups in North and South Carolina probably indicate that
trips to the picture show for rural Southern farm families were few and far
between. Over the course of a year, how many movie tickets would $3.00
buy for a white Carolina farm family earning $1,500–1,749 annually?—or
fifty cents, which was the average amount spent per year on moviegoing by
African American sharecropper families in Mississippi and Georgia? 12
Farm families had opportunities to see motion pictures at familiar,
accessible venues other than the movie theater, however. The most memorable
Hollywood image of the rural non-theatrical moviegoing experience comes
from Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), where, in an isolated
African American church deep in a swampy Southern backwater, a Disney
cartoon projected on a sheet provokes peals of communal laughter from
white chain gang convicts and rural black families alike. During the 1930s,
newspapers in agricultural areas often advertised film screenings outside the
local theater(s). The occasional amateur picture or recycled studio product
might be mentioned but, more often, newspapers referred to professionally
produced, non-Hollywood films usually shown for free under the auspices
of a church, school, business, service organization, or government agency.
Such free shows made motion pictures generally (that is, beyond what we
typically think of as ‘the Movies’) that much more culturally visible and
potentially available on a daily basis for rural Americans, who would be
more likely to see their own workaday concerns and familiar landscapes in
non-theatrical fare than in Hollywood productions.
One form of non-theatrical programming strategy and rural motion
picture attraction was the ‘free farm movie’ produced by agricultural
equipment companies such as International Harvester, Allis-Chalmers, and
John Deere. These free films promoted and participated in what is arguably
the major shift in American agriculture in the first half of the twentieth
century: the ‘powering’ of the farm.13 Widely available in certain regions
of the United States, especially in the later 1930s, free farm films were

251
 g oing to the mov ies

sponsored by local merchants and typically screened at retail sites, though

they could also be shown at schools, public halls, or even temporary outdoor
facilities. To situate the merchant-sponsored free show and its cinematic
paeans to ‘power farming’ in historical terms, this chapter will examine
the role of motion pictures within the social and cultural programs of the
American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and the extensive film activity
of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), before concluding
with a brief look at motion picture related discourse in Country Gentleman,
self-styled as ‘America’s foremost rural magazine.’

Attention! Mr. Farmer!

Given that farm families would, according to a study conducted in 1930,
drive into their ‘home town’ for ‘groceries, machinery, furniture, dry goods,
banking, marketing their products, high school, movies, church, social
affairs, and library services,’ 14 it is not surprising that they would also come
to town for free motion picture shows, whether sponsored by churches,
farm supply companies, or—perhaps most prominently—by automobile
dealerships. For instance, in Winamac, Indiana (with a population under
2,500) on the same day in 1936, Zellars Motor Company screened a four-
film ‘Free Talking Picture’ program in its showroom, while Duggleby Motor
Sales offered a ‘Big Double Feature Talking Picture Show’ that included
The Frame-Up, ‘an interesting comedy-drama produced by Oldsmobile under
the supervision of Hollywood directors.’ 15 Winamac was also one stop for
the Chevrolet Traveling Theatre, a self-contained mobile screening facility
on tour in the summer of 1938.16
Another form of the free show was aimed more specifically at farmers.
‘Free Talking Picture … Every Farmer is Welcome,’ declared a newspaper
ad (23 January 1935) for the McFarland Implement and Seed Company in
Bowling Green, Kentucky, whose population then topped 12,000. ‘Ladies
and children’ were also invited to attend the special Friday afternoon
screening inside McFarland’s Main Street store. Though neither the title of
the film nor the company that sponsored it were mentioned in this ad, there
is no doubt about the commercial motivation behind McFarland’s venture
into on-site sound film exhibition, for the ad promised that ‘in addition to
being a most entertaining “talkie,” this picture also has a high educational
value because it shows and describes the importance of tractors and power
farming equipment in reducing the cost of crop production.’ 17
Cinematic celebrations of ‘power farming’ remained something of a
stand-by in Bowling Green. In February 1936, McFarland advertised another
show—a ‘big double bill’ of talking pictures (Sheppard & Sons and Murphy

252
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

Delivers the Goods) provided by John Deere.18 Free farm films also came
to this small Kentucky city under the auspices of other local merchants,
including the American Hardware Company (as part of ‘Power Farmers
Day’) and a feed supply firm, which sponsored a screening at the state
Teacher’s College of Hidden Harvest, a ‘two hour talking’ picture from the
Checkerboard feed company that was billed as a ‘farm life movie.’ Judging
from the following promotional notice, this dramatization of agricultural
progress also seems to have been a model of economical construction and
product-driven narrative:

Walter Conway, a collegiate son of an industrialist, is injured in an

automobile accident and is taken into the farm home of the Allens.
During convalescence, he takes a deep interest in Mary Allen. The
film ends with Conway marrying Mary Allen after the Allen farm
has been greatly improved by a ‘hidden harvest’ plan with which the
young couple become acquainted while attending a movie entitled,
Animal Checkers, depicting sequences of work in the barnyard.19

It ought not to be surprising that free farm films were available in the
relatively ‘urban’ small city of Bowling Green, which served as a retail
center for area farmers and staked its economic faith in agriculture. ‘The
state of the country’s prosperity is in direct ratio to the thickness of the
farmer’s purse,’ declared one of Bowling Green’s newspapers in 1938.20
The same editorial ‘credo’ informed weekly newspapers from much smaller
towns in the region, where farm supply companies, tractor dealerships, and
even hardware stores sponsored screenings. In Campbellsville, Kentucky
(1930 population: 1,923), one firm offered a ‘Big Power Farming Show and
Entertainment’ at the county high school, while another staged a ‘Free
Show’ at the courthouse that promised to be ‘educational—entertaining with
Amos ‘n Andy on screen. All colored, about farm feeding.’ 21 In Columbia,
Kentucky (1930 population: 1,195), ‘John Deere Day’ meant a free program
of four different motion pictures, including Friendly Valley and What’s New
in Farm Equipment.22 In Winamac, Indiana, Hoch Hardware invited all
to a Friday night show with live entertainment and ‘talking pictures of a
beautiful romance of pioneer days up to the introduction and use of the
Allis-Chalmers All-Crop Harvester.’ 23
Local newspapers rarely indicated whether a company sales representative
was on hand to participate in the show. Tracking these newspaper ads over
different localities, however, reveals not only a sizable number of examples,
but also a range of variation in the programming of free farm movies.
Whereas the incorporation of live entertainment could possibly ‘localize’

253
 g oing to the mov ies

12.2 Ad for John

Deere Day, 1938.

any given show, ads indicate that the John Deere Day multi-film program
cited above was constant from place to place. Describing a tractor film as
a ‘talkie’ or as part of a ‘big double bill’ attempted to blur the distinction
between Hollywood’s version of the Movies and non-theatrical, commercial
motion pictures, as did the narrativization of farm films like Hidden Hand.
The seed store, garage, or high school auditorium was, however, obviously
not the Main Street movie theater. Unfortunately for our understanding
of rural audiences, contemporary newspaper accounts provide little detail
about the conditions of non-theatrical film exhibition: the behavior of the
audience, for example, or the seating arrangement, screen size, and projection
equipment. One thing is clear. By the mid-1930s there was nothing novel
about these non-theatrical film sites, which were too familiar and mundane

254
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

to merit newspaper coverage, and there was nothing surprising about John
Deere and International Harvester being in the business of funding and
circulating motion pictures.

Tractor Films and Power Farming

International Harvester, the largest farm equipment company, had been
active in film production and distribution since the early ‘teens and had
released at least eight ‘industrial and educational subjects’ such as The Power
Farmer and Uncovering Earth’s Riches by 1926.24 International Harvester
relied heavily on advertising during 1921–27 as it struggled with Ford in
what agricultural historian Robert C. Williams calls an ‘epic in industrial
competition’ to see which company would dominate the tractor market.25
According to film historian Anthony Slide, ‘no company was as important
as International Harvester in pioneering the use of sponsored production
and film as an advertising medium,’ 26 but other commercial firms also
funded motion pictures intended for the rural market in the late silent era.
Ford promoted its Fordson tractors in Farm Progress, while General Electric
offered The Yoke of the Past, a ‘pictorial record of a century of progress in
agriculture.’ And the Caterpillar Tractor Company circulated six ‘industrial
subjects’ promoting earth-moving machinery.27
Among the more than 200 motion pictures that the United States
Department of Agriculture had available in 1926 was a one-reel film entitled
Should I Buy a Tractor? 28 In its celebration of ‘power farming,’ International
Harvester—like Ford, John Deere, and its other competitors—had a ready
answer. Widely distributed International Harvester films like The Progress
of Power and The Power Behind the Orange stood as professionally produced
demonstrations of the ‘innumerable ways in which modern power machinery
saves labor for the farmer.’ 29 Tractor films became even more numerous and
more widely screened during the 1930s, spurred in part by improved 35mm
and 16mm sound film technology.30 In 1932, a spokesman for Caterpillar
insisted that his company was ‘the largest user of motion pictures for
business purposes,’ since ‘practically every Caterpillar dealer throughout
the world is equipped with one or more 16mm projectors and a complete
library of films on various subjects supplied free to them by the Caterpillar
Tractor Co.’ 31 Ford relied on a similar distribution strategy for films like
Farms of the Future.32
By 1934, International Harvester was distributing forty-three free
agricultural films through its home office in Chicago and its eighty-five
‘branch houses’ in the United States and seventeen in Canada. These
were primarily one- or two-reelers promoting the general advantages of

255
 g oing to the mov ies

mechanized, modernized farming (like The Horseless Farm and Power in

the Farm Home) or depicting the application of new technologies to a wide
array of particular crops and agricultural ventures from soybeans, corn,
and livestock to dairy farming, orange groves, and cherry orchards. As a
result, some International Harvester films had a markedly regional focus:
Fruitland, for instance, looked at the ‘Niagara fruit belt,’ which was quite
distinct from the Midwestern cornbelt or the ‘modern plantations’ of the
Mississippi Delta region, a site featured in the three-reel Power Farming
in the South (1934).33 Geographic specificity was also a crucial element in
Partners, a particularly ambitious six-reel sound film produced by John
Deere in 1934. Promising to show ‘the John Deere tractor in actual field
operation,’ Partners was set at the Iowa State Fair and used ‘a charming farm
home nearby’ for its location shots.34 One of the most telling aspects of the
farm film as a genre is how it contrasts the archaic with the modern, while
simultaneously addressing the claims of the regional and the national, and
rearticulating the relation between the rural and the urban.
The epic among early Depression-era farm films was Romance of the
Reaper. According to Educational Screen in 1931, this five-reel production
was ‘the most widely used industrial talking picture ever produced,’ with
124 prints circulating in the United States alone and numerous foreign
language prints also available.35 Shot on location in Virginia, Romance of
the Reaper served as the centerpiece of International Harvester’s centennial
celebration of the McCormick reaper. Thus, the local McCormick-Deering
dealer in Chesterton, Indiana, exhibited Romance of the Reaper as part of
day-long festivities at the town’s biggest hall, complete with a free lunch,
live demonstrations of new products, and a working model of the 1831
machine. ‘Never before has so much real history been packed into a single
film of this kind,’ claimed an ad in the Chesterton Tribune. ‘From the first
scene to the last, Romance of the Reaper is authentic. It is interesting and
educational; it is romantic; it is thrilling.’ 36 Long after the centennial
celebration had concluded, Romance of the Reaper—like a great many farm
films—remained readily available for use in a wide array of non-theatrical
venues.
For example, International Harvester screened its motion pictures not
only at small-town dealerships, but also at the annual National Conference of
Visual Education and Film Exhibition in Chicago. Sponsored by the DeVry
Corporation (manufacturers of projectors and cameras, including, from the
1910s, portable 35mm projectors), this event was in the mid-1930s a key site
to showcase new films, including amateur pictures, instructional material
tailored for the classroom, and industrials produced by, among other major
companies, American Steel and Wire, Ford, Firestone, General Motors,

256
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

and Household Finance.37 International Harvester regularly participated

in the conference, bringing Boulder Dam in 1936 and Farm Inconveniences
in 1937, thus keeping pace with other agricultural machinery companies
that were also showing off new films: Caterpillar with Power and Progress
in 1936 and Allis-Chalmers with Soil Builders in 1937.38 At the 1938
conference, which celebrated Henry DeVry’s 25 years of involvement in
visual education, International Harvester used the occasion to underscore
its own history in this domain, screening two films: its first industrial, Back
to the Farm, an Essanay production the company had ‘sponsored’ in 1911
(which it claimed to be ‘the first full length reel industrial motion picture
ever made in America’);39 and their ‘latest rural life “talkie,”’ The Beaverton
Consolidated School, which dramatized how ‘improved roads and motor buses
for transportation have greatly aided the transition from the Little Red
School House to the Big Modern Consolidated Country School.’ 40
International Harvester’s boundless optimism about the improvability
of ‘rural life’ was not quite unfounded. ‘Both the farmers and the farm
machinery industry,’ claims the author of the authoritative book on the
John Deere Company, ‘came through the 1930s stronger than any could
have imagined in the depths of the Great Depression in 1932.’ 41 The same
could be said of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which for a time
rivaled International Harvester as a sponsor of farm films.

The American Farm Bureau Federation: Rural Motion Picture

Entertainment
Organized in 1919, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF)—the
national umbrella group for local, county, and state Farm Bureaus—began,
in historian Christiana McFadyen Campbell’s phrase, as a ‘crusading
educational agency.’ 42 It is, therefore, not surprising that this activist
organization made significant use of motion pictures. According to Arthur
Edwin Krows, the first historian of non-theatrical films in the United States,
the AFBF had begun producing and distributing films as early as 1921,
under the aegis of the ‘Farm Films Service,’ which sold prints, arranged for
sponsored theatrical and non-theatrical screenings, and provided portable
projection equipment. Among the farm films it distributed were several of
its own titles including Spring Valley (1921), The Homestead (1921), and My
Farm Bureau (1925).43 In 1923, the AFBF claimed to have supplied motion
pictures for more than 3500 screenings that attracted an audience of 670,000
across 35 states. By the end of the 1920s, the AFBF’s film production
and distribution had expanded even further (with as many as 50 prints
of each AFBF film in circulation), a trend that Krows attributes to the

257
 g oing to the mov ies

organization’s willingness to sell ‘advertising space’ in its films, but also an

indication of the growing national presence of the Farm Bureau.44
While the most publicly visible role of the AFBF during the Depression
was as a key player in shaping federal agricultural policy, it continued to
have an ongoing commitment at the local level to what it called its ‘Home
and Community Department.’ Nancy Berlage convincingly argues that
the AFBF’s programs in social welfare, education, and recreation during
the 1920s underscored ‘an ideology of family farm, family production, and
community’ intended to ‘forge a sense of group identity’ for farmers as
farmers.45 The AFBF’s Community Hand Book (1928) described more than
twenty different programs designed to bring rural families together on a
regular basis in order to encourage an ‘appreciation of the value of rural
life,’ a ‘satisfying rural family life’ and a ‘spirit of neighborliness’ in the rural
community.46 Along with oratorical readings, sing-a-longs, plays, games,
and debates, motion pictures were mentioned as effective ‘program material,’
for ‘many valuable truths and lessons can be taught through the medium of
moving pictures.’ In addition to promoting its own ‘official’ productions, the
AFBF recommended obtaining ‘pictures suitable for farm gatherings’ from
the USDA, state agricultural extension offices, and commercial distributors
like Homestead Films Company, the Pathé Exchange, and Universal Film
(through its Division of Education). In effect, the AFBF assumed that there
was enough ‘suitable’ material then available for any local farm bureau to
arrange for what the Community Hand Book called ‘regular motion picture
service.’ 47
I have found no information indicating how many local Farm Bureaus
actually sponsored regular motion picture screenings, but by 1931 the
AFBF announced that its own 11 motion pictures then in circulation (on
both 16mm and 35mm) were screened 5,898 times across the United States
under the auspices of 1,435 county Farm Bureaus, attracting more than
540,000 spectators. Sometimes incorporated into vocational classes, 4-H
Club meetings, and Sunday evening church services, these films played at a
range of highly accessible venues: ‘rural schools, town halls, country churches,
private homes, outdoor natural theatres and other rural gathering places.’ 48
Based on these attendance figures, the AFBF’s Motion Picture Division
boasted in Educational Screen early in 1932 that it was ‘the largest purveyor
of rural motion picture entertainment in America.’ 49 Although the AFBF’s
actual membership was at its lowest point in 1932–33, its trademarked motion
pictures may have been one way for the organization to maintain its visibility:
‘Farm Bureau movies are made by the Farm Bureau for farm folks.’ 50
According to the AFBF’s promotional material, its free farm films were
top-notch two-reel productions distinct from mainstream theatrical releases

258
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

principally because they were tailored ‘to please farm people.’ The intended
result was ‘interesting and educational films, professionally produced, and
always with a “farm slant”’ and an endorsement of the goals of the Farm
Bureau. To this end, ‘real actors and actresses are employed [for all AFBF
productions] because it is felt that professional artists can act more like
farmers before the camera than farmers can themselves.’ 51 Often made
in co-operation with ‘outstanding commercial and industrial firms’ and
principally shot on location and at the studio of the Atlas Educational Film
Company in Oak Park, Illinois, AFBF films were

educational and entertaining features for farmers which are generally

not obtainable in the regular theatrical releases. They are decidedly
not the lecture type. Each tells a real dramatic story, packed with
romance, comedy and other necessary attributes to a good photoplay.
In each picture is demonstrated some Farm Bureau project, ranging
from sewing and cooking for farm women to a picturization of the
organization of a live stock shipping association and other kindred
subjects.52

Contemporary accounts suggest that AFBF productions from the early

Depression years mimicked theatrical films, favoring topical and even
explicitly political narratives that reworked familiar tropes of action
melodrama and represented the rural family or farm as always already
endangered. Indeed, it was presumably the dramatic quality of these
productions that also allowed the AFBF to offer ‘radio versions’ of its films,
which were broadcast over the NBC network.53
Deadline (1932), for instance, pits a girl reporter for a weekly county
newspaper against ‘city promoters’ who are attempting ‘to force an expensive
highway through the county in preference to adequate secondary roads for
the farmers.’ With the aid of the local Farm Bureau, the interlopers are
foiled.54 Similarly, On Time (1931), made in ‘cooperation’ with International
Harvester and filmed partly in rural Indiana, (melo)dramatized the politics
of road construction and farm property rights, as a positive review in the
‘School Department’ section of Educational Screen made clear:

It is a ‘road-building’ story—of an old farmer and his daughter

through whose little farm the preceding Commission had planned to
run the highway. Pleas for a change in route were refused in high-
handed fashion—but a new authority comes into power in the form
of a young engineer-hero. He seems to see justice in the old farmer’s
side of the case, and is no less willing to see it after glimpsing the

259
 g oing to the mov ies

charming daughter. To change the blue-prints the Commissioner’s

signature is required, and the hero starts over the State to locate
him. The villain, foreman of the job and with a degree of authority,
tries to rush through the job of tearing up the farm before the hero
can return—but he failed to reckon on the spirit of the farmer,
shot-gun in hand. The old fellow’s threat postpones the danger until
the hero—after a fast and exciting race in his auto over all sorts of
roads—returns in triumph with the precious signature, and ‘on time.’
Then, the kind of happy ending everyone will enjoy. On Time is not
only entertaining but is a realistic bit of genuine country life and
rural economies.55

On Time would be followed by The Test, another two-reel AFBF produc-

tion with a decidedly topical theme, described in the 1934–5 edition of the
Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films as ‘a lively story dealing with city gangsters’
attempt to prevent organization of farm cooperatives.’ 56 The organization
ceased producing or distributing motion pictures after 1934, although it con-
tinued to use them in its activities. It was, for example, probably affiliated with
the non-profit National Farm Council for Visual Education, an organization
based in Chicago that sponsored a nation-wide contest in 1934 ‘to develop
and promote the use of agricultural motion pictures among farm people.’ The
winner was a Farm Bureau county agent from Indiana who managed to screen
a film about the ‘need for cooperation in milk marketing’ to twelve different
groups during the brief time the film was in his hands.57
Perhaps farm films came to play less of a role in AFBF local activities
because, as de Brunner and Lorge suggest, Farm Bureau efforts were
increasingly focused on community-building ‘folk’ recreation—group arts
and crafts projects, dancing, music, and drama—in an effort to maintain
membership and buttress rural values.58 Especially for progressive agrarians
like C.R. Hoffer (writing in Rural America in January, 1934), the motion
picture show and other forms of ‘commercialized recreation’ were inherently
problematic by comparison to pageants and other participatory, collective
activities.59 It is interesting to note, however, that the photographs of
successful entertainments published in Hoosier Farmer, the official Indiana
Farm Bureau magazine, in the mid-1930s showed amateur blackface minstrel
shows, popular musical groups, and ‘mock’ weddings—precisely the same
kinds of local performances that small-town picture shows favored—rather
than historical pageants or topical plays.60
The AFBF seems to have cut back its production of motion pictures
just as the number of companies distributing farm films increased. The
Department of Commerce listed more than 50 sources for non-theatrical

260
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

‘agricultural’ films in 1935, most of which offered ‘free’ films in 16mm

(although only one-third of those sources handled sound films). Distributors
ranged from the YMCA Motion Picture Service and the National Dairy
Council to a host of companies and individuals (e.g., Ideal Pictures in
Chicago, Film Classics Exchange in Buffalo, Mogull Bros. in New York
City, International Educational Pictures in Boston) renting various non-
theatrical titles, presumably as a profit-making venture.61
The AFBF was not mentioned in the Department of Commerce’s 1935
Composite List of Non Theatrical Film Sources or in Educational Screen’s more
selective Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films (1940—41 edition). The Blue Book
identified producers and distributors who handled notable films related
to agriculture and, more specifically, to ‘rural life and farm engineering,’
including the USDA, General Electric, and International Harvester, as well
as firms based in Denver, Indianapolis, and Peoria, Illinois, home to C.L.
Venard, a ‘producer-distributor of agricultural films.’ It is, of course, difficult
to assess thematic and ideological shifts in as amorphous a category as
‘agricultural film’ over the 1930s on the basis solely of promotional literature
and synopses, but the blend of comedy, newsreel, and human interest
suggested in the following list of Venard’s 1940 offerings seems a far cry
from the AFB’s action-packed attempts to dramatize ‘rural economies’:

Farming in One Lesson (2 reel): ‘comedy of young city couple who

try to farm’
Give the Pigs a Square Deal (2 reel): ‘how a 4-H Club profits from a
visit to a steel mill’
Hidden Treasures (6 reel): ‘Human interest story of the soil and proper
farm management’
National Farm Newsreel (2 reel)
Partner’s Three (4 reel): ‘a 4-H Club story about a boy’s reclamation
through a girl’s efforts to bring him back on the farm’
A Safe Bet (2 reel): ‘corn husking contests’
Steel: Servant of the Soil (4 reel): ‘use of steel on the farm; proper
method of erecting wire fences’
Tom, Dick, and Harry Co. (5 reels): ‘How a run-down farm becomes
productive through proper crop and livestock rotation’
Tunin’ In (1 reel): ‘comedy of a happy old farmer, after a hard day’s
work on the farm, tunin’ in on the radio’
Under the 4-H Flag (7 reels): ‘all-talking production of the story of
4-H Club work.’ 62

261
 g oing to the mov ies

The rural non-theatrical market was still expanding in 1940, even with
the absence of the American Farm Bureau Federation (whose earlier motion
picture productions probably remained in distribution.) Quantity, however,
hardly tells the whole story. Meager, if tantalizing, evidence concerning
the long-orphaned films circulated by Venard, the AFBF, and firms like
International Harvester suggests that farm films of the 1920s–1930s merit
the attention of historians, not least because they address, narrate, and
participate in rural everyday life in America. That is especially true for the
major supplier of farm films, the United States Department of Agriculture,
which circulated its films though more than 3,000 agricultural extension
field agents and select state universities.63

The United States Department of Agriculture:

Non-Commercial Motion Pictures for the Farming Families
of America
The USDA had been the primary federal agency involved in film production
since the 1910s.64 ‘Motion-picture activities’ fell under the jurisdiction of its
Extension Service, which was also responsible for all manner of ‘cooperative
extension work’ and ‘agricultural exhibits’ at fairs.65 The 1926 edition of
The Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films, for instance, lists 220 Department of
Agriculture instructional films usually dealing in what seems to have been a
no-nonsense, practical way with individual crops, problems afflicting farmers,
and regulatory concerns, in titles such as Cranberries—and Why They Are
Sometimes Bitter. A closer look at the USDA’s own motion picture catalogues
reveals that the agency’s output was actually quite varied, including films like
Uncle Sam, World Champion Farmer, which in one reel covered the gamut of
U.S. agriculture from cotton and citrus fruit to cattle and sheep, and Poor
Mrs. Jones, which took four reels to recount ‘the vicissitudes of a farm woman
who seeks a rest by visiting her sister in the city,’ thereby gaining a ‘lesson
in appreciation of the advantages of country life.’ 66
Lessons in appreciation as well as solutions to problems were probably
packaged quite differently across the multi-genre range of the USDA’s
‘educational motion pictures.’ The department’s official 1926 catalogue
included a few animated films (like A Tale of Two Bulls, Charge of the Tick
Brigade), various self-described ‘scenics’ (for example, Vacation Days on the
National Forests, Roads from Surf to Summit, and De Vargas Day in Santa
Fe, N. Mex.), and a surprising number of narrative films dramatizing, for
instance, the capture of an elk poacher by a forest ranger (When Elk Come
Down), the effort of a preacher in the Ozarks to convince his flock to stop
burning wooded land (Trees of Righteousness), and the good work done by

262
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

12.3 The 1926

USDA Motion
Picture Catalogue.

agricultural extension agents in the home and on the farm (Apples and the
County Agent).67
Since USDA motion pictures could be purchased by the foot for a flat
rate (with an additional charge for foreign language intertitles), there is no
telling how many prints of Poor Mrs. Jones and When Elk Come Down were
in circulation, although both of these films, and indeed, more than half of
the films listed in the 1926 catalogue, were still available in 1931. In addition
to describing its motion pictures according to genre and topic area (such
as Domestic Animals: Beef Cattle; Federal Regulations: Food Inspection;
Meteorology; National Forests, Western-Scenic, and so on), the USDA
offered a fairly elaborate, if not entirely systematic categorization based on
likely audiences, with certain productions designed for a quite specialized
clientele and others for a broader public. Some titles were considered ‘of
general interest for rural communities’ or simply for ‘rural use,’ while others

263
 g oing to the mov ies

were designated as being ‘of general interest in the South,’ ‘particularly for
dairyman, but of general interest,’ or ‘of interest to campers and nature
lovers.’ 68 This strategy no doubt reflected the USDA’s mission as a national
agency with a host of quite varied constituencies and clients, but it also
complicates any simple understanding of the ‘rural’ audience.
By 1934, 256 of the approximately 500 motion pictures the USDA had
produced were still in circulation by the agency itself (not to mention the
prints that had been purchased, for example, by educational institutions).
New titles were added each year, including a few sound-on-film productions
in 16mm as well as 35mm.69 Among USDA sound films from 1934 were
Highway Beautification and Roads to Wonderland, both re-issued with scores
performed by military service bands, as well as 4-H Club Work (1932), a
three-reel production using footage shot around the country.70 Poor Mrs.
Jones had been dropped from the catalogue, but her spirit remained alive at
the USDA, notably in a three-reel 1940 release entitled, Re-Creation, which
detailed ‘how one family escaped the distractions of city life through a
vacation to the National Forests.’ 71 The catalogue as a whole was indicative
of the diverse range of sponsoring agencies within the USDA, including,
for instance, the Forest Service (Forest Fire!), the Bureau of Agricultural
Economics (The Master Farmer), the Bureau of Entomology (An Undesirable
Alien—The European Corn Borer), the Extension Service (From Ranch to
Ranch in California), and the Bureau of Public Roads (Roads in Our National
Parks). USDA catalogues also reflected the gradual diffusion of technological
innovation in the non-theatrical film industry during the 1930s, even as
35mm silent films remained in distribution. In 1935, a substantial part of
the USDA’s list could be rented or purchased in both 16mm and 35mm,
although only 10 per cent of the titles were sound films. Of the thirty new
USDA motion pictures released between July 1934 and January 1936, seven
were sound films, with titles like Farm Women’s Markets and Winter Sports
only available in silent versions.72
Although the USDA did address pressing contemporary concerns with
The Agricultural Crisis in 1933,73 the release of Pare Lorentz’s high-profile
social documentaries on American agriculture and the plight of the land, The
Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), seemed to necessitate a
more purely ‘instructional’ focus for the Department of Agriculture’s motion
picture division. Lorentz’s documentaries quickly attained canonical status,
largely squeezing USDA productions—even titles like The Negro Farmer
(1938) or the silent two-reeler, Helping Negroes to Become Better Farmers and
Home Makers—out of the picture for scholars of American non-fiction film.
As Brian Winston aptly put it, ‘the received history of US documentary in
the later 1930s becomes the story of Pare Lorentz.’ 74

264
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

The specter of ‘documentary,’ as well as the (false) charges that the

Roosevelt administration was spending vast sums on film production, was
faced directly by Raymond Evans, Chief of the USDA Division of Motion
Pictures since 1927. Evans delivered what amounted to a public policy
statement when he addressed the DeVry National Conference on Visual
Education and Film Exhibition in June 1937. Federal government films,
Evans avowed, should not be politically partisan, informed by rarified
aesthetic values, or—worst of all—designed to pass for ‘entertainment.’ ‘We
do not believe,’ Evans told his audience, ‘that the educational field and the
entertainment field have anything important in common.’ 75 No doubt this
was music to the ears of Will Hays and the MPPDA, who wanted no
theatrical competition from government-made films.
A year later, speaking to the same gathering of educators and non-
theatrical film producers and distributors, Fanning Hearon, the Director
of the Division of Motion Pictures, U.S. Department of the Interior, was
more willing to cede that ‘entertainment has a place in the educational
film.’ The genre could benefit, he declared, from ‘professional titling,
background music with subject feeling, interesting, rhythmic narration;
social implications; camera angles and special photographic effects; a little
drama in the story; a little humor and perhaps a lively girl in a white bathing
suit. In short, if such an expression makes sense, a factual improvement on
reality.’ Motion pictures made with federal funds and aimed toward what
Hearon called the ‘farmer families of America’ were thus drawn into the
Griersonian discourse on documentary cinema,76 that tangled debate in
the 1930s concerning the competing claims of facts and reality, style and
transparency, social responsibility and individual creativity, information and
enlightenment in the non-fiction film.77 Grierson’s ‘Man of Aran is essentially
a work of art,’ Evans argued, ‘and the government has no business spending
taxpayers’ dollars on forms of pure art while there remains a crying need for
instructional films on the control of syphilis, of malaria, of hog worms, of
the Japanese beetle or the boll weevil.’ 78 USDA farm films, in other words,
ought to be not so much about farmers or some agrarian ideal, as for farmers
and other people who lived and worked in rural America.
The heightened attention paid to the state of U.S. agriculture during the
Depression probably gave a sense of topical urgency to issue-oriented USDA
films like Salt of the Earth (1937)—on ‘the contribution of the farmer to
national wealth and the body politic’—and Farm and City—Forward Together
(1939).79 But even the USDA’s most patently instructional reels are of interest
for their understanding and promotion of the ‘agricultural,’ whether framed
in terms of the farm, the forest, the rural, the countryside, the region, and/
or the nation. This discursive construction had everything to do with the

265
 g oing to the mov ies

intended audiences for farm films. As Richard Dyer MacCann notes in his
study of U.S. government motion pictures, USDA films, while potentially
serving the larger ‘farming community,’ were produced with ‘specialized
publics’ in mind: ‘the women, the cattlemen, the corn farmers, the western
farmers, the farmers afflicted with specific pests.’ 80 And, we might add, the
African American farmer, the teenaged 4-H Club member, and the farmer
as consumer. Clearly reflected in the USDA’s own promotional publications,
this strategy of addressing and serving multiple audiences in the 1930s—a
clear instance of pragmatically targeted filmmaking—is one of the most
significant features of the non-theatrical film industry in the period, a point
of particular contrast with Hollywood.
To target ‘specialized audiences,’ as well as the more inclusive ‘farming
community,’ and to be cognizant of the usefulness and cost-effectiveness of
motion pictures is necessarily to be concerned with matters of distribution
and exhibition. The USDA regularly publicized its success in precisely
these terms, noting, for example, that in 1933 more than 4,700 agency
films were exhibited at no charge to an estimated 10,000,000 people.81
For both Raymond Evans and Fanning Hearon one obvious flash point
in this regard had to do with the desirability, the cost, even the ethics of
screening USDA films in movie theaters rather than non-theatrical venues,
especially in the later 1930s when the availability of 16mm had significantly
increased the number of potential screening sites. Paramount’s successful
theatrical distribution of Lorentz’s The River only exacerbated what had at
least sporadically long been on the table. Arthur Edwin Krows claims, for
instance, that the USDA had attempted to ‘obtain theatrical circulation of
Department motion pictures’ as early as 1917–9.82 The 1926, 1931, and 1935
editions of Motion Pictures of the United States Department of Agriculture
offered films free to theaters as well as to non-theatrical sites. (There is
no such offer in the 1941 catalogue.) The USDA’s Use of Motion Pictures
in Agricultural Extension Work (1926) directly encouraged its extension
agents to take advantage of local theaters, since ‘theaters, especially in the
smaller towns, are frequently eager to arrange special exhibitions of films
for farmers,’ citing one successful case in Centerville, Tennessee, where
‘the business men’s club raised a fund to pay a theater’s actual expenses in
running free shows of agricultural films on two Saturday afternoons each
month.’ 83
The Department of Agriculture had long gauged its success in part on
the circulation of its films, the shelf life of which was measured in years.
For instance, Out of the Shadows (1921), a dramatized warning about how
bovine tuberculosis can infect farm children, was finally retired from active
service in 1931, after having been booked 1,644 times, with most bookings

266
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

involving multiple screenings (and with sixty-one prints sold for use outside
the United States).84 The USDA encouraged the extension agent to make
use of portable equipment so that ‘he can carry his film message to any
place in his county.’ 85 ‘While agricultural extension agents have preference
in booking’ USDA films, wrote Cline Koon in Motion Pictures in Education
in the United States (1934), ‘effort is made to serve also schools, especially
agricultural high schools, churches, civic organizations, and other worthy
agencies.’ 86 Raymond Evans in 1932 enumerated a similar list of potential
screening sites and sponsoring agencies: ‘schools, churches, granges and
scientific organizations.’ 87 Furthermore, it is worth recalling when gauging
the circulation of USDA films that all of the department’s productions were
also offered for sale, with one crucial proviso: ‘no commercial advertising
matter [is to] be added to or inserted in the films.’ 88
For a sense of how USDA-styled, highly localized, non-theatrical
activity operated at ground level, we can consider the case of the University
of Kentucky’s College of Agriculture, whose Extension Service had fifty
reels of motion pictures in circulation in the early 1920s. These films were
exhibited by agents throughout the state, including, for example, screenings
sponsored by the Rotary Club and the Men’s Bible Club of the (Colored)
First Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. This latter exhibition also
featured a professor from the university lecturing as well as live musical
performances.89 In other words, the USDA films were not only brought
into non-theatrical sites that were very familiar for prospective viewers
(a Rotary Club meeting, a church) but were made part of a program. In
this regard, it is noteworthy that the University of Kentucky’s Agricultural
Extension service actually set out in the early 1920s to create its own
‘balanced’ five-reel program, in which three reels of USDA farm films
would be combined with a comedy and a travelogue.90 Without considerably
more research into the activities of local agricultural extension agents, it
is impossible to determine much about specific programming practices,
although Don Carlos Ellis and Laura Thornborough reported in 1923 that
state-funded ‘portable operating units’ mounted on trucks offered isolated
rural communities in North Carolina a six-reel program ‘made up from
comedy, history, literature and agricultural subjects of both general and
local interest,’ and Educational Screen in 1937 described a very similar effort
by the Louisiana State University Agricultural Extension Division, which
sponsored a traveling motion picture show that stopped at over 250 rural
communities, screening three reels of educational film and either a cartoon
or a scenic.91
These final two examples seem somewhat anomalous, since most of the
other rural non-theatrical exhibition so far examined relied little if at all

267
 g oing to the mov ies

on recycled Hollywood fare. (Itinerant moving picture shows and many

screenings in churches, resorts, and military bases are another matter.)
Programming was, however, consistently a concern for the producers
and exhibitors of agricultural film. The John Deere Company not only
invested in films about farm machinery, but also sponsored a multi-film
show promoted as ‘John Deere Day.’ Programming, likewise, obviously
mattered to the AFBF, which incorporated its two-reelers into community
building events, and to the USDA, which took pains to inform agricultural
extension agents about how to structure and pace a four-reel program into a
‘harmonious whole,’ integrating music and lectures with motion pictures.92
These strategies reflected different assumptions about how rural audiences
were best attracted to and influenced by free screenings. More generally, the
programming of farm movies raised important questions about the relation
between the theatrical and the non-theatrical: did the fact that free farm
films were organized into programs (even, at times, into ‘shows’) work to
collapse the difference between the non-theatrical and the theatrical? 93
Was the typical 1930s movie theater programming strategy (a feature with
various shorts, supplemented occasionally by live entertainment) the model
for the exhibition of motion pictures outside of theaters? At the very least,
programming provides one way to differentiate among the broad range of
non-theatrical venues, to separate the classroom (and perhaps the home, as
well), for example, from the church or traveling show, the resort or YMCA
hall.

The Movies in Country Gentleman, ‘America’s Foremost Rural

Magazine’
Tractor films, USDA shorts, American Farm Bureau Federation
productions—all these quite distinct versions of the free farm film may
have reached substantial rural audiences and drawn extensive coverage in
Educational Screen, but they seem to have been ignored by periodicals such
as Rural America and Hoosier Farmer, and even by a mass-market magazine
like Country Gentleman, which billed itself as ‘America’s foremost rural
magazine.’ This large format, heavily illustrated monthly put out by Curtis
Publications (publisher of Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal)
frequently editorialized on agricultural policy issues, had monthly ‘farm
departments,’ and contained ads for work clothes, tractors, and automobile
products, while devoting considerable space to the ‘Country Gentlewoman’
and the ‘Outdoor Boy.’ As might be expected considering the proclivities of
Curtis’s other magazines, Country Gentleman regularly took up the theme of
the movies (Hollywood in particular) throughout the 1930s. A brief look at

268
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

this mass circulation magazine helps to contextualize free farm movies and
underscores the fact that film entered into rural everyday life discursively as
well as theatrically and non-theatrically.
The movies were the subject of nine feature articles published in Country
Gentleman between 1930 and 1939 (including three focusing on Disney’s
characters and studio practices), one short story with a movie setting, and,
for three months in 1938, Jerome Beatty’s ‘Hitch Your Wagon,’ a serialized
novella about press agentry, studio politics, a temperamental starlet, and a
young man from Kansas who more than holds his own on both coasts and
winds up as a screenwriter for the fictitious Amalgamated Pictures. It was
not, however, as material for feature articles or fiction that the movies figured
most prominently in Country Gentleman. An issue-by-issue survey turns up a
fairly wide range of movie-related material: advertisements, cartoons, jokes,
free ‘movie books’ such as The Virginian or Shirley Temple dolls offered as
an inducement to new subscribers, and a monthly advice column from Ruth
Hogeland. Hogeland’s column always featured photographs of sophisticated
Hollywood stars or would-be stars, who sometimes passed on their beauty
tips: ‘An interesting lipstick idea comes from Bette Davis, who tells how to
apply it evenly. The way to do it, she explains, is to powder the lips slightly,
then apply your lip rouge, and you’ll get better results with less effort. These
are all useful ideas that virtually any girl or woman [urban or rural, farm
or village] can profit by.’ 94
The same stars who graced Hogeland’s columns reappeared in
advertisements in virtually every issue of Country Gentleman throughout
the decade, along with their male counterparts. Beginning in 1931,
testimonial ads for Lux soap ran each year in March, April, May, June, July,
September, and October—always starring at least one leading lady, like
Irene Dunne and Loretta Young, who warn against the dangers of ‘cosmetic
skin.’ 95 Union Leader tobacco’s campaign throughout 1934–5 relied on
satisfied male customers from Lee Tracy to George Brent, while Merle
Oberon, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, and Shirley Temple swore by Quaker
Puffed Wheat; Joan Bennett, Claudette Colbert, and Dick Powell chewed
Doublemint gum; Fritz Lang drank Maxwell House coffee; Maureen
O’Sullivan and Judy Garland cooked up homemade jelly the Certo way;
Ken Maynard used Listerine; and George Raft drove on Goodrich tires.
Nothing in these testimonial ads specifically refers to farms, small towns,
or any other aspect of rural life. In targeting readers of Country Gentleman,
these ads brought Hollywood stars doubly into the rural everyday: firstly,
by associating screen celebrities with mundane products; and, secondly, by
keeping the stars so visibly in mass circulation outside the theater and the
fan magazine.

269
 g oing to the mov ies

Even ads that made no direct reference at all to Hollywood could

underscore the deeply embedded presence of motion pictures in Country
Gentleman’s rural America by graphically mimicking in their design a
strip of perforated celluloid or a series of panels arranged like an edited
scene. (Clearly, such ads were also indebted to comic strips. Indeed, Grape
Nut Flakes in 1936–7 regularly ran narrative comic-strip ads in Country
Gentleman featuring movie comedian Joe E. Brown and western star Buck
Jones.) Goodrich dubbed its February 1936 ad about winter weather ‘A
Newsreel Short.’ Lava soap combined captioned dialogue and photos of the
Nissen farm family of Meservey, Iowa to create a ‘Lava Soap Movie with
Real People.’ 96 In such ads, stars were not necessary—‘real people’ (even
real rural people) were the protagonists of their own movie shorts, facing
problems, using the correct products, achieving success frame-by-frame.
Given the theme of this chapter, the most intriguing ad from Country
Gentleman during the 1930s was a full-page spread for Wolverine Shell
Horsehide Work Shoes starring a middle-aged farmer troubled by sore
feet. Frame-by-frame, the narrative unrolled: ‘Can’t go tonight,’ the farmer
tells his friend, Bill, ‘chores ain’t done and my feet hurt like h___!’ Bill
recommends a pair of Wolverine Shell Horsehides and is willing to bet five
dollars that they will do the trick. Having bought a pair, fed the hogs, and
plowed for fourteen hours, the rejuvenated protagonist is convinced that
he’s made the right purchase and tries to pay off the bet, but Bill refuses
to accept the money. So the protagonist takes Bill to the ‘show’ instead:
in the final frame the two farmers (rural adult males—hardly the sort of
demographic we associate with Hollywood movie audiences during the
Depression) are headed toward a movie theater where, of all things, Top
Hat (released in 1935) is playing. Going to the ‘show’ is the reward for hard
work and good friendship; the movie theater is within easy distance from
the farm; Astaire and Rogers, not tractors, are on the bill. This farmer needs
farm-ready work boots; he has no need for farm movies.97
An ad for Wolverine Shell Horsehide Work Shoes in Country Gentleman
is admittedly a long way from a promotional notice in a weekly newspaper
inviting Mr. Farmer to a free show. Seeing Bill and his pal head off to buy
tickets for Top Hat at the movie theater in town rather obviously suggests
that Hollywood movies were an available, accessible, and desirable part
of life in rural America. Moviegoing is here the entirely fit and justified
pay-off for putting in an honest day’s labor, heeding friendly advice, and
making smart consumer choices. The presence of the movie industry, star
culture, and the movie theater in Country Gentleman is a corollary to the
absence of tractor films and, indeed, any trace of the non-theatrical in
this ‘rural’ magazine. What we are dealing with is a decidedly imbalanced

270
 film a nd ev ery day life in rur a l a mer ic a

equation, at least in the period under consideration: the Movies (made-for-

profit entertainment that was widely and nationally circulated in theaters
and in print discourse) had no need to acknowledge or worry about getting
mistaken for non-theatrical ‘free shows.’ As a category of motion picture
production, distribution and exhibition, the non-theatrical could, however,
only construct its public identity in relation to—if not necessarily in
opposition to—the theatrical: it was, after all, the non-theatrical. That is
the tirelessly reiterated message of Educational Screen, the closest thing to
a non-theatrical trade journal in the 1920s and 1930s. It is equally evident
in Raymond Evans’ argument for expunging entertainment from USDA
productions and in the American Farm Bureau Federation creation of ‘a
real dramatic story, packed with romance, comedy and other necessary
attributes of a good photoplay.’ 98 Willfully resisting or willingly mimicking
the movies kept the non-theatrical in the same historically bound dialectical
relationship with its ubiquitous, highly public Other. The challenge for film
historians is to acknowledge this relationship without reifying either the
theatrical or the non-theatrical.
There is also a much more practical challenge to thinking historically
about the non-theatrical. If we can now easily own a copy of Top Hat,
it is much more difficult to track down even the most widely seen farm
films, which very likely have long been ‘retired’ even from those university
libraries that did not junk their 16mm collections. These problems of access
have prevented me from including any analysis based on actually viewing
motion pictures about power farming, invading pests, and public road
projects from this chapter. Such textual analysis is, I believe, a necessary
corollary to archival research on production, distribution, exhibition,
and reception. Judging from the information gathered from catalogues,
reviews, and promotional material, these films prompt a host of compelling
questions: what did the electrified and tractor-powered farm look like?
What constituted those ‘advantages of country life’ that the USDA’s poor
Mrs. Jones came to appreciate after a visit to the city? Did commercial and
instructional films present rural America, in the words of a 1935 Country
Gentleman editorial, both as a ‘vast market for goods’ and a source of
‘national ideals?’ 99 How did these films gauge the distance between urban
and rural, small town and farm, farmer and consumer? How did they
visualize and make sense of the natural, the regional, and the rural—all
within the context of the agricultural?
Such questions are germane not only to the motion pictures screened for
promotional purposes by farm equipment dealers, but across the range of
what were in the 1920s and 1930s called ‘agricultural’ films. I have discussed
various examples of the genre, taking into account period discourse, the

271
 g oing to the mov ies

institutional history of producer-distributors like International Harvester and

the USDA, and the ephemeral traces of free shows and their audiences—all
in service of the larger goal of exploring what free farm films can tell us
about a topic that is as maddeningly diffuse as it is inescapably important:
the place of film in everyday life in rural America. Ben Highmore provides a
good guide to modernist and post-modernist theorizations of the everyday—
which has been located in the strange or the mundane, the novel or the
repetitive, the ideologically dominant or the resistant, the culture’s detritus
or its ubiquitous landmarks.100 To consider the place of film in everyday
life at a particular historical moment means, for me, to examine both how
motion pictures represent and shape (intentionally or not) the everyday
and also the accessibility and availability of motion pictures on a daily
basis, including where, when, and how they were promoted, programmed,
exhibited, and received, in and out of the movie theater. In exploring this
topic, it is entirely possible to limit ‘motion pictures’ to ‘movies screened
theatrically.’ But after following the trail prompted by a few ads for free
tractor movies, I remain convinced that film historians need to at least take
the non-theatrical into account before dismissing it as categorically distinct
from or simply irrelevant to the study of the Movies.

272
 13

Cinema’s Shadow
Reconsidering Non-theatrical Exhibition

Barbara Klinger

I be gi n with two stories.

Between 1938 and 1950, the words ‘Last night I dreamt I went to
Manderley again,’ from Daphne du Maurier’s celebrated novel Rebecca were
spoken by a number of Hollywood’s most fabled leading ladies. In their
respective performances as the second Mrs. de Winter, Margaret Sullavan,
Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Loretta Young, and Vivien Leigh each uttered
these remarks from the novel’s introductory subjective narration. In turn,
Maxim de Winter’s climactic admission of his true feelings about his first
wife: ‘You thought I loved Rebecca? … I hated her’ was pronounced with
varying degrees of passion by a succession of leading men: Orson Welles,
Laurence Olivier, Ronald Colman, and John Lund. But only Fontaine and
Olivier starred in a film version of the novel, the well-known 1940 adaptation
produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Decades later and worlds away, school children filed into a classroom,
where, once lights dimmed, a Kansas twister filled the screen. This was
the first time the children had seen The Wizard of Oz (1939); in fact, it was
the first time many had ever seen a movie of any kind. Although the film
was in English, the audience was transfixed, gasping in awe when the film
blossomed from black and white into color. Out of respect for the local
sense of propriety, however, the projectionist fast-forwarded through the
scenes with singing Munchkins in frilly pink tutus to avoid showing too
much skin.1
In some senses, these two stories could not be more different. The first is
expressly concerned with Hollywood and its successful relationship with an
early rival medium. The surplus of actors and actresses who played lead roles

273
 g oing to the mov ies

in Rebecca performed in successive radio adaptations of the novel and the

film. After the 1938 publication of du Maurier’s novel, Orson Welles and
John Houseman quickly adapted it for the airwaves for the debut episode
of ‘The Campbell Playhouse.’ With a musical score composed by Bernard
Herrmann, Welles and Sullavan assumed the roles of Maxim de Winter
and his second wife. In 1941, ‘Lux Radio Theater’ adapted Hitchcock’s
version of Rebecca with Colman and Lupino in the leads. In 1948, ‘The
Screen Guild Players’ broadcast another version of the film starring Lund
and Young. Finally, in 1950, ‘Lux’ revisited Rebecca with Olivier reprising
his original screen role as Maxim and Leigh, his real-life wife, playing
opposite him.2
Set in 2002, the second story takes place far from the limelight. The
Wizard of Oz was shown in a refugee camp for residents of Afghanistan
displaced from their homes by the 2001 allied invasion that toppled the
Taliban regime. The screening was arranged by FilmAid International,
a U.S.-based nonprofit organization founded in 1999 by film producer
Caroline Baron in response to the Kosovo refugee crisis. FilmAid’s self-
described mission is to use cinema ‘to educate, entertain, and inspire …
displaced people throughout the world’ by providing programming that
‘eases psychological suffering, fosters understanding, engages the mind,
and sparks the imagination.’ 3 With the collaboration of other aid agencies,
including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), FilmAid offers
those living in refugee camps a kind of assistance most relief organizations,
focused on urgent physical and material needs, cannot supply. By furnishing
education, a sense of community, diversion from tedium, and an emotional
buoy, cinema is seen as a means of reaching people who often wait in camps
for years, even decades. Since Afghanistan has one of the worst refugee
crises in the world, it represents a particularly compelling site for FilmAid’s
brand of support.
The revivals of Rebecca and The Wizard of Oz clearly represent disparate
deployments of Hollywood cinema: the former takes place within a
past commercial, American setting, while the latter occurs within a
contemporary humanitarian, global context. Yet, these examples have more
in common than it otherwise might first appear. Each represents an instance
of the ancillary, non-theatrical exhibition of a Hollywood film—that is, the
presentation of a commercial title after its initial theatrical run in a medium
other than 35mm and/or in a space distinct from cinema’s official dedicated
venue, the motion picture theater. Within this alternative realm, each story
summons a vision of cinema in an unexpected place where, unleashed from
its customary domain, it enters more intimately and expansively into the
everyday experience of diverse spectators.

274
 r econsider ing non-the atr ic a l e x hibition

From the 1930s to the early 1950s, radio programs adapted hundreds
of Hollywood titles, casting movie stars in lead roles. Hitchcock’s oeuvre
alone inspired radio productions of The Lodger (1926), The 39 Steps (1935),
and most of his films from the 1940s and early 1950s, from Foreign
Correspondent (1940) to I Confess (1953).4 Through this inter-media alliance,
radio sponsors and advertisers hoped to gain greater exposure for their
products by exploiting the national visibility of stars appearing on their
shows, while the film industry wished to capitalize on radio’s ability to
reach audiences in the home.5 In the process, Hollywood’s empire extended
further into private space, making the studios’ features accessible through
the turn of a radio dial.
FilmAid International represents a more public instance of non-theatrical
exhibition. Refugees often watch movies outdoors on Barco video projectors
and movie screens bolted to flatbed trucks that travel from camp to camp.
In Afghanistan, films have also been shown in schools and in deserted
barns, where children may sit in old cow stalls appropriately prepared for
the occasion. Movies screened are often educational, related to literacy and
health issues, for example; but commercial shorts and feature films also
have their place. Organizers regard Charlie Chaplin films and other silent
fare, for instance, as ‘pure entertainment’ that is ‘always a big hit’ with
audiences. In this context, such films are regarded as having a therapeutic
effect, relieving boredom and the trauma of displacement by creating both
diversion and spontaneous communities for spectators.6
While I will return to these examples, what interests me here is how
vividly they inspire consideration of rarely addressed aspects of cinema’s
existence critical to a fuller understanding of its business, aesthetics, and
social impact. Research on the exhibition and reception of Hollywood
films, especially in the United States, has tended to concentrate on a film’s
original release period in legitimate American public theaters. Theaters may
indeed influentially introduce a film to audiences during its initial run or
upon the occasion of its big-screen reissue. But public theaters comprise
only a moment in the life-cycle of a particular title—a life-cycle that often
sees the title, Phoenix-like, rise up repeatedly from the ashes, appearing in
venues as diverse as museums, airplanes, cable television, and laptops. From
16mm film to video and DVD, a succession of new technologies and media
has helped to realize cinema’s extra-theatrical existence in times and places
far removed from first runs. Given the importance that foreign markets
have long had to Hollywood, these times and places necessarily involve
international, as well as domestic, contexts.
In this chapter, I shall examine cinema’s life beyond the movie house,
exploring what non-theatrical exhibition and recycled films contribute to

275
 g oing to the mov ies

reception studies and to Film Studies more generally. Without being able
to do justice to the extensive history of non-theatrical cinema in private
or public spheres, I hope to provide a view of its insistent pervasiveness in
everyday life and its significance for the study of film and spectatorship.
I begin by sketching the history of cinema’s presence in the U.S. home,
focusing on the phenomenon of recycling. Recycling is a practice rooted in
industry economics: the reissue is a cost-effective way to continue gaining
revenue from a single property. As it inevitably results in alterations of
theatrical texts, so that they conform to the characteristics of a different
media outlet, this practice also has substantial aesthetic consequences worth
considering. The second part of the chapter concerns cinema’s more public
face. While texts are subject to alteration in public exhibition as well, here
I examine a different ramification of recycling: the impact of non-theatrical
settings on film reception. Once films leave the theater, they are inserted
into multifarious spaces, from the home to the refugee camp. What effects
do these non-theatrical situations have on the film experience and film
meaning? Since the question of the semiotics of setting is most pointedly
raised when Hollywood products cross national frontiers, my emphasis will
be on the challenges that globalization brings to analyses of exhibition.
Finally, no study of the non-theatrical can conclude without addressing
the question of why its exhibition sites have for so long remained marginal
areas of inquiry, laboring in the shadows of their more lavishly neoned
big-screen counterparts.
Although the term non-theatrical applies more familiarly to non-
commercial films produced by certain companies for educational purposes,
I concentrate on another species of the non-theatrical: commercial studio
films appearing in non-35mm formats outside of the precincts of the
motion picture theater. Without intending to marginalize other kinds of
non-theatricals, my interest in the recycled studio film lies in its ability
to expose clearly the breadth and depth of the relative invisibility of this
alternative cinema within dominant paradigms of contemporary film theory,
criticism, and history. Despite its massive presence in daily life, the non-
theatrical Hollywood film has not truly entered the mainstream of academic
research. Often dismissed as an inferior version of a big-screen original, the
Hollywood non-theatrical hides in plain sight.

Cinema at Home
While many conceive of film exhibition in the home as beginning with
network television in the 1950s and accelerating in the 1970s with the
development of cable television and the VCR, commercial and non-

276
 r econsider ing non-the atr ic a l e x hibition

commercial films have been shown in domestic space since cinema’s

invention in the late 1800s. According to Ben Singer, in 1896, two years
after the appearance of Edison’s Kinetoscope, manufacturers produced
dozens of projectors intended for amateur use in the home and elsewhere;
among these machines were Edison’s own Projecting Kinetoscope and
Pathe Frere’s Pathoscope.7 At the time, entrepreneurs saw cinema as another
medium that could be successfully exploited for home leisure, along with
an assortment of other audiovisual phenomena, including the photograph,
the phonograph, the magic lantern, and the slide projector. Inventors and
businesses hoped that developing a place for cinema in the parlour would
compound the medium’s popularity by appealing to families for whom the
concept of home entertainment was gaining increasing importance.8
Although companies like Edison and Pathé produced films specifically
for the home and educational market, they relied largely on their own
previous theatrical releases to create a catalogue of titles available for home
audiences. In an alternate model, companies that manufactured equipment
for the home cinema market made deals with studios, including Vitagraph
and Biograph, to supply subjects for their catalogues. In either case,
films could be rented or purchased through the mail or through regional
‘brick and mortar’ outlets.9 These early arrangements involving supply and
distribution established enduring business models. Studios continued to
have their own non-theatrical distribution divisions and to license their
products for distribution by other media concerns; similarly, both mail-order
and retail outlets have remained central means of delivering films to home
viewers, from Netflix.com to Blockbuster Video.
Beyond establishing such precedents, the phenomenon of parlour cinema
defines the medium’s place in the private sphere as an intimate part of
its total history. At the moment of cinema’s birth, entrepreneurs grasped
the economic incentives for developing multiple viewing contexts for
the medium—signaling that cinema’s invention was inextricable from its
dissemination in other venues. While the early sensational success of the
movies was realized in public forums like the nickelodeon and, later, the
motion picture palace, studios and media businesses suspected that part of
building cinema’s fortunes lay beyond the silver screen, in stirring interest
in the possession and experience of the new medium in the consumer’s
most intimate surroundings. Early experiments in home cinema suggest
that efforts to ‘domesticate’ the medium were necessary moves toward its
Manifest Destiny, with its expansion into the household conceived as a
means of securing its place in American life.
After this inaugural moment, cinema’s history in the home continues
unbroken through a series of technological developments. The 1920s and

277

Maltby et al, Going to the movie277 277 22/11/2007 13:16:46

 g oing to the mov ies

early 1930s saw immense technical advances that affected both amateur
filmmaking and the home exhibition of studio films, including the
introduction of 16mm and 8mm film gauges, color cameras, and sound
projectors. As the heyday of radio adaptations of Hollywood films came
to an end in the 1950s, films were broadcast on independent and network
television stations. In 1975, cable television and video were introduced to the
consumer market, each later outstripping network TV as an ancillary venue
for Hollywood. More recently, since 1997, titles have been rented and sold
on DVD. Besides other methods of home cinema delivery, including satellite
television and video on demand, feature films are streamed and exhibited
every day legally and illegally by the hundreds of thousands—some estimate
by the millions—on the Internet. Media industries have thus tirelessly and
successfully managed to situate cinema within a succession of competitive
entertainment technologies designed for home use, not only increasing
revenues through the new distribution windows represented by these
technologies, but weaving movies further into the audience’s daily routines,
rituals, and experiences.
The issue of non-theatrical exhibition is especially important because
for the last thirty years more American viewers have watched Hollywood
films at home than in the theater, causing revenues generated from the
home consumption of feature films to surpass box office takes. Meanwhile,
formats and systems designed to deliver movies to viewers through the TV
set or computer have multiplied, indicating that the domestic sphere will
maintain its central economic and cultural position in relation to cinema.
As theatrical exhibition now amounts to no more than one quarter of the
industry’s global revenues, the home’s importance as a screening venue
is even more pronounced in foreign markets.10 In countries where movie
theaters are sparse and pirated videos, VCDs, and DVDs proliferate, cinema
is almost totally identified with television.
The longevity and contemporary prominence of this non-theatrical market
makes the home and the ancillary versions of films shown in domestic space
critical to an analysis of moviegoing. Among other things, the home is the
site par excellence of a deeply ingrained, pervasive practice that has become
the sine qua non of the film business and experience: film recycling, known
in the industry as repurposing. To generate as much revenue as possible from
a film—an imperative especially important today as a means of offsetting
the blockbuster’s immense price tag—repurposing may result in a network
of marketing tie-ins, from fast-food franchises to cartoon series spin-offs.
But, repurposing also means ‘taking a given property developed in one
media form and repackaging it for sale in all the other forms possible,’
resulting in the systematic reissue of films in ancillary exhibition venues.

278
 r econsider ing non-the atr ic a l e x hibition

After its theatrical run, a recent film will reappear according to an elaborate
‘windowing’ sequence that staggers its re-release in multiple venues over a
number of months, providing the studios with valuable additional revenue
along each step of the way. While the order is subject to change, it often
begins with home video and DVD, followed by pay-per-view channels
and direct satellite broadcasts, premium cable movie channels, basic cable,
network television, and, finally, local television syndication.11 Although
their sequencing is not as complex, classical Hollywood and older titles
are also repurposed. At times, they materialize on the big screen, such
as the restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) that appeared
in 1996. More often, they are re-released on video and DVD or through
cable channels with large libraries of old studio titles, such as TBS. In its
ability to resell established properties, whether classic or contemporary,
repurposing is an essential economic strategy that is enormously suggestive
for the aesthetic, historical, and cultural study of cinema.
Before DVD, film academics typically regarded the repurposed film as
a bad object. Panned and scanned and re-edited for length, content, and
commercial interruption, the televised film, for example, was for many the
equivalent of the Frankenstein monster, haphazardly thrown together with
horrific results. Invariably, the films that circulate in the home are not the
same as their theatrical relatives, nor do they provide the same experiences.
Domesticated feature films undergo various kinds of surgery to suit the
commercial and technological characteristics of their exhibition venues.
Radio broadcasts of Hollywood films provide a pointed example of how
extensive these changes could be.
Because radio dramas often ran either in half-hour or hour-long
programming slots, were interrupted by commercials, and included the
commentary of announcers and hosts, feature films were substantially
abridged in the process of adaptation. ‘Lux Radio Theater,’ for instance,
presented each film in three acts separated by framing materials. A one-
hour show, ‘Lux’ allotted between twelve to twenty minutes for the host’s
comments (until 1945, the show’s host was Cecil B. DeMille), commercials,
and intermissions, leaving between forty to forty-eight minutes for the
adaptation itself.12 Thus, with a theatrical running time of 130 minutes,
Hitchcock’s Rebecca had to be cut to roughly one-third of its original length
to fit the programming slot. Half-hour radio shows condensed the film to
approximately a fifth of its original length.
Radio adaptations based on the film thus abbreviated or deleted scenes
from Hitchcock’s movie and excised incidental characters and subplots
deemed as not absolutely necessary to the story. In the shortest of the
Rebecca adaptations, the half-hour Screen Player’s Guild presentation with

279
 g oing to the mov ies

Loretta Young, there is no Mrs. Van Hopper, the ugly American who is
the narrator’s employer. Jack Favell, Rebecca’s cousin with whom she has
had an illicit affair, and Ben, the mentally disturbed character who hangs
about the cottage on the Manderley estate, are similarly missing. Plot
connections made by such incidental characters are simply forged by the
major characters.
In addition to these kinds of alterations, radio writers obviously had to
convert a visual into an aural medium; in the process, scenes that relied
heavily on images to express narrative information were eliminated or
transposed into aural counterparts. For instance, due to its literal reliance
on cinema’s visuality, all of the radio adaptations of Rebecca cut the scene
in which Maxim projects 16mm home movies of his honeymoon with his
second wife. The scene’s function in the film—to emphasize the distance
that has grown between the couple since the honeymoon—is not lost, but
expressed through narration and dialogue in other scenes.
Because new performers often assumed parts originally played by other
actors and actresses, character roles also underwent change. Along with an
emphasis on sound effects and music, the grain of the voice would dominate
the adaptation. Thus, while striving to express the shy, self-effacing nature of
the second Mrs. de Winter, Margaret Sullavan, Ida Lupino, Loretta Young,
and Vivien Leigh each crafted distinct variations of the breathy, anxiety-
ridden, and vulnerable voice expected from this character. Unavoidably, their
screen personas also entered into the mix, making strange bedfellows in the
audience’s mind, perhaps, between Leigh’s fiery Scarlett O’Hara from Gone
with the Wind (1939) and the ineffectual second Mrs. de Winter, who is
never even given a first name. Thus, along with other alterations, recasting
in radio adaptations of Hollywood films rearranged the alchemies between
voice, star persona, and role established by theatrical films, providing new
dimensions to old material.
Such changes help describe how feature-length films materialized in
the homes of millions of listeners for more than two decades. Hollywood’s
extension into the private sphere meant that its products had to be
transformed to suit a different medium and context. This transformation
in turn produced a hybrid creature—part cinema, part radio—that served
both the interests of the film and broadcast industries, a relationship that
would continue influentially into the television era.
Changes in the theatrical film had, however, always been a component of
off-theater exhibition. In home cinema’s early days, films were often shown
on substandard formats (that is, gauges smaller than 35mm), including
17.5mm and 28mm and, later, 16mm and 8mm, offering viewers images
that differed in quality from those on the big screen. During the classic

280
 r econsider ing non-the atr ic a l e x hibition

Hollywood era and beyond, the major studios produced abridgements of

their features for the home and other ancillary markets, customarily cutting
them to less than sixty minutes in length. As it not only saved on shipping
costs, but used the abbreviated form to advertise the full-length feature,
this practice continued well into the 1960s and 1970s. During the height
of 8mm’s popularity, for example, MGM reissued scaled-down or ‘reader’s
digest’ prints of some of its major titles in this format. Thus, the sagas of
How the West Was Won (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) were condensed
into twenty-minute mini-epics. As the educational market developed, fiction
films were shortened and edited into pedagogical lessons that provided
information about everything from travel and history to morality. For
example, in 1937, Paramount Pictures’ Maid of Salem (1937) became ‘Seeing
Salem,’ a 16mm short showing what life was like in eighteenth-century
New England. In 1953, Warner Bros.’s anti-Nazi film The Mortal Storm
(1937) saw 16mm re-release as ‘First Seize His Books,’ a version of the
film that redesigned its original message to suit the Cold War era, so that
Communists, not Nazis, were the enemy.13
From the beginning, then, the history of home exhibition has been
at the same time a history of textual transfiguration. Re-mediatized, cut,
interrupted, reinterpreted, theatrical films appear to home audiences in
dramatically altered forms. But the physical modification of films is not
the only consequence of recycling; the non-theatrical setting itself provides
another significant dimension to the encounter between spectators and films.
Although the home represents the most familiar of these settings, films
have been shown in public venues other than theaters for over a century,
comprising a history as long and as complex as that of home cinema.

Cinema in the Public Eye

As historians such as Douglas Gomery and Gregory Waller have explained,
the medium’s earliest days saw public film screenings in an array of locations,
including vaudeville houses, street carnivals, fairs, amusement parks, and
circuses. When films found more permanent residence in nickelodeons and
later incarnations of movie houses, cinema could still not be contained
within the walls of these official establishments. Until the end of World
War II, traveling exhibitors in the United States presented films in opera
houses, tents, town halls, libraries, and schools.14 Well before the advent of
video, numerous independent companies and distribution networks leased
and sold both commercial and non-commercial 8mm and 16mm films to
schools, businesses, restaurants, religious organizations, museums, factories,
hospitals, prisons, ocean liners, airlines, and the military. Today, through a

281
 g oing to the mov ies

variety of forums, including pay television and video, films are still publicly
shown in many of these same places, as well as in bars, hotels, department
stores, automobiles, and parks.
Certainly, these settings have a makeshift, ephemeral quality compared
to the motion picture theater or even the home. But this quality is the very
source of their value for study. Along with the home, the street carnivals and
airplanes help comprise a history of cinema in its ‘ambient’ forms, to borrow
a term from Anna McCarthy’s analysis of television, which calls attention
to the medium’s pervasive presence in spaces distinct from its official
outlet. Such spaces represent cinema’s ‘quotidian geography,’ a geography
that allows insight into the local tasks cinema performs, the constellation
of interests outside of the film industry that attempt to define its social
use, and the relationships it has forged with off-theater audiences.15 For
audiences, ambient exhibition settings operate very much like their theatrical
counterparts, acting as ‘signal systems,’ environments that shape audiences’
dispositions toward media texts through various cultural and institutional
cues.16 Just as showing a film in the 1920s in a luxurious motion picture
palace had an enormous impact on the spectator’s consumption of films
and attitudes toward moviegoing, homes, schools, prisons, ocean liners, and
other non-theatrical arenas carry their own respective institutional charges
that affect the film experience. The social and historical contexts in which
the non-theatrical is embedded further define the meeting of films and
spectators.
To consider the potential these sites have for reception study, let us
return to the case of FilmAid International and its efforts in Afghanistan.
Like other exhibition sites, the refugee camp’s viewing situation involves
interrelated institutional, physical, emotional, and social elements. Organizers
screen Charlie Chaplin shorts and The Wizard of Oz within the framework of
a humanitarian enterprise in which films are regarded as therapeutic vessels
that can relieve monotony, trauma, and isolation among diasporic peoples.
As films are presented under the stars, in schools, or barns, the distinctive
rhythms, sights, sounds, and smells of each setting contribute further to
the film experience. Exhibition is additionally defined by the fact that,
from 1996 to 2001, Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, a fundamentalist
and anti-Western Islamic regime that, among other regulations, forbade
all media, including cinema, television, and music. Thus, at least for many
children, movies were novel; for female children and women, whose public
presence was severely restricted under the Taliban, watching films in male
company brought other new dimensions to camp screenings.
The refugee camp is also notably a space of cross-cultural or transnational
reception; American films are shown to foreign audiences who have

282
 r econsider ing non-the atr ic a l e x hibition

different linguistic, cultural, and historical backgrounds. In exploring the

implications of this exchange, we see at first glance a resurrection of the
historical function silent cinema once served for pre-literate or non-English
speaking immigrants in the United States. Because of its lack of dialogue
and reliance on gesture and action, the silent film was and apparently still
is able to appeal to diverse cultures, races, and ethnicities. The showing of
The Wizard of Oz raises other parallels with the past. As in cinema’s early
days, the exhibitor has license to alter the original film, practicing a local
act of censorship in deference to the sensitivities of the audience; hence, the
screening committee advises the projectionist to fast-forward through the
Munchkin scenes to avoid offending Muslim viewers. Moreover, reports on
the screening suggest that the sheer spectacle of The Wizard of Oz’s mise-
en-scène, particularly its transformation into color, operated as a cinema of
attractions for an audience new to or long deprived of the visual arts. In
this sense, exhibition demonstrates the fluidity and reversibility of cinema’s
history when placed in a global context—that is, the ability of practices and
experiences reminiscent of cinema’s origins to return over a century later in
new and unanticipated circumstances.
More speculatively, The Wizard of Oz has pointed relevance for this
particular audience. Consider the affinities between the narratives of the
film and the refugee. In the film, a young person is violently uprooted
from home and forced to wander a strange landscape, only to find that
it was all a bad dream and that home and loved ones actually lie within
arm’s reach. Despite obvious cultural differences and the film’s fantastic
proportions, this story bears a resemblance to that of the refugee, who has
also experienced a sudden, tumultuous displacement, followed by mandatory
roaming and a quest to return to home and normalcy. Whether plausible or
not, such a vision of the film’s meaning calls attention to dynamics within
cross-cultural consumption that can aspire to identification across racial,
religious, and social lines. Through what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
refer to as ‘analogical structures of feeling,’ that is, ‘strongly perceived or
dimly felt affinities of social perceptions or historical experience,’ spectators,
particularly those whose communities go unrepresented, identify with
cinematic images from starkly different cultural contexts.17 In this sense,
we can imagine that those living far from home in strange and uncertain
surroundings might convert films—even those as apparently far removed
from their daily life as The Wizard of Oz—into allegories of the diasporic
experience.18
As an instance of transnational reception, this case clearly poses
substantial challenges to interpretation. For the Western observer, the labor
of decoding is both an immense and a sensitive undertaking. Not only must

283
 g oing to the mov ies

the siren song of Orientalism be somehow evaded, but the ideological stakes
involved in the globalization of Western products must be considered. Does
the exhibition of U.S. films in this context represent Western imperialism—
a humanitarian gesture that nonetheless results in the captivation of the
imaginations of a susceptible foreign audience by U.S. cinema? Conversely,
might it represent cinema’s ability to connote freedom and democracy to
oppressed peoples, or, more generally, to act as a powerful affective force
capable of raising spirits and providing hope? Or, could it reveal how
thoroughly subject Hollywood films are to massive rewriting according
to the social, political, and historical coordinates of the local, destination
culture? While there is insufficient information to paint an adequate picture
of this exhibition scene, the circumstances and considerations involved
are suggestive. At the very least, this example depicts the complexity of
signal systems operating beyond the pale of theater districts and the rich
role cinema’s ambient manifestations should play in reaching a broader
understanding of the medium’s social and ideological functions.
Despite the enormity of cinema’s ambience in both public and private
realms, however, ancillary exhibition has so far generated little interest in
Film Studies scholarship. Why has this form of exhibition occupied such a
peripheral place in the field?

Big Screen/Small Screen

For film scholars and enthusiasts, cinema is fully realized as a medium in
the projection of 35mm film in the motion picture theater. The big screen
is implicitly regarded as offering optimum access to cinema aesthetically
and experientially and, therefore, as the rightful forum for its exhibition.
Many spectators, including film academics, nevertheless watch movies on
the small screen via such media as cable TV, video, and DVD. Cinema thus
attains a kind of schizophrenic identity, derived from its shifting material
bases and exhibition contexts: it exists both as a theatrical medium with
images registered on and projected in celluloid and as a non-theatrical
medium with images often rendered electronically and shown on a TV
monitor. This double identity assumes an immediate comparative aesthetic
and experiential value. The big-screen performance is marked as authentic,
as representing bona fide cinema, while the small screen by comparison is
characterized as inauthentic and ersatz.
Although no one could deny that there are differences between theatrical
and non-theatrical cinemas, the fact that these differences are frequently
assessed within a value-laden dichotomy that privileges the theatrical over
the non-theatrical is problematic. In continually appraising the non-theatrical

284
 r econsider ing non-the atr ic a l e x hibition

through a comparative lens, this dichotomy has restrained a more fulsome

critical and cultural study of non-theatrical exhibition venues and of the
ancillary forms of movies that have existed since the late 1800s in multiple
formats from 17.5mm to Internet files. In the logic that embraces big-screen
aesthetics, ancillary forms (with the exception of 16mm and DVD) are often
seen as perversions or assaults on 35mm originals. As John Ford once said
upon viewing the deletions that rendered Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) incoherent
in its 1960s TV broadcast, ‘Your name’s on it but it isn’t the thing you did.’ 19
As in the colorization scandals of the 1980s and countless other unwelcome
transformations of celluloid originals, alterations make ancillary versions of
movies seem completely unworthy of serious critical attention.
However unseemly the changes that cinema may undergo in its post-
theatrical life, the dichotomy between big and small screens has been
drawn too sharply and upon some premises that require reconsideration.
As Peter Krämer has pointed out in the case of home film exhibition, this
is not simply a parallel history that exists separately from its theatrical
counterpart.20 The theatrical and household incarnations of cinema are
financially and experientially interdependent. Particularly after the advent of
video, the theatrical motion picture business has relied on the small screen
to generate profits that help support the production of its extravaganzas.
Conversely, home exhibition venues rely on movies for programming, while
also cashing in on the drawing power of blockbusters and other noted
films.
The viewer’s experience is similarly defined by a continuum of theatrical
and home cinemas. Viewers return home from the movie theater to find yet
more movies available to them on television and computer. Today, with so
many different ancillary viewing options, spectators would be disconcerted
if they could not rent, own, and re-view theatrical fare at will. Moreover,
although critics have complained that the allegedly sloppy aesthetics of
television watching, in which viewers talk and engage in otherwise distracted
and distracting behavior, have invaded movie theaters, scholars such as Roy
Rosenzweig and Janet Staiger have shown that theaters have been the site
of such ‘misbehavior’ since their origins.21 Even if we grant the invasion of
codes of viewing associated with other media into movie theaters, surely
influences are reciprocal. Research on home video consumption has found
that viewing dynamics commonly linked to the motion picture theater—that
is, attentive watching from beginning to end without interruption—have
also affected domestic spectatorship.22 This influence has only grown
through the efforts of home theater and DVD marketers to promote their
products as providing the same quality of experience as the theater. Thus,
although the provinces of the movie theater and the home have unique

285
 g oing to the mov ies

characteristics as exhibition venues, they are not radically discontinuous,

but richly and unavoidably interdependent.
The dichotomy between big and small screens also presumes a kind
of stability in theatrical exhibition seen as lacking in the non-theatrical
situation. In this perception, the darkened establishments animated by
projector beams and dedicated to celluloid comprise the ideal space of
spectatorship, an ideal difficult for other institutions and settings with
diverse activities and circumstances of viewing—the street carnival, the
ocean liner, or the home—to realize. This view, however, minimizes the
impact of the historical variability in motion picture theater technology,
space, design, and atmosphere on spectatorship. Which kind of theater
exactly represents the optimum cinematic experience: the converted store-
front nickelodeon, the luxurious motion picture palace, the dilapidated
dollar cinema, the shopping mall theater with its paper-thin walls, the
modern multiplex with digital sound or the fully digital theater that lacks
altogether a celluloid dimension? This flux in the concept of theaters and the
experiences they provide to patrons is only exacerbated when we enter the
global stage, where the type, condition, and cultural prominence of public
film venues vary greatly from country to country.
Instabilities characterize the products shown in these official exhibition
sites as well. As we have seen, ancillary versions of films have always
been subject to multifarious kinds of alterations, including re-editing and
abridgement. But the fate of the theatrical picture has not been so different.
In cinema’s early days, multiple versions of a title routinely circulated
during an opening run, consequently giving that title a shifting identity
for audiences. Exhibitors regularly edited films to suit municipal censors,
the tastes of their clientele, and/or the conventions of preexisting successful
forms (such as the magic lantern show). In his essay on Edwin Porter,
Charles Musser establishes that, before the producer and cinematographer
obtained more control, the theater exhibitor decided what would appear on
screen. In fact, films were constructed for exhibition ‘in such a way that
individual scenes, functioning as self-contained units, could be selected and
organized at the discretion of the exhibitor.’ Early cinema historians have
been particularly adroit in recognizing the fluctuating nature of their objects
of study, not only because numerous prints have been irretrievably lost, but
because what constitutes a definitive print is often a matter of intense debate
(as, for example, in the case of the different circulating prints of Porter’s
Life of an American Fireman [1903]).23
Cinema’s chameleon-like status did not end, however, after the passing
of cinema’s ‘novelty phase.’ Multiple versions of films destined for theatrical
release continued to exist in the days of classical Hollywood cinema. In one

286
 r econsider ing non-the atr ic a l e x hibition

common example of this, different prints of certain titles were struck for
Northern and Southern audiences. To avoid alienating Southern audiences,
studios produced what they hoped would be less ‘offensive’ cuts of films with
African-American actors and actresses or racial themes (such as The Pirate
[1948] which featured the Nicholas Brothers and Imitation of Life [1959], a
story about racial passing and discrimination), either excising performers of
color outright or otherwise editing to minimize aspects deemed controversial.
In a variation of this practice, studios prepared a number of theatrical prints
for foreign release. So, for instance, the British release of Vertigo included
an epilogue that explained what had happened to the villain, providing a
moralistic touch missing in the U.S. release. More recently, the orgy scene
in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was digitally censored for its
first run in the United States (among other things, to disguise frontal male
nudity), while the British version displayed the scene in full. Regionalism,
foreign release, censorship, studio interference, and marketing decisions are
but a few factors that enter into the potentially volatile modification and
multiplication of prints during their initial theatrical life
Perhaps the theatrical film’s changeability is nowhere more evident
than in the phenomenon of the remedial release—the reissue of a film
that ‘remedies’ in various ways the shortcomings of the first-run version.
Re-releases of newly uncensored prints, re-mastered films, or director’s
cuts are part of theatrical practice. Theaters have screened, for example:
King Kong (1933) in 1971 with previously censored footage included; the
physically restored and digitally re-mastered version of Vertigo in 1996; and
the director’s cut of Blade Runner (1982) in 1992, which altered the original
studio cut by removing the voice-over narration and changing the ending.
With its proliferation of re-edited versions of films accompanied by extra
features, the DVD market has made the remedial variant a steadfast part of
the film business and cinematic experience. While alteration of the original
theatrical print has been an intimate part of cinema’s big screen history, the
ancillary market manifests most clearly the inherent and potentially never-
ending revisionism that cinematic texts are subject to through successive
waves of repurposing that mark their exhibition histories.
Because many re-edits on the big screen and the ancillary market
claim that they provide a definitive copy of a film, the remedial release
also challenges the first-run theatrical print in a key area of presumed
authority—that is, the originality and authenticity that appear to accompany
its position of primacy in relation to all subsequent versions. The remedial
release attempts to establish that, in thrall to industry forces, the first-run
print has failed to realize its director’s original designs. Along with the
case of Blade Runner, this claim is particularly clear in the 1998 re-editing

287
 g oing to the mov ies

of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), which revises the film according to a
lengthy memo Welles wrote to Universal’s studio head in 1957. Although the
remedial re-release is no less a commercial entity, it brings the authenticity
argument full circle: reclaiming originality becomes the terrain not of
primary, but of ancillary forms. Today, as industry executives increasingly
conceive of theatrical exhibition as an advertisement for later DVD release,
the issue of theatrical primacy becomes even more dramatically vexed.
But, even if it results in a reversal, this struggle over originality is still
caught up in the push-and-pull of the dichotomy between screens. Returning
for a moment to the case of Rebecca, we can consider an alternative solution
to this conundrum. As we have seen, du Maurier’s novel served as the source
for Welles’ radio drama. As it was presented in cooperation with Selznick
International, which owned the rights to the novel, the radio drama was
used as a forum to publicize Selznick’s plans to adapt the novel. Both
the novel and Welles’ version influenced the Selznick production directed
by Hitchcock. After the Hitchcock film appeared, it formed the basis of
subsequent radio adaptations. With the rise of television, the novel Rebecca
continued to be adapted—in an NBC production in 1962, a BBC production
on PBS’s show Mystery! in 1978, and again in 1997 on PBS’s Masterpiece
Theater. Thus, the story of the shy and inept heroine, her mysterious and
withdrawn husband, and their twisted housekeeper enjoyed rather persistent
staging and restaging over six decades in several different media.
Asking which of these is the best adaptation of the literary source or of
the film is a legitimate and perhaps inevitable question. But if that question
dominates the field of inquiry, it obscures a different productive approach to
this flurry of repurposed narratives. As André Bazin argues, critics should
‘find not a novel out of which a play and a film had been “made,” but rather
a single work reflected through three art forms, an artistic pyramid with
three sides,’ which should be ‘all equal in the eyes of the critic.’ From Bazin’s
perspective, the original work would ‘be only an ideal point at the top of
this figure, which itself is an ideal construct. The chronological precedence
of one part over another would not be an aesthetic criterion any more than
the chronological precedence of one twin over the other is a genealogical
one.’ 24
Bazin suggests that in those studies of adaptation that regard one entity
as derived from and compared to another, there is an inherently limiting
dualism that prevents a more nuanced understanding of the adapting text.
Through the figure of the pyramid, he advocates a different view, seeing
each version as helping to constitute the work, belonging to its overall
architecture and conception, with none privileged by virtue of original
status. This means that rather than concentrating on fidelity as the central

288
 r econsider ing non-the atr ic a l e x hibition

issue, adaptations of Rebecca should be regarded as valid re-articulations of

the original that comprise an integral part of its overall identity. In a further
revisionist move, by referring to it as an ‘ideal construct,’ Bazin questions
the notion of the original itself. If we consider du Maurier’s novel as the
source, what of the novel’s roots in the Gothic tradition stemming from,
at the very least, the Brontë sisters’ oeuvre in the nineteenth century? The
line of aesthetic ancestors alone makes the attribution of a primary source
problematic.
Although many ancillary versions of films are not adaptations in the
strict sense, Bazin’s perspective helps shed a different light on the value
of re-mediated films, whether they appear on 8mm, radio, video, or other
formats. Like adaptations, ancillary variants transform the source text
to various degrees to suit the requirements of a new outlet or medium;
like adaptations, then, these variants translate the source into a different
language. Each cross-media transformation is interesting for what it can
tell us about the ‘work,’ understood as a complex, prismatic entity subject
to shifts and changes within the parameters of its re-production, re-release,
and reception. Or, put in the terms of Bazin’s genealogical analogy, thanks
to both theatrical and non-theatrical distribution, the multiple versions of
a film constitute part of its ‘family tree.’ No version should be dismissed,
because each represents a revision that demonstrates the realpolitik of a
film’s history—not something that exists ‘out there,’ definitively apart from
the original text. With its ties to the novel, the film industry, and radio
conventions, the Welles’ adaptation of Rebecca alone illustrates that the
interests of multiple media are present in any adapted and repurposed form.
This fact of textual existence further amplifies the deficits of any dualistic
model of exchange, and the importance of maintaining an inclusive,
nonhierarchical perspective when considering the phenomena of ancillary
forms.
In this view, then, along with the film re-edited into an educational
travelogue of Salem and the mangled TV print that kept John Ford awake
at night, the radio adaptation of a Hollywood feature that elides its visuality
and foregrounds its aural dimensions, condenses its narrative, replaces its
original actors and actresses, and interrupts it with commercials, should
not simply be consigned to an aesthetic rogue’s gallery. As part of a film’s
material social history, these versions yield insight into its afterlife and its
continually shifting relationship to audiences. With Hollywood’s economic
engine behind it, textual afterlife is in many cases inevitable. In fact, the
most vigorous existence for many films lies in their revival by various
institutions long after they originally circulated. These are the moments in
which they often literally become memorable. Films such as The Wizard of

289
 g oing to the mov ies

Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), for instance, owe most of their audience
penetration and fame to ritual television screenings. FilmAid International’s
enterprise offers a particularly keen view of the unexpected twists and turns
that Hollywood films are subject to during the course of their circulation,
where their significance and meaning can be utterly transformed through
changes in their historical, institutional, and cultural exhibition settings.
Moreover, the non-theatrical encourages reflection about how originality
itself is constructed during certain times and according to certain imperatives.
Since originality is as much a commodity as an aesthetic criterion, we
can trace how ancillary versions intervene in, confuse, and regulate the
appearance of authenticity within a film’s exhibition history. As the
exhibition history of a film like The Wizard of Oz or Metropolis (1927)
reveals, successive claims about presenting the most authentic and inclusive
print doggedly accompany some films, making the rediscovery of their
true, definitive version into a serial, steadfast component of their continued
cultural circulation.
Thus, realizing the protean character of the Hollywood feature inspires
more serious examination of how cinema’s many screens and situations of
viewing affect the manner in which its objects are decoded and enjoyed.
While acknowledging the aesthetic and experiential differences of non-
theatrical exhibition, we should be careful not to let those differences
establish all the terms of discussion or produce a hierarchy that, in
privileging celluloid, regards the non-theatrical film as a kind of ‘un-cinema’
or inferior proxy. As a means of analyzing non-theatrical film outside of
its usual dichotomous position, we can turn our attention instead to the
transformations of film identity that occur in the cinematic afterlife and the
implications that such transformations have for the aesthetic and cultural
study of the medium.
In conclusion, let me return to the figure I have used to describe the non-
theatrical’s subordinate status—that is, as ‘official’ cinema’s shadow. In the
dictionary, shadow is defined in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways.
It can be construed as a derivative entity: a reflected image; an imitation; an
imperfect and faint representation; an attenuated form or vestigial remnant;
even a state of ignominy or obscurity. But, in a less frequent usage, shadow
also connotes a force in its own right: an inseparable companion; a pervasive
and dominant influence. This latter set of meanings better represents
the nature of non-theatrical cinema. In its daily incarnations, it exists
beyond, but intimately connected to, the motion picture theater’s darkened
auditoriums and silhouetted spectators who, upon leaving the theater, have
no reason to expect that they will enter a world without cinema.

290
 pa r t i i i

Hollywood Movies in
Broader Perspective
Audiences at Home and Abroad
 14

Changing Images of
Movie Audiences
Richard Butsch

W h at makes a ‘good’ audience or a ‘bad’ one? For two centuries,

despite dramatic transformations of entertainment media and audience
styles, the conception of the ‘good’ audience in public discourse—in popular
magazines and trade books, scholarly journals and books, and reports by
reformers—has remained remarkably consistent. Uniformly, this discourse
has preferred an audience that acts more like a public. The conception of
‘bad’ audiences on the other hand has changed. The considerable public
debates about television through the second half of the twentieth century
presumed a conception of audiences as isolated individuals, weak and
vulnerable to the influence of the screen. By contrast, debates about live
entertainments, particularly in the nineteenth century, conceived audiences
as volatile and potentially violent crowds. Discourses about movie audiences
were part of the transition from the one to the other type of bad audience
that elites worried about. This chapter is concerned with how the discourse
shifted during the first half of the twentieth century, when movies were
the predominant visual entertainment.

Crowds, Audiences and Riots

One kind of bad audience is the crowd. Before movies, nineteenth-century
audiences gathered in theaters were considered crowds and therefore
conventionally seen as a threat to public order. Authorities and elites
imagined crowds as lower-class mobs, prone to riot.
Crowds were not always seen as a danger to public order. Pre-industrial
traditions, shared by elites and lower classes alike, considered crowd actions
and even riots as acceptable forms of political expression. According to

293
 g oing to the mov ies

Paul Gilje’s epic study, Rioting in America, crowd actions in the eighteenth
century tended to be contained within channels familiar to both participants
and authorities. Riots were ritualized and directed at property rather than
persons. Both rioters and authorities knew their scripts.1 Gilje echoes one of
the early statements of this interpretation of crowd history, that of English
historian Eric Hobsbawm, who described ‘the mob’ as part of a tradition in
non-republican, pre-industrial cities ruled by princes, where mobs expected
authorities to make some concessions to their protests of violations of their
traditional rights. It was understood by rulers and by lower classes that if
their rights were infringed, the lower classes could riot to bring attention to
this, and the ruler had an obligation to make concessions to them. Edward
P. Thompson called this the ‘moral economy’ of the crowd.2 If bread prices
rose too high, crowds could legitimately riot to restore affordable prices.
Crowds were not a threat to the status quo, seldom exercised violence
against elites and, since there was a recognized script to this ritual, were
less fearsome to authorities.
Carnival and street parades were part of another tradition of crowd
behavior condoned by authorities, in this case as outlets for the lower classes.
Included among these were rowdy and even riotous theater audiences.
American working men, who could afford theater by the late eighteenth
century, claimed sovereignty over the stage, and were granted it by managers
and civic authorities. It was accepted that they had the right to call for
tunes and encores by musicians and performers, and to call managers and
performers before the curtain for an accounting of their behavior on and
even off the stage. Authorities assented to this because they felt confident
they could control such crowds.3
Crowds became worrisome, however, once bourgeois republican
government instituted an expectation that all groups in a society express
their demands through legal channels of discussion and petition rather
than through crowd action. The rising bourgeoisie asserted its own voice
by advancing its Enlightenment project of deliberative gatherings (publics,
legislatures, republics). This project was antithetical to mobs and riots, and
disapproved of them. In the transition to modern societies, authorities
became increasingly concerned about their control over crowds.4
Discourse shifted from one of accepting crowds as exercising traditional
rights and letting off steam to one of fearing crowds as sinister sources of
rebellion. In 1715, in order to strengthen the power of civil authorities to
stop crowds that they feared might riot, the English Parliament passed
the Riot Act, which required crowds as small as twelve people to disperse
within an hour of being ordered to do so by a magistrate. Throughout the
eighteenth century, British authorities repeatedly attempted unsuccessfully

294
 ch a nging im ages of mov ie audiences

to disperse crowds, a pattern of behavior which peaked in the 1809 OP (old

prices) protests and riots at Covent Garden theater, which lasted sixty-seven
days.5 Fueled by reports on the crowds of the French Revolution, such
incidents confirmed elite fears of crowds.
By the mid-nineteenth century, authorities and elites in the United States
had become increasingly alarmed about crowds as they went beyond the
traditional script and authorities lost control. The growing violence of crowds
had coincided with the growth of theater and commercial entertainment in
the Early Republic and the Jacksonian era, and the growing presence of
lower classes inside these theaters.6 Nineteenth-century theater audiences
specifically came to be feared as potential rioters, and did indeed riot,
infrequently but regularly. Theater audiences were increasingly characterized
as dangerous. Rowdy crowd behavior in theaters was identified as a mark
of lower-class status. ‘Proper’ ladies were cautioned not to attend theater
because of the disreputable and disorderly crowd that was the audience. The
withdrawal of the well-to-do to their own exclusive theaters and the parallel
segregation of ‘legitimate drama’ from ‘melodrama’ was itself a statement
disapproving the rowdiness of lower-class audiences.

Individualizing the Crowd

In the United States, the second half of the nineteenth century was marked
by considerable efforts by theater owners and managers, and by the law, to
restrict and contain audiences to prevent them from becoming mobs. The re-
conceptualization of audiences as dangerous and unruly crowds threatening
rational democratic or aesthetic discourse justified efforts to contain such
audiences. Audience sovereignty was no longer acknowledged by managers
and constables. Through the second half of the century, managers and
directors imposed a new definition of audience behavior through a variety
of changes. Among these were alterations in legal discourse, in the physical
arrangement of the theater, and in the style of drama and acting.7
Legal discourse redefined audience rights. Albert Brackett, author of
the standard text on theater law, summed up the development of theater
law through the nineteenth century by concluding that ‘The manager has
full right to insist that his patrons behave in an orderly manner … This
requires propriety of deportment and silence when the play is in progress.’ 8
Another standard legal text, Bishop’s Criminal Law, citing nineteenth-
century criminal cases, stated that theater audiences had no right to disturb
a performance and that planning to hiss in unison constituted criminal
conspiracy. Hissing and applauding was acceptable only if each individual
spontaneously chose to do so.9 These statements abrogated the old rights of

295
 g oing to the mov ies

audience sovereignty to direct the performance and required audiences to

act as individuals rather than a crowd.
Managers made changes in theaters that not only physically restricted
audiences’ ability to act as crowds but also symbolically expressed the
expectation that they should act as individuals. Previously the theater pit,
which we now call the orchestra, was less expensive and had benches that
could be picked up and moved about. More people could be crowded into
the pit; and the benches could contribute to disturbances. In the second
half of the nineteenth century, the pit was redesigned as the orchestra.
Loose benches were replaced by single seats, ordered in rows and bolted
to the floor. The shift from multi-seat benches to single seats symbolized
the redefinition of audiences from crowds to individuals. Bolting made it
clear that each patron was confined to a fixed space with clear boundaries
between them and their neighbors, avoiding the body contact that crowd
psychologists of the time believed was conducive to crowd action.
The installation of electric lights enabled managers to darken the theater
while lighting the stage, making it difficult to see your neighbor, and harder
to ignore the stage. Previously, candles and gas lights remained on during
performances, allowing audience members to observe and communicate
with each other. Darkening of lights still to this day is used as a clear
message that the audience should cease conversing and silently watch the
stage. New seating and lighting ‘disciplined’ the audience both structurally
and symbolically.
This effect of darkness was complemented by the new tradition of
dramatic realism and its new style of acting and staging at legitimate drama
theaters. The stage was withdrawn behind the proscenium arch, which
became an invisible ‘fourth wall’ separating the audience but allowing them
to witness events portrayed. The curtain closed or opened this window.
Actors no longer came to the fore of the stage to give monologues. To
look at the audience, let alone talk to them, would destroy the illusion of
reality. They remained ‘in role,’ speaking only to other actors and ignoring
the audience. This new dramatic style stated to the audience that they were
to see but not be heard.
These changes redefined the manner in which the audience was conceived
or constructed from a unified crowd into a mass of separate individuals
‘spell-bound in darkness,’ as moviegoing itself would also be described For
the first time, audiences were expected to be silent, isolated witnesses in
theaters, instead of members of a large crowd. A few writers even began to
wonder publicly what docile people legitimate theater audiences had become.
An editorial in Every Saturday bemoaned: ‘woe befall the man who had the
frankness to signal his displeasure in any other manner than by leaving the

296
 ch a nging im ages of mov ie audiences

house’ and then described his experience at a very poor performance in a

New York theater. One man of the twelve hundred in the audience hissed
mildly and was ejected by a policeman, while the rest ‘tamely submitted to
the insult’ of the performance. ‘What mild creatures we are when sitting at
a play!’ he wrote, ‘with what pitiful patience we submit to the long-drawn-
out stupidity of thin melodrama.’ 10
Not all audiences, of course, complied. Whole sectors of cheap
entertainment continued to allow or even encourage active audiences who
hissed and hoorayed. Vaudeville, especially cheap vaudeville, thrived on
dialogue between audiences and performers. But, even here, managers
planned to direct audiences responses, not to allow them autonomy.11

Spellbound in Darkness
Darkness and the fourth wall were not stylistic choices but technological
necessities of motion pictures. Movies removed a strong stimulus for
audiences acting as a crowd, since there were no live actors whose
performance they could alter, even though in the silent era, some audiences
still demanded that projectionists and pianists change their performance.
At the same time, movies substituted a realism that might draw viewers
into the movie and away from their theater mates. This appeared to cement
the transformation of audiences from crowds to individuals. Like dramatic
realism, narrative movies also placed the audience in the role of furtive
spectators, peeping through the camera, with the screen as a fourth wall
allowing them to watch but excluding them from the events depicted.
In the nickelodeon era, writers also briefly promoted an image of
immigrant audiences as crowds using the storefront movie houses. The
loosely arranged chairs not bolted to the floor were reminiscent of the old
days of theater. Patrons packed together as in the old theater pit. For a
brief time magazine articles for the well-to-do about the early movie house
were part of a much larger ‘reformer’ or ‘slumming’ literature that included
works by Dreiser, James and other novelists, describing the teeming masses
of great cities in the era of the great wave of immigration. These articles
sketching the inside of urban nickelodeons uniformly attributed moviegoing
to the lower classes, and especially to immigrants. They described, however,
a friendly group, not the menacing crowd described by French intellectual
Gustave Le Bon in his classic text The Crowd (1898). Writers commonly
referred to these neighborhood nickelodeons as social clubs. John Collier
of the New York People’s Institute, indeed, called them ‘family theaters,’
full of women and children, rather than places of dangerous crowds. In a
deeply sympathetic sketch, wealthy reformer Mary Heaton Vorse described

297
 g oing to the mov ies

every woman as having ‘a baby in her arms and at least two clinging
to her skirts … A baby seems as much a matter of course.’ In Sherman
Kingsley’s account, ‘Father and mother, the baby, the older children, the
grand parents—all were there.’ While the recurring mention of mothers
with many children may have invoked a common fear among upper-class
conservatives that they were being overrun not only by migration but also
procreation, it also provided an assurance that these were not dangerous
crowds, but vulnerable people.12

Picturing Weak Individuals

Through the twentieth century a variety of stories accumulated about
audiences as weak individuals easily swayed by media messages. Cultural
critics, social reformers and political conservatives charged that media led
audiences to crime and violence, copycat behavior, addiction, fanatical
obsession, aesthetic degradation, civic disintegration, and also made them
succumb more easily to propaganda. These tales of audiences flourished
especially after the introduction of television and the rise of effects research
as the dominant paradigm in both public and scholarly debate on audiences.
Such stories began in the early days of movies and quickly became the
central theme of public debate about movies.
Stories about movie audiences emphasized the spellbinding capability of
motion pictures to exert a dangerous influence on the minds and behavior of
film-goers. The idea of being spellbound was part of the crowd psychology
of the time that was widely held among academics and elites ranging in
political convictions from Progressives to conservatives.13 This theory was
the bridge for the intellectual redefinition of audiences from bad crowds
to weak individuals, since it was based on a psychological mechanism of
individual susceptibility to suggestion. At the heart of crowd psychology
was the concept that people in crowds were more prone to suggestion,
to being stirred up emotionally by a demagogue and then turning into
rash and violent mobs. The theory of suggestibility was borrowed from
widespread nineteenth-century theories of means to control the minds of
others, especially hypnotism. These ideas were also linked to the corollary
belief that subordinate groups were particularly susceptible to such mind
controls.14 Crowd psychology gained popularity among intellectuals and
elites in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, and was soon imported into the
U.S. by some of the most prominent psychologists and social scientists of
the day.
The most influential exponent of this theory was French sociologist
Gustave Le Bon. In The Crowd, Le Bon argued that the primary characteristic

298
 ch a nging im ages of mov ie audiences

of crowds is that individuals surrender their independent thinking through a

process of ‘emotional contagion.’ Crowd leaders implant suggestions through
the emotional intensity of their exhortations. The suggestion ‘implants
itself immediately by a process of [emotional] contagion in the brains of all
assembled.’ According to Le Bon, emotion bypasses reason. Le Bon claimed
that the impulsiveness and emotionality that cause suggestion, ‘are almost
always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution—women,
savages and children,’ and that a nation was less susceptible when the ‘spirit
of the race’ was strong in the upper class.15
Many progressive reformers expressed their belief in the powerful
suggestibility of movies which they hoped to harness to uplift the masses.
The terms ‘spellbound,’ ‘implant’ and ‘mesmerize’ were sprinkled through
articles on the effects of movies. More broadly, social reformer Jane Addams
called cheap theater the ‘house of dreams’, a powerful inducement to
fantasies.16
One recurring story was that movies depicting crime and sex made deep
impressions on teenagers and led them into juvenile delinquency. Most of
this discourse focused on working-class youth as those most susceptible
to this influence. Boys would engage in drinking, drugs and driving as
well as minor crimes. Girls would be persuaded to engage in sex and ruin
their reputations and chances for respectable marriage. Such stories were
presented so often about nickelodeon movies as to suggest they were an
urban myth rather than facts.17 These claims argued that crimes were copied
from movies. Allegedly unstable, highly suggestible people saw things in
movies that suggested to them the idea of imitating it themselves.
Soon professors entered the discourse. George Elliot Howard, soon to
be president of the American Sociological Society, writing in the American
Journal of Sociology, used crowd psychology in order to claim audiences are
very suggestible. He went on to allege that audiences of the lower sorts
were even more so: children, women, striking workers more than burghers,
the ignorant more than the cultured, Italians, Slavs and Irish more than
Dutch, German or English. Howard proposed, therefore, to use movies as
a means of suggesting the proper things to the lower sorts.18
Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay (1916), also
argued that movies implanted ideas. Münsterberg was an important figure
in the formation of American psychology at the turn of the century and
a founding member of the American Psychological Association. He said
about movies that ‘The intensity with which the plays take hold of the
audience cannot remain without social effects … the mind is so completely
given up to the moving pictures.’ Münsterberg was familiar with theories
of crowd psychology, as he was advisor to Boris Sidis, a Russian émigré

299
 g oing to the mov ies

student at Harvard, whose thesis, The Psychology of Suggestion, had become

the single most important book in the U.S. on the subject, when it had
been published in 1898.19
Like many of these writers, Münsterberg considered women, lower
classes and certain races to be more susceptible. He held strong opinions
about the inferiority of women and was an outspoken opponent of suffrage.
He advocated the superiority of Anglo-Saxons and Germans, to whom he
credited the creation and protection of ‘civilization.’ He referred to ‘the
millions … daily under the spell’ and exhorted reformers to use film for
the ‘aesthetic cultivation’ of ‘the masses,’ emphasizing that he considered
the lower classes to be the group most vulnerable to influence from the
movies.20
Such claims continued into the 1920s. In 1921, psychologist A.T.
Poffenberger of Columbia University expressed the belief that young people
and adults of low mentality were led to crime by movies. In 1928 sociologist
E.A. Ross, renowned for his writings on crowd psychology and social
control, claimed that movies ‘stirred the sex instincts into life years sooner
than used to be the case with boys and girls from good homes,’ suggesting
the contamination of higher-class children by this low-class entertainment.
Also in the 1920s University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess claimed
that movies countered the good influence of home, church and school.21
In 1930, Christian Century published a series of five articles by Dr. Fred
Eastman, religious educator and playwright, on the ‘menace of the movies,’
especially to youth who lived in ‘congested areas,’ i.e. poor neighborhoods.22
Consistently through the silent movie era, these writers identified working-
class teenagers, adults and Southern and Eastern European immigrants as
especially susceptible to movies’ spellbinding effects.
In 1933, the Payne Fund, a private foundation, published Motion
Pictures and Youth, eight volumes of studies by prominent psychologists and
sociologists that examined the relationship between movies and teen-age
delinquency, plus a research summary volume as well as a popularized
summary.23 This was by far the most ambitious investigation into film
effects on moviegoers. It was inspired by a desire to convince Americans
of the power of movies over children, so they would support censorship.
While studies by University of Chicago sociologist Herbert Blumer and his
graduate students Philip Hauser and Frederick Thrasher tended to confirm
the arousal of teenagers and claim movies encouraged delinquency, Louis
Thurstone and Ruth Peterson, Frank Shuttleworth and Mark May, William
Dysinger and Christian Ruckmick concluded that movies had varied effects
and were capable even at times of countering delinquent tendencies. But
the popular summary by Henry Forman ignored such equivocations—and

300
 ch a nging im ages of mov ie audiences

evidence for the positive impact of motion pictures—in order to emphasize

movies’ negative influence on youth.24 In his two Payne studies, Herbert
Blumer reaffirmed the conception of movies mesmerizing audiences when
he framed his reports around his concept of ‘emotional possession,’ which
he described as one in which

the individual identifies himself so thoroughly with the plot or loses

himself so much in the picture that he is carried away from the
usual trend of conduct [and] even his efforts to rid himself of it by
reasoning with himself may prove of little avail.25

Blumer also reaffirmed the idea that the influence of motion pictures ‘is less
in the cultured classes’ and more ‘in disorganized city areas,’ a euphemism
for the urban poor.26
Ironically, although Blumer and the other sociologists working on
the Payne studies were part of the University of Chicago department
renowned for its ethnographic approach that emphasized community and
group subcultures, all of their studies, as well as those of the psychologists,
methodologically treated the movie audience as individually affected by the
movies with almost no investigation into the influence from their friends
or the rest of the audience watching with them.27 Thus, from the initial
conception of their research the Payne studies excluded from consideration
the concept of the audience as a crowd or community, and concentrated
almost exclusively on the audience as isolated individuals focused on the
movie. They retained the mechanism of suggestibility but discarded the
idea of the crowd, producing a picture of weak individuals vulnerable to
the spellbinding influence of movies.
After the Payne Fund studies were published, public debate about
movies receded. Part of the reason for this may have been that their
major proponent, Reverend William Short, died shortly after publication.
But policy within the industry also changed with the institution of the
Production Code Administration in 1934. The Production Code of 1930
itself had discouraged much of what reformers such as Short disapproved,
but the work of the PCA after 1934 also greatly reduced the controversial
treatment of issues such as, for example, crime. In the 1950s, however, a
moral panic again arose about the effects of movies. A new movie genre
depicting rebellious teen-agers, including The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle
and Rebel Without a Cause, was blamed for what was perceived as a rise in
juvenile delinquency. The rise of a teen market served by drive-in movies
and movies about teenagers contributed to debates about what movies were
doing to teens. This was part of what James Gilbert called a ‘cycle of outrage’

301
 g oing to the mov ies

that also targeted comic books, and rock’n’roll. Trade books by psychiatrists
and journalists and Senate hearings all fed the flames of fear about movies
and other media corrupting youth. As Gilbert phrased it, echoing the
language of turn of the century crowd psychology, ‘the popular metaphor
was one of contagion, contamination and infection.’ Again, lower classes
were implicated. This time, according to Gilbert, the discourse expressed
fears that middle-class teens would be infected by the delinquent behavior
of working-class youths represented in the movies.28
Such beliefs about individuals mesmerized and deeply influenced by
movies have continued into more recent years, in news reports offering
explanations of juvenile crimes and deaths. In the 1980s, incidents of
teenagers lying in the road while cars passed over them were claimed to
be copycat cases inspired by a movie in which a character did this. School
shootings of the 1990s were sometimes attributed to the influence of movies
and video games. A report on a trend in the new millennium of turning
action movies into video games that producers hope consumers will want
to play again and again conjures up images of the isolated spellbound loner,
crazed by repeated viewing, who goes out and kills someone.29
Two other tropes duplicate this conception of audiences as spellbound
individuals, but—in contrast to the focus on children by much of the
discourse on suggestibility—concentrate more on adults. Children and even
teens are assumed to be vulnerable, but suggestible adults clearly require
some explanation. Adults who are heavily influenced by movies are labeled
‘fans’ or ‘addicts’ and presumed to be neurotic. Addiction discourses often
consider the weak will of the addicted person as the central mechanism
explaining why particular individuals are susceptible, just as suggestibility
was presumed to depend on the weak will of some individuals. Like
suggestibility, addiction is attributed to presumed weak-willed groups,
particularly subordinate races, who are understood to be too weak to resist
their compulsion to indulge in their addiction.30
Movies have seldom been described as addictive, but the obsession of the
fan, short for ‘fanatic,’ is closely related to the compulsiveness of the addict.
The intense attachments of fans to movies and stars was individualized
and psychologized by claiming that fans were ‘drugged’ by movies, and
comments about the hysterical movie fan proliferated in the 1920s and
1930s. Samantha Barbas notes that the image of the fan as an obsessed
fanatic became so strong that many people made a point of dissociating
themselves from that label. Movie fans were presumed to be immature or
childlike, uneducated and unintelligent. It needed not be said that they were
female, since fan and female were considered synonymous. A censorship
advocate and doctor claimed that many adult movie fans possessed the

302
 ch a nging im ages of mov ie audiences

‘mental age of an eleven year old.’ The fan was likewise understood to
be deluded about the realism of the movies, an image that was also used
to deride woman soap opera fans. In 1939 Margaret Thorp characterized
fans as gullible and cited a claim that their letters indicate a very limited
vocabulary. Another writer, Carl Cotter, deduced from the simple writing
of fan magazines that fans must be uneducated and naïve.31
In recent years, some fans of ‘cult movies’ have developed their own
communities and even acted in some ways like publics to lobby the movie
industry, but images of fans as communities have not been included in the
dominant discourses about them.32 When mentioned, they are instead used
to confirm the psychopathology of fans, for example in news coverage of
fan conventions that focus on fans dressed in bizarre costumes.
In these discourses, the predominant image is of isolated individuals with
eyes fixed on the screen. Representations of different, active movie audiences
were buried in infrequent newspaper reports of children misbehaving in
neighborhood theaters, and were overshadowed by the image of individ-
ualized viewers.

Publics, Fans and Addictions

Jane Gaines’ discussion of political mimesis suggests an underlying similarity
between the discourses on the audience as crowd and as isolated individuals.
Gaines discusses the intent of the ‘radical documentary’ to arouse the
audience to collective action, to ‘kick and yell’ and carry on the struggle
even if it means ‘fighting back in physical ways that exceed restrained
public demonstrations of protest.’ 33 She is referring to a movie’s appeal to
the senses and emotion rather than reason: the movie as demagogue, as Le
Bon might have presented it.
Gaines compares this response to those noted by Linda Williams:
that horror films make you scream, melodrama makes you cry, and
pornography makes you orgasm. Williams notes that these movies cause in
spectators an ‘almost involuntary’ bodily response.34 In each of these non-
political instances, audiences are isolated individuals, focused on the bodily
convulsions on-screen and absorbed in their own individual bodily spasms.
Their responses, with the possible exception of the screams, are private and
do not unite them as a crowd.
Although Williams describes audiences acting as individuals, and Gaines
describes audiences acting collectively, both actions are induced by the
same seemingly ‘involuntary’ visceral reaction to movies. Le Bon described
individuals transformed into crowds by a demagogue; the discourses
on audiences described individuals transformed by movies, but not into

303
 g oing to the mov ies

crowds. They remain individuated. Discourses on both crowds and isolated

individuals thus begin with some central focus that each member of the
audience attends to.35 Both the dangerous crowd and the weak-willed
individual are cast as undesirable audiences.
The significance of this is more evident as we notice that those who are
‘bad’ or weak-willed are almost always peoples who are subordinate groups.
Discourses on audiences as crowd or individual consistently assert that
those of ‘lower’ class, race, and gender are more susceptible to suggestion,
especially from visual media such as movies.

Crowds, Publics and Individuals

What possibility lies between the bad crowd and the weak individual
audiences? In the discourses I have discussed, implicitly or explicitly,
the preferred bourgeois audience is a Habermasian ‘public,’ active and
thoughtful but not unruly and riotous. Audiences as publics are imagined
with bourgeois characteristics. They are intellectually, aesthetically, socially
and politically ‘cultivated.’ They engage the entertainment in all these
dimensions; and they employ the entertainment to engage each other in
all these dimensions. They watch and think about the movie individually,
come to their own conclusions, and then respond as a group joined by their
individually derived opinions.
Discourses on audiences both as crowds and as individuals agree that
a ‘good’ audience response is to act as a bourgeois public. Film scholar
Miriam Hansen was perhaps the first to introduce the concept of the movie
audience as a public rather than a crowd, using the Habermasian ideas of
public sphere.36 Habermas described the bourgeois public sphere as practices
of public discussion in a social space where all participants were treated
as equals, regardless of their status outside that space. This was thought
critical to the European transition from aristocracy to democracy. He cited
the English coffee house and the French salon as examples.37
Hansen sees in the sociality of the nickelodeon a public sphere of
the working class and women that was autonomous from supervision by
authorities and higher classes. Nickelodeons are, however, also limited as
the ideal public space, since there is scant evidence of political discussion
in this space and little evidence of diverse social statuses present. Indeed,
it was the homogeneity of audiences that encouraged their sociability, and
formed them as a community more than a public. In fact, a public sphere
may simply be a utopian ideal. The closest that American theater audiences
came to such a public sphere was in the Early Republic when Federalists
and Jeffersonians ‘debated’ in theaters. These incidents were, however, more

304
 ch a nging im ages of mov ie audiences

like shouting matches and sometimes erupted into riots. They were, in other
words, more the actions of crowds than of publics. Thus, since these are the
discursive terms in which their behavior has always been couched, it seems
more consistent with the history of audiences to use the concept of crowd
rather than public.38
In the cases of both the nineteenth-century crowd and twentieth-century
individualized audiences, concern has centered on the failure of lower classes
to engage in and adhere to the rules of debate and discourse within the
framework of a bourgeois public sphere. Such a sphere presumed a discourse
based upon the bourgeois culture of reading and education, and inevitably
put lower classes at a disadvantage. Lower classes historically have been
more effective as collectives rather than as individuals. Crowds, not publics,
and streets, not salons were their preferred political implements.
Nineteenth-century audiences, typically the lower class segments of
audiences or audiences in theaters catering to lower classes, did not abide by
the decorum of public sphere debate. Instead they exercised power as a crowd.
The rights of audience sovereignty vigorously exercised in the Early Republic
and the Jacksonian era were rights to collective action, to command musicians
and performers to perform favorite selections, to demand accounting from
performers and managers by calling them before the curtain. To some
degree, these practices survived in cheap theaters until their demise at the
hand of movies in the early decades of the twentieth century.39
The dominant discourse therefore increasingly called for the containment,
rather than the inclusion, of these crowds. Managers and metropolitan
police embarked on a program of repression of such crowd actions. Courts
seem to have upheld audience rights only when behaviors such as widespread
hissing could be construed as an opinion expressed by a public.40
On the other hand, audiences of the twentieth century were believed
to be debilitated by mass media such as movies, and thus disabled from
the prospect of participation in the bourgeois public sphere Mass culture
critics blamed media for undermining the enculturation of the masses into
the bourgeois culture that is the prerequisite to participation in the public
sphere. At first, cultural uplifters hoped that movies, radio and television
would be their tools. Progressive reformers hoped that movies would teach
lessons of Americanism to low income immigrants. Promoters of high
culture, such as Walter Damrosch, believed that radio would make America
a nation of Beethoven fans. Educators thought television would bring the
world into the home of every child and make him well informed. None of
these hopes was realized, as profit outbid culture for media use.
Instead, lower classes and other subordinate groups have been cast as
the weak audience that bourgeois critics fear are undermining democracy

305
 g oing to the mov ies

by consuming too much of the wrong kind of media and neglecting

civic participation, choosing consumption over citizenry.41 The discourses
defining subordinate groups as ‘bad’ audiences disenfranchise them by de-
legitimating their expression and justifying efforts to limit or control it.42
Until they are seen to be acting like a bourgeois public in using movies and
other media, they continue to be characterized as endangering themselves
and democracy in their alleged habits as audiences.

306
 15

‘Healthy Films from America’

The Emergence of a Catholic Film Mass
Movement in Belgium and the Realm of
Hollywood, 1928–1939

Daniel Biltereyst

Recreation, in its manifold varieties, has become a necessity for

people who work under the fatiguing conditions of modern industry,
but it must be worthy of the rational nature of man and therefore
must be morally healthy.
(Pope Pius XI, 29 June 1936) 1

T h i s quotation from Pope Pius XI’s Encyclical Letter on the motion

pictures, Vigilanti Cura, exemplifies the shifting attitude of the
Catholic Church towards cinema in the 1930s. While cinema had long been
considered an immoral medium and a major force of secularisation, now the
highest Vatican authority openly praised the American Legion of Decency’s
successful efforts at improving the morality in Hollywood movies. The 1936
papal encyclical was even more determined than ever to take the offensive
in encouraging Catholic film movements in other countries to increase their
initiatives against ‘morally unhealthy’ movies.
The general drift of argument in the papal letter gave the impression
that the centre of the Catholic ‘moral crusade’ lay in the US, an impression
likely to be corroborated by the recent scholarly attention given to the role
played by the Legion of Decency and individual American Catholic figures

307
 g oing to the mov ies

in changing the Production Code, and with it the nature of American

movies.2 This impression is, however, misleading. In fact, in many European
countries where Catholicism had a major influence on society, local religious
organisations had been actively trying to shape the medium for a long
time.3 In 1928, many of these Catholic film organisations were brought
together in an international network, the Office Catholique International du
Cinématographe (OCIC), while during the first half of the 1930s some local
European Catholic organisations engaged in an impressive range of activities
intended to influence film consumption, from production, distribution and
exhibition to initiatives to create a film propaganda machinery, film news
agencies, film magazines, film classification or censorship boards, and wider
efforts to initiate a film mass movement.4
In Belgium, the Church and local Catholic film organisations succeeded
in increasing pressure on various levels of the wider film culture. From
the end of the 1920s onwards, the well-organised Belgian Catholic film
movement grew into a forceful player on the national film scene, while
trying to spread its influence on a wider, international level. Through the
well-oiled information and propaganda machinery of the Brussels OCIC
headquarters, and through the personal engagements of some of its leaders,
Belgian Catholics succeeded in influencing Vatican views on what was
commonly called the ‘film problem.’ 5 As John Trumpbour has argued, the
Belgian Catholic film movement ‘played a special role on the international
plane, entrusted by the Vatican with coordination of national Catholic film
movements.’ 6 Trumpbour even suggests that:

In the Catholic Church’s international strategy on film, Belgium at

times played a more central role than the U.S. Legion of Decency.
While Pope Pius XI in his Encyclical of 1936 (Vigilanti cura)
regarded the Legion of Decency as the national model for Catholics,
the Belgian church stood out as the international command-and-
control center of the movement by heading the Office Catholique
International du Cinéma … Organizing international conferences and
fostering Catholic ownership and entrepeneurship in the exhibition
sector, the OCIC built a films movement well in advance of the
Legion of Decency and indeed served to inspire its American
cadres.7

Much scholarly work has still to be done on the history of OCIC as well
as on the strategies of national Catholic film movements in Europe.8 This
chapter, which is part of a larger research project on the history of official
and Catholic film censorship in Belgium, examines Belgian Catholics’

308
 ‘he a lth y films from a mer ic a’

shifting attitude towards ‘immoral’ or ‘unhealthy’ films during their crucial

period of growth and influence on the film market.9 From the end of the
1920s until the Second World War, Belgian Catholics developed a clear
strategy in promoting particular types of movies while heavily boycotting
others. Given the dominance of American movies on the Belgian market
ever since World War I, the main focus here is on the Catholic film
movement’s attitude towards American cinema throughout the 1930s.
Through an analysis of pamphlets, reviews, and other writings from the
Catholic Film Action, it will be shown how the initially negative image of
Hollywood and its products gradually changed into a more positive one,
distinct from the perception of some European pictures as controversial and
many French pictures as immoral.

Belgian Film Market, Hollywood Hegemony and the Catholic

Film Action during the Interwar Period
Since Belgium achieved independence from the Netherlands in 1830, the
Church and various local Catholic organisations played a significant role
in its political, economic, educational and cultural life. Probably more
than in any other Western European country, the Church succeeded in
developing a network of influential institutions ranging from a dominant
political party, press, schools, hospitals and trade unions to youth, women’s
and other organisations aimed at leisure and cultural development. After
World War I devastated the country, social change was intensified under
the banner of modernity.10 Universal male suffrage brought the Socialist
party to government, and this growing democratisation was accompanied
by mass production, industrialisation and rapid urbanisation, so that by
the 1930s more than half of the Belgian population lived in major cities.
These changes also brought new forms of urban cultural production and
consumption—including the growth of music halls, fairs and—above all—
cinema. The Church, however, viewed much of this change as threatening
to their traditional worldview.
Before World War I, Brussels had already been an important centre
for film trade, and distribution and exhibition activities grew further after
the War.11 International film trade overviews reported that Belgians were
heavy film consumers,12 and throughout the interwar period the small
Kingdom was celebrated by the big international production centers as one
of the most liberal film markets in Europe.13 American sources reported
Belgium to be a market with “no agitation” against Hollywood and no
restrictions against the import of American movies. The Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (MPPDA) regarded it as a free

309
 g oing to the mov ies

trade zone, since it placed few obstacles in the way of Hollywood’s market
dominance.14 In addition to the strong position occupied by the distribution
arms of American and German corporations, Belgium was seen as a
‘natural’ extension of the French film market. Initially, the film market was
dominated by Pathé and Gaumont, but other French corporations such as
Aubert, Franco-Film and Osso also had a share of the Belgian distribution
and exhibition market. The gravitational force of French production also
pulled Belgian creative personnel such as Armand du Plessy, Jacques Feyder,
Charles Spaak or Fernand Gravey across the border. The openness of the
small Belgian film market was increased by the lack of any serious state
intervention to stimulate local production or quota regulations diminishing
the inflow from abroad. As a result, Belgium probably showed a greater
cross-section of international film output with fewer policy restrictions than
anywhere else in Europe.
After 1918, American distribution corporations entered the Belgian
market, opening branch offices of their Parisian distribution companies in
Brussels.15 By 1929, most American majors had a Belgian subsidiary.16 Little
information about the majors’ market share is available, but only German
and French movies seemed to be able to withstand Hollywood’s hegemony
in the interwar period. A Commerce Report by Leigh W. Hunt on the
Belgian film market in 1923–24 claimed that ‘of the films shown in Belgium
probably 60 to 70 per cent are American,’ adding that these ‘generally come
into Belgium through France, Germany, or England.’ 17 At the end of the
1920s, this percentage had grown to 80 per cent, with the remaining market
share divided between mainly French and German movies.18 The country’s
cultural and language divisions meant that there were significant variations
in the popularity of different national products, however. The appeal of
American movies was much stronger in the northern, Dutch-language
part of the country (Flanders), where Hollywood productions accounted for
more than 80 per cent of the market. In the bilingual Brussels market and
the French-speaking southern part of the Kingdom (Wallonia), however,
French movies were much more popular, and after the introduction of
sound, French productions increased their market share there to more than
50 per cent 19 This internal division of film taste and consumption patterns
continued until the end of the 1930s, when in the French-speaking parts
American movies were dubbed and only accounted for 30–40 per cent.20
At the height of cinema’s popularity during the interwar period, the
Church’s moral and political power also reached its apex, especially in
Flanders and on the countryside. In major cities and in the French-speaking
parts of the country, however, its power position was increasingly opposed
by Socialist and (to a much lesser degree) liberal organisations. For the

310
 ‘he a lth y films from a mer ic a’

Church and many Catholic leaders, the commercial exploitation of cinema

epitomized the immorality of modern urban entertainment. The Church’s
institutional attitude remained one of aversion to what in 1929 was still
identified as one of the major ‘modern diseases.’ 21 Before World War I there
had nevertheless been some local initiatives to integrate movies into various
Catholic activities and to build a network of Catholic cinemas, often under
the leadership of local priests.22 These initiatives continued after the war,
and in 1920 a Catholic film distribution company, Brabo-Films, specialising
in ‘morally healthy’ films aimed at both parochial and commercial cinemas,
was established. Brabo was also active in building film projectors and other
hardware, but as the Dominican Felix Morlion, one of the leaders of the
Catholic film movement, wrote later, the Church did not invest in cinema
nearly as effectively as it had done in its programmes of building Catholic
schools, hospitals and newspapers.23
At the end of the 1920s, as Brabo-Films started to break into the
commercial film distribution sector, this began to change. In 1928, the
Church decided to bring all local film initiatives and Catholic cinemas
together under the umbrella of the Katholieke Film Centrale (KFC, or in
French Centrale Catholique du Cinéma).24 The KFC’s main purpose was to
act as an ‘intermediary between the many pagan distribution companies
and the growing number of Catholic cinemas.’ 25 Under the leadership of a
small group of clergymen, openly supported by the highest Belgian Church
leaders, new initiatives were developed.26 In 1930, a film educational service
was launched, and in 1931 Brabo-Films was dissolved and transformed into
a more forceful film distribution company (Filmavox). Filmavox ‘disguised’
itself as an independent commercial company amongst others, successfully
trying to put more pressure upon commercial exhibition and distribution.
In 1931, a Catholic film documentation and information service was
created: Dokumentatie der Cinematographische Pers (DOCIP) in Dutch,
Documentation Cinématographique de la Presse in French. DOCIP soon grew
into an important films news agency and a propaganda instrument for the
whole movement, not only by creating its own film magazine (Filmliga
in Dutch, Cran in French) but more importantly by trying to convince
Catholic radio and press outlets to publish their film articles. This strategy
proved very successful, and DOCIP journalists soon came to dominate the
film pages of some of the most popular and elite Catholic newspapers of
the country, such as De Standaard.27 By 1937, the Catholic film movement
played a major role in film criticism in the Belgian newspaper and magazine
market.28 DOCIP played a major role as a Catholic moral guardian,
and developed an international dimension after OCIC established its
headquarters in Brussels.29

311
 g oing to the mov ies

A key instrument in this perspective was another Catholic film

initiative: in 1931 the Katholieke Filmkeurraad (KFK)—a Catholic Film
Classification/Censorship Board—was founded, specializing in the moral
and aesthetic evaluation of all films issued in Belgium.30 Similar to
what happened in France and some other countries where Catholic film
‘censorship’ was organized, the KFK awarded movies a rating, from a
positive 1 (‘for all’) to a negative 5 (‘dangerous’) and 6 (‘to be avoided’).
According to an internal guideline for Catholic censors, pictures with a
6-rate identified movies ‘whose basic thesis is bad’ from a moral, religious
and social political perspective, or which could lead to ‘debauchery,’ and
could be ‘compared to “books on the Index.”’ 31 The Catholic censorship
board’s decisions (usually lists of accepted movies and ‘black lists’) were
widely publicized through DOCIP articles as well as by posters displayed
in church portals, parochial halls and leaflets distributed by other Catholic
organizations.32
In 1932, other initiatives were launched by Father Felix Morlion, who
turned out to be a formidable propagandist and organizer, with growing
links to the highest Vatican authorities.33 Morlion dreamed of building a

15.1 Father Felix Morlion (1904–1987) [in the middle] photographed later in Rome.
Morlion was a skilled Catholic propagandist against modern mass media.
Source: DOCIP, Brussels.

312
 ‘he a lth y films from a mer ic a’

mass organization as well as of influencing what was considered the heart

of the problem: film production. Between 1932 and 1934, leaders of the
Belgian Catholic film movement frequently wrote of the need to move
beyond the activities of the range of action from education, information
and distribution to engage in production and establish a mass movement.
In 1932, Morlion argued that while it was important to influence censorship
and the programming schedules of commercial cinemas, ‘the only sound
solution to the film problem’ was to ‘guide film production itself into a
healthy direction, and increase the proportion of good movies.’ 34 In a similar
vein, Canon Brohée wrote in 1933 that ‘the solution is in the production
and not elsewhere,’ 35 a statement which was supported by Cardinal Pacelli’s
April 1934 Letter to OCIC’s president.36 After some local initiatives,
however, the Belgian Catholics were soon sobered up by the difficulties of
film production in a small country.37
The other project of building a mass film movement was more successful,
however. Also in 1932, Morlion created the Catholic Film Legion (Katholieke
Film Liga, or KFL),38 which tried to make use of the many local Catholic
youth, women’s, men’s and workers’ organizations in order to make people
more sensitive to the need for ‘good movies.’ 39 The KFL recruited several
thousand members to spread the censorship board’s decisions and DOCIP’s
film lists and leaflets, and in some cases to organize local protests against
film theaters showing ‘immoral movies.’ 40 This overview indicates that by
July 1932, when an international film congress was organized in Brussels,
a strong Belgian Catholic film movement was in place. At this congress,
Cardinal van Roey openly declared that the Belgian Episcopate recognized
the significance of the movement. In June 1933, finally, the wide range
of Church activities over movies were coordinated under the umbrella of
Catholic Film Action (in Dutch: Katholieke Film Actie, or KFA, in French:
Centre Catholique d’Action Cinématographique, or CCAC).41
The Belgian Catholics’ promptness of action also had an international
dimension, which gained attention from higher Church authorities and
led to OCIC’s move to Brussels and the appointment of the Belgian KFA
leader, Canon Brohée, to the presidency of the international Catholic
film organization in 1933.42 Compared to the Catholic film movements
in most other European countries, the Belgian KFA had succeeded in
rapidly establishing an integrated approach to the cinema ‘problem’ which
included a distribution company (Brabo/Filmavox), an exhibition network of
parochial cinemas through KFC, educational activities, a film classification/
censorship board (KFK), press and wider media actions, a film information
apparatus (DOCIP), a mass movement (KFL). Only its initiatives in the
field of film production produced disappointing results.43

313
 g oing to the mov ies

This active and aggressive attitude towards the ‘film problem’ might
appear exceptional, but its practical ‘pastoral’ approach embodied the idea of
Catholic Action, which itself represented a wider shift of attitude towards
modernity and urban culture among Catholic Church leaders in Belgium
and elsewhere in the world. Belgian Catholic Action in the field of cinema
was paralleled in other fields such as the press, which had a quite similar
structure of censorship, information and mass mobilization. Responding to
the threat of modernism, Pope Pius XI’s idea of Catholic Action carried the
spirit of a Catholic ‘reconquista,’ capturing people in their everyday activities,
including cinema. In Belgium, where Catholicism had great influence over
a huge majority of the population, Catholic Action stood for the idea of
a moral revival. Especially after the social and economic crisis at the end
of the 1920s, what had begun as a rejection of pagan modernity became
a militant, more engaged attitude that evolved together with a growing
discourse of conservative morality. The whole movement was built upon
a clear hierarchy: clergymen organized concrete local actions, mobilizing
laymen as militant soldiers, and tried to expand the Catholic network of
organizations. Where the media—and cinema in particular—had previously
been seen as a dangerous school for crime, socialism and immorality, the
new more aggressive campaign welcomed these modern inventions as
potentially a formidable tool in a new campaign of ‘re-christianization.’ 44
This new attitude, which was translated into martial terms such as a
Catholic film ‘offensive,’ ‘action’ and ‘guidance,’ would reach its peak of
momentum with the campaign of the American Legion of Decency to
promote movie morality.

Vaudevilles, Sex-appeal and the Turning Tide of Hollywood

In 1934 and 1935, the Legion of Decency’s successful activities in the U.S.
were regularly reported in the film pages of Belgian Catholic newspapers.
In KFA publications, leaflets, letters and other internal documents, there
was great enthusiasm for their American counterparts’ success in turning
the tide in Hollywood. Already in 1933, leaders of the Belgian KFA referred
to American Catholic initiatives, such as those by the National Council of
Catholic Women.45 But, mainly from July 1934 onwards, Belgian Catholic
film leaders openly supported the success of the Legion in influencing
Hollywood. In several texts, including an undated internal report about the
growth and strategies of the Legion of Decency, Belgian Catholics saw both
clear parallels and differences between the American and European Catholic
actions over film. On the one hand, ‘the organization of the Catholic film
action in America can be fully compared with our purposes in Europe,’

314
 ‘he a lth y films from a mer ic a’

while the success of this ‘most powerful action group … should be highly
instructive for us.’ 46 In another undated internal document, Father Morlion
praised the ‘clear purposes … rapid action … and powerful leadership’ of
the American Catholics’ ‘film offensive,’ which had led to ‘major victories
in less than four months time.’ In the same document, however, Morlion
criticized the Legion’s structural problems and short term strategies:

While the protests and the general boycott cannot last for a long
time, America will soon have to organize its own censorship system,
documentation and press action. Otherwise the fruit of the victories
will soon vanish. Here in Europe we should better start our action
in a reversed manner: first we must have a technical basis and then
we should risk a major offensive … In the meantime we should try
to prevent (bad) American movies, which no longer have any chance
to be screened in America, from coming faster to Europe.47

In an August 1934 article in the leading conservative newspaper, De

Standaard, Morlion referred to a meeting between the Pope and the Catholic
film press and tried to interpret the importance of the Legion’s breakthrough
for the European and international Catholic film movement:

America has started the battle with great courage and power, but it
lacks any technical basis for its own work: an authoritative Catholic
censorship board, a documentation and press service. In our country
and in a couple of other European nations these organisms do exist,
but here we do not have a big mass movement. In some countries they
have nothing at all. The time has come … that we will soon, after so
many years of preparation, launch a big Legion[-style] offensive in our
country too. We want to repeat in a brutal and patient manner that
we, the defenders of decency, faith and humanity, are the potential
masters of the game.48

The Legion of Decency not only inspired the Belgian Catholics to

accelerate their attempts to set up a wider mass movement and to increase
their offensive against local theatres and immoral productions. More
generally, it also heralded an increasingly positive attitude towards American
cinema. Since 1918, American movies had been associated with productions
that sought ‘to break with morality at large,’ and Hollywood escaped none
of the prejudices against the dangers of cinema.49 In numerous articles and
pamphlets, Hollywood was associated with paganism:

315
 g oing to the mov ies

cinema is born in a pagan environment. Especially the American

cinema during the lawless years after the war … seemed to define
evil as its basic theory. Debauchery was glorified. Women who had
lost all sense of shame become the ideals of femininity and sincerity.
Men with the faintest moral concerns were portrayed as heroes
and winners. Dances, images and relationships became ever more
suggestive in order to titillate the audience, which was demoralized
and depressed by the ongoing crisis.50

At the end of the 1920s, when Belgian Catholics faced the film problem
in a more structured manner, American cinema was perceived through the
binary oppositions of America vs. Europe, industrial vs. art cinema, and
immoral/pagan vs. moral/religious movies. In line with debates on growing
American hegemony during the second half of the 1920s,51 some writers
opposed European cinema to American commercialism, paganism, and the
use of cheap tricks, ‘sex appeal’ and ‘bluff.’ In a series of articles published in
early 1929 on ‘The Flemish Catholics against the Film Problem,’ American
film production was indicted as ‘conservative’ and ‘rooted in easy and
entertaining formulas,’ while European film makers were more ‘honest in
searching for a pure, aesthetic and independent form of cinematography.’ 52
In a 1932 pamphlet on the future of cinema, another Dominican concluded
that in the U.S. most movies

work upon the element of ‘sex appeal’ as the main point of attraction
and upon voluptuousness as the main target of life … Life has
become a pure adventure with a pagan materialist spirit: pleasure
and making fun as much as we can … The chances of a comedian
in the USA depend upon his potential to stir up a ‘civilized’ erotic
excitement among the audience.53

In their criticism, Catholic film writers were extremely sensitive to movies

with religious themes, Biblical dramas and films portraying clergymen.
Referring to such movies as Queen of Sheba (1921), King of Kings (1927)
and The Gaucho (1927), several authors warned that readers should not be
deceived by movies with an apparently ‘religious feeling or motive.’ Many
of these films featured ‘provocative half-naked women,’ while religion was
‘represented as one kind of hysteria’:

American film producers are clever in this perspective; but this

religious varnish and trick prove that they know nothing about these
ceremonies, let alone understand the deeper sense of religion …

316
 ‘he a lth y films from a mer ic a’

Tragedy becomes a comedy of passion or even a parody … They once

heard about miracles; and they will try to work upon the sensational
aspect of it, but then in an American sense: bluff! 54

The theme of Europe vs. America soon became more complicated and
less relevant, because, according to KFA writers, German and French studios
imitated many themes, strategies and the overall profligacy to be found in
American movies.55 In 1931 and 1932, a new batch of Catholic film writers
widened the debate by beginning to write more fully about alternatives
to mainstream commercial cinema, and the possibility of a truly Catholic
cinema. Earlier conservative Catholic denunciations of Soviet communist
cinema changed into a re-examination of the potential of a truly ideological
cinema. In several speeches and in an internal document on the dangers of
cinema, probably from 1934, Felix Morlion made a distinction between the
dangers of communist and industrial capitalist cinema, arguing that while
‘communism is of course the public enemy,’ Catholics ‘need to recognize two
major qualities of its production: the courage to put everything in service
of an idea as well as the denunciation of sex-appeal and other cheap means
in order to attract audience attention’ 56 The openly ideological nature of
communist cinema, and its critique of cheap capitalist film techniques were
enough to devote great attention to communist cinema in the first half
of the 1930s.57 Morlion claimed that capitalist industrial cinema posed ‘a
greater danger because it disguises its poison,’ and was nothing less than ‘a
great hypocritical enemy,’ which ‘seems to attack nothing or deny nothing,
but finally undermines every conviction.’ 58 Referring to both French and
American films but specifically citing The Love Parade (1929), King Kong
(1933) and The Sign of the Cross (1932), Morlion went on to denounce the
influences of this type of industrialist/capitalist cinema as cultivating a ‘false
romanticism’ against the joys and duties of family life, ‘the need for strong
sensations’ and ‘eroticism’ instead of true love, and ‘false mysticism’ rather
than the deeper sense of true religious faith.59
By the time that the Belgian Catholics had constructed a firmer structure
for their film movement, American movies were no longer the sole targets.60
In press articles and a variety of internal documents, the Catholic film
movement heavily criticized German operette-filme and initiated a crusade
against French vaudevilles. Many French low-budget movies were put on
the black list, dominating the categories of ‘dangerous films’ (rating 5) and
the ultimate ‘bad movies to be avoided’ (rating 6). In the first years of the
censorship board dozens of French B-movies, often light-hearted, quite
theatrical comedies with music and songs, filled the black list. Controversial
films such as Arlette et ses Papas (1934), Bibi la Purée (1934), On a trouvé

317
 g oing to the mov ies

15.2 Lloyd Bacon’s Wonder Bar (1934) was one of the last American films to receive
a rating of 6 (‘to be avoided’). Source: Belgian Film Archive, Brussels.

une femme nue (1934) and Sexe Faible (1933) were criticized for not being
serious about ‘marital fidelity,’ for showing ‘complete nudity’ and for the
general ‘atmosphere of immorality.’ 61 In this first batch of censored movies,
a significant number of American movies were also given a rating of 5 or 6,
among them Wonder Bar (1934) and Murder at the Vanities (1934).
In the following years, however, the censorship board increased its
attack on French cinema, under the banner of a campaign against French

318
 ‘he a lth y films from a mer ic a’

‘vaudevillisme.’ This was also linked to the fact that, since the first half of
the 1930s, sound had reduced Hollywood’s market share and increased the
appeal of French cinema, especially in the capital and in the Walloon part
of the country. In the wake of the Legion of Decency’s success, the French
Catholic film movement, the Comité Catholique du Cinéma (CCC) had
started a campaign against the French film industry, but with few concrete
results. Their ‘anti-vaudeville campaign’ in 1934 and 1935 was heavily
supported by their Belgian counterparts, who tried in vain to mobilize a
wider movement in order to ‘encircle the Parisian pagan film industry.’ 62
In this particularly vicious campaign, the French film industry was often
associated with theories about international conspiracy under Jewish and
pagan leadership.63 In Belgium, this campaign lasted for several years, and
in the published black lists based upon the censorships board’s decisions,
French movies continued to fill the 5 and 6 ratings. In a blacklist for
March 1935, more than five out of six movies were French, including many
which could be categorized as light-hearted comedy ‘vaudevilles.’ Other
reasons also appear, and in this list of ‘films to be avoided’ can be found
Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), Allégret’s Lac aux Dames (1934) and several
Parisian Paramount movies (e.g. Plaisir de Paris, Gréville, 1932). The list also
contained some movies adapted from books on the Church Index, such as
Jocelyn (Guerlais, 1933, after Lamartine), which was banned by the Church
for its objectionable representation of clergymen. The satirical comedy Rosier
de Mme Husson (Deschamps, 1932), which made Fernandel a star, was
boycotted by local Catholic groups. This successful boycott illustrated the
power of the Catholic Film Action.64

Table 15.1 The Belgian Catholic Censorship Board’s evaluation:

number of movies by origin on the black list’s code 6 (‘to avoid’)

French US German Soviet Czech total

March/April 1935 54 5 3 1 1 64
January 1937 14 0 0 0 0 14
September 1939 (three weeks) 12 1 0 0 1 14
Source: Filmliga (March/April 1935; January 1937) and De Standaard (8.9.1939;
22.9.1939; 29.9.1939)

As Table 15.1 indicates, French movies dominated the black list until the
Second World War. A list issued in January 1937 contained only French
movies, including some extreme ‘scandal’ movies, such as La Garçonne

319
 g oing to the mov ies

(1936), Lucrèce Borgia (1935) and La vie est à nous (1936). It is difficult to
measure the precise impact of this severe Catholic censorship, negative
press reviews, campaigns of boycotting or picketing theaters, and pressure
upon local politicians and authorities. At least in the northern part of
the country, where the Catholic press was dominant and where the KFA
controlled film discourse, this anti-vaudeville campaign might explain why
French cinema had only a marginal market share in Flanders. The extreme
instance, and a moment of glory for the Belgian Catholic film movement,
was the reception of the historical movie La Kermesse Héroïque (1935), made
by Belgian director Jacques Feyder. In this French-German co-production,
Feyder went back to a Breughelian sixteenth-century Flemish setting, telling
how local people ‘collaborated’ with the Spanish invaders. Several groups,
including local extreme nationalists, considered Feyder’s movie a disgrace to
Flemish historical heritage and collective identity, and demanded that it be
banned.65 The Catholic film movement had first made only few objections,
but soon changed its position and started a massive offensive action against
the movie. For the KFA, which succeeded in dominating the public debate,
the movie only demonstrated the perverted nature of French vaudevilles, in
the way that it turned Flemish women into whores, men into cowards, and
local priests into hypocrites. Felix Morlion took the lead:

This movie should be boycotted … It is a pity that our warnings

have not been sufficiently heard when we talked about movies such
as: Arlette et ses Papas, Simone est comme ça, Beguin de la Garnison, Ce
cochon de Morin, Chasseur de chez Maxim’s, On a trouvé une femme nue,
Ferdinand le Noceur, La folle nuit, and many other French movies,
which went from town to town … Taking into account the better
directions in the American production, one could say that nearly
half of it can now be labeled as ‘for all’ or ‘for adults.’ In the French
production though, suitable films are still a small minority.66

By 1935, only a few American movies were still on the Catholic blacklist.
Most of the U.S. movies given a 6-rating were older pictures, still in
circulation but soon to disappear, such as Back Street (1932), Flying Down
to Rio (1933), Hoopla (1933), Queen Kelly (1922) and Murder at the Vanities
(1934). For Belgian Catholics, it was clear that the Legion of Decency had
proven that ‘the morally healthy film can be as profitable, or even more
interesting, than dirty productions.’ 67 The Legion’s efforts had given rise
to several innocent genres such as ‘adventure movies,’ and one KFA critic
joyfully wrote that even ‘Cecil B. de Mille had finally understood that
decency and good taste are indispensable in film production.’ 68

320
 ‘he a lth y films from a mer ic a’

This heavy rejection of French movies as immoral, by comparison to

the increasingly positive evaluation of American cinema as morally healthy,
was echoed in France itself. Table 15.2 is based on a 1936 article which
originally appeared in La Cinématographie Française and was reproduced
in the Belgian Catholic magazine Filmliga. It shows the proportion of
American and French movies placed in each of the three basic categories
used by the French Catholic censors and published in French Catholic
newspapers. The CCC advised French cinemagoers to avoid more than half
of the national production, while praising 90 per cent of Hollywood movies.
Commenting about these data, the Belgian Catholics claimed that ‘only
three years ago, such a comparison would have been much more negative
for Hollywood.’ 69

Table 15.2 The French Catholic Church’s evaluation for

French and US movies: percentage of movies for three codes

French US
A (for all) 20 % 50 %
B (for adults) 25 % 40 %
C (to be avoided) 55 % 10 %
Source: Filmliga, November 1936, p. 4.

Conclusion
Given the relatively small size of the Belgian market, the activities of the
Belgian Catholic film movement might seem of marginal importance.
As I have argued, however, the Belgian film market was exceptional
in its openness, in the intensity of the film trade, and the high rate of
film consumption among the population. The Belgian KFA was one of
the earliest and most elaborate Catholic film activities in Europe, and
seems to have played a key role in the Vatican’s more offensive views
upon this modern medium. The demonstrable shift in its attitude towards
American cinema was, from an international perspective, perhaps almost
as significant in influencing Catholic action in neighbouring countries as
was the American example of the Legion of Decency itself. The KFA’s
increasingly positive perception of Hollywood movies in the 1930s provides
support for Ruth Vasey’s thesis, in The World According to Hollywood, that
Hollywood increasingly produced morally sound as well as culturally and

321
 g oing to the mov ies

politically acceptable products.70 In a critical review of Vasey’s book, Ian

Jarvie suggested that her findings might be tested by comparing them
with archival material from those who received such films.71 The Belgian
Catholics’ case, at least, tends to support Vasey’s thesis by demonstrating
the clearly more positive appreciation of Hollywood movies as ‘morally
healthy’ entertainment.

322
 16

The Child Audience and the

‘Horrific’ Film in 1930s Britain
Annette Kuhn

I n Britain in the 1930s, children’s cinemagoing was seen as an issue of

the most pressing social concern.1 Childhood seems to be a universal site
of, and cause for, cultural anxieties; and worries about young audiences and
users have surfaced repeatedly throughout the history of popular media. But
the content, tenor and circumstances of such concerns are always unique,
and 1930s Britain saw the emergence and evolution of a distinctive set of
constructions of the child cinema audience in the context of a specific set
of strategies aimed at regulating film exhibition and children’s access to
certain sorts of films. In particular, the first few years of the decade saw a
sharp rise in the profile of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) and
its system of film classification, along with pressures on film exhibitors to
police children’s access to cinemas. These circumstances eventually became
focussed around a cycle of Hollywood films that were dubbed ‘horrific.’ An
unprecedented set of events then unfolded involving the BBFC, government,
a disparate array of pressure groups, and the film industry itself.
From its very earliest years, cinema’s potential effects on the child
audience had been the subject of considerable concern, in Britain, the
U.S. and many other countries.2 During the 1910s, British worries about
the young cinema audience focussed on the danger of sexual assaults on
children in or near cinemas, as well as on eyestrain and other physical
damage children might suffer as a result of watching films. Thus a report by
the Medical Officer of Health of the Yorkshire industrial town of Bradford
could conclude in characteristic tones with the observation that:

… cinemagoing can affect the vision and mind of children, giving

rise to visual and mental fatigue prejudicial to normal development

323
 g oing to the mov ies

which, if these displays are too frequently indulged in, is certain to

lead in the end to a greater or lesser degree of organic defect.3

Conflation of children’s ‘organic’ and moral integrity marked many

expressions of disquiet in these early years. A Times leader of 1915 on the
children and cinema question alludes to the ‘moral and physical dangers
to which young children may be exposed if they are allowed unrestricted
admission to cinematograph shows’;4 and it was in fact combined such
physical and moral concerns that lay behind Britain’s first-ever systematic
inquiry into the cinema audience: The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future
Possibilities was conducted in 1917 under the auspices of an influential
social purity organisation, the National Council of Public Morals.5 The
inquiry’s prime concern was children’s ‘health, intelligence and morals,’ all
of which were seen as equally at risk from the harmful consequences of
cinemagoing.
In the years that followed, anxieties about young people’s cinemagoing
persisted; but by the 1930s the focus on the potential moral and/or physical
harmfulness of the entire activity of cinemagoing—the places where films
were exhibited as much as the films themselves—had largely given way to
a conviction that many of the films shown in cinemas and seen by children
were simply not suitable for them. While a shift in attention from ‘harm’ to
‘unsuitability’ may have taken place in other countries as well, the British
situation is distinctive in a number of significant respects.
In the period between 1930 and 1933, the British government was
subjected to pressures from numerous quarters, ranging from calls to reform
the existing system of film censorship in its entirety to demands to set
some limits on children’s cinemagoing. Britain’s system of film regulation
was unusual in that it came about as a result of a piece of legislation (the
Cinematograph Act, 1909) that was designed to empower local authorities to
license premises where films were screened. Some local licensing authorities,
using their powers to lay down conditions for the granting of cinema
licences, soon seized the opportunity to set conditions concerning the
content of films shown in the cinemas they were responsible for licensing.
Within a year or two of the Act’s passage, many authorities were
imposing conditions concerning the ‘morality’ and ‘decency’ of films. At
this time, film exhibition in Britain was enjoying its first boom; and like
every new form of mass entertainment, cinema—with its predominantly
working-class and youthful audience—immediately became a major focus
for public concern. Film exhibitors sought to protect their businesses from
the vagaries of local censorship by lobbying government for a ‘voluntary’
central scheme of film regulation, to be sponsored by the film trade; and

324
 child audience a nd the ‘horr ific’ fil m in br ita in

in 1913, the BBFC, financed by fees from film companies, began its work
with the promise that ‘No film subject will be passed that is not clean and
wholesome and absolutely above suspicion.’ Films infringing this code would
be subject to bans or cuts; and in a system of classification that was to remain
in force for many years, those passed for exhibition would be certificated
either ‘U’ (for ‘universal’ exhibition) or ‘A’ (for ‘public’ exhibition).
The BBFC had (and indeed still has) no legal powers to censor films:
strictly speaking, it can only offer advice to the local cinema licensing
authorities who do hold these powers. In consequence, at various points in
its history the Board has found itself caught between the competing interests
of its various clients—the Home Office (the government department
responsible for administering the Cinematograph Act),6 the film industry,
and the local licensing authorities, as well as of various, often very disparate
pressure groups. From the outset, governments of all persuasions were
anxious to avoid Parliamentary accountability in the delicate area of film
censorship, and the arms’ length principle enshrined in the BBFC’s non-
governmental status has remained in place.
The public record reveals, however, that the Home Office and the BBFC
have occasionally felt the need to consult with each other behind the scenes,
while the Home Office’s responsibility for the working of the Cinematograph
Act has always meant that it was explicitly tasked with liaising with local
authorities on matters concerning the licensing of cinemas. In public, the
Home Office had been at pains to tread warily in its relations with the
BBFC, and it was not until ten years after the Board was founded that it
was publicly endorsed by the Home Office in a recommendation to local
authorities that cinema licence conditions should include the rule that ‘no
film … which has not been passed for “universal” or “public” exhibition by
the British Board of Film Censors shall be exhibited without the express
consent of the [licensing authority].’ 7

Children and ‘A’ Films

Six years later, the Home Office was to find itself publicly involved for the
first time in the thorny issue of children’s cinemagoing. In the last weeks
of 1929, it circulated a private letter headed ‘The Cinema and Children’
to every local authority in England and Wales with responsibility for
issuing licences to cinemas. This attempted to clarify the system of film
classification developed by the BBFC: ‘U’ films were those passed by the
Board for universal exhibition, while ‘A’ films were those passed as suitable
for persons above the age of sixteen. Licensing authorities were urged to
adopt the BBFC’s scheme of certification and to make it a condition of

325
 g oing to the mov ies

granting cinema licences that under-sixteens would not be admitted to

‘A’ films unless accompanied by a bona fide adult guardian, and that the
categories of films on exhibition would be clearly displayed both inside and
outside cinemas.8
In its broad-brush way, this was explicit recognition of a need to exercise
some degree of control over the sorts of films that could be seen by children;
and the Home Office expressed the view that the BBFC’s scheme of film
classification ‘has done all that could be reasonably expected … to protect
the interests of young people’, but that in the end it was up to the licensing
authorities to see that it was enforced. Originally intended only for these
authorities, ‘The Cinema and Children’ at first attracted little attention
outside official circles; but in the summer of 1931, the Home Office decided
to publish it. How did this come about?
The intervening eighteen months had seen renewed, and increasingly
heated, public debates about children’s cinemagoing, as well as mounting
pressure on government to reform the existing film censorship arrangements.
It was brought to the attention of the BBFC and the Home Office that
the recommendations regarding the exhibition of ‘A’ films were not being
consistently enforced across the nation, and that in many places children
were able without difficulty to see any and every film screened in local
cinemas (it was common practice, for instance, for children to ask adult
strangers to pose as guardians and ‘take them in’ to the cinema). At the
other extreme, some local authorities were enthusiastically exercising their
legal powers of censorship independently of the BBFC’s advice.
In October 1930, a decision by the Liverpool licensing authority to
exclude all under-sixteens from ‘A’ films, whether accompanied by adults or
not, received nationwide publicity. Since children represented a substantial
proportion of their custom, it also alarmed film exhibitors. The Liverpool
decision became the subject of a test case aimed at determining the extent
and limits of local licensing authorities’ powers of censorship, although it
in fact failed to do so.9 In the months that followed, a number of other
authorities followed Liverpool’s lead. In this volatile climate, the Home
Office commissioned an investigation of the local take-up of the model
licensing conditions recommended in the 1929 circular, especially those
concerning admission of children to ‘A’ films.
While two-thirds of all eligible authorities reported that they had made
it a condition of granting licenses that children unaccompanied by adults
should not be admitted to ‘A’ films, few of them felt they could deploy
the resources to enforce the rule. Despite guarded official expressions of
satisfaction that ‘the censorship as now established meets requirements very
well indeed on the whole,’ the unevenness in the practice of regulating

326
 child audience a nd the ‘horr ific’ fil m in br ita in

children’s cinemagoing brought to light by the survey was anathema to

both the Home Office and the BBFC, because it posed a clear threat to the
carefully cultivated arms’ length principle of British film censorship, which
could only work as long as local authorities accepted the BBFC’s advice.10
Against this background of non-compliance by some authorities, pressure
group activity around the ‘problem’ of children’s cinemagoing was mounting.
Early in 1930, the BBFC had received a deputation from the London Public
Morality Council (LPMC), urging greater clarity in the advertising of film
classifications, expressing general concern about ‘sordid themes’ in films,
and calling for the production and promotion of films suitable for children.
In July, the Parliamentary Film Committee asked the Home Secretary to
appoint a committee of inquiry into film censorship; and in the same month
the Birmingham branch of the National Council of Women (NCW) made
a private visit to the Home Secretary to discuss an investigation they had
conducted of children’s cinema matinées in their city.11 In November that
year, the Birmingham Cinema Inquiry Committee (BCIC), a body that was
to become particularly vociferous on the issue of children’s cinemagoing and
a thorn in the side of the BBFC and the Home Office, held a meeting to
voice concern about the exposure of children and adolescents to ‘harmful
and undesirable’ films. It was agreed to mount a petition to the Home Office
calling for a committee of inquiry into film censorship.12
This was certainly an embattled start to the new decade for both the
government and the BBFC, with 1931 in particular an annus horribilis for all
concerned. BBFC President Edward Shortt began the year with an attempt
to take some heat out of the debate, issuing a warning to the film trade that
films showing a ‘continuous succession of prolonged and gross brutality and
sordid themes’ would no longer be certificated.13 But Shortt was missing
the point: the main concern was not at this stage with representational
practices—the contents, sordid or otherwise, of films—but with the welfare
of the children who were flocking to see them. Throughout 1931, a motley
array of pressure groups, including churches, women’s groups and various
social purity and vigilance organisations, entered the fray. Some of these
bodies conducted their own investigations into children’s cinemagoing. In
May, the BCIC published a substantial report of its own researches, which
it used as ammunition as it continued to press for a public inquiry, sending
further deputations to the Home Office during 1931 and 1932.14
Other reports of inquiries into children’s cinema and film censorship were
published by, among others, the Sheffield Social Survey, the Birkenhead
Vigilance Committee, the National Council of Women and the Mothers’
Union.15 It seems clear that the Home Office decision to publish its
December 1929 ‘Cinema and Children’ circular eighteen months after its

327
 g oing to the mov ies

original private circulation came as a response both to internal pressure

wrought by anomalies in local licensing authorities’ enforcement of controls
on children’s access to cinemas and to external pressures from the various
interest groups.
These groups were quite diverse in their objectives, and some were
more supportive of existing film regulation arrangements than others. The
well-organised, persistent and vociferous BCIC took the toughest line of
all, and its repeated calls for a public inquiry were seen as irksome (they
were dismissed by one Home Office official as ‘neither impartial nor well-
informed’) 16 and went unheeded. By May 1931, when representatives of the
BCIC called once again on the Home Secretary with a petition calling for
a committee of inquiry into ‘the undesirable nature of many of the films
shown in picture houses’ and urging the total exclusion of under-sixteens
from ‘A’ films,17 a course of action rather more agreeable to the Home Office
and the BBFC had already been quietly decided on.
In January, the London Public Morality Council had held a private
conference on cinema, calling not for a full-scale public inquiry but for the
appointment of a small consultative committee on film censorship.18 Neither
were bodies such as the Mothers’ Union and the National Council of
Women clamouring for any wholesale change to the film censorship system.
In its May 1931 ‘Report of an Inquiry into Film Censorship,’ for example,
the NCW obligingly recommended the establishment of a consultative
committee which would keep the BBFC in touch with the various interested
parties and look into the question of ‘A’ films and children.19 In fact, by
May the Home Office had already started setting up this body, and in
November the newly convened Film Censorship Consultative Committee
(FCCC) held its first meeting.20 While the establishment of the FCCC by
no means put an end to pressures on the Home Office and the BBFC, it
did mean there was now a ready answer to further demands for government
action on censorship.

‘Horrific’ Films and Children

At this point, the problem of children’s access to ‘A’-certificated films was
still the main cause for concern. It was not until the following year that
the more specific issue of films’ contents and their effects on children
began to be looked at. This shift was prompted by anxieties about so-called
‘frightening films.’ The BCIC had been first to draw attention to this
question when one of the speakers at its November 1930 conference made
passing reference to ‘the fear element’ as a cause for concern in films seen
by children; and in its 1931 investigation, children had been asked about

328
 child audience a nd the ‘horr ific’ fil m in br ita in

their responses to ‘frightening pictures.’ But it was some months later, with
the UK releases of Dracula and Frankenstein, that a new cycle of Hollywood
horror talkies began to make its presence felt across Britain, exciting concern
about particular films. At a conference hosted by the BCIC early in 1932,
there was mention of Frankenstein (which the BBFC had passed ‘A’ with
some cuts the year before) and of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (passed ‘A’ with
major cuts in 1932). At this point the films were called ‘thrillers.’ 21
In April 1932, the FCCC took up discussion of complaints about
Frankenstein, noting that a number of licensing authorities, including the
influential London and Surrey County Councils, had taken their own
steps to restrict children’s access to the film. The Committee considered
a range of policy options.22 When the question came up again at a later
meeting, the committee agreed that there ought to be some arrangement
whereby exhibitors could be notified of films the BBFC considered entirely
unsuitable for children, so that they could ‘continue to warn the public
of ‘“horrific” films by methods similar to those adopted in the case of …
“Frankenstein.”’ 23 This decision marks the birth of the BBFC’s advisory ‘H’
(‘horrific’) label. Although not a separate certificate, the ‘H’ was intended to
inform exhibitors and warn parents that an ‘A’ film that bore this label was
unsuitable for children. It did not prohibit admission of children to these
films, however. At the end of the year, the committee produced an internal
report which looked again at arrangements for limiting children’s access to
‘A’ films in general, and which also named several ‘horror’ [sic] films.
The arrangement proposed was that the FCCC secretary would keep
a list of ‘horrific’ films to pass on to the Cinematograph Exhibitors’
Association (CEA), which would in turn ask its members to post notices
outside cinemas when such films were showing, warning parents not to
bring in their children. This report in essence formed the text of a new
Home Office circular, ‘Children and A Films,’ distributed in March 1933.24
The FCCC’s proposals were also endorsed in the BBFC’s Annual Report for
1932, which was published after the distribution of the circular and which
discussed the ‘horror’ film for the first time.
However, because these additional restrictions on admitting children to
‘horrific’ films were purely advisory, exhibitors were not obliged to enforce
them. The final decision as to whether or not to take children into cinemas
to see ‘horrific’ films was expressly left up to parents. Moreover, titles on
the FCCC’s ‘horrific’ films list appear to have been somewhat erratically
selected, and the grounds for placing some films and not others on the
list remain unrecorded (the first films to acquire the ‘H’ label were The
Ghoul, The Invisible Man, King Klunk, Vampyr and The Vampire Bat). It
seems reasonable to conclude that the purpose of launching the ‘H’ label

329
 g oing to the mov ies

was mainly to forestall further troublesome complaints from the public and
from pressure groups, and so to protect film producers and exhibitors, as
well as the BBFC itself.
When frightening films were first dubbed ‘horrific,’ calls for clarification
of the term soon followed. The London County Council, a licensing
authority that regularly took a leading role in film censorship policymaking,
set out what was to become the standard definition of a ‘horrific’ film:
‘one likely to frighten or horrify children under the age of 16 years.’ 25
The definition of a film genre in terms not of its themes or iconographies
but of the responses it is likely, or intended, to provoke in a particular
audience has interesting implications. Looked at from another perspective, it
suggests that the test of a ‘horrific’ film’s effectiveness lay in its capacity to
provoke a certain emotional and/or physical response. Studies of children’s
cinemagoing conducted during the 1930s, including those referred to above,
routinely inquired into dreams and nightmares experienced after visits to the
cinema; and indeed many people who were children in the 1930s remember
their responses to horror films seen at the time extraordinarily vividly.26
By the time the ‘Children and “A” Films’ circular was made public,
the FCCC had achieved what it was set up to do—divert demands for
censorship reform. The frenzy of pressure group activity around children,
‘A’ films, and frightening films had largely died down, despite sporadic
commotions around ‘horrific’ films over the following few years, when a few
local authorities tried to exclude under-sixteens altogether from screenings,
banned them outright, or imposed exceptional restrictions on children’s
entry to individual pictures.27 By the mid-1930s a new, and more restrictive,
Hollywood Production Code was in place, while Hollywood producers had
yielded to pressures from Britain and other foreign markets by reducing
their output of frightening films. And yet when the newly appointed BBFC
President, Lord Tyrrell of Avon, attempted to ‘kill’ the ‘horrific’ category,
an outcry ensued and he was obliged to back down.28
In June 1937, yielding to pressure from the LCC, the BBFC agreed to
make the ‘H’ label a certificate, meaning that children were now officially
excluded from ‘horrific’ films (the first film to be given an ‘H’ certificate
was The Thirteenth Chair). It seems clear that this change was made with
uniformity of cinema regulation across the nation in mind rather than in
response to any fresh wave of ‘horrific’ films, because by this time, as Tyrrell
had hinted, the film industry had come to the conclusion that horror films
were ‘more trouble than they are worth.’ 29 In fact, the ‘H’ certificate was
applied to only a tiny fraction of films released in Britain before being
quietly withdrawn in 1951.30 By the time the certificate was introduced,
the tenor of public opinion about children’s cinemagoing had in any case

330
 child audience a nd the ‘horr ific’ fil m in br ita in

changed, with ideas about young people’s psychological vulnerability to

‘horrific’ and other ‘unsuitable’ films giving way to calls for films produced,
programmed and screened especially for children.

An Audience Apart
By the later 1930s, children’s cinemagoing was increasingly becoming an
issue of concern for educationalists, child psychologists and academics,
rather than for pressure groups. In 1936, the newly formed British Film
Institute (BFI) made a bid to shift the terms of the debate about the child
audience, hosting a high-profile conference on Children and the Cinema.
Speakers pointed out that only a small minority of commercial cinemas
were offering special weekly matinées for children, and that children’s
preferences for films with movement, action, moral outcomes, heroic deeds,
and happy endings were not being catered for. It was consequently resolved
to look at the potential for putting together programmes of films specifically
for children and presenting these at special children’s performances in
mainstream cinemas.31 The BFI soon produced the first of a series of lists
of films recommended for such performances; and this fresh direction in
thinking about the young cinema audience also inspired further debate and
renewed inquiry into children’s cinemagoing habits and preferences.32 From
these beginnings, organised children’s cinema matinées and film clubs were
to develop.
From the mid-1930s on, then, the notion that children had specific
needs in the cinema gained impetus, and this led to increasing demands
for a child-centred approach to film programming. This was symptomatic
of an important shift in thinking about children’s cinemagoing. Children
now began to be regarded as an audience apart with needs of its own, a
group whose film-going—through children’s matinées, special screenings,
films made for children, and so on—should be segregated from that of
adult audiences.33

In Britain, the pressures on film regulation and censorship that arose

during 1930 and 1931 were in the first instance about the meaning and
the enforcement of the BBFC’s ‘A’ certificate with regard to the child
audience. These pressures were grounded in, and produced, a conceptu-
alisation of young cinemagoers as a group for whom certain films were
‘unsuitable’ by virtue of being morally or psychologically harmful, or simply
inappropriate at particular stages of their mental development. It is against
this background that the naming of a new type of film, deemed unsuitable
for children because it was intended to arouse fear, must be understood. The

331
 g oing to the mov ies

concept of the ‘horrific’ film emerged towards the end of 1932 in response
to a cycle of Hollywood talkies which had seen their British releases a
year or two earlier; and the anxieties aroused by this type of film joined
with pre-existing concerns about the meaning of the British Board of Film
Censors’ ‘A’ and ‘U’ classifications in relation to the child audience. These
in turn touched on the question of parental rights and responsibilities in
choosing the films children should see; on the problem of non-bona fide
guardians taking children into ‘A’ films; and on the issue of what was and
was not a film suitable for children. Significantly in this context, ‘horrific’
films were defined and understood not in terms of their contents—narrative
themes, characters, and so on—nor even in terms of their iconographic and
expressive elements, but in relation to the response they generated (fear) and
the audience (children) in which it was generated.
The history of public anxieties about children’s use of popular media is a
long one. The introduction of each new medium—be it film, radio, comics,
television, video, computer games or the Internet—has given rise to similar
sorts of concerns about their impact on young people, and to consequent
waves of pressure group activity, scholarly research, and even the occasional
moral panic:34

Each time we seem to go through the same stages …Whenever there

is a new social invention, there is a feeling of strangeness and distrust
of the new until it becomes familiar.35

Moreover, interest—whether political, professional or academic—in

children’s use of popular media has invariably been quite distinctive in
tone and content. While such interest is always grounded in historically
and culturally specific conceptualisations and constructions of childhood, in
actual instances these interact with broader and more diffuse figurations of
childhood as a site for a range of often diffuse cultural anxieties. In the early
1930s, concerns about children’s cinemagoing reached a peak, generating
public debate, pressure group activity, official reaction and academic research
in virtually every country where young people could go to the cinema.
The story of the child audience and the ‘horrific’ film in Britain is
therefore a small episode in a much wider history. But it is significant
because in it are encapsulated all the broad, varied and changing cultural
concerns about childhood as a separate state and stage, as they worked
their way through a very particular, local set of circumstances. This process
produced not only a new film genre, but also a new—and metapsycho-
logical avant la lettre—understanding of what makes one genre different
from others.

332
 17

Hollywood in Vernacular
Translation and Cross-cultural Reception
of American Films in Turkey

Ahmet Gürata

To write the international history of classical American cinema …

is a matter of tracing not just its mechanisms of standardization and
hegemony but also the diversity of ways in which this cinema was
translated and reconfigured in both local and translocal contexts of
reception.1

Cinema as ‘Vernacular Modernism’

T h e world-wide success of classical Hollywood cinema is usually

attributed to a combination of its universal intelligibility, derived from
its popular and hybrid nature, and the cultural imperialism that resulted
from the enormous economic power of the U.S culture industry. According
to the first argument, Hollywood films developed a narrative style that
different audiences throughout the world found easy to comprehend. As
Will Hays, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America, Inc. (MPPDA), recalled in his Memoirs, ‘American films of the
earliest silent picture era had to be designed to appeal to the less educated
groups and to the large foreign-language sections of our own population.
It was essential that the viewer should be able to follow the story whether
understanding English or not. Hence our silent pictures early developed a
style and form that commended them to all races and groups of people,
without the aid of words.’ 2 The popularity of Hollywood films in the sound
era has also often been explained by reference to a comparable universalism,

333
 g oing to the mov ies

in which American cinema’s repetition and quotation of its own images and
genres proved more responsive to consumer desires than did the products
of other cinemas.3 Most accounts of Hollywood’s strong global presence,
however, also attribute its success to political and economic factors such as
its significant mode of production, large economies of scale and the US.
government’s support and aggressive policies.4
Beyond these narrative templates and industrial strategies, however,
more localised processes by which these products were adapted to suit the
cultural preferences of the target audiences contributed significantly to their
success, as did the specific ways in which they were exhibited. As Jacques
Malthête’s study of Georges Méliès’ films shows, the adaptation of films
into specific contexts of reception started almost with the introduction
of the cinématagrophe. The English and French versions of Méliès’ films
sometimes differ significantly, and from 1900, Méliès’ catalogues included
a twenty-metre film aiming to thank respective spectators of his films: Vue
de remerciements au public. In this short film, different people display the
same banner, reading ‘thanks’ in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian,
Russian and finally in Arabic and Greek. The latter, addressing Ottoman
audiences, was presented by two women and a men in Oriental dress.5

17.1 Vue de remerciements au public (Méliès catalogue no. 292, 1900).

The banner reads ‘Thanks’ in Arabic and Greek (From Malthête, ‘Méliès et
le conférencier,’ Iris, p. 128).

334
 a mer ica n films in t urk e y

Interpreted by lecturers or inter-titles and accompanied by music or

sound effects, silent movies were adapted for different culturally specific
audiences. Although the introduction of sound made these kinds of
modification more difficult and expensive, similar strategies were used by
producers, distributors and exhibitors alike during the sound era. Altering
foreign films, especially Hollywood products, helped to increase movies’
popularity among local audiences. As Miriam Hansen observes:

If classical Hollywood cinema succeeded as an international modernist

idiom on a mass basis, it did so not because of its presumably
universal narrative form but because it meant different things to
different people and publics, both at home and abroad. We must
not forget that these films, along with other mass-cultural exports,
were consumed in locally quite specific, and unequally developed,
contexts and conditions of reception; that they not only had a levelling
impact on indigenous cultures but also challenged prevailing social
and sexual arrangements and advanced new possibilities of social
identity and cultural styles; and that the films were also changed in
that process.6

In this chapter, I would like to focus on the processes of cultural

adaptation by which Hollywood films were modified and translated into the
local context in Turkey between 1930 and 1970. In some cases, the movies
were significantly altered for particular export markets.7 More importantly,
local distributors, exhibitors and censorship bodies modified these movies
to facilitate their reception by their culturally specific audiences. Sometimes
scenes were removed, or performances featuring local stars were inserted
into the original prints. These transformations particularly affected the
local context of reception in relation to the experience of modernisation
and modernity. In her essay on the transnational currency of classical
Hollywood cinema, Miriam Hansen, describes the promiscuity and translat-
ability of this cinema as a form of ‘vernacular modernism.’ 8 She suggests
that the American movies of the classical period played a key role in
mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernisation.9
Appropriating Hansen’s theoretical framework, I would like to discuss the
role of marketing, programming and exhibition practices, as well as dubbing
and censorship, as strategies of translation in effecting the cross-cultural
reception of Hollywood cinema.

335
 g oing to the mov ies

Marketing, Programming and Exhibition

Hollywood films have been an integral and naturalised part of Turkish
movie culture, spreading from Istanbul’s highly Westernised Pera district to
the whole country. Starting in 1913 with the opening of Istanbul’s Cinéma
Americain theatre promoting Vitagraph films, American films become
highly popular, outnumbering continental brands by the mid-1920s. As the
movie theatre’s name itself indicated, French was used extensively amongst
the Ottoman elite.10 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
French symbolised all European—or Western—networks and values. Until
the mid-1940s, American films were either dubbed into French or screened
in the original with French subtitles in Istanbul’s Pera district.11 As late as
1948, the U.S Department of Commerce was reporting that ‘from a foreign
language point of view with regard to films, French could be rated next to
Turkish.’ 12 This trend changed only in the 1950s, with the impact of the
Marshall Plan and Turkey’s growing relations with the US. Before then,
American culture made its entry, if not in Turkish then in French.
American film titles were translated into Turkish, in the process often
being either adapted to the local context for easy comprehension, or stripped
of any offending phrases, in order to attract larger audiences. Cheaper by
the Dozen (1950), a movie about a couple who try to conduct their lives
efficiently as they have a dozen children, was translated as Demokrat Aile
(Democratic Family), referring to the just and equal care given by the parents,
but also connoting the Democratic Party, which was then enjoying its first
years in power after the end of single party rule in 1950. Cecil B. de Mille’s
The Crusades (1935) was screened under the title Selahattin Eyyübi ve Haçlı
Seferleri (Salahaddin-i Ayyubi and the Crusades), emphasising the role of the
Abbasid Sultan fighting against the Crusades.13 The movie’s dialogue was
probably also modified to justify this emphasis. In a practice that Robert
Stam has called ‘parasitical translation,’ movies were sometimes also re-
titled to refer to earlier box-office hits for obvious commercial reasons.14
For example, after the success of Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik (Turkish
title Şeyh Ahmet) and The Son of Sheik a number of movies screened under
similar titles. Roman Novarro’s The Sheik Steps Out (Irving Pichel, 1937)
was screened under the familiar title Şeyh Ahmet, while The Barbarian
(1933) was titled as Þeyhin Aþký (The Lover of the Sheik) probably because
the word barbarian, a term commonly used to describe Turks in the West,
was conceived as insulting.
The movies were also exhibited in locally specific ways. Movie program
formats varied. The program of Istanbul’s Türk movie theatre in 1935
included a Turkish short, a Fox Movietone newsreel and a feature film.

336
 a mer ica n films in t urk e y

Other Istanbul theatres showed double-bills, programming two films,

each approximately sixty minutes long, for the price of one.15 Generally,
however, the two-hour program of American movie theatres was standard
in Turkey, although exhibitors were reluctant to go beyond this limit. If a
film did not fit into this program together with the shorts and newsreels,
it was automatically shortened. For example, 20 minutes out of 140 minutes
of The Story of Dr Wassell (Cecil B. de Mille, 1944) was removed by its
Turkish distributors. This type of trimming caused misapprehensions and
was strongly criticised by film journals in the 1940s.16
Distributors also removed songs and dance scenes from some musicals.
Spectacular Hollywood productions such as Kismet (Vincente Minnelli,
1955) and South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958) were exhibited in much shorter
versions, without their songs.17 1940s Turkish audiences disliked musicals,
despite their being the third most popular genre (after action and drama)
among audiences worldwide according to a survey conducted by MGM into
the relative popularity of different genres, Turkey was listed with India,
Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon as being among the countries with tastes almost
diametrically opposed to those of American audiences.18 These films were
further modified by inserting locally produced scenes featuring local singers
or dancers into the original film. Although this method was widely used in
adapting Egyptian and European films, some Hollywood movies were also
altered in this fashion. As Alim Şerif Onaran, a film scholar and former
member of the Turkish censorship body, explains, international films were
‘not just retitled, but altered in order to give the impression that the movie
was set in Turkey.’ As a result, ‘the movies were presented as almost like
a Turkish movie.’ 19
Indigenisation of this kind was a cheap way of catering to local tastes,
since film production in Turkey was limited at the time. The modification
of movies gained a new momentum in 1948, when local taxes on film
admissions were reduced in favour of Turkish products. As a result, the
number of films produced in Turkey increased from six in 1946 to eighteen
in 1948. In response, foreign film distributors released nearly twice as many
dubbed and modified films in 1948 as they had in the previous year.20 Most
of these dubbed versions included inserted indigenous performances, and
new film studios were established to produce them. Faruk Kenç, who started
his career by shooting inserts of local dancers, singers, comedians and
magicians described this process as the ‘Turkification’ of a movie.21 While
these inserts often replaced song and dance scenes in the original prints of
musicals, dramas and other genres of films also included such performances
Here, the aim was to offer something like the variety form of programming
that had been highly popular among Turkish audiences during and after

337
 g oing to the mov ies

the silent period. As late as the mid-1930s, some Turkish movie theatres
were not equipped with sound projectors, and most of these continued to
use a variety programming format. For example, before the exhibition of
a Turkish film, musicians performed a classical Turkish music concert in
Konya’s Belediye movie theatre.22 Inserting locally produced performances
or significant modification of films can be considered as an extension of this
type of variety programming.
This suggests that even in the sound period the relationship between
film and viewer in Turkey was ‘presentational’ rather than ‘representational.’
According to Hansen, early modes of presentation, alternating short
films with live performances, borrowed their disjunctive style from other
commercial forms of entertainment. ‘Presentational’ films address the viewer
directly, with frequent asides to the camera and a frontal organisation of
space. According to Hansen, ‘early cinema’s dispersal of meaning across
filmic and nonfilmic sources, such as the alternation of films and numbers,
lent the exhibition the character of a live event, that is, a performance that
varied from place to place and time to time depending on theater type and
location, audience composition, and musical accompaniment.’ 23 Some of
these practices remained quite common in Turkey in the sound era, and
distributors and exhibitors transformed classical films into ‘presentational’
ones, by cutting different scenes into original copies or programming them
together with musical numbers.

Dubbing
During the early sound years, Hollywood companies mostly dubbed their
own movies into different languages, but before long they received protests
from several countries about the use of unsuitable accents and intonation.
This method also left little room to modify any inappropriate scenes. During
the early 1930s, eleven countries introduced regulations requiring dubbing
to be carried out on their home soil.24 After the success of the first Turkish
talking picture, İstanbul Sokaklarında (On the Streets of Istanbul) (Muhsin
Ertuğrul, 1931), which was dubbed at Epinay Studios in France, Turkey’s
sole production company İpek Film decided to build a new sound film
studio in Istanbul. In 1933, with equipment from Tobis-Klangfilm and
under the supervision of a German engineer, İpek Film’s dubbing studio
was launched.25 In its first year, the studio dubbed four movies.26 Soon other
dubbing studios were launched and, by the late 1940s, Turkish studios were
dubbing more than a hundred movies a year.
The cultural adaptation and familiarisation provided by dubbing might
best be exemplified by the case of voice actor Ferdi Tayfur (1904–58), who

338
 a mer ica n films in t urk e y

worked for the İpek Studio. He was a man of many trades, translating
and dubbing films as well as acting and directing. As fellow dubbing actor
Mücap Ofluoğlu recalls, he could simultaneously translate films from French
and English: ‘in some cases, he would just listen to the original dialogue
and then translate it into Turkish. German was his mother-tongue. He had
a vast knowledge of Ottoman-Turkish and was proficient in Istanbul dialect.
He could imitate the dialects of [non-Muslim] minorities and Anatolian
people very well. He had an appealing and natural voice.’ 27 Tayfur dubbed a
number of Hollywood stars, such as Roman Novarro, Spencer Tracy, Clark
Gable and Gary Cooper.28 He is, however, best known for his successful
dubbing of a number of comedians, including Groucho Marx, Eddie Cantor
and both Laurel and Hardy.
Comedy was one of the most popular genres of 1930s and 1940s
in Turkey, and the films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were highly
successful. Both characters were dubbed speaking broken Turkish with
an American accent. İpek Film’s studio manager, the famous poet Nazım
Hikmet (1902–63), together with dubbing actor Ferdi Tayfur, thought
Laurel and Hardy’s gags and puns were ‘too American’ and did not make
much sense in Turkish. The idea of Americans speaking Turkish with an
accent did the trick, although the locale and the topics also had to be
altered to fit into the context.29 As Tayfur, who dubbed both characters,
explained in a 1938 interview:

Question: Why did you decide to dub Laurel and Hardy in an

American accent?
Tayfur: We wanted to add some extra comic elements via the
characters’ voice and accent. Don’t you like it?
Q: On the contrary, I quite like it. But do you translate literally or
do you improvise?
Tayfur: Well, at the beginning I tried to translate word by word,
but later I thought it was more appropriate to lip synchronise my
very own gags. For example, in one of the movies Laurel and Hardy
bought the shadow (!) of the famous Galata Tower. In another one,
Hardy sings a traditional folk song, while Laurel compares him
to a local singer. Of course, there are similar adaptations in their
movies.30

Similar strategies of adaptation were quite widespread. In Spain, Laurel

and Hardy were dubbed as speaking in ‘trick pigeon Spanish.’ MGM
modelled this for the French version of The Night Owls (James Parrott,

339
 g oing to the mov ies

1930). Later, they were dubbed in French speaking with a strong English
accent. Although ‘poor accent and bad grammar were no hindrance to
foreign success,’ improper French ‘reinforced the slapstick and burlesque
character of comedies which were based on physical gags, incongruous
behaviour, or loss of dignity.’ 31 In a similar fashion, Tayfur added specific
qualities to his characters’ voice, such as pronunciation and accent, and
used vernacular idioms. As Tim Bergfelder suggests, idioms based on class,
generational or sub-cultural variations, create a nationally recognisable
correspondence between language, social status, and character.32 Through
these modifications, comedy films were also assimilated into different
generic traditions. In the end, these films were promoted almost like a local
product, emphasising the significant role of their voice actor, as exemplified
in this advertisement.

17.2 In this
flyer Ferdi
Tayfur is seen
while dubbing
a Laurel-Hardy
film. The
caption reads,
‘Tayfur, both
Laurel and
Hardy’ (Perde ve
Sahne 4, 1941).

340
 a mer ica n films in t urk e y

Tayfur also changed protagonists’ names and transferred them into

familiar locations. The Marx Brothers, who were renamed Üç Ahbap
Çavuşlar (Three Buddies), lived in Istanbul in their films’ Turkish versions.
Groucho Marx, dubbed by Tayfur, was renamed as Arşak Palabıyıkyan,
an Armenian from Istanbul (Palabıyık: bushy-moustache, with the suffix
-yan meaning ‘from the family of ’ in Armenian). According to Tayfur,
‘this character was so well-liked that some Armenians living in Istanbul
even claimed to be relatives of Arşak Palabıyıkyan.’ 33 Chico was called
Torik (Bonito), and Harpo was Kıvırcık (Curly) in the Turkish versions.
Tayfur also transformed Eddie Cantor into a nouveau-riche merchant from
Turkey’s Kayseri region called Yani Babanoğlu, who is unscrupulously savvy
—conforming to the stereotype of this region’s inhabitants.
These were successful adaptations of the films’ original ‘ethnic role-
playing’ into another context. As Charles Musser notes, by the 1920s in
Hollywood, ‘the daily conditions of role-playing are reversed. Instead of
immigrants seeking to lose their ethnic markings and assimilate, native-
born performers assume ethnic identities—and yet do so without simulating
specific qualities that would associate them with that group.’ 34 Among
the early sound comedians, the Marx Brothers and Eddie Cantor, both
originating from the polyglot city of New York, used a humour that was
verbal and ethnic. Cantor’s Whoopee (1930) and Marx Brothers’ Animal
Crackers (1930) were ‘quintessential New York comedies that take the city’s
ethnic, social, and cultural milieu as their subject and ridicule.’ 35 These
characters’ comic appeal depended on their performances as highly adept
role-players. In moving the original setting from New York to another
cosmopolitan city, Istanbul, Tayfur managed to preserve the basic comic
contradictions of the Marx Brothers. While Jewish Groucho Marx and
WASP Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Rittenhouse in the original) are given
Armenian names, Italian immigrant Chico is turned into a tough Turkish
guy. In the case of Eddie Cantor, references to his Jewishness are replaced
with local stereotypes. Similarly, in the 1950s, Italian comic Antonio de
Curtis’s popular character Toto was dubbed in a Turkish-Jewish accent
in his movies’ Turkish versions (by dubbing actor Necdet Mahfi Ayral).36
Rubber-faced French comedian Fernandel (Fernand Contandin), who starred
in the Don Camillo series, was also dubbed in a Kayseri accent, like Eddie
Cantor (dubbed by actor Mücap Ofluoğlu).37 The table below, adapted from
Ian Jarvie’s work on stars and ethnicity, shows the perceived ethnicities of
these comedians both in the original and Turkish versions:38

341
 g oing to the mov ies

Table 17.1 Comedy and ethnic role-playing in dubbed movies

Name in Ethnicity Ethnicity

Name on Turkish Where ‘real’/ Ethnicity in Turkish
Star name screen version born perceived on screen version
Stan Laurel Same Same Britain British WASP American
Oliver Hardy Same Same US WASP WASP American
Julius Marx Groucho Arşak US Jewish Jewish Armenian-
Palabıyıkyan Turkish
Adolph Marx Harpo Kıvırcık (Curly) US Jewish — —
Leonard Marx Chico Torik (Bonito) US Jewish Italian Turkish
Necmi
Margaret Dumont Mrs. Madam US WASP WASP Armenian-
(Margaret Baker) Rittenhouse Hayganuş Turkish
Eddie Cantor Yani Babanoğlu USA Jewish Jewish Turkish
(Kayseri)
Fernand ContandinFernandel — France French French Turkish
(Kayseri)
Antonio de Curtis Toto Toto Italy Italian Italian Jewish-
Turkish
Ali al-Kassar Ali Baba Balıkçı Osman Egypt Arab Arab Turkish
(Osman the (Black
Fisherman) Sea)

Although accents were an asset in comedy, standardised dialect was a

general requirement for other genres. Voice actors, mostly from Istanbul’s
Municipality Theatre, were trained to speak in an Istanbul accent, and both
international and Turkish films were dubbed in this accent. In many films
where accent was used to emphasise social and cultural differences, this
produced an effect of cultural levelling. In this sense, dubbing functions
as the effacement of the national signifier, as Mark Betz suggests. At the
intra-national level, it creates the ‘synthetic unity’ of a shared national
language. At the international level, on the other hand, dubbing may be
regarded as a form of national protectionism and a different kind of nation
building, since the dubbed film becomes a new, often local product once it
is re-contextualised through this process.39
Dubbing was an important tool for cultural adaptation and familiar-
isation, especially in the case of comedy. Through dubbing, a film’s foreign
origin was at least partially effaced, giving its Turkish audience ‘the chance
to disavow what they really know, hence opening an avenue for cultural

342
 a mer ica n films in t urk e y

ventriloquism through voice post-synchronization. In doing so, the dubbed

film appears as a radically new product rather than a transformed old one,
a single text rather than a double one.’ 40

Censorship
It was not only local distributors and exhibitors who omitted certain scenes
from movies and replaced them with new ones; censors also decided how
the movies should be modified, and Turkey’s extremely strict censorship
rules served as a straitjacket that all movies had to wear. Although there
were virtually no rules on film censorship in the early days of cinema, the
1934 Law on the Obligation and Authority of the Police entrusted the
duty of censorship to local governors. Under their authority, films were
reviewed and censored by two police officers in each city where they were
to be screened. The Regulation on the Control of Films and Screenplays
was introduced in 1939. This regulation, based on an Italian model, stayed
largely intact until 1985. It established two control commissions, one based
in Istanbul reviewing foreign films, and the other in Ankara for Turkish
films.41 The membership of these boards comprised representatives of the
governor (head), the chief of Metropolitan Police, the Interior Ministry
(controlling the police force), the Ministry of Education and the Directorate
of the Press (part of the Tourism Ministry). Depending on the nature of
the film, representatives of the army or other ministries were also to join
the commissions, and eventually army officers became de facto members.42
The commissions not only reviewed all movies to be screened in Turkey,
but also the scripts for movies that were to be shot. The rules of censorship
were comprehensive and strict. Article 7 has been defined as the ‘ten
commandments of censorship’ by film scholar Oğuz Makal.43 This article
prohibited movies deemed guilty of the following offences:

1) political propaganda in favour of a particular state;

2) degrading a race or a nation;
3) humiliating allied states and nations;
4) propagating religion;
5) propagating political, economic and social ideologies hostile to
the national regime;
6) contradicting general decency and morals, and national
sentiments;
7) debasing the honour and dignity of the armed forces, and
propagating anti-militarism;
8) undermining the order and security of the country;

343
 g oing to the mov ies

9) provoking people to commit crimes;

10) including scenes that are propaganda against Turkey.

Out of these ‘ten commandments’ the most controversial were numbers

one and five. According to a survey by critic Nijat Özön, 30 per cent of
banned foreign films fell under these clauses.44 In the 1950s, the foreign film
commission banned almost all Soviet productions, citing the two clauses.
Another common basis for rejection was the fourth clause, under which a
number of Hollywood epics, including King of Kings (Cecil B. de Mille,
1927), The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. de Mille, 1956), The Bible (John
Huston, 1966), and The Devil at Four o’Clock (Melvyn Le Roy, 1961), were
banned.45 Decency and moral considerations were the other great concerns
of the censors. Almost 25 per cent of movies were banned under clause six,
according to Özön. Hollywood movies tamed by the Hays Code were not
much affected by this rule, however, and the French ‘New Wave’ troubled
the censors most in the 1960s.
The army was also sensitive about the portrayal of the military in films,
whether indigenous or foreign productions. Clause seven affected a number
of war movies such as The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950), The Attack (Robert
Aldrich, 1956) and The Victors (Carl Foreman, 1963). Ironically, Francis
(Arthur Lubin, 1950), the first of the series about the talking mule Francis,
was also banned in 1951 because Francis befriended an army private. Scenes
of revolt, riot or crime were also unacceptable under clause eight: El Cid
(Anthony Mann, 1961), Ben Hur (William Wyler, 1959), Doctor Zhivago
(David Lean, 1965), Riot in Cell Block Eleven (Don Siegel, 1954), and Crisis
(Richard Brooks, 1950) were all banned under this clause. Finally, most of
the international movies set in Turkey or related to Turkey, such as Lawrence
of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), America, America (Elia Kazan, 1963) 46 and
Topkapı (Jules Dassin, 1964) were banned from screening in accordance
with clause ten.
The censors were also equipped with other rules that authorised them
to ban movies that conformed to the ‘ten commandments.’ Article 8 of the
Regulation permitted censors to prevent ‘the screening of over-used and
damaged films that might threaten spectators’ eyesight.’ Old classics with
damaged prints and even some films with atmospheric lighting were banned
under this article, which was used, controversially, to prohibit Orson Welles’
Citizen Kane (1941) and Macbeth (1948), and Long Voyage Home (John Ford,
1940).47
The commission would approve the release of some previously rejected
movies if certain conditions were met. These conditions, or in the terms
used by the Regulation ‘revision requests,’ normally involved the removal

344
 a mer ica n films in t urk e y

of certain scenes, re-titling or dubbing. The revisions could only be carried

out after the approval of the film’s distributor. In most cases, distributors
consented to the revisions in order to avoid financial loss. Between 1940 and
1967 the censors banned 4.5 per cent of the foreign movies they reviewed (a
total of 9,097), while approving the release of some 7.9 per cent of movies
with certain revisions.48 For example, the censorship committee authorised
the release of Anatole Litvak’s The Journey (1959) with two cuts. The film
was set in the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and told the story of a bus-load of
passengers who were detained by a Russian major. The censorship committee
requested the removal of two sentences: ‘Russians are good people’ and
‘Men are bastards, but after 10 p.m. they become irresistible.’ 49 In another
instance, the censors requested the removal of blessing scenes during the war
between Spanish and Arab soldiers, as well as King Ferdinand’s death, in
El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1961).50 Similarly, all the love scenes were removed
from Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970) at the censors’ request, turning it into
an entirely platonic affair.51
It would be interesting to evaluate which countries’ films had most
problems with censorship. According to a survey by Özcan Tikveş, only 18.9
per cent of the films imported from the USSR could be screened in Turkey
without any revisions. 41.3 per cent of USSR films were banned, while 39.8
per cent of them could only be released with some revisions. French and
Italian films were also most likely to be censored. 17 per cent of French films
and 13.1 per cent of Italian films—mostly on the grounds of general decency
and morals—were subject to modification. Censors viewed US. films quite
favourably, and banned only 2.6 per cent of these between 1951 and 1966.52

Table 17.2 Films reviewed by Istanbul Controlling Commission

from 1951 and 1966

Country of origin Conditionally accepted (%) Rejected (%)

US 2.2 2.6
Britain 5.6 3.5
Italy 13.1 3.8
Germany 7 6.4
France 17 7.8
USSR 39.8 41.3
Total 8.1 5.3
(From Tikveş, Mukayeseli Hukukta ve Türk Hukukunda Sinema
Filmlerinin Sansürü, p. 154).

345
 g oing to the mov ies

We should also note that, even before they sent their films to the censorship
body, the distributors might have modified them while dubbing or subtitling.
As seen from these examples, what is left out from these films is quite
significant. As Annette Kuhn has argued, film censorship ‘is not reducible to
a circumscribed and predefined set of institutions and institutional activities,’
and should be understood as a process.53 In this sense, the unwritten rules
of prohibition have changed with time and context. In the relatively liberal
atmosphere of the early 1960s and mid-1970s, the discourses and practices
about film censorship shifted, allowing some former banning decisions to
be lifted. One can explore the nature of these discourses and practices by
examining the individual examples that are cited here.

Conclusion: The grocer and the chief

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed

or subtitled version.
Jean Baudrillard, America

Daniel Lerner, in his classic 1964 text on Turkish modernisation, The Passing
of Traditional Society, explains the function of movies in this process. When
he first visited Turkey in 1950, Lerner’s first stop was Balgat, then a village
eight kilometres outside Ankara. There he met a village chief (muhtar) who,
for him, represented the traditional, and a grocer who was much more
forward-looking. Lerner used the story of these characters as a parable of
modern Turkey. One of the questions Lerner asked was: ‘If for some reason,
you could not live in your country, what other country would you choose to
live in?’ The chief ’s answer was ‘nowhere,’ while the grocer wanted to live in
America, because he heard that ‘it is a nice country, and with possibilities
to be rich even for the simplest person.’ 54 In Lerner’s survey, which was
carried out in the mid-1950s, the answers to this question form what he
calls the ‘empathy index.’ According to the survey, a large majority of people
who could imagine living outside Turkey chose the U.S. as their preferred
imagined residence.

Table 17.3 Empathy index

Ability to imagine Moderns Transitionals Traditionals
Living outside Turkey 94 74 49
Living in U.S. 100 98 74
Source: Lerner, 1964, 144.

346
 a mer ica n films in t urk e y

Lerner was also interested in the ‘influence’ of movies, commenting that

they became a ‘commodity to which the ordinary Turk gained access on
the terms of closest equality with the ordinary American’ in the 1950s.55
Ticket prices were, however relatively more expensive than in the US at the
time. An ordinary Turkish worker was working at least an hour for a single
admission to a cinema, whereas his American counterpart need to work
for half that time.56 Lerner believed that the growth of media—movies,
theatres, radio and newspaper circulation—along with the parallel growth
of literacy, would bring the Enlightenment to Turkey. He asked a number of
questions, such as ‘What sort of movies do you like best?,’ ‘Which country
makes this kind of movies best?’ and ‘What is it about their movies that is
better than others?’ The grocer thought that Turkish movies were gloomy
and ordinary, commenting that: ‘I can guess at the start of the film how
it will end … The American ones are exciting. You know, it makes people
ask what will happen next.’ 57 The chief did not have much of an opinion
about them, and only stressed that his sons were always impressed by the
movies they saw.

Table 17.4 Movie attendance

Moderns Transitionals Traditionals

Attend movies 88 63 27
Prefer American movies* 68 48 23
* Among moviegoers
Source: Lerner, 1964, 139.

The most important deficiency in Daniel Lerner’s study was that he

conceived the modernisation process as a struggle between ‘modernists,’
who provided Turkey’s elite with a model for the country’s future, and the
‘traditionalists,’ who ‘neither have nor seek a shaping influence over the
Turkish future.’ This approach has long been discarded as oversimplified
in studies of modernisation.58 Rather than merely providing a modern
alternative to traditional forms, as Lerner would have claimed, Hollywood’s
products were appropriated and transformed in different contexts. These
films were received and interpreted in ways that were bound to their local
historical context, ‘naturalising’ them as part of Turkish cinema. Once the
films entered local distribution they were subject to translations, cultural
adaptations and significant modifications, which not only made them
intelligible to a different language market, but also offered a vernacular
version of the modern.

347
 18

Cowboy Modern
African Audiences, Hollywood Films,
and Visions of the West

Charles Ambler

I n 1948 A.M. Baeta, a young female student in England who came

originally from the British colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana),
published a brief but remarkable commentary in the journal Sight and Sound
on the impact of film in her home country. Reflecting on the contributions
to a conference in London sponsored by the British Film Institute on ‘The
Film in Colonial Development,’ Baeta took strong issue with the prevailing
wisdom expressed by conference participants on colonial film reception.1 She
first disputed the general assumption that ‘primitive’ Africans lacked the
capacity to fathom film representation and then challenged the argument,
widely and persistently held among white observers and ‘experts,’ that even
relatively sophisticated urban African audiences were unable to comprehend
films that depicted unfamiliar settings and circumstances.2 As Baeta
pointed out, the moviegoing practices of urban Africans, with their deeply
held affection for Hollywood epics, demonstrated very clearly that African
audiences were more than ready to watch movies that featured foreign
landscapes and cultures. Moreover, these films represented a very important
resource for African urban residents to develop an understanding of the
larger worlds into which they were increasingly drawn.
In her essay, Baeta described the surprise that she and her fellow West
African students experienced when they arrived in England and found a
country that was in many respects quite at odds with the ‘Europe’ that
they had constructed back home out of the fragments of conversations with
people who had been there, magazines, newspapers, and, above, all films. In

348
 afr ica n audiences, holly wood fil ms

particular, they were stunned to find working-class Englishmen engaged in

manual labor, a phenomenon very different from their vision of the roles of
whites, nurtured in colonial contexts and reinforced in the popular culture
that they experienced. As Baeta noted, all films, including those that were
purely for entertainment, did ‘leave certain impressions on the minds of
people especially where very little is known about the matter depicted on
the screen.’ 3 In particular, these films were instrumental in shaping popular
West African stereotypes of Western cultures:

If you ask anyone who enjoys seeing films at home to describe an

American, he is sure to tell you the American carries a revolver with
him everywhere he goes and shoots on the slightest provocation or
that the American never wastes time planning things, but goes in
for action and thinks of the results later.

When asked to describe a typical Frenchman, West Africans would ‘give

you the picture of a happy, carefree man—not caring what’s happening
around him, so long as it does not interfere with his happiness. A man
who dances every night in magnificent and well-lit halls.’ An Englishman,
in the popular imagination, was quite different: ‘a well-dressed man, sitting
peacefully behind his desk and smoking a cigarette or reading a book.’ 4
This chapter explores the meanings that these impressions had for African
audiences and the processes through which these cultural constructs were
conveyed, received and ultimately synthesized. A deeply held and shared
theory of media power governed the discussions that took place at the 1948
conference Baeta attended and, in fact, shaped most official thinking about
the impact of film in the British African colonies.5 The presumption that
unsophisticated African audiences were passive recipients of film imagery
and texts led colonial authorities enthusiastically to embrace both censorship
and the development of film for educational and propagandistic purposes.6
Baeta pointed out, however, that people in places like Ghana and Nigeria in
the 1940s had to assemble their understandings of the larger world out of the
information and images that they had at their disposal, within the contexts
of their existing world views, and based on their own cultural precepts. This
process had little to do with either lack of sophistication or the mesmerizing
character of film. Superficial or distorted notions of the West simply
reflected a lack of knowledge and experience: a phenomenon perhaps even
more evident in Western representations and readings of Africa through
film. ‘A European trying to think in terms of the primitive African fails,
and what he gets is anything but the way a primitive African thinks,’ Baeta
commented. ‘What others think Africans think, is not necessarily what we

349
 g oing to the mov ies

think.’ 7 Such circumstances, in which viewers grapple with plot lines and
images across profound barriers of language, education, and culture, only
reinforce Richard Maltby’s criticism of the lack of attention to audiences in
film scholarship, reflecting its tendency to focus attention ‘on the relatively
abstract entity of the “film-as-text.”’ 8

Films in African Communities

The movies came to Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century, and
by the 1920s and 1930s cinema shows were a commonplace phenomenon
in urban areas across the continent.9 Films were shown in a wide range of
venues, from luxurious movie palaces in South African cities to simple out-
door theatres in the towns in Zambia’s rapidly industrializing Copperbelt.10
In the 1940s, young people like A.M. Baeta would have grown up on
the movies, seeing largely the same films as audiences in England and,
especially, America. This was, not surprisingly, a matter of concern for
imperial policy-makers. In a 1926 article, in the British journal The
Nineteenth Century, Robert Donald drew attention to imperial dependence
on foreign suppliers for more than 90 per cent of films shown and called
for action to end ‘the stranglehold of the United States on the world’s film
supplies.’ 11 Worse, the vast majority of American films were ‘just hick films,’
some of which were not regarded as fit for exhibition in the United States
and consequently were ‘dumped in overseas markets.’ With unmistakable
anti-Semitic undertones, Donald noted that the dominant filmmakers cared
only about profits and turned out pictures ‘without other motive than to
make money in providing people with an entertainment.’ While admitting
that these films had no direct propagandistic intent, Donald argued that
‘the propaganda is all the more telling because it is unconscious.’ 12 In his
view, these films carried no explicit message, but instead exported in broad
terms the idea of America and American culture. To illustrate his point, he
quoted Will Hays, described by Donald as the ‘head of the motion picture
industry in the United States,’ making the argument that ‘American films
abroad create a demand for American clothes and other American products,
and have been an important aid to the American manufacturers doing
business in foreign markets.’ 13
Generations of censorship boards in African colonies would expend
countless hours determining the impact of particular plot lines and scenes
on the colonial architecture of political and racial hegemony but, as Robert
Donald implied, African audiences were drawing less explicit ideas from
American movies. The cultural experiences of African audiences shaped
their very definition as an audience for films. In particular, as the American

350
 afr ica n audiences, holly wood fil ms

cultural historian Lawrence Levine has noted in his study of popular culture
in early working-class communities, ‘people enjoyed popular culture not as
atomized beings vulnerable to an overpowering external force but as part
of social groups in which they experienced the performance or with which
they shared it after the fact.’ 14
In Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast or Ghana, the first established
theater was the Merry Villas Cinematograph Palace, built in 1913 to
seat more than 1,000 patrons. This theater and two others built during
the next decade showed imported films and also offered variety shows,
social evenings, and dances. Moviegoers represented a wide spectrum
of the population, with both cheap and more expensive seats offered to
African and white patrons alike.15 The most well-known of the theaters,
the Palladium, began life as the ‘West End Kinema Palladium,’ and was
the creation of the local African entrepreneur, Alfred Ocansey. Having
traveled to England and seen the theater and cinema there, Ocansey was
determined to offer a similar kind of ‘modern’ entertainment in Accra.16
In her recent book on the development of an indigenous theater tradition
in Ghana, Catherine Cole documents the interplay between the films
and the plays known as ‘concerts’ that were often performed in the very
same theaters. The pioneers of concert party entertainments got their ideas
from play books, sheet music, from visiting entertainers from England
and America and, especially, from the American films that played in the
local theaters where they performed. African actors took their cues from
American movie performers, notably Al Jolson, and often blackened their
faces and put white makeup around their mouths. The group that is now
recognized as the original concert party troupe went by the name of ‘The
Two Bobs and Their Carolina Girl.’ 17 Clearly, the application of black
makeup was not intended as a racial marker (since the actors were all
‘black’ according to European and American racial categorizations), but
rather was an element in a broader effort to appropriate ‘American’ and
other modern attributes.
As the history of the concert performers and their predecessors makes
clear, this was not a case of either ‘cultural imperialism’ or indiscriminate
appropriation of American or Western culture. As early as 1915, a Ghanaian
writer, Kobina Sekyi, had written ‘The Blinkards,’ a play for popular
audiences. In that play, Sekyi took satirical aim at newly educated and
well-to-do people who had become slavishly devoted to everything English.
Integrating the use of English and the local language, Twi, the play
essentially argued for adoption of English customs that made sense in the
African context. Later concert party performers extended this tradition
by rejecting a definition of modernity defined as exclusively Western and

351
 g oing to the mov ies

in opposition to ‘primitive’ culture, instead conceiving of ‘the modern’ as

describing ‘an integrative process involving conscious choices of inclusion
and exclusion.’ 18
American movies continued to be a critical source of cultural vocabulary
in Ghana in the post World War II period, when the under-employed
‘veranda boys’ who flooded Ghana’s urban centers in the period leading
up to independence in 1957 incorporated elements from popular films in
their distinctive styles. A passage from Cameron Duodu’s novel, The Gab
Boys (1967), captures the open-ended engagement of such young men with
movies: ‘I love this woman, I said. And I’ll go to her. What would Robin
Hood have done? What did the young boy I had seen in the film Lorna
Doone do? Didn’t he climb a huge waterfall to go to his love? Didn’t Romeo
sleep in the house of Juliet on the night of his exile? And what did I have to
fear? Only two policemen …’ 19 In Accra, at the same time, groups of young
men formed clubs marked by distinctive styles of playing and listening to
rock ‘n’ roll music that they encountered especially in American rock ‘n’
roll movies.20 In each of these cases, the young people who made up the
mass of film audiences saw movies as sources of information about other
parts of the world and, in particular, as sources of inspiration for defining
styles and modes of behavior. This was quite different from superficial and
indiscriminate copying. Colonial officials, and especially white settlers, were
seemingly preoccupied by fears that screen narratives and images would
drive African audiences to criminal behavior and immorality, but African
audiences were generally more likely to criticize Western behavior than to
emulate the actions that concerned censors. At the same time, however,
they were anxious to enjoy and appropriate story elements, characteristic
styles and behaviors, and visual images that seemed to offer guidance in the
difficult work of navigating a rapidly changing social context.21
The remarkable and persistent appeal of American movies among
African audiences both perplexed and appalled colonial observers. White
officials and residents often found it hard to comprehend how uneducated
Africans, who knew little or no English and who in many cases had grown
up in remote rural areas, would be attracted to films set in foreign locales
populated by stock characters whose fictional lives seemed to be about as
far removed from the experience of residents of Ghana or of the Zambian
Copperbelt as was possible to imagine. Yet the popularity of these films was
unmistakable. Week after week, crowds poured in to the bioscope intent on
the latest escapades of cowboy heroes.22
The deep affection that young women and men on the Copperbelt and
elsewhere in Africa had for these films challenged deeply entrenched colonial
mythologies. From the highly racialized perspectives that dominated much

352
 afr ica n audiences, holly wood fil ms

imperial thinking through the end of colonialism and beyond, Africans

should have lacked the cognitive and imaginative capacities to comprehend
and appreciate American and European feature films. In a colonial world
marked by manifestations of supposedly atavistic behavior, such as the Mau
Mau rebellion of the mid 1950s, how could it be that Africans would be so
powerfully drawn to such radically foreign cultural artifacts as Hollywood
movies? From the point of view of more progressive whites (and growing
numbers of Africans), whose aspirations for the development of African
societies gained increasing prominence in the 1950s, the appeal of American
films was similarly disturbing and inexplicable. For them, the images
portrayed in standard Hollywood fare purveyed distorted notions of life in
Europe and America and undermined efforts to build the foundations of
middle- and working-class respectability.
The debates that surrounded these issues and the resolution of the
contradictions inherent in them involved the construction of successive
or competing notions of what constituted African audiences and African
audience behavior. As might be expected in the racially very stratified
circumstances that defined central and southern Africa, these debates
were highly theoretical in the sense that they were rooted in white
assumptions about African culture and behavior—the belief that ‘we
know our own Bantu’—rather than any objective empirical research.23
Whether they held deeply racist or more progressive views on the potential
for African development, white observers shared a common faith in the
extraordinary power of the film medium and, in particular, in its power on
‘impressionable’ audiences. At the same time, of course, African film-goers
were defining themselves as an audience—or a series of audiences. But only
very occasionally was a voice like that of A.M. Baeta raised to articulate
their positions and to challenge the prevailing notion of African spectators
as the passive recipients of the images and messages of film. Scholars have,
by and large, failed to challenge the assumption of the inarticulate audience.
In a brief chapter in her study of urban society in Northern Rhodesia, the
anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker left a rich record of African film-
going on the Copperbelt in the 1950s, but subsequent scholarship has tended
to conceptualize film as a tool of imperial subjugation, reinforcing the
passivity of the audience to the degree that it emerges into view at all.

Colonial Film Spectatorship

The paucity of scholarship addressing the global impact of popular films
reflects a broad inattention in film studies to film reception across race,
ethnic, national, class, generational, and gender lines.24 Standard accounts of

353
 g oing to the mov ies

the history of movies in the United States, for example, typically pay little
attention to audience and especially to audience diversity.25 This apparent
lack of serious concern among film historians and other scholars for the
process of film consumption contrasts quite remarkably with the continuing
prominence in political and moral discourse—in locations as diverse as the
United States and South Africa—of the dangers that certain kinds of films
supposedly represent to the social and moral order. In the first full-length
study of the impact of film in Africa, historian James Burns traces the
development of theories of film literacy in British Africa.26 Burns documents
the persistence of white assumptions that unsophisticated African audiences
were incapable of distinguishing between reality and representation. The
stock example, cited repeatedly, was the supposed confusion caused by films
on malaria that featured shots of mosquitos depicted in very large scale.
Ironic comments from audiences regarding the size of mosquitos in the area
where the film had been shot were simply taken at face value and cited as
evidence of African inability to grasp the nature of film and the related need
for cinema for Africans to be produced in accordance with their supposedly
limited capacity for the reception of film images. In the late 1940s, however,
at the same time that A.M. Baeta raised her objections to this racist folk
wisdom, such thinking was increasingly under challenge. Certainly, imperial
planners were impressed that ‘as a medium of education and entertainment,
the cinema in African society is known to be effective, but the modes of its
effectiveness are still largely unknown.’ Since film production was expensive,
the British government directed the Colonial Office in the early 1950s to
‘conduct a proper research into the suitability of the film as a method of
educating backward peoples.’ 27
In response to that directive the colonial administration funded a study
in rural Nigeria that was designed systematically to address the question
of African reception to film.28 Specifically, researchers were charged with
investigating a number of ‘problems urgently demanding attention,’ including
whether ‘primitive peoples’ comprehended various forms of representation;
whether and how comprehension varied among people of different cultures
and in relationship to various types of films, especially cartoons; if the
‘habitual associations of ideas of African peoples are very different from
those of Europeans,’ in particular with reference to the ‘causes of laughter’;
and, finally, whether there were clear differences in terms of reaction and
understanding among people from diverse cultures to the same films.29
This study, and other less systematic observations from the same period,
demonstrated conclusively that even inexperienced rural audiences readily
understood films, and that a wide range of audiences could understand the
messages in propaganda or educational films—even if they did not appreciate

354
 afr ica n audiences, holly wood fil ms

them. In West Africa during that period, as colonies moved rapidly toward
independence, a non-racialist view of cinema reception emerged, but the
traditional, racially inspired assumptions remained widespread, even among
film ‘experts,’ in the racially highly stratified societies of southern Africa.
The 1953 official study of film reception in rural Nigeria, undertaken
by anthropologist Peter Morton-Williams, provides a fascinating window
onto the impact of film in colonial Africa, even though it focused almost
exclusively on the reception of educational films rather than Hollywood
products.30 In analyzing audience response, Morton-Williams was particularly
interested in exploring the question of the relationship between ‘the habitual
associations of ideas’ linked to members of particular African ‘tribes’ and
their understanding of ideas conveyed in films. The research relied heavily
on the observation of audiences watching films and was rooted in a
presumption that consistent observable responses were a strong indicator of
common interpretation of meaning. Typically for the period, the research
project was developed in a framework that privileged a social order defined
by exclusive and neatly bounded ethnic or tribal affiliations, and largely
ignored the distinctions of generation, social standing, and gender in these
rural societies.31 Although cultural relativism strongly influenced Morton-
Williams’s perspective, he was nevertheless a developmentalist—looking
for ways that films might be utilized to ‘break into a closed system of
thought.’ 32 What emerges most clearly in the report, especially in the very
detailed accounts of audience responses to showings of the same films
in different locales, is the easy accommodation to the film medium even
among people who had very little or no experience with movies. Audiences
typically took the apparatus of cinema for granted and focused on the film
action—although they also expressed a preference for films with dialogue,
even when, as was usually the case, they did not understand the spoken
words.33
Confounding the typical assumptions of imperial officials, the responses
of audiences suggested no greater affinity or effectiveness for educational
films with African locales. In fact, the preoccupation of audience members
with identifying the unfamiliar styles and customs represented in such
movies seemed to obscure the film topic. In some cases, for example, there
were confusions regarding the gender and behavior of the film characters
because they were at odds with local custom.34 Nevertheless, audience
interest in ethnic and regional cultural differences represented in films,
and occasional confusion derived from them, did not translate into any
preference for films with very localized settings—although the researchers
themselves persisted in assuming that this was the case. In one example, the
negative response of audiences to a film about the Caribbean was explained

355
 g oing to the mov ies

away in terms of the unfamiliarity of the topic—a fairly preposterous

suggestion given the strong audience preference, expressed repeatedly, for
Westerns and Chaplin movies rather than the educational fare that was
being served up.35
With its stated objective of exploring the role of local cultural contexts
in shaping film understanding, the Nigerian research project did provide
some provocative insights into the readings that specific audiences made
of film elements. In particular, the researchers carefully charted incidences
of laughter with the objective of gaining some insight into the perplexing
immunity of African audiences to certain brands of British humor and,
especially, into their disconcerting tendency to laugh at scenes that European
film-goers would be expected to see as serious or even tragic. At about the
same time, British officials in colonial Zambia experimented with a showing
of the film Cry the Beloved Country based on the South African novel by
Alan Paton. Not only did many in the audience leave because there were no
cowboys on the bill, but others laughed uproariously at the scene in which
the wealthy white landowner is informed of the death of his son.36 As the
Nigerian research project and other evidence of audience reaction in Africa
showed, people inevitably reacted to particular scenes and characters very
much out of their own experience.
The presentation of serious issues in European and American dramatic
films could often appear to African audiences preposterous or grossly
inappropriate, especially as audiences had the expectation that films would
be entirely for entertainment. In those circumstances, dramatic moments
could provoke laughter that was as much derived from nervousness or
incomprehension as amusement, although it is quite likely that politics
shaped responses to Cry the Beloved Country.37 More significantly, the
Nigerian study pointed to the interesting ways in which local belief systems
and experience shaped film readings, even as audiences often brought a
broad accumulation of knowledge to their encounters with unfamiliar
movie subjects. In one instance, at a film showing in the Yoruba area of
southwestern Nigeria, an educational film about the value of modern health
care ran up against local tendencies to understand disease in religious
terms and to see hospitals as dangerous, even spiritually polluted, places.
The film went to some lengths to portray the African nurses as caring and
efficient, but these efforts were unconvincing to an audience which assumed
that nurses were arrogant and corrupt, often demanding personal cash
payments to ensure proper care.38 It is hardly surprising, then, that audiences
read Hollywood film products in contradictory and inventive ways and
appropriated and invested meanings in elements and images from popular
cinema that would have very much confounded filmmakers. Moreover, as

356
 afr ica n audiences, holly wood fil ms

the Nigerian report showed, even within a single if highly diverse territory,
class, gender, and especially culture shaped quite distinctive responses to
films. In such circumstances, there could be no monolithic African response
to films.

Cowboy Culture
In a predictably brief section on ‘Natives’ in Thelma Gutsche’s lengthy 1946
study, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, the
author noted that ‘the reaction of native audiences to the cinema was in many
cases unexpected and remained constant in only one instance—affection
for “Wild Westerns.”’ Although Gutsche’s study focused almost entirely
on white South Africa, she perceptively noted that in South Africa, as in
many other areas across Africa, ‘more than twenty years of film exhibitions’
had failed to cure working-class African audiences of ‘their affection for
a mythical cowboy called “Jack” (no matter what his real name) and his
always-successful deeds of daring.’ 39 In the memoir of Zimbabwean author
Shimmer Chinodya, ‘those were the days of the mobile bioscope [movie
theater], when the nights belonged to Mataka and Zuze and the Three
Stooges and cinema was so alive you could smell cowboys’ gunpowder off
the big white screen.’ 40 Although Westerns and other popular British and
American action movies almost entirely dominated African movie screens
from the 1930s through the 1960s, scholars have, with few exceptions,
avoided the topic.41
But the cowboys were everywhere. In the French West African colony of
Senegal, when the striking railway workers portrayed in Sembene Ousman’s
great novel, God’s Bits of Wood, gathered to pass the time, ‘their discussions
were invariably concerned with the same subject—the films they had seen
in the days before the strike. They told the stories of every one of them
over and over again, but never without feverish interruptions … Next to
Western films, war films were their favorites.’ 42 In Senegal, as in Zambia
and in communities across Africa, films were savored and discussed and
their elements examined. This imagined Wild West with its legendary
cowboy heroes (and it is notable that the Indian ‘enemies’ that populated
some Westerns were largely ignored) penetrated popular culture well beyond
the boundaries of the moviegoing public, and in fact many people who
had rarely if ever seen a movie were very familiar with the Wild West
ethos. In rural eastern Nigeria in the 1940s and early 1950s, young men
formed into cowboy gangs that adopted none of the outward trappings of
Wild West attire but adopted the bravado and aggressiveness that they
somehow associated with their notions of cowboys.43 Everywhere across the

357
 g oing to the mov ies

continent, youths who were in the vanguard of defining a self-consciously

modern society, linked to global political, economic, and cultural forces,
shared this fascination with Western films. Often, these young men and
some women were urban migrants or the town-nurtured children of urban
migrants. In the urbanized copper-mining region of colonial Zambia, some
of these youths strutted around town wearing ten-gallon hats and chaps.
White officials and missionaries, as well as older Africans, often looked
with alarm at these young men, seeing dangerous assertiveness and potential
criminality in their dress and attitude. In the 1950s, when the host of a
popular radio request program made a visit to mining communities that he
described as ‘pulsating with a noise and vitality,’ he encountered one young
man wearing a ‘loud-check shirt and a cowboy hat’ who responded to a
mention of World War II with the comment ‘that’s what I’m like when
I smoke dagga [marijuana] just like Hitler.’ He then added, ‘Jus’ gimme
jive!’ Then ‘holding his silver-studded belt with his thumbs he elbowed his
way through the children, and announced, “I’m the best jiver on the whole
Copperbelt.”’ 44 For this youth, and many of his compatriots, his ‘cowboy’
identity synthesized an eclectic mix of modern behaviors and qualities.
The same author, however, stressed that in the vibrant urban communities
of Central Africa this was simply one among numerous manifestations
of modernity. Many of his listeners, for example, enjoyed making fun of
the craze for Westerns and the ‘unemployed juvenile delinquents of the
Copperbelt dressed in cowboy clothes and living a Wild West fantasy life,’
by asking questions they may well have already known the answers to: ‘Are
all Americans cowboys or are there some ordinary people like villagers and
clerks? Are the cowboys we see in films employed people or do they look
after their own cattle?’ 45 At the same time, such questions quite directly
illustrate the ways that movie audiences explored the cowboy world through
their own, very typically Central African, lens.
The ‘cowboy culture’ was also very much in evidence in the capital of
the British Protectorate of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). According to a 1956
survey of Dar es Salaam:

there has grown up, as elsewhere in East Africa, the cult of the
cowboy, the African equivalent of the English teddy-boy. The young
man from the country, or the young man from the Town, soon
acquires the idioms of tough speech, the slouch, the walk of the
‘dangerous man’ of the films; the ever-popular Western films teach
him in detail the items of clothes that go with the part, the wide
hat, neckerchief, particoloured shirt, often with tassels, jeans, and
high heels, or at least the kilipa [the local term for crepe soled shoes]

358
 afr ica n audiences, holly wood fil ms

… After the first years of direct imitation local fashions have added
their own peculiarities, such as the uchinjo jeans drawn down tight
to well above the ankle … With such an outfit, sometimes costing as
much as a hundred shillings … goes … an attitude of mind; it is the
revolt of the adolescent, in age and in culture, against the authority
of elders, of the established, of the superior and supercilious.

The survey report linked cowboy styles with the activities of gangs of youths
in bars, dance halls and cinemas and asserted that ‘the cult of cowboy
clothes is the safety-valve of the dangerous mob element.’ 46 If such alarmist
claims of linkages between Hollywood films and challenges to authority
were exaggerated, the report accurately placed film as a critical element in
the development of local sub-cultures.
By the 1930s across urban Africa, movies had become a very important
leisure activity and in South Africa, in particular, films were attracting very
large audiences.47 In the Johannesburg region, for example, by the late 1950s
there were thirty-two cinemas open to the black population, attracting a
weekly audience of 150,000.48 In historian Bill Nasson’s description of leisure
in the District Six neighborhood of Cape Town, cinema shows emerge as
community institutions, and the film-going experience spilt out into the
surrounding neighborhoods and spread beyond the patrons themselves.
Managers aggressively promoted film shows, organized a wide variety of
promotions, and, like their counterparts in Ghana, opened their theaters to
a wide range of entertainment activities and meetings.49 In South Africa,
theaters were strictly segregated by race, but in terms of the moviegoing
experience and the films shown, there was perhaps a greater difference
between the first- and third-run theaters located in black communities than
between black and white first-run cinemas.50 The first-run theaters showed
a much smaller number of action and adventure movies and carefully
cultivated an atmosphere of elegance and decorum. For better educated and
more affluent black audiences, these film shows offered an opportunity to
reaffirm definitions of respectability and enrich their cultural vocabularies
through the films shown. For them, like moviegoers in Ghana, musicals and
various kinds of spectaculars offered a means to join local cultural traditions
with the sophisticated modern entertainments served up on film.51
Like the movie houses that catered to immigrant audiences in New
York, the South African cinemas fostered intensely social experiences
that reinforced collective identities.52 This was particular evident among
the audiences that returned week after week to shabby third-run theaters,
encountering their friends and neighbors each week in a crowded and
raucous atmosphere often redolent with the odor of marijuana, where

359
 g oing to the mov ies

patrons vocally engaged the B film of the week. These working-class

moviegoers had no patience with heavily plotted dramas, voting with their
feet for the action-oriented Westerns and gangster films whose rough and
rebellious characters seemed to resonate more with their own marginal
circumstances.53 Writer Don Mattera recalled that, in the black community
of Sophiatown, near Johannesburg, in the 1940s and 1950s, residents flocked
to the local cinemas: ‘almost everything we wore or ate was fashioned after
American styles. Some gangs and gang members chose the names, habits
and mannerisms of film stars such as George Raft, John Garfield and John
Wayne, who was nicknamed Motsamai (swaggerer).’ People were prepared to
pay high prices for ‘the privilege of wearing USA imports such as Florsheim,
Nunn Bush and Jarman shoes.’ 54 For these movie patrons, the images and
behaviors observed on screen provided critical guidance in shaping not only
their superficial appearance but their individual and group identities.55
In her account of the culture of moviegoing in the industrial mining
communities of colonial Zambia in the 1950s, Hortense Powdermaker
described film shows that attracted many hundreds of patrons to out-
door cinemas. At that time as many as half the adults living in these
communities attended movies once a week, drawn by both the films
themselves and the excitement of ‘being part of a movie audience of
more than a thousand people, constantly commenting to each other,
shouting their pleasure and booing their displeasure.’ In contrast to radio
listening or film attendance in Europe and the United States, ‘going to the
movies was a social experience.’ 56 Powdermaker, like most white observers,
bemoaned the affection of audiences for B cowboy movies while simulta-
neously asserting the incapacity of unsophisticated African audiences to
comprehend the products of Hollywood studios. Yet the invaluable detailed
evidence of audience reaction that Powdermaker provides suggests that
Zambian audiences had little difficulty distinguishing between fact and
fiction, although not surprisingly they often mis-interpreted (or perhaps re-
interpreted) the ‘intended’ meanings of dialogue and plots.
Film shows in the mining districts generally began with newsreels
and other educational films, and African audiences invariably expressed
their anti-white settler perspectives in reaction to any films that smacked
of propaganda for the white-dominated Central African Federation.57
Powdermaker interpreted the reactions of high school students to a film
about ‘The First Easter’ as evidence of their incapacity to see the distinction
among documentaries, docudramas and fiction films, but the students’
comments can also be read as indicating an astutely skeptical engagement
with the movie: one asked if there were actually records from the time of
Jesus, another wanted to know why white people portrayed the characters,

360
 afr ica n audiences, holly wood fil ms

and a comment that the king’s cape resembled Superman’s was probably
more evidence of the importance of Hollywood films in defining the visual
vocabularies of students than any confusion between Herod and the caped
crusader. A number of the students complained vocally at having to look
at such a film at all, and there is a good chance that the young man who
asked whether there were cameras during the time of Jesus had his tongue
in his cheek. After all, another indicated his preference for Westerns by
saying, ‘with cowboys it is interesting, because it is all acting.’ 58
Both women and men were attracted to the action movies, with their
weak plots and continual scenes of combat between cowboys and their
adversaries. White censors had assembled long lists of types of scenes and
plot lines that they regarded as too dangerous for Africans to see, but
African audiences seemed to approach films in ways that transcended such
concerns.59 They looked in particular for the behavior of the cowboy hero,
always referred to as ‘Jack,’ and the quality of the fight scenes. During the
fight scenes, the sounds of the crowd cheering on the protagonists could
be heard several miles away: ‘They all fear him because they cannot fight
him … This one’s a weakling … That is the only man who can fight Jack!
… Jack is very clever, he can fight them all … This is the kind of Jack we
want.’ 60 Especially for male residents of these mining towns, many of whom
worked in very physically demanding jobs, cowboys represented a culture of
toughness that they found appealing: ‘When the people are fighting, I feel
as if I am also going to fight someone … I always want to see how strong
Jack is … I expect the hero, Jack, to beat everyone and to win every time
… He must always rise up after he is hit and the enemy must always run
away. I like the way they ride and fight with their hands … If I went to
America, I would very much want to be a cowboy.’ More tellingly, another
audience member stated: ‘I like best the cowboy films, because they teach
us how to fight others and how to win lovers.’ 61
Inverting the arguments of the censors, Powdermaker was anxious to
find a political explanation for the appeal of cowboy movies. The cowboys,
according to Powdermaker, were white but not British and the ‘cowboy
hero fits into the present power relations between European and Africans.’
Zambian audiences, she argued, found in the ‘hard fighting cowboy’ riding
across open spaces some relief from their smoldering resentment of their
oppressed political and social status. Certainly, residents of the mining
communities were increasingly politicized during the 1950s, but there is
little evidence in their affection for these heroes and their responses to these
films—or the similar responses from audiences across much of Africa—to
suggest a powerful political metaphor.62 In fact, what was much more
notable among film-goers in South Africa, Zambia, Ghana and elsewhere

361
 g oing to the mov ies

was the creativity with which they drew the action and characters off the
screen and invested them with indigenous qualities. Thus, at the same time
that audiences were drawing on films to develop a lexicon of modernity,
they were reinventing the films in their own cultural and political terms.
Cowboys, and the mythic hero, Jack, in particular, were seen as possessing
supernatural powers and having important kinship connections: ‘The cowboy
has medicines to make him invisible. His enemies have failed to see him
hiding in the bush. Jack knows he is younger than Chibale [an older cowboy
who plays the part of a clown] … So Jack has to respect him. Cowboys show
respect. And Jack is also the son of a big man.’ 63 At the same time, films
that showed displays of affection between men and women or both women
and men together at the beach or at a pool were, on the one hand, read as
guides to sophisticated behavior and, on the other, observed through a local
moral code that led viewers to ascribe immorality to the characters and to
make negative judgements about Western society and mores.64

The Return of Film

In the 1960s, with independence and the advent of other forms of popular
entertainment, the cinema declined in importance across Africa, as larger
numbers of people gained access to radio and even television and as the
cowboy genre itself lost popularity globally.65 In West Africa especially the
cultural ferment associated with decolonization inspired the emergence of
a number of highly regarded filmmakers, notably Sembene Ousmane from
Senegal. However important in artistic terms, these filmmakers and their
works made relatively little popular impact. With few exceptions, African
films were not widely distributed and most failed to find substantial
audiences. Moviegoers in African urban centers continued to favor imports,
but increasingly they preferred Kung Fu films from Hong Kong to
Hollywood products. In the late 1980s, the availability of VCRs dramatically
revived the popularity of films and a video revolution swept across the
continent. In urban neighborhoods and in rural hamlets, local businessman
put together the capital to buy a television set and a VCR and gain access
to electricity, if necessary with a small generator, in order to open small
video dens. These dens were in some cases no more than a backroom,
and in others small theaters.66 For a few cents the new and tragic ‘leisure
class’ of under- or unemployed young men could spend hours watching
pirated copies of Hollywood and Hong Kong epics. In their fathers’ and
grandfathers’ time, cowboys had ruled the cinematic landscape; now the
heroes of martial arts epics dominated, while they gathered in small groups
in shabby facilities that were a far cry from the hundreds who had assembled

362
 afr ica n audiences, holly wood fil ms

for outdoor film shows in Zambia in the 1950s or in the grand movie
palaces in South African cities. Increasingly, relatively affluent households
could afford their own apparatus.67 In the midst of bitter fighting in 2003
in the eastern Congo, video dens were virtually the only businesses that
remained open in the town of Bunia as warring militias ravaged the town
and the surroundings.68 With schools shut down and few opportunities for
work, boys and young men flocked to these makeshift theaters to pay about
eleven cents to see movies like Mortal Kombat and a Chinese action feature
called Iron Angels.
As in the earlier period, these films served as critical sources for the
development of distinctive sub-cultures and the construction of self-
consciously modern forms of behavior, especially during a period of
time marked by growing economic despair. Ernie Wolfe III’s fascinating
compendium of images of hand painted movie posters created in Ghana
between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, as video dens proliferated, provides
visual evidence of the cultural processes at work.69 Derived from the
illustrations on cassette boxes and other sources, these images represent a
strange amalgam of Hollywood and Hong Kong imagery on the one hand
and Ghanaian culture on the other. Very often, stars like Sylvester Stallone
emerge on these canvases as racially indeterminate, and the suggestions of
film content incorporate local traditions and beliefs. Much like the movie
audiences of the 1950s, these artists, and presumably those who frequented
the video dens, engaged the films they watched as cultural products to
be discussed, analyzed, critiqued and reinvented. This process accelerated
rapidly in the mid-1990s, with the dramatic development of indigenous video
industries in Ghana and especially in Nigeria. In makeshift studios in Accra
and Lagos, African filmmakers, often with very little experience, churned
out hundreds of video films. With this development, local filmmakers
in West Africa were for the first time reaching a mass audience, and in
many cases their videos proved more popular than imports. Sharing a
kinship with some of the early Hollywood directors and producers, these
African producers approached filmmaking from a business perspective and
saw themselves more as members of the audience than self-consciously
as artists.70 To date, there has been little study of the actual response of
audiences to these ephemeral epics. With narratives that run the gamut
from Christian fables to tales of cannibalism, these films represent the
manifestation of the goals of the imperial filmmakers of the 1930s and
1940s to make movies with indigenous settings. It remains to be seen,
however, whether these new videos will challenge imported action films,
long embraced and invested with local cultural norms.

363
 19

‘Opening Everywhere’
Multiplexes and the
Speed of Cinema Culture

Charles R. Acland

T h e opening of a film has long held an iconic place in the imagery

of American cinemagoing. Tales of Hollywood past are replete with
accounts of the excitement and expectation of a film première. Histories and
biographies, whether popular or scholarly, typically describe these events
with reference to notable theatres, their ornamentation further adorned
with red carpets and velvet ropes, and with archival photographs of the
throngs of spectators waiting for admittance. Samuel Fuller reminisced
that following the opening of his film Fixed Bayonets (1951) at the Rivoli
in New York, ‘we had a raucous dinner at Toots Shor’s place, like in the
old days, with an abundance of steaks and vodka. I don’t know how I got
back to my hotel that night.’ 1 Whatever the circumstances and celebrations,
the filmmaker’s worries about critical reception, the studio’s anxieties about
box-office receipts, and the audiences’ thrill in seeing the freshest instalment
of movie culture all converge at the launch of a film. Confirming the
extremes of Hollywood’s glamour and spectacle, the romanticism of the
première runs high.
In more quotidian contexts, the routines of commercial cinemagoing also
include the pleasure—or frustration—of the opening weekend crowds. Who
among us has not looked forward to seeing the new work of a treasured
filmmaker or star, and considered the extra delight of watching with a
gathering of similarly enthralled patrons? And who, conversely, has not
waited impatiently for crowds to clear in order to enjoy a more intimate
cinematic experience? The contemporary American motion picture industry

364
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

relies upon opening weekends as a source of rapidly accumulated revenue

and as a predictor of future economic success; in 1997, those films given
wide releases, meaning 600 or more screens, earned an average of 37.3%
of their total box office during their first week.2 The opening weekends
for wide released films accounted for 24.7% in 1999, 29.5% in 2001, and
30.3% in 2003 of total box office, on average.3 The reliance on immediate
box-office return rests on a broad acceptance of the value of such openings
among cinemagoers. Some on-line and telephone ticketing services offer
the purchase of tickets forty-five days in advance to allow customers to
secure seats at the most expectantly awaited premières. Religious groups
booked entire theatres in advance of the release of The Passion of the Christ
(Mel Gibson, 2004), and some have attributed the startling early financial
success of the film to this phenomenon. Exhibitors and audiences both
note, often with consternation, the uneven distribution of cinemagoing
throughout the week, an inequality that initial release dates accentuate
further. Since they tend to be the most crowded and the most expensive of
cinemagoing occasions, one is tempted to wonder why more people do not
avoid opening weekends. Many do, but not enough to alter this dominant
industry strategy.
Although the promotional festivities of a première at, for example,
Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood are a world away from the
more pedestrian launches at a local multiplex, the two share a relationship
with the ‘new’ in film culture. Wherever it is located, a première requires
the circulation of some prior knowledge about coming attractions. The
film itself cannot account for all of the intensity of pre-launch interest.
Building expectation for and awareness of a new movie is a key goal of
film advertising. For this promotion to have any consequence, there must
be something especially appealing about the freshness of these new arrivals.
Most obviously, the opening’s added sign-value involves a sense of being
up-to-date, inviting people to be the first on the scene. This supplementary
value is time-sensitive and fades as the initial release date passes.
The valorisation of the ‘new’ is a familiar quality of consumer culture
in general, but with motion pictures, patrons are attending more than a
new film. Theatres play a special role as a point of initiation in the life
of cultural commodities, and the release of a major motion picture into
commercial cinemas is also the introduction of a set of commodities and
artefacts—a soundtrack, a website, a magazine issue, a new star, a re-
released book or comic, a video game, a music video, action figures and
other merchandise. Audiences expect the films themselves to mutate into
videos, DVDs, and television content. Because films can be viewed and
experienced in multiple formats, one now hears the previously unnecessary

365
 g oing to the mov ies

marketing claim ‘only in theatres.’ Films also become fodder for posters,
becoming books, and amusement park rides. There is no fixed trajectory to
these transformations; there are frequent instances of films based on theme
park rides and graphic novels. Moreover, fully re-mediated texts, running
the gamut of all media forms, may account for only a small number—the
most highly visible—of films. This multiple incarnation of related and
successive texts does, however, mean that the massive amount of promotion
accompanying a new blockbuster is also selling all the other artefacts that
appear according to their own flexible schedules. Whether the availability
of these variously mediated commodities is bundled together or staggered,
these new blockbusters are selling a timeline for cultural practice and
consumption.
In addition to their association with new cultural works, opening
weekends provide the material and sensory experience of a shared
community. The desirability of this feature varies according to taste, genre,
and mood. Moviegoers may identify some films as ideally suited to the din
and distraction of the full house, best seen with other spectators. Some
consider the belly laughs of comedy and the embarrassing involuntary yelps
of horror to be realized better in crowds than in solitary viewing situations.
Although this aspect of communality may characterize much cinemagoing,
queues are customary at film premières; people attend them precisely to be
with strangers and, at the same time, to be part of a knowing first-on-the-
scene crowd. A thin gathering at an opening weekend screening gives off
a whiff of morbidity, and may instantly conjure up a sense of failure for
the film in question.
Those sitting in neighbouring seats are only the most literal and visible
of opening weekend cinemagoers. Significantly, the current coordination
of release dates across the US, Canada and beyond, fosters an imagined
and temporally bound sense of similar crowds elsewhere Lord of the
Rings: Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002) opened in Germany one week,
in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Spain the next week, and then
in Australia and Korea. The increasingly rapid circulation of new films
is evident even for those that do not receive saturation release. Gangs of
New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002) appeared first in Japan, then the US.
and Canada the following week, and Italy five weeks later.4 The Matrix
Revolutions (Wachowski Brothers, 2003) may be an extreme instance of
wide international release, but it is also a harbinger of a trend toward
simultaneity. Within the first week of its release, its 10,013 prints had
premièred in 107 territories, and on 18 IMAX screens. Reportedly, co-
producers Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow coordinated many of the
premières to begin at exactly the same time.5

366
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

The avoidance of piracy is a convenient excuse for this synchronization

and, certainly, revenue can be siphoned off when there is a temporal lag in
a film’s availability; all that is needed is an enterprising individual willing
to copy and distribute faster and cheaper, and to take on the associated legal
risks.6 In 2003, this prospect prompted the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) to ban the delivery of DVD screening copies of Academy
Award nominated films to voting members.7 Synchronization of releasing
responds to more than the piracy threat, however. It is no secret that, for
some blockbusters, international audiences are more important than the
US. domestic market, and their distributors can make use of economies
of scale in advertising and promotion to build a global time-sensitive
momentum in awareness and expectation. Promotional material can travel
faster across national borders than the motion pictures themselves, and a
quicker release can capitalize on this. Furthermore, there are a number of
industrial conditions that make this accelerated circulation feasible. To pull
off their remarkable global launch, the last two Matrix films made full use
of two producing corporations (Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow), that
also act as distributors and operate large international theatre chains. The
industrial rationale of piracy avoidance, economics of scale, and corporate
ownership structure together equally create the conditions for an imagined
transnational popular movie scene. One effect has been a widely dispersed
sense of the current or the ‘new’ in cinema culture as well as a sense of
communality among moviegoers across continents. Put differently, the
coordination of one stratum of film culture offers a ‘felt internationalism’
to be shared by cultural consumers.
Research on the globalization of film has tended to focus on either film
texts or film financing. The former examines the consequences of interna-
tionally salient conventions, as evident in art film circuits or popular movie
genres. The latter considers the internationalization of the ownership of
media corporations and the moves toward co-production financing. The
best of this scholarship has prompted a reconsideration of so-called national
cinemas.8 Scant attention has so far been given to the internationalization
of exhibition and distribution, despite the fact that operations in this
part of the film business have radically altered in recent years, creating a
greater coordination of openings over a wider geographical expanse.9 The
need for larger numbers of screens for saturation openings means that
films are pushed aside faster, bumped from a limited number of theatrical
venues to make room for newer releases. This coordination has shuffled the
parameters of what is understood as being the current cinema by bundling
the appearance of some, accelerating the arrival and departure of releases,
and leaving a greater waiting period for others. The category of the ‘current

367
 g oing to the mov ies

cinema’ is a conceptual necessity in light of the fact that American cinema

culture occupies multiple sites and formats, all of which have different
temporalities; it designates a temporally defined slate of films characterized
by their newness: that is, those movies ‘in theatres now.’ With the exception
of the increasingly marginal repertory cinemas (especially in Canada, U.S.,
and the UK) theatres offer new films for a short period of time. At the
same time, videotape and DVD sales and rentals offer a growing back
catalogue of films, giving long-term availability to works that would have
disappeared in the past. This trend introduces a modified sense of scarcity
to cinemagoing: if you want to see a film on a theatrical screen, you may
have but a matter of weeks to do so. Otherwise, you have the rest of your
life to see it at home.
A crucial factor facilitating the speeded-up circulation of current
cinema has been the building of ever more extensive theater chains on
several continents through the 1990s. Crucially, the internationalization of
exhibition has had the effect of exporting certain kinds of cinema spaces,
most distinctively large multiplex or ‘megaplex’ cinemas, along with the
modes of cinemagoing associated with the expanded media and leisure
activities offered at these new complexes. Although the wide international
opening is a feature of select highly visible movies, it is a powerful defining
characteristic of contemporary cinemagoing. It is worth remembering that
the history of the national ‘breakout’ of major films is still a fairly recent
development, which film historians tend to date from the rising saturation
releases of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
and the less frequently acknowledged Breakout (Tom Gries, 1975). Twenty
years later, Canadian distributor Alliance opened Scream 2 (Wes Craven,
1997) in Iqaluit, Nunavut, on the same day as it opened in other cities to the
south. This was the first time that this northern capital had witnessed such
coordination with Ottawa and New York.10 The crowds at such synchronous
openings are not solely an indication of the loss of will to consumer agendas.
While indisputably representing a consumerist ‘being in the world,’ the
crowded theatrical opening is also a means of ‘being in the know’ about
contemporary cultural life. Just as saturation release calls forth an imagined
collectivity of moviegoers in other suburbs and cities across the country, and
at times across international borders, it equally emphasizes the gap between
such productions and the timed appearances of more marginal contributions
to the current cinema.
It is important to keep in mind the added sign-value of the film opening,
for it reminds us of the practices and meanings built around the act of
cinemagoing. Even as economic forces structure the cinemagoing space
and event, ordinary cultural life does not simply become a static construct,

368
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

in which people are programmed to exchange money, sit quietly, and leave
promptly. Yet, some exemplary work continues tacitly to offer a limited
view of the cultural life of cinemagoing. In an essay on digital cinema, for
instance, John Belton expresses scepticism about the revolution of digital
delivery and projection, and effectively debunks the myth that it is the most
significant innovation since the arrival of sound. He argues that even if
complete conversion transpires, ‘digital projection does not offer audiences a
new experience in the theater.’ 11 Several significant changes to the experience
of cinema can, however, be expected from digital delivery, many of which
stem from digital cinema’s reversal of the current skyrocketing expenses
associated with the wider opening of films. Once the projection hardware
is in place, and without the familiar, expensive and heavy film reels, digital
distribution and exhibition will give an incentive to even wider openings
and even faster replacement of films. Digital delivery could make routine
the one-time only screenings and programmes of non-feature films with
which some exhibitors have already been experimenting. Digital delivery
and projection will, therefore, in all probability accelerate the temporality
of the current cinema.12 The full impact of this has yet to be imagined, let
alone unfold.
While Belton’s dismissal of digital delivery is a welcome response to
the fever that now typically surrounds arrival of new media, it is also
symptomatic of some of the conceptual blindspots that inhibit us from
examining cinematic experience beyond the root definition of sound and
light in the dark. Too often, media scholars define cinema culture as
involving only a narrow band of activities. To emphasize how unimpressed
he is with the ‘digital revolution,’ Belton sardonically asserts that the only
substantive change in the film experience in the last forty years has been
stadium seating, which he sees as window-dressing that has not truly
altered the film experience.13 If, however, we think of cinemagoing as
the raw fact of gathering bodies in a designated location for a specified
audiovisual performance, then any alteration to the material boundaries
of this event, whether spatial or temporal, has radiating effects upon the
structure and experience of that cultural practice. What at first glance
appear to be trivial elements may in fact be salient components of the
experience for a moviegoing population. In newly opened megaplexes
and refurbished auditoria, audiences are now confronted with cupholders,
expanded concessions, high-tech arcades, more leg room, longer and more
varied audiovisual advertising displays before features, and, yes, stadium
seating. Among these supposed trivialities are material indicators of efforts
to situate the movie experience in relation to other sites, including the
home, the workplace, the theatre, and the arena. Some cinemas expand

369
 g oing to the mov ies

access to parents with infants, to children’s parties, to summer camps, to

people in wheelchairs, and to corporate meetings. These features and uses
are not inconsequential. They are ripples on the surface of cultural life,
giving us access to what Siegfried Kracauer called the Ratio of the time.14 If
cupholders and party rooms had been part of the ornamentation of Weimer
Berlin movie palaces, I believe Kracauer would have written about them.
After all, he actually did comment upon stadium seating.15
What I am addressing here is the incorporation of the everyday into our
critical tool-kit. Doing this means we must pay heed to the organization
of ordinary cultural life, including those so-called trivialities that are easy
to overlook. Rita Felski evocatively describes the conceptual challenge as
follows: ‘At first glance, everyday life seems to be everywhere, yet nowhere.
Because it has no clear boundaries, it is difficult to identify. Everyday life
is synonymous with the habitual, the ordinary, the mundane, yet it is also
strangely elusive, that which resists our understanding and escapes our
grasp. Like the blurred speck at the edge of one’s vision that disappears
when looked at directly, the everyday ceases to be everyday when it is subject
to critical scrutiny.’ 16 We might ask, then, why this ‘blur’ has been so well
considered with other media—television, for instance—and not so with
film? There has been some notable work on film audiences, in particular
Miriam Hansen’s sustained investigations of the making of audiences as
standardized industrial components, Janet Staiger’s delineations of audience
historiography, as well as the edited collections of Melvyn Stokes and
Richard Maltby that have rescued studies of film spectatorship from both
textual universalism and anecdotal ethnography.17 Works of this kind have
begun to expand the borders of cinema scholarship to encompass everyday
life and such research deserves to be broadened.
One explanation for the comparatively slow ‘take up’ of film and the
everyday might be the apparent rhetorical collapse in the distinction
between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter
term appears as a powerful trope of the former. For example, no matter
how ordinary film is, TV is seen as more so. One consequence of this
presumption has been the absenting of a myriad of other extra-domestic
manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal
understanding of the everyday. In effect, the abstractions of the everyday
are reduced to daily occurrences, and the presumed status of film as more
of an ‘event’—something less frequently attended—marks its break from
the everyday. This crude binary opposition is a philosophically untenable
proposition, encouraging unproductive digressions about how often does the
‘everyday’ have to occur. Henri Lefebvre cautioned against such evaluations,
encouraging the investigation of different orders of repetition, and pointing

370
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

to the uneven development of the everyday, one aspect of which is the

way in which apparent breaks from the ordinary work to construct the
ordinary.18 Thus, Lefebvre observed, ‘leisure appears as the non-everyday
in the everyday.’ 19
In considering the everyday nature of audio-visual media, the economic
and cultural interrelationship of film and videotape, DVD, broadcasting,
cable, radio, soundtracks and the Internet renders strict boundaries around
their cultural consumption either misguided or nostalgic, and should wash
away any remaining fixations about stable and isolated media qualities.
It is more advantageous to map the routines of use, addressing the place
and occasion of cinemagoing in light of these inter-media meldings. There
exists an assortment of paths through the world of videotape, DVD, and
web-based non-theatrical viewing possibilities. This changing materiality
of moving image culture, from airplane screenings to home video libraries,
renders cinemagoing a special practice. We might think of this as a call
for the study of cultural occasions. Whereas Michel de Certeau characterizes
‘the procedures of everyday creativity,’ 20 I want to emphasize the parameters,
which include the routines, habits, paths, spaces and times that constitute
the patterns of cultural engagement. Accordingly, as I detail industrial
investments, I am attempting to portray the context for the activity
surrounding the films and the practices appended to these industrial
commodities, that is, the field on which the occasions for cinema culture
play themselves out.
Cinema culture is woven variously into daily life: marquees adorn our
cities; video rental outlets dot local malls; star interviews and production
news inhabit our television schedules; film posters decorate bedrooms, offices
and construction sites; promotional t-shirts are worn; entertainment sections
occupy space in newspapers; favourite movies take up semi-permanent
residence in home video libraries; celebrity gossip underpins some ordinary
forms of sociability; and stars’ faces hail us in commercial venues. Although
the act of cinemagoing might occur for many people only once every few
months—and the rates of attendance are one of the more pronounced
features of differentiation among cinemagoing populations—cinemagoing
is only one type of occasion, that is, one enactment of the structure and
experience of cinema culture, one detail in the pattern. Such patterns,
comprised of historically specific configurations of artefacts, spaces, times,
designs, activities, bodies, and representations, constitute the ordinary and
the routine of cultural life. Part of any such pattern is that cinemagoing does
not involve only film viewing, a fact that the advent of megaplex cinemas has
only accented differently. The public film experience involves other forms of
media consumption, and even if we confine our focus to the contemporary

371
 g oing to the mov ies

structure of cinemagoing, the social activities of cinema culture that extend

beyond film consumption must still be kept in mind.
Few periods in cinema history saw as much alteration to the cinemagoing
context as the 1990s. Some locations experienced unprecedented investment
in cinema building and refurbishment, as exhibition companies blindly
followed a business strategy beyond economic rationality until the complete,
if temporary, destabilization of U.S. exhibition was brought about with
the bankruptcies of 2000. During the 1990s, this investment reshaped
the spatial and temporal parameters of cinemagoing in a reconfiguration
that maintained an eye on international markets. Warner’s international
success with Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) is often cited as an indicator of
the contemporary turn to global marketing and releasing.21 Comparable
globalizing turns have been a feature of other eras of cinema history,
but this instance, evidenced by swelling international film rentals and
ancillary markets for the Hollywood majors, was substantial enough for
trade publications to call globalization the ‘gospel of the 1990s.’ 22 An early
sign of the transnationalization of exhibition was the first Cinema Expo
International, held in 1992 in Brussels expressly for the film industry’s
‘extended global marketplace,’ after which it became an annual event with
steadily rising attendance over the years.23
Following the return to exhibition of several Hollywood majors in the
mid-1980s, the 1990s witnessed growing investments in theatrical exhibition
in international locations.24 Variety reflected the ruling spirit, stating that
global distribution was ‘entering a new golden age unlike anything seen
since World War II.’ 25 United International Pictures (UIP) president
Michael Williams-Jones, whose company handled international sales for
Universal, Paramount and MGM/UA films, claimed in 1995 that ‘within
five years … the current B.O. ratio between domestic and foreign for
Hollywood films of around 50–50 will swing to 30–70 in foreign’s favor.’ 26
This highly exaggerated estimate would not come close to being realized,
but it nevertheless typified the globalizing consciousness of the day.
In 1992, Millard Ochs of United Cinemas International (UCI), a
theatre chain jointly owned by Paramount and Universal, commented that
the internationalization of exhibition followed the saturation of the U.S.
domestic market.27 Both he and Peter Ivany of Australian exhibitor Hoyts
wrote assessments on costs and issues involved with the international
building of theatre chains on the occasion of the joint ShoWest/National
Association of Theater Owners (NATO) meeting in 1992, encouraging
unparalleled attention to this trend.28 Intercontinental chains had some
presence in earlier periods. In the 1930s, for example, Paramount and Loews
had both had theatres in England and France, and Twentieth Century-

372
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

Fox had ownership interests in England’s Gaumont and Australia’s Hoyts,

as well as cinemas in New Zealand and South Africa.29 Thomas Guback
records a failed post-World War II attempt to build theatres in West
Germany, but all these efforts pale in comparison to the building and buying
boom of the 1990s.30
What distinguished this period was not just the level of investment, but
the kinds of facilities that were being constructed. This was specifically a
‘multiplex building boom’ with U.S.-based corporations providing much of the
capital and direction for the expansion, and some commentators attributing
the rise in global box office simply to ‘the construction and acceptance of
multiplexes.’ 31 For others, the boom represented the “Americanization” of
moviegoing, a term that implied a strengthened relation between shopping
and cinema as manifest in multiplexes. For Boxoffice, the ‘multiplex invasion’
of Europe was a suburban American idea that was ‘just now revolutionizing
exhibition practices along the rues, strasses and calles of Europe.’ 32
Throughout the 1990s, cinema refurbishment and construction occurred in
most European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany,
Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and the
U.K.33 More cautious multiplex construction took place in Eastern Europe,
particularly in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Russia.34
With the exception of France, where multiplexing was relatively slow to
take off, this Europe-wide development resulted in a rise in the number of
screens per site.35 Multiplexing did not hit Europe alone. A Sony Cinema
Products vice president proclaimed that Latin America had the highest
building rate of new cinemas in the world.36 There was also an ‘explosion’
of new multiplex theatres in Southeast Asia.37
The involvement of US.-based interests in these markets was an impetus
to investment by national concerns Loews Cineplex Entertainment built
175 screens in Spain through a joint venture with Yelmo Films.38 In Italy,
UCI made plans for a circuit with department-store chain Rinascente. UCI
Central Europe, in conjunction with a European-based investment group,
developed a multiplex chain with cinemas in the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Slovakia, and Turkey.39 Warner Bros. invested in Japan in association with
supermarket chain Nichii. Smile-UA Cineplex and Tanjung Golden Village,
the latter a venture combining Malaysian, Hong Kong and Australian
exhibitors, opened new theatres in Malaysian shopping malls.40 Exhibition
in India saw joint multiplex building by Modi and United Artists Theater
Circuit, part of the Regal Entertainment Group (including the Regal and
Edwards chains) that also operated in Hong Kong and Thailand until the
bankruptcies of 2000.41

373
 g oing to the mov ies

Table 19.1 Countries/territories of operation for U.S.-based

exhibitors with international circuits (and majority owners), February
2004 42

AMC Canada, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Portugal, Spain,

and U.K.43
Caribbean Cinemas/Regency Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, St. Maarten,
Caribbean Enterprises Trinidad, Virgin Islands
Cinemark (Madison Dearborn Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa
Partners) Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico,
Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and Taiwan.
Cinemastar Luxury Mexico
Loews Cineplex (Onex) Canada, Mexico, Spain, and South Korea
National Amusements (parent Argentina, Chile, and U.K.
company of Viacom)
Wallace American Samoa, Guam, Marshall Islands, Saipan, and
Federated States of Micronesia
Warner Bros. International China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Taiwan, and
Theatres (AOL Time-Warner) U.K.44
Ultrastar Mexico
United Cinemas International Austria, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Panama,
(Viacom and Universal) Poland, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan, and the U.K.

These examples of investment activity are signs of the organization of

the flow of national and city economies. This organization solidifies the
status and presence of certain corporate agents as they participate with
larger conglomerates. What we do not see here is a culture industry cleanly
divided into global and local operations; instead, we see business classes and
investment elites in each country taking part in economic development,
perhaps angling for their own international growth. To regard this process
only as an internationalization of finance misses the national, city, and
neighbourhood ramifications of this investment. These outcomes have
become factors in the circulation (or non-circulation) of local fare and in
the materiality of parameters of cultural practice: who sees what, where
people attend, under what conditions, in relation to what other moviegoing
populations, and with what economic consequences.
The multi-directionality of international cultural-economic traffic has
other manifestations. Firstly, the intricacies of media conglomerates mean
that decision-making power and ownership is spread across several financial
capitals and involves internationally circulating business elites. Associating

374
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

a corporation with a single country might identify the site of its corporate
headquarters, its principal location of operation, or its majority ownership,
but it might not recognize the range of its participants and facilities. In a
way, the phrases ‘U.S. exhibitor’ or even ‘Hollywood major’ are references to
an historical sense of presence and influence rather than to actual national
affiliation. Secondly, it should be evident that U.S. exhibitors were not
alone in extending their global outlook. Table II indicates that Australian
exhibitors Hoyts, Village Roadshow and Greater Union had screens on
several continents. Other examples include Australian Amalgamated
Holdings, which owns half of Germany’s Kieft & Kieft circuit, Virgin
Cinemas, which built in Japan, and South African exhibitor and distributor
Ster Century, which opened multiplexes in the UK and Ireland, and Eastern
Europe (which they have since sold).45

Table 19.2 Screen count for major international chains, 2002 46

Central/
Latin North Western Eastern
Africa Asia Australia America America Europe Europe Total
AMC 90 160 3,340 134 3724
Cinemark 799 2215 17 3031
Greater Union 26 457 410 893
Hoyts 408 160 857 1425
Onex 48 361 2281 263 2953
UCI 108 122 947 168 1345
Village Roadshow 129 668 69 578 22 1466
Total 14,837

Some have argued that the ‘multiplex revolution’ in Europe was a result
of the post-recession context coinciding with an increase in attendance, but
the motor of this investment wave is more intricate than this explanation
suggests. U.S. interests in international exhibition were intense enough to
be characterized as a mode of competition between exhibitors who were,
in effect, taking their rivalries abroad.47 As Tino Balio has suggested,
the industry accepted the assessment that ‘[o]utside the U.S., nearly every
market was under-screened.’ 48 UCI, Cinemark, General Cinema and Hoyts
all focussed on Brazil, with a population of 160 million and fewer than
1600 screens.49 Spain’s film attendance decreased rapidly in the mid-1980s,
leading to the closing of almost 2,000 theatres.50 New theatres were in part

375
 g oing to the mov ies

a response to this ‘underscreening,’ even though the number of screens may

in fact have been an adequate reflection of cinemagoing rates that were
lower than those of U.S. audiences. Additionally, distributors had long been
complaining of the decrepitude of some countries’ cinemas. For instance,
many Italian cinemas were owned by small chains lacking the capital for
refurbishment. Many were zoned to protect historic buildings, making such
changes difficult.51 As might be expected, stories of international corporate
giants insensitive to historical value accumulated as the forces of global
capital collided with local concerns.52
Even an industrial discourse of underdevelopment, however, explains
only so much. Significantly, this investment spree helped to restructure
existing distributor/exhibitor agreements. As one commentator put it in
1995, ‘The boom is breaking down the old cozy and restrictive relationships
between distrib[utor]s and the traditional circuits, and bringing family
audiences back to the cinema. It is contributing to the wider release of
major titles in Europe and an increase in marketing budgets.’ 53 Several of
the most active chains—UCI, National Amusements, Warner Bros., and
for a time Loews Cineplex—were part of conglomerates that produced
and distributed films. Other exhibitors formed distribution arms where
domestically they had none; for instance, AMC elected to distribute its own
films in Japan instead of relying on locals.54 The new organization of chains,
and the new deals struck between local and international investors, prepared
exhibition for a higher degree of coordination across a vast geographical
expanse. The push toward global film commodities encouraged distributors
to adopt more harmonized international releasing strategies, which could
mean similar or successive opening dates and promotional campaigns.55 In
effect, the exportation of the multiplex served as a beachhead for globalizing
distribution.56
The international management of the spaces and economies of
cinemagoing includes products and services as well as films. In 2003, UCI
and Warner entered into a joint procurement deal for cinema concessions.
With this agreement, the ordering of food, beverages and containers for
their respective cinemas has the bargaining advantage of these corporations
operating in tandem. They also have the power to grant global procurement
contracts, of which they had eight, totaling $100 million, in 2003.57
Notwithstanding some national differences—German tastes for sweet
popcorn against Spanish preferences for salty—concessions have become
more standardized, with the same soft drink and sweet selection available
in a chain’s theatres across continents.
For several years after the destabilization of exhibition in 2000, chains
continued to change hands. Moving into Mexico, Onex acquired a share

376
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

of Cinemex in 2002. Cinemark continued expansion in Mexico, Chile and

Costa Rica during 2003.58 These developments have helped make Mexico
one of the top ten most lucrative markets for the Hollywood majors. In the
same period, Hoyts backed away from its some of its international ambitions,
particularly in the U.S. and Latin America. In order to concentrate more
upon film production, Village Roadshow shut half its screens throughout
Asia, although it still remained the largest chain in the region. Onex,
AMC and UCI continued to develop on that continent.59 The aftermath
of the bankruptcies demonstrated the uncertainty of joint ownership of
distribution and exhibition, suggesting that not all conglomerates are equally
inclined to concern themselves with the nitty-gritty of ticket-taking and
popcorn sales. As a consequence of its shaky financial status, French-U.S.
Vivendi Universal backed away from its participation in UCI in 2002, and
sold its share of Loews to Canadian Onex in 2001.60 Onex in turn put its
chain on the market in 2004, with some expectation that AMC would act
upon its previous interest in buying it.61 Viacom’s continued obsession with
exhibition contrasted with both Vivendi’s on-again-off-again commitment
to that aspect of the film business and Disney’s staunch lack of interest
in buying theatre chains. Even so, such broad character profiles invariably
conceal more intricate positions. For example, in 1993 Disney joined with
Gaumont forming Gaumont Buena Vista International to distribute films
in France; Gaumont itself subsequently built multiplexes.
For theatrical exhibition, the multi-directionality of cultural flow does not
describe a universe of equal economic participation. What we witness is the
fortification of paths of cultural and economic circulation and a delimitation
of who benefits. By 2001, exhibitors based in just four countries owned the
majority of all European screens: France (32.4%), the U.S. (19.4%), Australia
(18.8%), and the U.K. (17.6%).62 The investment wave was so dramatic that,
at the end of 2002, 44 per cent of European screens were in multiplexes. In
Belgium, Spain, Austria, and Ireland that figure is more than 50 per cent.
At 66 per cent of all screens, the U.K. is the most multiplexed European
country.63 Even when confronted with local recession, currency instability
and ongoing economic hardship, situating multiplexes in ‘secure shopping
malls popular with the middle and upper classes’ can apparently assure
resounding financial success, as is the experience of international exhibitors
in South America.64
While trade sources may give the impression of unfettered expansion,
reports of struggles against this form of transnational influence have surfaced
as well. Minor attempts to claw back some riches for local production, like
Mexico’s one peso surcharge for each admission ticket or Brazil’s tax on
international film distributors, sends shudders of nervousness through U.S.

377
 g oing to the mov ies

industry investors and prompts the MPAA to flex its lobbying might.65
Excluding Canada and the U.S., Brazil and Mexico accounted for 78 per
cent of the Americas’ remaining box office revenue in 2002, making their
cultural policies obvious targets for the industry’s lobbying attentions.66
By the end of the 1990s, the intercontinental expansion of popular cinema
circuits meant the redrawing of financial commitments inter­nationally and
the realignment of selective cooperation among the majors as they pooled
resources for international operations. Importantly, when we speak of the
international dominance of U.S. motion pictures, the above realities alert
us to the fact that globalization concerns not only the supply of films to
existing domestic chains. It also involves the construction and operation of
cinema spaces, and the capitalization of theatre building and reconstruction
on the part of major entertainment corporations.
Hidden beneath the tales of growth and corporate acquisition during
the 1990s and early 2000s are the accompanying closures and demolitions
of cinemas. As sites rise and fall, cinemagoing reconfigures to suit new
arrangements of cultural life. According to Screen Digest, the total number
of world screens was 165,774 in 2002, down from 166,440 in 2001, but
both still a far cry from the total of 400,107 for 1988 prior to the multiplex
boom.67 Among the material repercussions of these changes in exhibition
are the spatial reformations of cities, reinvigorating certain zones at the
expense of others, building new meeting places for cultural consumption
and abandoning older ones. The legacy of the multiplex boom has been the
installation of more screens at fewer sites in select, but dominant, locations,
thus assuring those cities’ participation in one version of international film
culture. These venues have expanded the start-times of films and the media
encountered on-site. Concurrently, the coordination that followed has
changed the temporality of the arrival and departure of films, that is, which
films are shared by whom for how long. Just as these changes reinforce a
particular formation of an international film culture, they also mould the
shape of the cinema occasion itself.
These characteristics of the coordinated life cycle of films lie behind
the adoption of the digital projection and delivery of motion pictures to
theatres. The logic motivating the rise of international chains is also directly
responsible for the emergence of lower-resolution e-cinema and the high-
resolution d-cinema, as it supports a willingness to invest in exhibition and
to experiment with the temporality of the current cinema. Digital formats,
using disk delivery, satellite relay or fibre-optic transmission to get moving
images and sounds to theatres, dispense with the transportation of film
canisters.68 Although most industry and scholarly discussions focus on
the quality of the projected image, it is the mode of delivery that is most

378
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

innovative and unsettling to reigning understandings of theatrical cinematic

events. Digital systems, with cheaper delivery of any video or televisual text,
offer the possibility of one-time audiovisual performances for specialized
audiences.
Although a broadcast-cinema concept has been simmering at least since
the 1940s, a renewed enthusiasm for conversion to e-cinema and d-cinema
arose at the end of 1998, before quickly becoming bogged down in debates
about who would pay for it.69 Exhibitor bankruptcies of 2000 slowed down
the pace of change even further. Not to be deterred, seven Hollywood
majors cooperated to form Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), charging it
with smoothing the way for d-cinema, including making recommendations
for industry-wide technical specifications, conversion financing and security
standards. The DCI questioned whether 2,000 lines of resolution was an
acceptable standard, as had been thought in 1998. Some argued for 4,000
lines of resolution as a more suitable goal for the industry. In the summer
of 2005, DCI’s long awaited report on technical standards appeared,
supporting both 2K and 4K systems.70 It did not pass unnoticed that, as a
creature of the majors and in a position to have significant influence over
the standards to which non-majors and exhibitors might have to adhere,
DCI seemed to be a form of ‘cartel behaviour.’ 71
Far from there being a sudden rejection of existing practices, by early
2003 there were only 143 commercial sites, serving 161 screens, equipped
with state-of-the-art digital projectors for feature films.72 Even the jump
to 328 digital screens in 2004 does not represent more than a miniscule
percentage of the total world screens.73 China has been moving to digital
projection and delivery faster than any other country, with plans for 100
cinemas before 2005, and 2,500 e-cinema venues by 2009.74 Notwithstanding
the financial and technological roadblocks to development, exhibitors have
experimented with less advanced projector systems and with events other
than feature films, including live sports, popular music, operas, ballets,
Broadway musicals, and television programs, not to mention the now fairly
common rental of facilities for corporate events.75 Three Brazilian art film
circuits have jointly developed an e-cinema network, using the technology’s
lower operating costs to help promote less mainstream feature fare.76 Seeing
revenue generating possibilities, U.S. exhibitor Regal has been aggressive in
its establishment of pre-show e-cinema as part of its film performances By
February 2003, its division Regal CineMedia had networked installations
in 158 theaters, serving 2000 screens. Replacing pre-screening slide shows,
these facilities present a 20-minute pre-show distributed to theatres via
satellite transmission, of which one third is advertising. For this pre-show,
Regal signed NBC and Turner to provide both content and advertisements.77

379
 g oing to the mov ies

Landmark Theaters, noted for its independent and international films, set
about adding digital projection to all of its fifty-three theaters, although
they were not networked, each instead having its own computer.78 Outside
the U.S., the U.K. Film Council made similar investments in nearly 150
cinemas, thinking that digital cinema’s reduced cost of distribution may be
a boon for independent and art cinema, and Arts Alliance opened a seven
screen digital projection and delivery network in 2003.79
When we consider this rising industrial adoption of both d- and e-
cinema, it becomes clear that a reduction in the costs of distribution provides
an added incentive to replace audiovisual packages faster, further reinforcing
the drift toward the rapid turnover of films in cinemas. As the growing
number of alternative presentations indicates, moving away from celluloid
allows distributors to provide new slates of programming, from the ‘live’
sporting event and concert to the networked preview package. In many
ways these experiments in programming begin to resemble the schedules of
television broadcasters. The simultaneity of the current cinema is entrenched
further, and ‘opening everywhere’ simultaneously remains the ever-present
promise. In short, these changes amount to temporal experiments as much
as tests of the acceptability of the projected digital image. Conversion is
not just a technological or financial issue; it is one of procedures, genres,
and practices. We might ask how we need to re-think the specificity of the
cultural activity at the motion picture theatre in light of such developments.
To the existing tendency for rapidly revised runs and openings we can expect
to see the sense of immediacy and the ‘liveness’ of performance return to the
movie house. While they are marginal at the moment, live event screenings
should push us to reconsider our understanding of theatrical exhibition as
bound by feature films, just as film studies has had to acknowledge and
take seriously, however reluctantly, the reality that films are themselves not
bound by theatres and have a life elsewhere.
The temporality of the cinema culture continues to accelerate in other
arenas, altering the life cycle of audiovisual materials. In 2003, Disney
became the last major to move to simultaneous video and DVD releasing
for rental and retail markets. Their films also began to appear on pay-per-
view three, rather than four, months after theatrical release.80 At times this
acceleration has been intensified as a result of poor box office performance.
Such was the case of the early fall releasing of DVD and videos for the
2003 summer blockbusters, an unusual number of which were seen as
disappointments by investors.81 The timeline of the releases in successive
formats, however, can create curious circumstances between countries. For
example, 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle 2002) opened in the U.K. in October,
then in June 2003 in Canada and the U.S. By that time, the DVD was

380
 multiple x es a nd the speed of cinem a cult ur e

already available in Britain, with an alternative, more pessimistic ending.

Word of the availability of a less uplifting finale traveled across the Atlantic,
and drew the attention of fans. The appeal of the darker conclusion was
substantial enough for the film’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, to release into
domestic theaters a revised version of the film that included the two endings
only a month after the initial release.82 Thus, a DVD release in one country
prompted the alteration of a theatrical release in another. Or consider the
innovative promotion for Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder 2004), the remake
of the 1978 George Romero horror classic. On Monday, 15 March 2004, four
days before its scheduled opening, USA Network presented ‘the terrifying
first 10 minutes of this major motion picture exactly as you’ll see it on
the big screen.’ 83 Capitalizing on the cross-mobility of television and film
audiences and their genre preferences, the promotion interrupted a broadcast
of the popular horror film, Final Destination (James Wong 2000). More
than an extended trailer, this was a first-look sneak-peek at an excerpt of a
film shown in a location to which it would return some months later.
The preceding documentation of investments and experiments remain
but a partial portrait, pertaining to just a fraction of the globe. The global
reorganization of screen traffic has been in actuality an extraordinarily
selective process, one that involves a reinforcement of the centre of gravity
for the flow of transnational film culture. Thus, while one stratum of highly
visible texts may be simultaneously released on a continental or global scale,
others may now take longer to arrive, if they ever do. This application of
international cultural power leads some to the point of grotesque celebration.
Variety commented, triumphantly, ‘in contrast to Europe, the region [Latin
America] saw Hollywood’s supremacy remain untroubled by domestic hits
in most arenas,’ as ‘Mexican production sank to its lowest level since the
1930s.’ 84 Such blatant imperialistic pride extended even to cinemagoing
practices, as ‘Even the less well-off Costa Ricans and Peruvians are getting
the mall ‘n’ movie habit.’ 85
As control over a national cinema culture is wrested away from a
domestic industry, there are supplementary consequences for cinema culture.
For one, these conditions alter the disposition of cinemagoers, in whom a
material and imagined sense of the ‘everywhere’ of the current cinema has
been fostered, as is evident in the many trailers promising this ubiquity. As a
result, there is a corresponding realignment of the very idea of the timeliness
of cinema and of a viewer’s affiliation with an international community of
cinemagoers. To reiterate, cinemas are now locations for experiencing new
cultural texts; there is no backlog, as would be found in videotape/DVD
rental outlets or CD stores. Commercial cinemas are not just becoming
more like closed-circuit broadcasting venues with e-cinema; they are also

381
 g oing to the mov ies

becoming more analogous to magazine and newspaper stands in the short-

lived currency of their products. Films age elsewhere, but not at cinemas.
We may conceptualise this era of exhibition and distribution as an effort
to maintain tighter control over the economic value at the front end, the
point of introduction of a film, with the expectation of increasingly looser
control throughout its lifecycle as it mutates into ever more mobile, cheaper
and more reproducible forms.
The 1990s multiplex building boom, much of which was jointly financed
by transnational entertainment conglomerates and local national development
firms, presents us with an extensive network of landing pads for a current
cinema that jets its way across the world. Although this process is a product
of business practices and ownership structures, its consequences extend
to the very ‘structure of feeling’ of everyday life in a global context. As
Raymond Williams powerfully argues: ‘… no mode of production and therefore
no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes
or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention’ 86 Treating
the spatial and temporal determinations of film points us to the specificities
of location and practice, and thus to outcomes beyond the sameness of the
films.87 The sheer volume of cinema spaces has escalated in some areas and
contracted in others, reorganising where, when and how people participate
in contemporary cinema culture and in ‘new’ audiovisual culture. It becomes
important to note what kinds of spaces are being exported, and to consider
what it means to ‘get the mall ‘n’ movie habit.’ These spaces are chains,
literally and figuratively drawing links to other cinema spaces in other cities
and to cinema culture in other countries, and conversely leaving other places
out of the circuit. Here, one must recognize this as yet another instance of
modernity’s uneven development. The chain-links of cultural practice shift
our attention from films, images, sounds and narratives, which studies of
global culture tend to focus on. Instead, one becomes aware of the material
and experiential dimensions resulting from an increasing involvement of
internationally operating major chains.
The international multiplex manufactures zones of global cultural traffic,
zones almost exclusively associated with the life of a contemporary city. As
Bruce Robbins might put it, cinemas are places to be and feel global.88 This
is not to suggest that there is some global everyday; in fact, we need more
work on national, city, and neighbourhood manifestations of the tendencies
and sensibilities to which I have alluded. The forces documented in this
chapter reshape and reinforce the flow of culture. They selectively alter city
and suburban life and re-organize the relations among media and cultural
practices. This fuels the alteration of the cinemagoing experience, regardless
of the effect upon the look and sound of motion pictures themselves.

382
 20

‘Cinema Comes to Life at the

Cornerhouse, Nottingham’
‘American’ Exhibition, Local Politics and
Global Culture in the Construction of the
Urban Entertainment Centre

Mark Jancovich

C i n e m a has acquired a major significance in accounts of globalisation.

Films feature prominently in negotiations over free trade, while the
standard icons of globalisation are those of food, drink and ‘Hollywood
movies’: what John Tomlinson refers to as ‘hamburgers, Mickey Mouse and
Coca-Cola.’ 1 As well as the films themselves, their modes of exhibition have
come to symbolise global culture. In his account of the multiplex, Stuart
Hanson argues:

Multiplexes are a clue to the process which the American sociologist

George Ritzer calls ‘McDonaldisation’ … ‘by which the principles
of the fast-foot restaurant are coming to dominate more and more
sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world.’ 2

‘McDonaldisation’ is seen as a form of ‘capitalist efficiency’ specific to ‘large

transnational business’ organisations.3
The multiplex, often seen as a product of American cultural imperialism
and globalisation is, as Tomlinson demonstrates, often seen as little more
than the result of a process of ‘Americanisation.’ 4 As Duncan Webster
has pointed out, debates about Americanisation often present it as a three

383
 g oing to the mov ies

stage process through which American culture invades another culture,

colonises it and final homogenises it, or else transforms it into a bland and
uniform culture indistinguishable from America itself.5 For critics from
Herbert Schiller to E.W. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, American
cultural products or ‘homogenised North Atlantic cultural slop’ are seen
as the ‘new missionaries of global capitalism,’ whose exportation to other
countries simply converts those cultures to the ethos and values of American
capitalism and consumerism.6
There are a number of problems with this position. Firstly, as Tomlinson
points out, it ‘makes a leap of inference from the simple presence of
cultural goods to the attribution of deeper cultural or ideological effects.’ 7
The presence of American cultural goods does not determine how they
are understood or consumed within a specific cultural context. Secondly,
it typically conflates American culture, capitalism and consumerism,
using an ‘Imaginary America’ as a scapegoat for capitalism. Christopher
Bigsby, writing about an earlier period, observed that ‘complaints about
Americanisation have often amounted to little more than laments over a
changing world … where “Americanisation” frequently means little more
than the incidence of change.’ 8 Accusations of Americanisation often serve
to deflect and disavow social problems: violence in Britain is not a product
of social tensions but caused by the influence of American music, films
or television programming; contemporary consumerism is not a product
of specific forms of capitalist organisation but the diffusion of perverse
American values such as greed and acquisitiveness; and exploitation in the
work place is not a product of inherent inequalities within the structure of
capitalist relations but the product of the evil business practices of American
corporations such as McDonalds.9
Discourses of Americanisation thus involve an ‘Othering’ of America
in which America comes to stand for all that is problematic, and other
identities, particularly national identities, are absolved from blame. Identity
is central to many fears of Americanisation and globalisation. Critics of
globalisation frequently claim that it results in both a loss of identity between
cultures and a loss of diversity within them. As Martin Woolacott puts
it: ‘What will it be like when all the globe is Disneyland?’ 10 Identity is
therefore presented as an obvious and uncontested value while conformity
is presented as an obvious and uncontested threat.
This opposition is, however, based on specific classed and gendered
dispositions, and is more frequently associated with certain cultural forms
than others.11 As the references to ‘homogenised North Atlantic cultural
slop’ and ‘Disneyland’ make clear, popular culture almost invariably bears
the brunt of the attack. On the one hand, the popular forms of the

384
 ‘cinem a comes to life’

MacDonalds meal and the genre film seem to offer the most potent images
of ­reproducibility, with their promise of the same experience everywhere in
the world.12 On the other, the association between globalisation and popular
culture also works to produce the same kind of conflations and elisions
discussed above, implicitly condemning certain aspects of American culture
while absolving others. This not only reproduces cultural distinctions,
through which the popular is associated with the homogeneous and
inauthentic and high culture is associated with diversity and authenticity,
but it thereby enables certain cultural values to be seen as unproblem-
atically universal. Those who condemn the exportation of popular culture
often vocally support the global diffusion of high culture or, at least, the
enforcement of human rights.
Among its reported ill effects, globalisation is often seen as having
disastrous implications for our sense of place. Theorists such as Joshua
Meyrowitz have claimed that global media are increasingly creating a
culture in which people have ‘no sense of place,’ while others, such as
Marc Augé, argue that global culture leads to the erosion of local identities
and the emergence of ‘supermodern non-places’: airports, supermarkets,
motorway service stations and cash-dispensers, in which interactions between
individuals are increasingly replaced by instructions on monitors.13 Many
of these ‘non-places’ depend on and facilitate movement or travel. Within
them, individuals are isolated, silent and anonymous while the environment
itself lacks a sense of location and could be anywhere. Augé’s vision is also
related to a more general anxiety that, in global culture, ‘there is nowhere
to go but to the shops,’ a fear that everyday life has become increasingly
commodified. It is claimed that social activities have been reduced to
consumerism and that the world has simply become a place to shop and
‘all the globe is Disneyland.’ 14 The multiplex is often associated with these
non-places, but such responses tend to come most often from those social
groups who rarely use these cinemas. Those who do use multiplexes are
more likely to describe them in very different terms.
As Tomlinson points out, one problem with Augé’s account of non-
places such as Roissy Airport is that he describes only the experience of
the consumers: ‘what he does not account for … is the entirely different
experience of Roissy that belongs to its more permanent denizens—the
check-in clerks, baggage handlers, cleaners, caterers, security staff, and so
forth who work there. For these people the non-place of the terminal is
clearly a “real” place—their workplace.’ 15 Even for consumers, a non-place
can acquire different meanings: people who use the same supermarket
regularly build up familiarity with specific cashiers; run into friends who
are also doing their shopping; and start to recognise other customers who

385
 g oing to the mov ies

use the store at the same times. The non-place starts to look a lot like a
‘real’ place.
Many criticisms of the regeneration of places such as Times Square in
New York make similar accusations that the area has been ‘Disneyfied,’
converted from a ‘real’ place into a commercial non-place.16 This particular
regeneration was, however, specifically designed to regenerate the city by
attracting tourism. If places such as Times Square, Fisherman’s Wharf in
San Francisco and Quincy Market in Boston are really global non-places
containing the same shops and goods, it is difficult to see how they are
supposed to attract tourists. Given that global non-places are associated with
travel, one has to ask why people bother to travel if the world has really
become homogeneous and undifferentiated.
Ulf Hannerz has argued that tourists do not really want difference,
but ‘home plus’ some exotic extra: ‘Spain is home plus sunshine, India is
home plus servants, Africa is home plus elephants and tigers.’ 17 Hannerz
emphasises sameness in his attempt to distinguish the tourist from the true
cosmopolitan, but one could equally choose to emphasise difference, or else
acknowledge that all travellers need some stable points of reference, without
which we are all adrift, unable to feel secure and unable to predict the
consequences of our actions.18 We might equally acknowledge that people’s
differing perceptions of threat are, at least in part, socially defined.19 The
attachment to the domestic, which is so often used to denigrate lower
middle-class women, is related to their sense of insecurity within public
space, while the social position of the middle-class male critics who celebrate
public space enables them to feel relatively secure, confident and assertive
within it.20
In his account of the multiplex, Tomlinson describes an imaginary couple
on a night out:

since the new multiplex arrived in the 1980s they go to the cinema
more, and this in itself is an oddly deterritorialised experience. The
cinema complex is an ‘out-of-town’ site on the edge of a business park
and trading estate and so surrounded, as they arrive in the twilight,
by dark warehouses rather than the pubs and shops and restaurants
around the old city-centre Odeon or Gaumont. But it is, of course,
so much easier—and safer—to park here. Once inside, the sense
that this is an environment that has been artificially ‘placed into’ the
locality continues—this is clearly an American cinema, evident from
the transatlantic voice-overs in the trailers and the slightly jarring
terms in the screened announcements (‘candy’, ‘please deposit trash’)
to the giant buckets of popcorn being consumed.21

386
 ‘cinem a comes to life’

Although Tomlinson describes this imaginary night out as if he is discussing

an abstract and generalised multiplex that could be located anywhere, the
multiplex with which he, as a resident of Nottingham, would be most
familiar does not conform to his description. The Nottingham Showcase
may be located in an out of town site, but its immediate surroundings are
not occupied by factories but rather by a series of other leisure facilities:
bars, nightclubs, restaurants and a bowling alley.
The ‘old city centre cinemas’ such as Nottingham’s Odeon, built in the
1930s and originally called the Ritz, did not try to blend into their locality
but were spectacular and exotic buildings that were seen by the local press
as evidence that the city was not a provincial backwater but fully modern
and cosmopolitan. Many of the cinemas that opened during the cinema
building boom of the 1930s closed in the late 1940s and 1950s, by which
time they were seen as old, traditional buildings representing a dying way
of life. They were, however, not much older when they went out of business
than the ‘new’ multiplex that Tomlinson, writing in 1999, describes.
While Tomlinson’s account concerns the insertion of cinemas into the
everyday life of the city, he deduces the experience of visiting the multiplex
from a description of the cinema rather than an examination of the processes
through which it was placed into the locality. Nonetheless, his account does
begin to suggest a key factor when he notes that it is ‘easier—and safer—to
park’ at the multiplex than in the town centre. In Britain and elsewhere, the
multiplex was a response to the crime, traffic and social problems associated
with city centres during the 1970s and 1980s.22
Many accounts of the multiplex actually conflate two different phenomena:
the multiplexes built on the outskirts of cities in the 1980s and early 1990s,
and the subsequent wave of Urban Entertainment Centres built in city
centres from the mid-1990s onwards.23 While the multiplex was the product
of a flight from the inner city, the UEC was the product of a concerted
effort by national and local government to regenerate the city centres. By
focusing on the supposedly American origins of the multiplex and the UEC,
most accounts have failed to see the significant differences between them,
differences that result from the different contexts within which they are
located. The form and meaning of cultural goods are not simply shaped by
their point of origin but are also indigenised within the specific contexts
within which they are consumed,24 and these contexts can reshape and
change their meaning, a point of which developers are well aware:

The vast majority of films screened are from Hollywood, and many
of the shops and restaurants are either American or are selling
American-style goods and services. But this does not mean that,

387
 g oing to the mov ies

from a property point of view, all the developments are alike. The
problems posed by projects in Spain are different from those in
Northern Europe, for example.25

Indeed, as Paul Grainge has shown, different UECs have very different
characters from each other, as a result of the specific local conditions within
which they are developed.26
During the 1990s, concern about the decline of city centres led to calls for
policies to regenerate them. One government response was the introduction
of Planning Permission Guideline 6 (PPG 6) which required authorities ‘to
determine planning applications in such a manner that the city centre must
be considered before an out of town site.’ 27 Developers turned their attention
to city centres. According to Estates Gazette Interactive,

The explanation of this shift is simple: PPG6. As Steve Weiner, chief

executive of Cine UK, comments: ‘It’s not difficult to get planning
permission for out-of-town leisure schemes. It’s impossible.’
A stream of rejected planning applications has forced many
operators to rethink their acquisition plans. Mark Atkins at Jones Lang
Wootton says: ‘Cinema operators want space as quickly as possible.
They won’t abide being seen to struggle to get planning permission.
Deliverability is the key and “town centre” is deliverable.’ 28

The UEC was, therefore, the product of a pragmatic response by developers

who wanted to enhance their chances of obtaining planning permission, but
also hoped that by addressing current policy objectives they would obtain
favourable terms from local government and so ‘see planning and the market
working in harmony.’ 29
While the Urban Entertainment Centre is often associated with the
cinema chain housed in it, it is not usually the case that the exhibition
company owns or runs the building; rather it is one of a number of different
companies who occupy its space. The buildings have usually been the
creation of local developers who either rent out space or sell a completed
building development on to other companies. In the case of the development
that became the Nottingham Cornerhouse, for example, the original
developer, Forman Hardy Holdings, did not build the eventual centre, but
simply obtained planning permission for the development. Having increased
the value of their property, they sold the land to another developer, Wilson
Bowden, at a considerable profit. That company built the site and then sold
it on to a pension company, which managed the site, renting units out to
shops, bars and restaurants.

388
 ‘cinem a comes to life’

Because the regeneration of city centres was seen as both socially beneficial
and financially advantageous to councils, individual UEC developments
have also been shaped by the agendas of local political organisations. Such
developments have had the potential not only to increase the rateable value
of city centre property but also to attract businesses to regions and so
increase their general prosperity. Places of leisure and consumption were
recognised as being particularly important in this regard; in Nottingham,
for example, it was claimed that ‘a multi-screen cinema should have a
knock-on effect in the city centre with more people visiting the local bars
and restaurants after watching a film.’ 30
The UEC in Nottingham was not simply designed to regenerate the
city centre in general but also a specific section of that centre. The council
supported the venture because it was to be built next to Trinity Square,
‘a part of town’ that ‘has been terribly neglected and any development
should be welcome.’ 31 The centre, it was hoped, would ‘revitalise” the area,
attract consumers to the businesses already located there and attract new
businesses to the area. The UEC site was also directly opposite the Theatre
Royal and the Concert Hall, so that the development would be located ‘in
an established leisure circuit of the city.’ Adding to the existing amenities,
it was argued that the UEC ‘will turn that part of Nottingham into the
cultural quarter.’ 32
This strategy was particularly important to Nottingham, which has
historically lacked heavy industry and has depended on leisure and
consumption for its affluence.33 It has therefore worked hard to maintain
its image as the regional centre for shopping, bars and, clubs, and also
‘culture,’ which attracts affluent consumers to whom the other facilities do
not necessarily appeal. The UEC was therefore seen as ‘a unique opportunity
to create a leisure scheme which will complement and enhance the existing
leisure and cultural facilities within the city centre’ and would therefore
‘ensure Nottingham’s continuing prominence as the principal regional
centre.’ 34 Plans for the cinema announced that it would have ‘leather
reclining seats’ at which customers would be served ‘gourmet foods’ such as
‘champagne and sushi.’ 35 Tickets were to be as much as £10 per head, about
twice that of any other cinema in the region at the time. The programming
would also be different, with screens that ‘aim to attract a different crowd
[from the traditional multiplex audience] by showing foreign, arthouse and
cult films.’ 36 In addition to the cinema, the building would also house a
restaurants, bars and clubs, and its ‘pedestrianised front and its proximity
to the Theatre Royal’ would give the area a continental feel that would
appeal to Nottingham’s ‘very cultured population … There is definitely a
market.’ 37

389
 g oing to the mov ies

Like earlier cinemas in Nottingham’s history, the building was therefore

supposed to emphasise the city’s image as a regional centre by presenting it
as an affluent and cosmopolitan centre of culture rather than a provincial
backwater. Neither its developers, the council nor the press viewed the centre
as the product of an invasion by a foreign colonising force, threatening
to destroy the city’s identity and sense of place. On the contrary, their
descriptions emphasised that it was a unique object, only possible because
of the city’s own special character. While these claims were in part local
boosterism, councillors supported the venture because it would enhance
the city’s image and attract consumers, not by creating a homogeneity in
which the city lost its identity but by distinguishing the city, at least at a
regional level.
To be successful, the UEC had to attract global brands to promote
the city, proving Nottingham’s distinctiveness by its ability to attract such
businesses. Rather than signifying homogeneity, brands such as Warner
Village are used by cities such as Nottingham as assets that signify the
health of the city’s economy and cultural life and themselves attract yet more
businesses. For example, the inward investment pages of Nottingham city
council’s website claim: ‘The leisure market, too, has seen a great expansion,
with the number of bars, clubs and pubs increasing from 209 in 1995 to
368 last year [1997], offering a combined capacity of 111,000. The recently
opened Cornerhouse is a tangible sign of the confidence in this sector,
with a multi-screen cinema and top restaurant chains like TGI Fridays
and Wagamama.’ 38 Rather than invading localities, global brands are often
actively courted by these localities.
The plans for Nottingham’s UEC certainly met with opposition from the
start, but this opposition was not motivated by a fear of American cultural
imperialism. It was not the new building itself that was opposed, but rather
the demolition of the Evening Post building that it was to replace. In this
campaign, the elderly were the most vocal protestors. They clearly identified
with the building and saw its proposed demolition as representative of
attitudes that defined them as irrelevant. As one protestor complained, ‘we
seem determined to be rid of a part of the city’s history … It’s as though
we are going through the 1960s syndrome “Out with the old, in with the
new.”’ 39
This campaign was couched not in terms of a loss of local identity
brought about by American cultural imperialism, but in resistance to certain
forms of local politics. It revealed a profound sense of alienation from the
political process. One letter complained that the city council behaved as if
they were ‘omniscient’ and ‘omnipotent’:

390
 ‘cinem a comes to life’

Having been appointed by an elected body they are no longer under

its control. They make a decision, they then listen to opinions, they
careful consider them, and then continue with the plan they intended
to impose.40

Others claimed that ‘the opinions of taxpayers don’t seem to matter to

the planners,’ 41 and that: ‘as a resident of Nottingham and a pensioner,
I’ve sadly watched the city being sold to the highest bidders, whose only
interest seems to be tearing down beautiful buildings and replacing them
with modern monstrosities no one wants.’ 42 Although English Heritage had
already declared the newspaper building ‘was not sufficiently archi­tecturally
or historically important’ to be designated as a listed building, by the time
that the plans came before the planning committee, a petition to preserve the
exterior of the building had acquired 11,000 signatures.43 The building had
become symbolic of the destruction of a way of life and of a sense of political
powerlessness among certain sections of the Nottingham population. As
has often been pointed out, modernity, and particularly urban geography
in modernity, involves a continual process of demolition and renewal.44 In
this process, the elderly often witness successive transformations, through
which the city literally becomes alien to them. One Nottingham resident,
for example, described driving around the city with her parents, who did
not actually see or experience the city before them but rather the absence of
the city they once knew.45 In this situation, the elderly experience alienation,
estrangement and a loss of security.
These responses to the demolition of the Evening Post building were
not, however, the whole story; the new building was read very differently
by its various consumers—who include the businesses renting space in the
complex as well as the general public who purchase goods and services
there. It is important to remember that the UEC is more than a cinema.
At the Cornerhouse, the cinema occupies most of the top two floors of a
five-story building. The rest of the space is rented out to other companies.
From the developers’ perspective, the cinema is there not to make money
in itself but to deliver customers to the other companies in the building,
and it was given favourable leasing terms by the owners for that reason.
The UEC has been seen as ‘a scaled down theme park’ in which the
cinema is a ‘magnet for traffic, benefiting both retailers and other leisure
operators.’ 46 The disadvantage of cinemas for such complexes is that they
do not turn over customers fast enough. Most complexes would ideally
‘average a £100 spend’ per car and a ‘two hour turnaround,’ but with
cinema attendance ‘the spend is low.’ As a result, the ‘sums don’t justify
having a cinema in the centre’ in themselves, and it is only through their

391
 g oing to the mov ies

ability to ‘attract extra customers’ to the centre that they are seen to ‘add
to the value.’ 47
Factors such as these led to a transformation of the building. While the
council had hoped that it would attract affluent consumers and help produce
a cultural quarter within the city centre, the various companies that rented
space in the centre gradually changed its image and the clientele that it
attracted. Wagamama, a chain of Japanese-style noodle bars, stated that it
had been attracted to the centre by ‘the large and lively student population,
[and] an increasing inner-city residential sector.’ 48 Both of these groups
are largely young and single, and the centre became increasingly directed
to these groups. In transforming the meaning of the area, the centre also
confirmed certain aspects of its character, consolidating its image, at least
in the minds of some residents, as a potentially dangerous place at night,
One letter writer asked, ‘What do the police think of another nightclub
and ten-screen cinema?’ 49
Concerns over the supposedly ‘American’ character of the entertainment
emerged only very late in the day, and were clearly limited to a specific
section of the Nottingham population. Predictably, these attacks focused
on the lack of ‘real’ choice at the cinema, which, it was claimed, would
‘favour the big money blockbusters over the more thoughtful independent
and foreign language films.’ 50 Gill Henderson, head of Nottingham’s
regional film theatre, the Broadway, argued that ‘it might mean you can
choose to go to the same film at three different cinemas. That’s fine if
one of them does your favourite flavour of popcorn, and you want to see
the latest blockbuster there.’ 51 This was, however, hardly a disinterested
comment. Although art cinemas have criticised multi-screen venues for
their lack of diversity, they are equally concerned that if these new venues
do show art films, they will come into direct competition with their own
business.
The focus on American cultural imperialism obscures the extent to which
UECs have actually offered more diversity than is commonly acknowledged.
The Cornerhouse has been concerned not only to stress that it would show
‘a wide selection of non-mainstream movies along with the blockbusters
that one would expect’ but it also placed special emphasis on its ‘weekly
Bollywood presentation.’ These screenings proved so successful that the
cinema massively expanded this strand of programming and employed
Ravinder Panaser, ‘a Bollywood expert, to commission their range of
features.’ 52 Critics of the supposedly global homogeneity of multiplex
entertainment rarely acknowledge the existence of such programming, but
the Cornerhouse has used its promise of ‘the best in Asian films’ as evidence
of its commitment to the local community.

392
 ‘cinem a comes to life’

The dynamics of globalisation are far more complex than is often

acknowledged. Cinemas seek to prove their commitment to local communities
by showing films produced on the other side of the world, and the claim that
these cinemas are products of Americanisation disguises the diversification
of mainstream programming, or its Bollywoodisation. As cultural goods and
services move from one context to another, they are subject to a complex
series of negotiations and reinterpretations. As John Tomlinson observes,
while globalisation has often been seen as a Westernisation of the world,

an acceptance of the technological-scientific culture of the West, of

its economic rationality and even some aspects of its consumerism
may well coexist with a vigorous rejection of its secular outlook,
along with its sexual permissiveness, attitudes towards gender and
the family relations, social use of alcohol and so on—as is common
in different mixes in many Islamic societies.” 53

Globalisation is neither a process of homogenisation nor a one-way process.

It is an uneven process of interaction and exchange in which there are ‘no
guarantees that the geographical patterns of dominance established in early
modernity—the elective affinity between the interests of capitalism and of
the West—will continue.’ 54

393
 Notes

Introduction
1. For an overview, see Sumiko Higashi et al., ‘In Focus: Film History, or a Baedeker Guide
to the Historical Turn,’ Cinema Journal 44:1 (Fall 2004), pp. 94–143.
2. Colin MacCabe, ‘Preface’ to Slavoj Żiżek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski
between Theory and Post-Theory (London: British Film Institute, 2001), p. vii, quoted in
David Bordwell, ‘Slavoj Żiżek: Say Anything’ (April 2005), http://www.davidbordwell.
net/zizek-say-anything.htm (accessed 26 August 2006).
3. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell and Ting Wang, Global
Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2004), p. 31.
4. Miller et al, Global Hollywood 2, p. 45.
5. James Hay, ‘Piecing Together What Remains of the Cinematic City,’ in David B. Clarke
(ed.), The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 210–12.
6. Kate Bowles and Nancy Huggett, ‘Cowboys, Jaffas and Pies: Researching Cinemagoing
in the Illawarra,’ in Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes (eds), Hollywood Abroad:
Audiences and Cultural Exchange (London: British Film Institute, 2004), pp. 64–77.
7. Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1997), p. 103.
8. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian,’ Critical Inquiry
18:1 (Autumn 1991), pp. 89–90.
9. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollanz, 1963),
p. 13. We take the term ‘undistinguished’ from Hamilton Holt (ed.), The Life Stories
of Undistinguished Americans As Told By Themselves (New York: Routledge, 1990). First
published in 1906, Holt’s book collected sixteen of the seventy-five ‘auto­biographies of
undistinguished American men and women’ published in The Independent magazine over
the previous four years. In an introductory note to the book, Holt described the aim of
each autobiography as being ‘to typify the life of the average worker in some particular
vocation, and to make each story the genuine experience of a real person.’ (p. xxix).
10. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 13; Vivian Sobchack, ‘What is Film
History?, or, the Riddle of the Sphinxes,’ in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams,
(eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 303.
11. Leo Lowenthal, quoted in Lee Grieveson, ‘Mimesis at the Movies,’ in Lee Grieveson and
Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Cinema Studies (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
The history of the ‘disciplinarization’ of film studies, and in particular its establishment
as a critically based humanities subject and its divorce from earlier connections to the

394
 notes to pages 3 – 14
social sciences and communication studies, is traced in several essays in Inventing Cinema
Studies, and in particular in Lee Greiveson and Haidee Wasson’s ‘Introduction: on the
Histories of Studying Cinema.’
12. David Bordwell, ‘Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,’
and Noël Carroll, ‘Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,’ both in David
Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds), Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
13. Lawrence Stone, ‘History and Postmodernism,’ Past and Present 135 (May 1992),
p. 194.
14. Emilie Altenhoh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema: the Audience,’ trans. Kathleen Cross,
Screen 42:3 (Autumn 2001), pp. 249–93.
15. Gregory A. Waller, ‘Hillbilly Music and Will Rogers: Small-town Picture Shows in
the 1930s,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences:
From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI Publishing, 1999),
pp. 164–79.
16. In 1948, one million American households already had their own movie cameras. Robert
C. Allen, ‘From Exhibition to Reception: Reflections on the Audience in Film History’
Screen 31:4 (Winter 1990), p. 350.
17. Motion Picture Association Worldwide Market Research, ‘US Entertainment Industry:
2005 MPA Market Statistics,’ p. 7. Viewed at http://www.mpaa.org/researchStatistics.
asp.
18. 16mm film survived for many years as the preferred gauge for schools, churches, libraries
and universities.
19. ‘What is Being Done for Motion Pictures,’ statement by Will H. Hays, London,
5 October 1923, p. 8, in Douglas Gomery (ed.), The Will Hays Papers (microfilm,
Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1986), part 1, reel 12, frame 813.
20. Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1993), p. 237.
21. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th-Century Europe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 3.
22. U.S. Supreme Court, Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495 (1952).
23. For summaries and critiques of this agenda, see Jonathan Freedman, Media Violence and
Its Effect on Aggression: Assessing the Scientific Evidence (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2002); Martin Barker and Julian Petley (eds), Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate
(London: Routledge, 1997).
24. Reporter’s transcript, Board meeting, Association of Motion Picture Producers, 10
February 1930, Motion Picture Association of America Archive, 1930 AMPP file,
p. 14.
25. Herbert Blumer and Philip Hauser, Movies, Delinquency and Crime (New York:
Macmillan, 1933), pp. 134–35.
26. Richard Maltby, ‘“A Brief Romantic Interlude”: Dick and Jane Go to Three-and-a-Half
Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema,’ in Bordwell and Carroll (eds), Post-Theory,
pp. 434–59.
27. This manuscript is published as part of Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie and Kathryn H.
Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
28. Paul G. Cressey, ‘The Motion Picture Experience as Modified by Social Background
and Personality’ American Sociological Review Vol. 3:4 (August 1938), p. 522.
29. Cressey, ‘The Motion Picture Experience,’ p. 518.
30. David Buckingham, ‘Electronic Child Abuse? Rethinking the Media’s Effects on
Children,’ in Barker and Petley (eds), Ill Effects, p. 26.

395
 notes to pages 14 – 2 8

31. Stephen Kline, ‘Media Effects: Redux or Reductive?’—A Reply to the St Louis Court
Brief,’ Particip@tions Volume 1, Issue 1 (November 2003), http://www.participations.
org/volume%201/issue%201/1_01_kline_reply.htm.
32. Graham Murdock, ‘Reservoirs of Dogma: An Archaeology of Popular Anxieties,’
in Barker and Petley (eds), Ill Effects, pp. 69, 77, 83; Cressey, ‘The Motion Picture
Experience,’ pp. 518–19.
33. Cressey, ‘The Motion Picture Experience,’ pp. 518–19.
34. See, for example, Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the
Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gregory D. Black, The Catholic
Crusade Against the Movies, 1940–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
James M. Skinner, The Cross and the Cinema: The Legion of Decency and the National
Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, 1933–1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993);
Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry
(New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1996).
35. Richard Ellis, ‘American Studies at the Millennium—Some Thoughts,’ American Studies
in Britain (Autumn/Winter 1999), p. 7; Janice Radway, ‘What’s in a Name’ American
Quarterly (March 1999), pp. 1–32.
36. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. x,
52, 456.
37. Jean-Marie Colombani, editorial, Le Monde, 13 September 2001.
°
38. Nataša D urovičová, ‘Translating America: The Hollywood Multilinguals, 1929–1933,’
in Rick Altman (ed.), Sound Theory, Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 141.
39. Philip Rosen, ‘Reformulating Hollywood as Global Cinema,’ paper given at the
Flinders Humanities Symposium on ‘Hollywood as Global Cinema,’ Flinders University,
Adelaide, South Australia, December 2002, p. 6.
40. Jennifer Holt, ‘In Deregulation We Trust: The Synergy of Politics and Industry in
Reagan-Era Hollywood,’ Film Quarterly 55:2 (Winter 2001–02), pp. 22–29.
41. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 189–223.
42. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, p. 446.
43. Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1907), p. 9.
44. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, p. 100.
45. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
46. Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York: Braziller,
1978).

Chapter 1: Race, Religion, and Rusticity: Relocating U.S. Film History

1. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), pp. 73–5.
2. Sumiko Higashi, ‘In Focus: Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn,’
Cinema Journal 44:1 (Fall 2004), pp. 94–100.
3. Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’ in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology
of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950), p. 410, quoted in Ben Singer, ‘Modernity,
Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,’ in Leo Charney and Vanessa
Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1995), p. 73.
4. Thirteenth Census of the United States (1910), Abstract of the Census—Population (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), p. 59.
5. Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century, U.S. Bureau of
the Census (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002), pp. 37–38.

396
 notes to pages 29 –36

6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the U.S., Colonial Times to 1970, Pt. 1
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), Series A 57–72: Population
in Rural and Urban Territory By Size of Place, 1790–1970.
7. Richard Maltby, ‘Sticks, Hicks and Flaps: Classical Hollywood’s Generic Conception
of Its Audiences,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), Identifying Hollywood’s
Audiences (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 23–41.
8. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, ‘White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New
Paradigms of Urban History,’ Reviews in American History 26:1 (1998), pp. 175–204.
9. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, ‘Introduction,’ in Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude
(eds), The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History
of Rural America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 6.
10. Gerald W. Creed and Barbara Ching, ‘Recognizing Rusticity: Identity and the Power of
Place,’ in Barbara Ching and Gerald W. Creed (eds), Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity
and Cultural Hierarchy (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–38.
11. Motion Picture Herald, 28 May 1938, quoted in Martin Johnson, ‘“See[ing] Yourself As
Others See You” in the Films of H. Lee Waters,’ M.A. Thesis, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005, pp. 24–25.
12. See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann
Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill
World (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 5–13.
13. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 90–118.
14. Thirteenth Census of the United States (1910), Abstract of the Census—Population, p. 80.
Between 1860 and 1910 the percentage of the population made up by immigrants
fluctuated between 13.2 and 14.7 per cent. Even though the total number of immigrants
to the U.S. increased by more than one million between 1890 and 1900, the proportion
of the total population they represented actually fell—from 14.7 to 13.6 per cent.
15. Concord Evening Tribune, 29 January 1908, p. 4.
16. Terry Lindvall, ‘Sundays in Norfolk: Toward a Protestant Utopia Through Film
Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1906–1926,’ chapter three below.
17. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, pp. 60–61.
18. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the U.S., Colonial Times to 1970, Pt. 1
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), Series A 43–56: Number
of Places in Urban and Rural Territory by Size of Place, 1790–1970.
19. Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, Volume I–IV, Population
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921–23), p. 59.
20. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 1–94.
21. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, p. 106.
22. Thirteenth Census of the United States (1910), Abstract of the Census—Population,
pp. 92–95.
23. Demographic Trends in the 20th Century, Table 8, Population by Race for the United
States, Regions, and States: 1900–1990, Part B Black Population, p. A–21; Table 3–1,
Ten States with the Highest Percents Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native, and
Asian and Pacific Islander: 1900, 1950, and 2000, p. 93.
24. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
25. For a discussion of the desegregation of Southern movie theatres, see Thomas Doherty’s
chapter in this volume.
26. John David Smith, ‘Segregation and the Age of Jim Crow,’ in John David Smith (ed.),
When Did Southern Segregation Begin? (Boston, MA: Beford/St. Martin’s, 2002), p. 34.
27. Smith, ‘Segregation and the Age of Jim Crow,’ pp. 34–25. Grace Elizabeth Hale calls

397
 notes to pages 36– 40

segregation one of the ‘spatial mediations of modernity.’ See Hale, Making Whiteness: The
Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). The
term ‘panoramic perception’ comes from Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey:
Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, translated by Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen
Books, 1979). Lynne Kirby discusses the relationship between the ‘perceptual paradigm’
of train travel and that of cinema spectatorship in Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent
Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 7. The expression ‘racing of
space’ is adapted from Barbara Young Welke’s Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race,
Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), p. 306. ‘Jim Crow,’ Welke writes, ‘raced space.’
28. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992), pp. 61–2.
29. See Gregory A. Waller, ‘Another Audience: Black Moviegoing, 1907–16,’ Cinema
Journal 31:2 (Winter 1992), pp. 3–25; Charlene Regester, ‘From the Buzzard’s Roost:
Black Moviegoing in Durham and Other North Carolina Cities During the Early
Period of American Cinema,’ Film History 17 (2005), pp. 113–24. Waller’s research
on black theaters and audiences in Lexington, Kentucky, also features in his Main
Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), especially chap. 7, ‘Another
Audience: Black Moviegoing from 1907 to 1916,’ pp. 161–79.
30. Smith, ‘Segregation and the Age of Jim Crow,’ p. 8.
31. Barbara Welke, ‘When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men,’
in Smith (ed.), When Did Southern Segregation Begin?, pp. 133–54. The quote is from
p. 148.
32. Quoted by Leon Litwack in ‘Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow,’
in Smith (ed.), When Did Southern Segregation Begin?, pp. 153–64. Quote is on p. 157.
33. Erle Stillwell Collection, Henderson County Public Library, Hendersonville, NC.
34. Robin Payne, ‘“We Enjoy Movies Too!” Porgy and Bess, the Citizens Committee for
“Open” Movies, and the Desegregation of the Chapel Hill Movie Theatres, 1959–62,’
unpublished seminar paper, American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 2005, p. 23. She cites the following sources for the desegregation of the Carolina
Theater in the fall of 1961: ‘Carolina’s Limited Integration Plan Accepted Calmly as One
Step Forward,’ The Chapel Hill Weekly, 24 August 1961, 4B; ‘Carolina Theater Initiates
Limited Integration Plan,’ The Chapel Hill Weekly, 21 August 1961, pp. 1, 8; ‘Negro
Students May Attend Theater: Desegregation Moves Along in Town,’ The Daily Tar Heel,
19 September 1961, p. 5; and ‘Two Break Movie Color Bar: Chapel Hill House Opens
to Race at UNC,’ The Carolina Times, 26 August 1961, pp. 1, 3A.
35. 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
36. Max W. Turner and Frank R. Kennedy, ‘Exclusion, Ejection, and Segregation of Theatre
Patrons,’ 32 Iowa L. Rev. 634 1947. The Tennessee law is Tenn. Code Ann. 5262 (Michie
1938).
37. 273 U.S. 418 (1927), quoted in Turner and Kennedy, ‘Exclusion. Ejection and Segregation,’
p. 629.
38. Nicholas K. Blomley, Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power (New York: The Guilford
Press, 1994), pp. 45–46.
39. Charlene Regester’s work is an exception here.
40. Robert J. Landry, ‘Negro Only: Hazy Outlook,’ Variety, 14 August 1963, p. 5. Quoted in
Thomas Doherty, “Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts, and Lily White Palaces: Desegregating
the Motion Picture Theater,” in this volume.
41. See Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United
States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 155–70; ‘232 Negro

398
 notes to pages 40–46

Theatres 1½% of All Houses, Motion Picture Herald,’ 24 April 1937, p. 78, quoted in
Johnson, ‘See[ing] Yourself As Others See You,’ p. 24. Stewart acknowledges that most
of the black theaters in Chicago were owned by whites (p. 162). In her Film History
article, Charlene Regester discusses several notable exceptions to this generalization,
in particular the theaters owned by the black exhibitor Frederick King Watkins in the
1910s and 1920s.
42. Quoted in Regester, ‘From the Buzzard’s Roost,’ p. 116. The cartoon appeared in the
Baltimore African American, 22 March 1930, p. 8.
43. Janna Jones, The Southern Movie Palace: Rise, Fall and Resurrection (Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida, 2003), p. 59.
44. Cheryl I. Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property,’ 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 1993.
45. Thomas Cripps, ‘The Myth of the Southern Box Office,’ in James Curtis and Lewis
Gould (eds), The Black Experience in America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1970), pp. 116–44.
46. Monroe Day (ed.), Family Expenditures for Education, Reading, Recreation, and Tobacco:
Five Regions (Washington: D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941), cited in Gregory
A. Waller, ‘Free Talking Picture—Every Farmer is Welcome: Non-theatrical Film and
Everyday Life in Rural America during the 1930s,’ in this volume.
47. As Greg Waller details in his study of moviegoing in Lexington, Kentucky, in the silent
era, religious opposition to the movies in many towns and small cities took the form of
sabbatarianism, and attracted support from both fundamentalist and more mainstream
Protestant clergy. Attempts by both black and white ministerial associations and the
‘Moral Improvement League’ to prohibit or restrict the showing of movies on Sundays
continued for a decade in Lexington. Waller notes that similar sabbatarian campaigns in
other Kentucky towns produced a variety of outcomes—from outright rejection of such
calls to closure of all theaters not only on Sunday evenings but on Wednesday evenings
as well. In the western Kentucky town of Owensboro, a 1916 municipal ordinance closed
white theaters on Sundays, but allowed ‘colored’ shows to stay open, on the theory that
‘negroes would be better off at the picture house than … frequenting dives.’ See Waller,
Main Street Amusements, p. 134.
48. J. Melville White, ‘The Motion Picture: Friend or Foe?’ Christianity Today (22 July 1966),
pp. 9–11. Changes in the evangelical stance toward the movies in the 1960s and 1970s
are discussed by Shanny Luft in his unpublished 2004 paper, ‘To Discern Between Good
and Evil: Christianity Today and the Movies.’
49. Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B. Taurus,
2002). The U.S. edition is: Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory
(New York: New York University Press, 2002).
50. James Hay, ‘Piecing Together What Remains of the Cinematic City,’x in David B.
Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 209–29. Quote is from
p. 216.

Chapter 2: Tri-racial Theaters in Robeson County, North Carolina, 1896–1940

1. Lee Grieveson, ‘Woof, Warp, History,’ Cinema Journal 44:1 (Fall 2004), p. 124.
2. For similar tales of lingering resentments, this time in a larger Southern town (Durham,
North Carolina), see ‘The Discursive Past’ in Jenna James’ The Southern Movie Palace: Rise,
Fall and Resurrection (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2003), particularly
pp. 205–208.
3. These changes have most recently been marked both by the election of a Lumbee mayor
in Lumberton, and by the efforts of Senator Elizabeth Dole to secure full federal
recognition of the Lumbee tribe.

399
 notes to pages 4 6 – 49

4. Karen I. Blu, The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 2–4.
5. Lumbee history is shrouded in mysteries. While Lumbees probably pre-dated European
or African immigration to America, their precise lineage is undocumented. Since their
culture generally lacks a distinctive religion, language, or set of social and/or leisure
customs setting them apart from European settlers, and because they were never in
open military conflict with the United States government, and subsisted primarily as a
farming rather than a nomadic people, they tended to remain under the cultural radar,
somewhat to their detriment, since they have not yet received complete recognition for
their Native American heritage from the federal government.
6. Lumbee identity is itself primarily a social construction. As Lumbee ethnologist Karen
Blu has noted, the foundation of Lumbee-ness for Lumbees consists of the confluence
of a network of family ties, a shared sense of an identifiable ‘home’ region for families
in several counties in southeastern North Carolina, and from what amounts to a group
judgment, or a self-determination, of who is a Lumbee and who is not. As Blu argues,
you are a Lumbee if other Lumbees say you are.
7. Blu, The Lumbee Problem, p. xii.
8. Michael Johnson, Macmillan Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes (2nd U.S. edn, New
York: Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1999), p. 516.
9. Robert C. Allen, ‘Decentering Historical Audience Studies: A Modest Proposal,’ paper
given at the Duke University/University of North Carolina conference, ‘Local Color: A
Conference on Moviegoing in the American South,’ January 2002. See also Chapter 1
of this volume.
10. Gerald M. Sider, Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the
Southern United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xv.
11. To be consistent with the historical labels used at least until mid-century in Robeson
County, at times in this study Caucasians will be termed ‘white,’ Native Americans
‘Indian,’ and African Americans ‘colored,’ ‘black,’ or ‘Negro.’ These labels were used
with precision and historical consistency in Robeson County. As early as 1900, for
example, its telephone directory was divided into sections for ‘white,’ ‘colored,’ and
‘Croatan.’ The latter term, which allegedly linked the Lumbees to Sir Walter Raleigh’s
‘Lost Colony,’ has fallen into severe disfavor with the Lumbee community, and is now
considered a highly derogatory term. For this reason, it will generally not be used in
this chapter.
12. The general timeline for the development of various motion picture houses in Robeson
has been constructed almost exclusively from a detailed review of microfilms of the local
newspaper, the Robesonian, from 1896 until mid-1940. While a fire in the Robesonian’s
offices in 1900 destroyed virtually all of the issues published since the paper’s inception
in 1877, sporadic issues were later preserved on microfilm.
13. ‘Improvements at the Opera House,’ Robesonian 18 September 1908, p. 3.
14. Few Indians lived in or near Lumberton at this time. Karen Blu notes that as late as
1970, Lumberton’s Indian population stood at 342, or only 2.2 per cent of the town’s
population, while its 4,128 blacks accounted for 27 per cent. Blu, The Lumbee Problem,
p. 13.
15. Ruth Dial Woods, ‘Growing up Red: The Lumbee Experience,’ Ph.D. dissertation,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001, pp. 20, 115.
16. Because such announcements tended to distinguish the advantages of one house over
another, this may imply that one or both of the other two houses in town—the Opera
House and the Pastime Theatre—may have served non-whites. Certainly the 1908
changes in the Opera House lend credence to this idea. But there is no absolute proof
that the Pastime did, or even was willing, to accommodate non-whites until possibly

400
 notes to pages 49 – 5 3

1918, when an advertisement for a war propaganda film entitled ‘My Four Years in
Germany’ announced separate showing for whites, blacks, and Indians. Even so, we have
no proof that the shows advertised did, in fact, occur. See ‘At the Movies,’ Robesonian
29 November 1915, p. 5 and the movie notice from Robesonian 29 August 1918, p. 1.
Similarly, we know that in 1915, for example, a public health initiative to reduce
mosquito infestations co-sponsored by the Pastime Theatre provided free movie tickets
to boys who collected and turned in tin cans. However, a second advertisement in the
newspaper clarified the eligibility requirements: tickets would be provided to ‘white’ boys
only. Robesonian 14 June 1915, p. 5.
17. This building was eventually donated to a local historical preservation group, Historic
Robeson, Incorporated, and is now part of a town museum, but is not identifed as a site
that once housed a ‘colored’ movie house.
18. See untitled local news items in the Robesonian, 3 September 1914, p. 2; 19 October
1914, p. 1; and 18 December 1919, p. 1. Charley Morrisey had a long career as a local
entertainer and was responsible for organizing and performing in a series of musical
shows in local sites (both black and white) in the 1920s. Ironically, he would become
the janitor at the Carolina Theater when it opened in June 1928—apparently, the only
non-white member of the staff.
19. See untitled local news items in the Robesonian, 23 June 1919, p. 1 and 11 September
1919, p. 1. Unfortunately, at this time there is no evidence to suggest how many non-
whites, or whites for that matter, ever attended these sites. No other information about
their exhibition or attendance policies or statistics is known.
20. ‘Community Service Pictures’ (editorial), Robesonian 18 March 1920, p. 4; ‘Free Health
Campaign in Robeson,’ Robesonian 13 September 1920, p. 1; ‘Health Campaign Among
Colored Folks,’ Robesonian 7 October 1920, p. 5; ‘Community Service Play Hours,’
Robesonian 27 February 1922, p. 8; ‘Community Meetings,’ Robesonian 13 April 1922,
p. 9.
21. ‘Educational Motion Pictures Begin Sept. 9,’ Robesonian 1 September 1919, p. 1.
22. The letter was signed ‘Indian Union Chapel.’ Robesonian 15 September 1919, p. 8. On
16 October 1919, the Editor replied by pointing out in exasperation how ‘some one got
excited over the supposed statement […] that a moving picture show “for colored” people
would be held at Union Chapel. That news item distinctly classified Union Chapel as
Indian’ (p. 4). The editor was not concerned about the need for racial classification of the
CSP shows; he accepted it as part of his paper’s duty, and defended his staff for having
followed procedure correctly.
23. Karen Blu claims that the Riverside ‘reportedly hired an Indian youngster to point out
“his people” to the manager, so that racial mistakes might be minimized.’ Karen I. Blu,
‘”We People”: Understanding Lumbee Indian Identity in a Tri-Racial Situation,’ Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Chicago, 1972, pp. 135–36.
24. Personal correspondence between Henry A. McKinnon and the author. As an adult,
McKinnon would eventually marry the daughter of Dr. Bowman, the second co-founder
of the Carolina, after which he presumably had little trouble being shown a seat in the
main auditorium.
25. Guy B. Johnson, ‘Personality in a White-Indian-Negro Community,’ American Sociological
Review 4:4 (August, 1939), p. 518.
26. To my knowledge, these advertisements represent the first published attempt to target
Indian moviegoing patrons in Robeson County. Robesonian 12 July 1934, p. 1; 19 July
1934, p. 8; ‘Pastime Theatre Opens Saturday,’ Robesonian 16 August 1934, p. 8; 20
August 1934, p. 8.
27. Robesonian 13 September 1934, p. 8.
28. See Ernest Dewey Hancock, ‘A Sociological Study of the Tri-Racial Community in

401
 notes to pages 5 3 – 62

Robeson County, North Carolina,’ Masters Thesis, University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill, 1935, see pp. 39 and 41 for Lumberton figures for 1930.
29. Indians in particular may have been unwilling to coexist. In a contemporary commentary,
Johnson, for example, noted that an Indian was quite willing to deny himself cinematic
pleasures, preferring to conduct himself ‘in such a way that the unpleasant reality [of
co-equal treatment with blacks] is negated’ by avoiding ‘theatres where his only choice
is to sit with Negroes,’ even if such sites represented one’s only moviegoing options.
Johnson, p. 521.
30. ‘Indians Crowded Out of Pastime Theatre,’ Robesonian 1 October 1934, p. 4.
31. Wishart had been the longtime foreman of the Robesonian’s composing room prior
to his entry into vaudeville and motion picture management around 1909. The editor
of the paper, Jack A. Sharpe, appears to have been a good friend of Wishart’s, and
Wishart himself remained a regular contributor to newspapers in Lumberton and
elsewhere during his long life. He is as responsible for the adoption of motion picture
entertainment by the Robeson County public as any other individual. Beginning his
career in entertainment at the age of fifty as manager of the Lumberton Opera House,
Wishart later opened the Pastime, and subsequently managed both the Star and the
Lyric theaters before leaving Lumberton to become a theater manager in several other
towns in the general vicinity. Returning to Lumberton, he wound up his career at the
Carolina, where he was still on the job at age 80 when the Riverside opened in 1939.
32. Hancock, ‘A Sociological Study,’ p. 101.
33. ‘Rowland Theatre to Open Monday,’ Robesonian 29 October 1937, p. 8; ‘Rowland Theatre
Packs ’Em In For Opening Program,’ Robesonian 3 November 1937, p. 6; ‘New Theatre
for Rowland Opens,’ Robesonian 29 November 1937; Robesonian Historical, Agricultural
and Industrial Edition, Section 3, p. 1.
34. ‘Carlyle Property Is Purchased for a New Theatre Site,’ Robesonian 12 December 1938,
p. 1; ‘Riverside Theatre To Open New Building Here Tonight,’ Robesonian 3 April 1939,
pp. 1, 3, 6. The building that housed the Riverside eventually became the home of the
Robesonian’s printing press, and although the interior of the movie-house was largely
gutted, remnants of the three entrances and ticket booths still remain, as do the separate
staircases running into the non-white sections (which, however, no longer contain the
barriers used to distinguish ‘Indian’ from ‘colored’ sections). The other remaining early
Lumberton theatre, founded as the Carolina but now restored as the Carolina Civic
Centre, no longer retains any vestiges of its earlier segregationist apparatus.
35. For example, ads for ‘The Home of Better Pictures’ on 11 September carried this ‘special
notice’ (Robesonian 11 September 1939, p. 2). Also see Maud Thomas, Away Down Home:
A History of Robeson County, North Carolina (Charlotte, NC: Distributed by Historic
Robeson, Inc., 1982), pp. 249–50.
36. Mary Carbine, ‘The Finest Outside the Loop: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s
Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,’ Camera Obscura 23 (May 1990), pp. 9–41.
37. Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie
Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 3.

Chapter 3: The White in the Race Movie Audience

1. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2002).
2. Jane Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2001).
3. Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in
a Southern City: 1896—1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

402
 notes to pages 62 – 69

For pioneering studies of black moviegoing, see Mary Carbine, ‘“The Finest Outside the
Loop”: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,’ Camera
Obscura 23, reprinted in Richard Abel (ed.), Silent Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1996) and Gregory A. Waller, ‘Another Audience: Black Moviegoing,
1907–1916,’ Cinema Journal 31: 2 (1992), pp. 3–24.
4. See, for example, Matthew Bernstein, ‘Oscar Micheaux and Leo Frank: Cinematic
Justice Across the Color Line,’ Film Quarterly 57, no. 4 (Summer 2004), pp. 8–21; Pearl
Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (eds), Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African
American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2001); Jane Gaines, ‘In and Out of Race: The Story of Noble Johnson,’
Women and Performance 29: 5:1 (2005), pp. 33–52; J. Ronald Green, Straight Lick: The
Cinema of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); idem,
With a Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2004).
5. Steedman, Dust, p. 128.
6. Ibid., p. 127.
7. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, ‘“The Mind that Burns in Each Body”: Women, Rape, and Racial
Violence,’ in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Powers of
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 328–49.
8. Dan Streible, ‘The Harlem Theater: Black Film Exhibition in Austin, Texas: 1920—
1973,’ in Manthia Diawara (ed.), Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993),
p. 227.
9. Oscar Micheaux, ‘The Negro and the Photo-Play,’ Half-Century, 9 May 1919, p. 9,
reprinted in Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Geneology of Black Film Criticism, 1909
–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 133.
10. Gaines, Fire and Desire, p. 270.
11. Palace Theatre to George P. Johnson, 31 May 1919, in George P. Johnson Collection,
Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, hereafter GPJC. Gaines,
Fire and Desire, p. 102.
12. Henry T. Sampson suggests that Micheaux’s rationale for including whites in his films,
producing the ‘mistaken racial identity theme’ went back to the advice he had from a
white friend who told him that whites bought his novel, The Homesteader, because of the
young white female character. Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White: A Source
Book on Black Films, (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 2nd edn, 1995), p. 158.
13. Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent
Films, and His Audiences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 27.
14. In my own thinking I am indebted to Miriam Hansen who in her discussion of the
kinds of female spectatorship in the silent era says that it ‘cannot be measured in any
empirical sense,’ but that their ‘conditions of possibility can be reconstructed.’ Miriam
Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 125). Before this, Judith Mayne called attention an
earlier imbalance between the empirical and the theoretical spectator in her remark that
she had the ‘sneaking suspicion that theorists of the subject have left aside the problem
of the relationship between constructions and contradictory people by discarding the
people.’ Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge,
1993), p. 5.
15. Clarence Muse and David Arlen, Way Down South (Hollywood, CA: David Graham
Fischer, 1932), pp. 49–50, quoted in Bowser and Louise Spence, Writing Himself into
History, p. 81. On Jim Crow, also see Elizabeth Abel, ‘Bathroom Doors and Drinking
Fountains: Jim Crow’s Racial Symbolic,’ Critical Inquiry 25 (Spring 1999), pp. 435–81.
16. Charlene Regester, ‘From the Buzzard’s Roost: Black Moviegoing in Durham and Other

403
 notes to pages 69 – 7 3

North Carolina Cities During the Early Period of American Cinema,’ paper delivered
at the Local Color: Moviegoing in the American South Conference, Duke University,
January, 2002. For another local exploration of moviegoing in North Carolina, see John
Chappell, ‘A History of Motion Picture Exhibition in Greensboro, North Carolina
1908—1928’ (Master’s Thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1978).
17. Dana F. White, ‘“A Landmark in Negro Progress”: The Auditorium Theater, 1914–1925,’
Marquee 34:4 (2002), p. 16.
18. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 157.
19. Muse and Allen, Way Down South, p. 61. The 81 Theatre was white-owned and it was
the main competition for black theatre owners in Atlanta. White, ‘A Landmark in Negro
Progress,’ p. 16.
20. Bowser and Spence, Writing Himself into History, p. 81. According to Sampson, the
Attucks Theatre was managed and owned by Twin City Amusement Corporation, Robert
Cross and Rufas Byers. Byers was a long time exhibitor in the Washington-Virginia area.
Sampson, Blacks in Black and White, p. 649. The white owner of the Interstate Theatre
circuit in Austin, Texas, offered ‘colored midnight shows’ during the 1930s. Streible,
‘The Harlem Theater,’ p. 224, Barbara Stones confirms that these shows were popular
into 1930s and 1940s and more Southern than Northern. Barbara Stones, America Goes
to the Movies: 100 Years of Motion Picture Exhibition (North Hollywood, CA: National
Association of Theater Owners, 1993), p. 208.
21. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978, first pub. in 1949),
p. 89.
22. Susan Gilman has recently demonstrated that Mark Twain was more interested in the
race question than scholars had previously thought, going beyond the concerns evidenced
in his fiction, Huckleberry Finn and especially Pudd’nhead Wilson. Susan Gilman, Blood
Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2003).
23. Donald Bogle, ‘Introduction,’ in John Kisch and Edward Mapp (eds), A Separate Cinema:
Fifty Years of Black Cast Posters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), p. xvii.
24. Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 106.
25. Noël Carroll, ‘Notes on the Sight Gag,’ in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 149.
26. Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, 1893–
1920 (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2004).
27. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 6.
28. Lott, Love and Theft, p. 4.
29. Norman Mailer, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster (New York: City
Lights Books, 1957); Lott, Love and Theft, p. 5.
30. Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (New York: Random House,
1946) For a discussion of the 1920s hipster, see Alison Griffiths and James Latham, ‘Film
and Ethnic Identity in Harlem, 1896–1915,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds),
American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London:
British Film Institute, 1999), pp. 46–63.
31. Mab Segrest, Memoirs of a Race Traitor (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994).
32. Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 2–3, 14.
33. See Jane Gaines, ‘Everyday Strangeness: Robert Ripley’s International Oddities as
Documentary Attractions,’ New Literary History 33:4 (2002), pp. 789–92; Tom Gunning,

404
 notes to pages 73–77

‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Cinema and the [In] Credulous Spectator,’ in
Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Films (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 129.
34. I am indebted to Arthur Knight for this point, which he discusses in relation to the
popularity of the black musical film. Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black
Performance and American Musical Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
35. Knight, Disintegrating the Musical, p. 21.
36. Bowser and Spence, Writing Himself Into History, pp. 69–70. The Chicago Defender (19
January 1918), described Noble Johnson as ‘supported by’ Eddie Polo; the Chicago Whip
(11 October 1919) announced that Johnson was ‘still starring with Eddie Polo in their
great serials.’ The article noted that Johnson was given more heavy parts than anything.
Cuing black viewers to look for him on the screen: ‘Johnson’s light complexion fools
some people who follow the screen light but he is colored all right, and we trust that
some day he will be allowed to play a stellar role.’
37. In Migrating to the Movies, Jacqueline Stewart stresses the pressure put upon Universal by
white owners of the Black Belt theatres in Chicago where the Lincoln films were drawing
business away from the theatres playing his Universal films. In other words, the pressure
put on Noble Johnson to resign would have been an effect of the competition between
black and white theatre owners in an extremely competitive neighborhood. This adds to
my earlier reading of Universal’s 1918 contract with Noble, which effectively asserted
Universal’s exclusive rights to the actor’s image and prohibited any new advertising of
his Lincoln films. Gaines, Fire and Desire, pp. 99–100.

Chapter 4: Sundays in Norfolk: Toward a Protestant Utopia Through Film Exhibition in

Norfolk, Virginia, 1910–1920
1. ‘Sunday Hurts in K.C.’ Variety 5 May 1916, pp. 1, 3.
2. ‘Afraid of Bill Sunday’ Variety 17 November 1916, p. 3.
3. In October 1925, Variety reported that evangelist George Wood Anderson attracted
‘considerable daily space in the newspapers and has been responsible’ for a drop in theatre
attendance in Connecticut. ‘Conn. Evangelist Killing Theatre Biz: Draws 3,000 Nightly
at So. Norwalk—Record Low Grosses for Theatres,’ Variety 21 October 1925, p. 1.
4. William A. Sunday, ‘Amusements,’ The Papers of William Ashley and Helen Amelia
Thompson Sunday: 1882 [1888–1957] 1974; n.d. (Microfilm collection by a joint effort of
the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois and Grace College and
Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana, 1978), reel 11, p. 3.
5. Motion Picture News 21 and 23 November 1912, p. 14.
6. John Tibbetts, His Majesty the American: The Cinema of Douglas Fairbanks. (Cranbury, NJ:
A.S. Barnes, 1977), p. 43.
7. William Gerald McLoughlin, Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 221.
8. Russell Merritt, ‘Nickelodeon Theaters 1905–1914: Building an Audience for the
Movies,’ in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1976), pp. 59–79.
9. Robert C. Allen, ‘Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906–1912: Beyond the
Nickelodeon,’ Cinema Journal 19:2 (Spring 1979).
10. I discuss the theatres of Norfolk and the Wells brothers in ‘Movie Gate to the South:
Silent Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1906–1921’ in Kathy Fuller and George
Potamianos (eds), Beyond the Bowery: The Cinema and Mass Entertainment in Small town
America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, forthcoming).
11. ‘Colonial Theatre: Results and Reasons,’ 17 October 1909, p. 3.

405
 notes to pages 78– 82

12. Carl D. Wells, ‘The Motion Picture Versus the Church,” Journal of Applied Sociology
(July–August 1932), pp. 540–46.
13. I have tried to show a trajectory of changing relations between the church and moving
picture in my Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent American Film and
Religion, 1908–1925 (London: Scarecrow Press, 2001).
14. William Uricchio, and Roberta E. Pearson, ‘Constructing the Audience: Competing
Discourses of Morality and Rationalization During the Nickelodeon Period,’ Iris 17
(Fall 1994), p. 11, fn. 53.
15. Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a
Southern City, 1896–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
16. ‘Race Population in Portsmouth and Norfolk is 66,719,’ Norfolk Journal and Guide 29
January 1921, p. 1.
17. ‘Nobody Agreed at Meeting on Sunday Movies,’ Virginian-Pilot (subsequently designated
as VP) 25 March 1919, p. 2.
18. Thomas C. Parramore, Norfolk: The First Four Centuries (Charlottesville, VA: University
Press of Virginia, 1999), p. 256; Carroll Walker, Norfolk: A Pictorial History (Virginia
Beach, VA: Donning Company, 1975), p. 268.
19. Norfolk and Portsmouth Virginia 1910 Directory XLIII (Norfolk, VA: Hill Directory
Company, 1911), p. 1122 and Norfolk and Portsmouth Virginia 1920–21 Directory LXXIII
(Norfolk, VA: Hill Directory Company, 1920–21), p. 1454.
20. Norfolk and Portsmouth 1920–21 Directory, p. 1456.
21. Parramore, Norfolk, p. 258.
22. Charles Musser, ‘Passions and the Passion Play: Theatre, Film, and Religion in America,
1880–1900’ Film History 5 (December 1993), p. 447.
23. ‘Aldermen Adopt Anti-Phonograph Ordinance,’ VP 10 July 1907, p. 1; ‘Show People to
Fight Ordinance,’ VP 11 July 1907, p. 3.
24. Tom Gunning, ‘From the Opium Den to the Theatre of Morality: Moral Discourse and
the Film Process in Early American Cinema’ Art and Text 30 (September–November
1988), pp. 30–41.
25. ‘Mass Meeting for Women at Colonial Next Sunday,’ VP 23 March 1919, p. 7; ‘Salvation
Army to Distribute Gifts at the Majestic,’ VP 21 December 1915, p. 4.
26. Variety identified a significant decline in box office revenues during Lent and Holy Week.
‘Easter Week Brings Boost Followed by Another Slump’ Variety 28 April 1922, p. 44;
‘Business Minimum Holy Week At Loop’s Picture Houses’ and ‘Week and Weather Hit
Buffalo Hard: Saturday Was Worst Day’ Variety 5 April 1922, p. 30; ‘Holy Week Hits
Frisco Houses Hard’; ‘Lent’s Bad Business Held Up Until Last: Holy Week Gave Light
Business to Picture House’ Variety 23 April 1924, p. 18. Thomas Doherty has recounted
how, when potential Roman Catholic patrons celebrated Lent, box-office revenues
dropped off sharply in what exhibitors dubbed the ‘Lenten slump.’ Thomas Doherty, ‘This
Is Where We Came In: The Audible Screen and the Voluble Audience of Early Sound
Cinema’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From
the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999),
p. 148.
27. ‘Bishop Strange to Large Audience,’ VP 17 March 1911, p. 10; ‘Large Attendance at
Noon-Day Services,’ VP 7 March 1911, p. 4; ‘Good Attendance at Monday Services,’
VP 9 March 1911, p. 5. The next year, a Bishop Tucker appealed to a packed theater of
businessmen at the Granby in an evangelistic sermon. ‘Larger Crowds at Noon Services,’
VP 23 February 1912, p. 7. The following week, the Episcopal Bishop Strange delivered
a lecture on ‘Love for Christ’ in the same theater. ‘Another Big Crowd Hears Bishop
Strange,’ VP 29 February 1912, p. 3.
28. ‘Noon-day Services in the Granby Begin Today,’ VP 1 March 1911, p. 3; ‘Noonday

406
 notes to pages 82– 85

Lenten Series with Prominent Preachers,’ VP 8 March 1915, p. 2; ‘Large Crowd Hear
Bishop Strange: Wonderland Theatre Packed to Capacity,’ VP 16 February 1910, p. 4.
29. Even conservative Baptists held a major unification meeting in the Academy. ‘Extension
Rally Early in New Year,’ VP 2 December 1908, p. 3. See also ‘Large Attendance at
Noon-Day Service,’ VP 11 March 1909, p. 6; ‘Noonday Services at the Wonderland,’ VP
16 March 1909, p. 3. Such practices continued throughout the decade: ‘Dr. Bell speaks
during Holy Week at the American Theatre,’ VP 16 April 1919, p. 10; ‘Episcopal Church
Congress Will Convene in Norfolk,’ VP 30 April 1916, p. 3.
30. ‘The Fall of Babylon: How? When? Why?,’ VP 12 January 1918, p. 2.
31. ‘To Lecture On World, War, and Bible,’ VP 20 January 1918, p. 4.
32. ‘Theatre Service Tomorrow Night,’ VP 29 October 1911, p. 8. Norfolk and Portsmouth
Baptists held revival services in the Orpheum as well. ‘Theatre Meeting to Be Held
Sunday,’ VP 3 November 1916, p. 10.
33. ‘Methods to Attract Worshippers,’ VP 12 July 1908, p. 16; ‘Pictures Lure for Non-
Churchgoers,’ VP 3 December 1911, p. 44.
34. ‘Col. Dean to Speak at Arcade Toda,’ VP 19 September 1915, p. 7; ‘Rain Interferes With
Revival,’ VP 8 October 1915, p. 4.
35. ‘Increased Interest in Baptist Revival,’ VP 7 October 1915, p. 3.
36. ‘YMCA Meeting Today,’ VP 19 January 1908, p. 5; ‘“Self Control” Theme of Rev. G.E.
Booker,’ VP 31 March 1908, p. 5.
37. ‘At Barton’s Theatre Tuesday,’ VP 25 April 1908, p. 2; ‘Barton on Bended Knee, Seeks
Blessings of God,’ VP 29 April 1908, p. 7.
38. ‘Will Operate Movie Theatre for Charity,’ VP 4 January 1920, pp. 2:1, 6.
39. ‘Will Operate Movie Theatre for Charity,’ VP 4 January 1920, pp. 2:1, 6; ‘Matinee at
Academy Net Many Gifts for Tuberculosis Cases,’ VP 23 December 1920, p. 2.
40. ‘At the American,’ VP 18 April 1915, p. 7.
41. Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie
for Culture (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institutution Press, 1996).
42. ‘Edison Moving Pictures,’ VP 31 January 1906, p. 8.
43. Rev. Henry W. Dowd illustrated his preaching on ‘The Life of St. Paul.’ ‘First
Congregational Church,’ VP 5 January 1908, p. 21.
44. ‘The Passion Play,’ VP 30 October 1907, p. 9.
45. ‘Passion Play Pictures and Big Boys’ Choir,’ VP 11 December 1907, p. 10; ‘Impressive
Passion Play,’ VP 12 December 1907, p. 10; ‘Story of the Passion Play,’ VP 13 December
1907, p. 10.
46. ‘China in Moving Pictures,’ VP 2 May 1908, p. 8.
47. ‘Illustrated Lecture on Great White Plague,’ VP 15 May 1908, p. 9.
48. ‘Moving Pictures Show Heathen Religious Rites,’ VP 11 January 1910, p. 5.
49. ‘Dr. Adams Tells of Heathen Lands: Illustrated Lecture Was Interesting to Audience,’
VP 12 January 1910, p. 4.
50. ‘Go to Church Sunday,’ VP 7 March 1914, p. 8; ‘“Movie” Films to Save Souls: Pictures
Presenting the Story of Human Development as Told in the Bible, Four Weeks’ Program
for the Wells Theatre,’ VP 15 May 1914, p. 8.
51. Richard Alan Nelson, ‘Propaganda for God: Pastor Charles Taze Russell and the Multi-
Media Photo-Drama of Creation (1914),’ in Roland Cosandey, Andre Gaudreault and Tom
Gunning (eds), Une Invention du Diable? Cinema des Premiers Temps et Religion (Lausanne:
Editions Payot, 1992), p. 234.
52. ‘City Churches to Use Movies: Educators and Religious Workers Complete Plans for
an Extended Service,’ VP 21 June 1914, p. 16; ‘Cumberland Street Methodist Church’s
“Moving Pictures and Music”,’ VP 1 March 1916, p. 12; ‘Will Use Moving Pictures in
Church,’ VP 12 August 1920, p. 4.

407
 notes to pages 85– 88

53. ‘Moving Pictures to be Used in Church,’ VP 31 December 1915, p. 8.

54. ‘New Plans of a Venerable Church,’ VP 13 February 1916, p. 7.
55. ‘Feature Films of Life of Christ,’ VP 13 February 1916, p. 18.
56. ‘Norfolk’s Christ, St. Luke’s designated Va. historic landmark’ The Ledger-Star 7 April
1979, A–4; ‘Christ Church to Have Modern Parish House,’ VP 24 April 1918, p. 1.
57. ‘Christ Church Parish House Opened,’ VP 11 December 1919, p. 3.
58. ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ VP 6 May 1921, p. 9; ‘Picture Series to Begin Tonight,’ VP 14
November 1921, p. 7.
59. ‘Give Movies Sunday for Greek Church,’ VP 10 December 1921, p. 14; ‘“Life of Moses”
Will Be Shown in Pictures,’ VP 27 August 1921, p. 10; ‘Religious News: Motion Pictures
at Epworth,’ VP 10 December 1920, p. 7; ‘Movies Tonight on Church Lawn,’ VP 7 July
1922, p. 18.
60. ‘Films Show Work of Catholics in War; At Colonial,’ VP 2 May 1920, p. 3:6; ‘Catholic
Council War Work Shown on the Screen,’ VP 3 May 1920, p. 3; ‘Movies in Prayer
Meeting,’ VP 27 May 1920, p. 7; ‘Federation’s Moving Picture Program,’ VP 23 June
1920, p. 7; ‘Summer Prayer Meetings at Epworth Methodist,’ VP 16 June 1920, p. 7;
‘Religious Film is Shown at Armory,’ VP 26 June 1920, p. 2.
61. ‘Sing the Messiah at the Academy,’ VP 30 December 1909, p. 12; ‘Elks’ Benefit at
Granby,’ VP 7 January 1910, p. 14; ‘Sacred Concert at Academy Tuesday,’ VP 13 February
1915, p. 3. See also Frank Burch Brown on the assimilationist sense of sacred space in
his Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
62. ‘Church or Devil to Entertain Young of This Century,’ VP 21 August 1909, p. 5.
63. ‘Using Moving Pictures to Illustrate Sermon,’ VP 6 July 1914, p. 3.
64. ‘Using Moving Pictures to Illustrate Sermon,’ VP 6 July 1914, p. 3; ‘Pictures on Liquor
Evil,’ VP 7 July 1914, p. 5.
65. ‘Idle Wives’ Film Sermon at Fotosho,’ VP 8 July 1917, p. 18.
66. ‘The Eternal Magdalene at the Colonial,’ VP 5 February 1916, p. 12.
67. ‘Want Movies Used to Benefit Public,’ VP 1 December 1918, p. 8C.
68. ‘“The Miracle Man” Is Unusual Photodrama,’ VP 15 October 1919, p. 9; ‘After Visit to
Granby Writes His Appreciation of “the Miracle Man”’ Ledger-Dispatch 18 December
1919, p. 5; ‘George Loane Tucker’s “The Miracle Man”,’ VP 14 December 1919,
p. 1:10.
69. ‘Use Movies to Draw People to Church,’ VP 1 February 1920, p. 5:10.
70. ‘Lois Weber’s Latest, “The Blot,” Appears at Granby,’ VP 11 September 1921, p. 5:3.
71. ‘Private Showing Will be Made of “The Blot”,’ VP 2 October 1921, p. 6:5. See also ‘The
Faith Healer,’ VP 25 September 1921, p. 5:4.
72. ‘Harold Lloyd’s Comedies Commended By Minister,’ VP 22 July 1923, p. 3:10.
73. ‘Censorship for Motion Pictures,’ VP 4 May 1920, p. 15.
74. See C.H. Jack Linn, ‘The Movies—The Devil’s Incubator: Can a Christian go to Movies?’
Flirting With the Devil (Oregon, WI: Hallelujah Print Shop, 1923).
75. ‘Kansas City Crusade Against Sunday Theatre,’ VP 17 October 1907, p. 1; ‘N. Y. Theatres
to Close on Sunday,’ VP 5 October 1907, p. 1; ‘Blue Law Lid Fits Tight on Gay New
York; Kansas City Also Adopts Same Process,’ VP 8 December 1907, p. 1. Every form
of amusement, including Y.M.C.A. entertainment, fell under this ‘literal enforcement
of an old, but not seriously regarded statute.’ Most major denominations joined the
bandwagon. See ‘Presbyterians Oppose Divorces: Sunday Amusements and Need of
Religious Education Discussed,’ VP 22 May 1909, p. 1; ‘Methodist Preachers on Sunday
Observance,’ VP 8 June 1909, p. 4.
76. See Lindvall, The Silents of God, pp. 100–16.
77. ‘Praise God Every Day: Sunday Protected by Divine Command’ Norfolk Virginian 24
October 1895, p. 1.

408
 notes to pages 88– 90

78. New York Times (NYT) 14 October 1907; ‘Pastors Open War on Sunday Shows,’ N YT
19 January 1909, p. 8; ‘Hearing on Sunday Pictures,’ N YT 13 March 1909, p. 5.
79. ‘[Police Chief] Kizer Put Sunday Selling Up to the Courts,’ VP 22 May 1909, p. 4.
W. Stephen Bush culled and marshaled statistics on Sunday showings in 120 large
and small cities, and their effects on public order and decorum, arguing as an editor
of moving picture trade periodical that ‘The advocates of rational enjoyment after
church hours on Sunday are not proposing or favoring a new thing. On the contrary
the right of people to innocent pastimes and healthful recreations after church hours
on Sundays is almost as old as Christianity itself and exists today in every part of
the Christian world with the sole exception of the British Isles.’ W. Stephen Bush
(ed.), Motion Pictures on Sunday: A Collection of Facts and Figures (Cincinnati, OH: The
Billboard Pub. Co., c. 1923), p. 3.
80. ‘Methodists Are Asked to Stay Out of Theatres,’ VP 10 May 1910, p. 3; ‘Conference
Pays Tribute: Condemn Desecration of Sabbath,’ VP 29 July 1910, p. 7.
81. ‘Nothing Harmful in ‘Traffic in Souls,’ VP 13 January 1914, p. 4.
82. ‘Better Observance of Sabbath,’ VP 28 March 1911, p. 4; ‘Better Observance of Sabbath
Day,’ VP 23 April 1911, p. 7.
83. ‘A Man’s Sins Will Find Him Out, Says Rev. Dr. Shelton,’ VP 24 March 1919, p. 2.
84. ‘Church Opposes Sunday Movies in Resolutions,’ VP 24 March 1919, p. 5.
85. ‘Nobody Agreed at Meeting on Sunday Movies,’ VP 25 March 1919, p. 2.
86. Musser, ‘Passions and the Passion Play,’ p. 447.
87. ‘Removal of Ban on Amusements Recommended: Bishops Declare Church Law
Prohibiting Dancing, Card Playing Gambling, and Theatre Going Is Obsolete,’ VP 4
May 1912, p. 1.
88. ‘This Observing Preacher Sees Many Things More Interesting Than Sermon to His
Flock,’ VP 19 December 1920, p. IV: 1.
89. ‘Entertainment at Spurgeon Memorial,’ VP 25 September 1917, p. 10; ‘Enlisted Men
Entertained at Cumberland St. Church,’ VP 28 September 1917, p. 4; ‘Park View Church
to Entertain Men,’ VP 2 October 1917, p. 7.
90. ‘Pictures at Church Entertain Sailors: Big Audience Attends Screen Show at Cumberland
Street Methodist Church,’ VP 14 September 1917, p. 7.
91. ‘Orphans Invited to Free Entertainment: “Pilgrim’s Progress” will be shown at
Cumberland St. Church Tonight,’ VP 18 October 1917, p. 4; ‘Pilgrim’s Progress and
Parsifal in Pictures,’ VP 17 November 1917, p. 7.
92. ‘Oppose Moving Picture Shows on Sunday,’ VP 10 February 1909, p. 4; ‘Oppose Free
Movies on Sunday Evenings,’ VP 24 August 1914, p. 9; ‘Baptist Church Puts Ban on
Sunday Movies,’ VP 27 August 1914, p. 14.
93. ‘Sailors to Have Own Theatre,’ VP 13 January 1918, p. 20; ‘Naval Base Theatre Attractive
Playhouse,’ VP 30 June 1918, p. 3:1.
94. A resolution provided that the armory may be used on Sundays for the illustrating of
travel talks, lectures on health, and other educational topics. It was the ‘desecration of the
Sabbath’ that would have a tendency to lower the moral standards of the community. ‘No
Movies For Enlisted Men on Sundays, Citizens Committee Decides Illustrated Lectures
And Travel Talks Sufficient,’ VP 28 March 1919, p. 4; ‘This Episcopal Divine Favors
Liberal Sunday,’ VP 27 July 1919, p. 5:6; ‘Sunday Movies in Elizabeth City: Children
and Grown-Ups Will Be Given Opportunity to See Historical Film,’ VP 24 November
1921, p. 11.
95. ‘“Movie Is Poor Man’s Book of Travel and Sunday Fun,” Lord Beaverbrook Argues,’ VP
17 April 1921, p. 5:2.
96. ‘Nobody Agreed at Meeting on Sunday Movies,’ VP 25 March 1919, p. 2; ‘Colored
Ministers Protest,’ VP 27 March 1919, p. 6.

409
 notes to pages 90 – 99

97. ‘S.R.O. Sign Out for Sunday Movie Show of Bible Films,’ VP 14 March 1922, p. 5;
‘Those Sunday “Blues”,’ VP 6 December 1920, p. 6; ‘English Liberals View With Smile
“Pussyfoot Sunday” Agitation in U.S.,’ VP 19 December 1920, p. 3:16; ‘Is it Lawful to
Pull Automobile Out of Ditch on Sunday?,’ VP 30 December 1920, p. 2; Briggs, ‘Movie
of a Man Reading of the Blue Law’ (cartoon) VP 3 December 1920, p. 14.
98. ‘Billy Sunday Sways Audience With His Famous Sermon on “Amusements”,’ VP 7
February 1920, p. 9.
99. ‘God Help Poor Girls—Says Billy Sunday,’ VP 19 March 1922, p. 2:8; ‘The Reverend
Billy Sunday Says,’ VP 30 September 1917, p. 10.
100. William T. Ellis, “Billy” Sunday: The Man and His Message (Philadelphia, PA: John C.
Winston Company, 1914), pp. 138–39.
101. Peter Bogdanovich, Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer (New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc.,
1971), p. 40.
102. Elijah P.D.D. Brown, The Real Billy Sunday: The Life and Work of Rev. William Ashley
Sunday, D.D. The Baseball Evangelist (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1914),
p. 217.
103. ‘Says Mothers Shimmy Set Bad Example’—‘While the children are at the moving picture
shows, their fifty year old mothers are at the dances learning how to “shimmy”’ NJG 29
July 1922, p. 1.
104. ‘Pastor Has Novel Plan for Sermons’ NJG 16 September 1922, p. 1; ‘Church Vote Acquits
Theatre Goers of Sin’ NJG 23 September 1922, p. 1.
105. ‘Bishop Ward to Open Crusade at Attucks Sunday’ NJG 5 February 1927, p. 8.

Chapter 5: Patchwork Maps of Moviegoing, 1911–1913

1. I want to thank Virginia Wright Wexman for inviting me to present a version of this
essay at the Chicago Film Seminar, 4 December 2003. Thanks also to Scott Curtis’s
incisive response and the discussion that followed.
2. These fictional women are based on a study of three generations of immigrant working
women in Central Falls—Louise Lamphere, From Working Daughters to Working Mothers:
Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1987).
3. See the New Pastime, Star, and Music Hall ads, Pawtucket Times (14 September 1912),
p. 5.
4. Emilie Altenloh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema: the Audience,’ trans. Kathleen Cross,
Screen 42.3 (Autumn 2001), pp. 249–93. See also ‘Editorial,’ Screen, 42.3 (Autumn 2001),
pp. 245–48.
5. Altenloh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema,’ pp. 257–58.
6. Altenloh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema,’ p. 255.
7. Altenloh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema,’ p. 255.
8. Altenloh, ‘A Sociology of the Cinema,’ p. 256.
9. ‘Nickels for Theatres vs. Nickels for Bread,’ New York Morning Telegraph (12 May 1912),
pp. 4.2, 2. In late 1909, David Hulfish offered far more conservative hours, ‘11:00 a.m.
until 9:00 p.m.’ for a typical moving picture theater in a downtown shopping district;
by 1913, he changed that to ‘9 A.M. until 11 P.M.’ for the ‘large exclusive picture
house’—see Hulfish, ‘Economy in Picture Theater Operation,’ Nickelodeon (1 January
1910), p. 15; and Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (Chicago, IL: American
Technical Society, 1914 [c. 1911]), p. 25.
10. Such ‘special program nights’ in theaters offering a variety program of daily changed
films were common at least through the summer of 1913—see John B. Rathburn,
‘Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting,’ Motography (26 July 1913), p. 72.

410
 notes to pages 9 9 – 10 0

11. W.W. Winters, ‘With the Picture Fans,’ Nickelodeon (1 September 1910), pp. 123–24.
See also ‘Spectator’s’ Comments,’ New York Dramatic Mirror (7 August 1912), p. 24.
12. See also Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner’s,
1990), pp. 126–28.
13. Quoted from an unpaginated twenty-page booklet on the Bijou Theatre printed in early
1911.
14. F.H. Madison, ‘In the Northwest,’ Moving Picture World (7 September 1912), p. 994.
15. It should not be forgotten that the downside of this increase in leisure time, especially
for young working women, was ‘a state of affairs wherein the world’s labour market
[had] actually come to depend on the work of women outside the home’—see Clara
E. Laughlin, The Work-A-Day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions (New York:
Fleming H. Revell, 1913), p. 53 A source that remains unexamined is Mother’s Magazine
(November 1912), which included four articles on motion pictures—see ‘Mothers,
Children and Pictures,’ Motography (7 December 1912), pp. 419–20.
16. Frederic C. Howe, ‘Leisure,’ Survey 31 (3 January 1914), p. 415; F.H. Richardson,
‘Women and Children,’ Moving Picture World (21 February 1914), p. 962. One report
claimed that ‘nine out of every ten persons that enter the moving picture shows … are
women,’ but this must have been exaggerated, coming from the Minneapolis Board
of Home Missions and Church Extension—‘Blames the Women,’ New York Morning
Telegraph (2 June 1912), 4.2: 3.
17. Alan Havig, ‘The Commercial Amusement Audience in Early 20 th-Century American
Cities,’ Journal of American Culture 5.1 (1982), pp. 7–8. This seems remarkable, given
the Massachusetts statistics revealing that many young working women (not living at
home) were paid less than $6.00 a week, far less than the estimated required budget
of $10.60—see Laughlin, The Work-A-Day Girl, pp. 160–63. Several studies of young
working women in New York City all noted that moving pictures were second only to
dance halls as a preferred amusement, even if the theaters they frequented may have
been in their own neighborhoods—see Robert Wood and Albert J. Kennedy (eds), Young
Working Girls (Boston, MA: Houghton Miflin, 1913), pp. 106–107, 112–13; Ruth S.
True, The Neglected Girl (New York: Survey, 1914), pp. 66–67; and Harriet McDougal
Daniels, The Girl and Her Chance (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1914), p. 71.
18. Cited in Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an
Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 201. See
also the more general comment about how ‘clerks, stenographers, etc. employ their noon
hour,’ in Jos. F. Hennegan, ‘Music and the Picture Show,’ Billboard (3 February 1912),
p. 13.
19. See the Providence Sunday Journal article (ca. 1910) reproduced in Roger Brett, ‘Temples
of Illusion,’ The Golden Age of Theaters in an American City (Providence, RI: Brett
Theatrical, 1976), pp. 162–65.
20. ‘The Great Child Problem,’ Providence News (15 February 1912) n.p.—Nickel Theatre and
Bijou Theatre Clippings Book, Series IV, Keith-Albee Collection, Special Collections,
University of Iowa Library, Iowa City, Iowa. I thank Rick Altman for drawing my
attention to this and other clippings books, along with the Star Theatre’s accounts book,
in the Keith-Albee Collection. William Trufant Foster, Vaudeville and Motion Picture
Shows: A Study of Theaters in Portland, Oregon (Portland: Reed College, 1914), pp. 17, 27,
28. Other surveys from Ipswich (Massachusetts) to Springfield (Illinois) and the Quad
Cities (Iowa/Illinois) are summarized in Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American
Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1982), pp. 42–43.
21. Foster, Vaudeville and Motion Pictures, pp. 17, 22. Summarizing other surveys in large
cities from this period, Havig concludes that ‘youth and young adults ranging in age

411
 notes to pages 10 0 – 10 3

from 15 to 25 years constituted the bulk of the movie audience in the years before World
War I’: in cities as different as Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Detroit, for instance, they
made up 50 per cent of the audience—Havig, ‘The Commercial Amusement Audience
in Early 20th-Century American Cities,’ p. 9.
22. Robert O. Bartholomew, ‘Report of Censorship of Motion Pictures and of Investigation
of Motion Picture Theatres of Cleveland, 1913’—cited in David Nasaw, ‘Children and
Commercial Culture: Moving Pictures in the Early Twentieth Century,’ in Elliott West
and Paula Petrik (eds), Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950
(Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1992), p. 18.
23. Frank H. Madison, ‘In the Mississippi Valley,’ Moving Picture World (15 June 1912),
p. 1051.
24. Lynn’s population increased 30 per cent from 1900—see ‘Population of Individual
Cities,’ Thirteenth Census of the United States: Abstract of the Census (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1913), p. 64. Of those 90,000, the 1910 census listed
slightly more than 30 per cent as ‘foreign-born white’ (with the greatest numbers
coming from Canada, Ireland, and Russia), somewhat lower than the 35 per cent in
Boston and substantially lower than the 40 per cent in Lowell and nearly 50 per cent in
Lawrence—see ‘Country of Origin,’ Thirteenth Census of the United States, p. 212.
25. For a summary history of Lynn, see Keith Melder, Life and Times in Shoe City: The Shoe
Workers of Lynn (Salem, MA: Essex Institute, 1979), pp. 2–9.
26. Earlier, the Dreamland and Comique also competed for customers with contests,
respectively, for ‘the most popular employees for local retail stores’ and ‘the most popular
female employees of the local shoe factories’—see Henry, ‘New England,’ Moving Picture
World (27 April 1912), p. 348; Henry, ‘New England,’ Moving Picture World (1 February
1913), p. 478.
27. Of the 170,000 people in Toledo, the 1910 census listed more than 30,000 as ‘foreign-
born white,’ with nearly half coming from Germany and the next largest numbers, from
Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Canada—see ‘Population—Ohio,’ Thirteenth Census of the
United States, pp. 363, 398.
28. For a summary history of Toledo’s commercial districts and ethnic communities, see
Charles N. Glaab and Morgan J. Barclay, Toledo: Gateway to the Great Lakes (Tulsa:
Commercial Heritage Press, 1982), pp. 66, 68, 71, 95, and 99. For the number of picture
theaters in Toledo, see the city directories as well as ‘The Moving Picture Situation in
Toledo, O.,’ Billboard (28 January 1911), p. 6.
29. See the Hart ads, Toledo Union Leader (10 December 1912), p. 6, and (23 May 1913),
p. 2. Toledo had ‘relatively strong unions’ during this period—see Glaab and Barclay,
Toledo: Gateway to the Great Lakes, p. 62.
30. The first of these contest announcements appeared in the Toledo Blade (18 February
1911), p. 1. They continued daily for the following week and then once or twice a week
thereafter, through March 10.
31. ‘Here Are Prize Winning Moving Picture Criticisms,’ Toledo Blade (4 March 1911), p. 24;
‘Picture Show Critics Do Better This Week,’ Toledo Blade (11 March 1911), p. 12; and
‘Last Moving Picture Prizes Won by Girls,’ Toledo Blade (18 March 1911), p. 13.
32. This accounts book can be found in Box 10, Series III, of the Keith-Albee Collection.
33. ‘Theatres,’ Pawtucket Chronicle and Gazette (26 November 1909), p. 8. Annual city taxes
for the Star Theatre’s personnel came to $1,500 during this period; annual taxes on the
theater itself were only $24.75—see the Pawtucket Tax Book (1911–1914).
34. ‘Population of Individual Cities,’ Thirteenth Census of the United States, p. 64. Of those
50,000, the 1910 census listed 18,000 or 35 per cent as ‘foreign-born white,’ with the
greatest numbers coming from Great Britain, Ireland, and French Canada—‘Country
of Origin,’ p. 213. Specifically, the city was known for producing calico, wadding, plush

412
 notes to pages 10 3 – 11 5

fabric, and woolen goods—see American Newspaper Annual and Directory (Philadelphia,
PA: N.W. Ayer & Son, 1914), p. 866. For information on nearby Providence’s picture
theaters, most of which were controlled by Charles Lovenberg, see Henry, ‘New
England,’ Moving Picture World (16 December 1911), p. 916 and (1 February 1913),
p. 479.
35. The earliest temple was located in a tenement on North Main Street, not far from the
Star Theatre—Pawtucket, Rhode Island (1978), p. 52.
36. Lamphere, From Working Daughters to Working Mothers, p. 109.
37. This information is gathered from the Star Theatre and Bijou Theatre Clippings Books,
Series IV, in the Keith-Albee Collection.
38. Weather may have been a factor because, the previous summer and fall, the Durbar in
Kinemacolor had played for a record five months at the Tremont Temple in Boston—
‘Correspondence: New England,’ Moving Picture World (26 October 1912), p. 357.
39. Star Theatre and Bijou Theatre Clippings Books, Series IV, Keith-Albee Collection.
40. One of those less profitable weeks included the 4 July holiday (on a Saturday); another
included the unusual expense of a new Simplex projector; and a third may have been
due to bad weather (in late February).
41. For a more focused analysis of early Famous Players distribution practices, see Michael
Quinn, ‘Distribution, the Transient Audience, and the Transition to the Feature Film,’
Cinema Journal 40.2 (2001), pp. 35–56.
42. The Star may well exemplify the claim, published in the New York Dramatic Mirror, that
‘a motion picture audience, save in rare instances, [was] drawn from the population living
within walking distance of the theater’—Film Man, ‘Comments and Suggestions,’ New
York Dramatic Mirror (16 October 1912), p. 25.
43. That the Star may not have catered to Jewish audiences specifically is suggested by the
scheduling of Kay-Bee’s The Man They Scorned (in which a Jewish army recruit plays an
unlikely western hero) on Thanksgiving weekend in 1912; although receipts were quite
high, as might be expected, on the holiday, they were below normal on Friday and
particularly Saturday.
44. ‘Resolutions Passed by the Civic Theatre Committee of Pawtucket and Central Falls, RI,
June 2, 1913,’ Moving Picture World (2 August 1913), p. 8. See also ‘Pawtucket Has Civic
Theater,’ Moving Picture World (20 March 1915), p. 1752. The resolutions specifically
mention the need for translating film stories and intertitles in such languages as Polish,
Italian, Syrian, and Hebrew or Yiddish.
45. ‘Moving Picture Shows Capture the State,’ Providence Sunday Journal (3 April 1910),
p. IV.5.
46. This pattern of weekly attendance may well have been established prior to the fall of
1912, during the period of MPPC programs and multiple-reel specials, and perhaps then
was solidified by the opening of the Pastime, one of whose weekly program changes
occurred on Friday.
47. This quote comes from ‘Mrs. W.H. Bryant, head worker of the Neighborhood House,
906 Galapago Street, Denver, in ‘Nickels for Theatres vs. Nickels for Bread,’ New York
Morning Telegraph (12 May 1912), pp. 4.2, 2.

Chapter 6: Next Year at the Moving Pictures: Cinema and Social Change in the Jewish
Immigrant Community
1. ‘An Unexploited Field and Its Possibilities,’ Views and Films Index, 6 October 1906.
2. Ben Singer, ‘Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors,’ Cinema
Journal 34:3 (Spring 1995), p. 22.
3. Abraham Cahan (1871–1951) was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the

413
 notes to pages 11 5 – 119

immigrant generation: editor of the Forward from 1901 until his death, literary and
theater critic for both English and Yiddish periodicals, and writer of short stories and a
novel about life in New York’s Jewish ‘ghetto.’
4. The number of articles on the nickelodeon boom compared poorly to the attention paid a
few years earlier to the Yiddish music hall boom. Then the Forward devoted over a dozen
articles to the Yiddish vaudeville business within less than a few months (December
1905–March 1906).
5. ‘Der unglik oyf rivington strit,’ editorial, Forward, 15 December 1908.
6. E.g. ‘Vu zaynen ahingekumen di yidishe myuzik hols?,’ Forward, 24 May 1908; ‘Vu
zaynen ahingekumen di yidishe myuzik hol “stars”?,’ ibid., 26 November 1908; ‘Der
“trost” oyf di yidishe muving piktshur “shous,”’ ibid., 16 December 1908; ‘Di ekelhafte
shmuts fun gevise muving piktshur pletser,’ ibid., 15 March 1909.
7. In 1910, AFL delegates urged local unions to ‘use all legitimate means … to discourage
the exhibition of such moving pictures that falsely pretend to represent instances in
connection with our movement.’ Quoted in Steven J. Ross, ‘The Revolt of the Audience:
Reconsidering Audiences and Reception during the Silent Era,’ in Melvyn Stokes and
Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early
Sound Era (London: BFI Publishing), p. 96. For a detailed analysis of labor and radical
film production, see Steven J. Ross, Working-class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping
of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
8. Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption and the
Search for American Idenity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 150.
9. ‘Der muving piktshur trost,’ Tageblatt, 6 January 1909; ‘Muving piktshurs in lebens-
farben,’ ibid., 17 December 1909.
10. Tageblatt, 14, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29 and 31 December 1908, 6 and 24 January 1909; Morgen
zhurnal 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 December 1908, and 7 January 1909.
11. It should be emphasized in this context that neither the Tageblatt nor the Morgen zhurnal
were subject to pressure from local film exhibitors, who might have used advertising as
leverage to produce favorable publicity. Movie theaters rarely advertised in the Yiddish
press before 1913–14.
12. ‘Golden rul theater iz zikher,’ Tageblatt, 16 December 1908.
13. ‘Der unglik oyf rivington strit,’ editorial, Forward, 15 December 1908.
14. ‘Di muving piktshur frage,’ editorial, Tageblatt, 20 March 1911.
15. Boston Advocate 7:5 (10 April 1908), p. 8, quoted in David Kaufman, Shul with a Pool:
The ‘Synagogue-Center’ in American-Jewish History (Hanover, NH: University Press of
New England, 1999), p. 124.
16. Louis Marshall, ‘The Need of a Distinctly Jewish Tendency in the Conduct of Jewish
Educational Institutions,’ (May 1908), quoted in Kaufman, Shul with a Pool, p. 125.
17. On the subject of Jewish labor and socialism, see Irving Howe, The World of Our Fathers:
The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976; repr: New York, Schocken, 1990), pp. 287–324;
Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 109–35.
18. Richard Abel, ‘The Perils of Pathé or the Americanization of Early American Cinema,’ in
Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 183–223, especially pp. 200–207.
19. See Judith Thissen, ‘Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New York City, 1905–1914,’ in
Melvin Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the
Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), pp. 21–23 (quote p. 23),
and Thissen, ‘Charlie Steiner’s Houston Hippodrome: Moviegoing on New York’s Lower
East Side, 1909–1913,’ in Gregg Bachman and Thomas Slater, American Silent Film:

414
 notes to pages 119 – 1 2 5

Discovering Marginalized Voices (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois

University Press, 2002), pp. 27–47, in particular pp. 43–47. For a somewhat different
view on Yiddish vaudeville, see Nina Warnke, ‘Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested
Sphere: Yiddish Music Halls, the Yiddish Press, and the Processes of Americanization,
1900–1910,’ in Theatre Journal 48 (1996), pp. 321–35.
20. ‘Grend theater thut zikh on in di bgodim fun muving piktshurs,’ Warheit, 5 September
1909.
21. ‘Adler, miler un kompani,’ Forward, 8 September 1909.
22. ‘Vos thut zikh in theater?,’ Tageblatt, 19 November 1910.
23. According Leo Rosten’s lexicon of Yinglish words ‘Alrightniks are materialists; they
parade their money; they lack modest, sensitive, edel qualities. They talk loudly, dress
garishly, show off … Above all, they are not learned, nor devoted to learning—hence
cannot be really respected.’ Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (1968; London: Penguin
Books, 1971), p. 13.
24. For a detailed analysis, see Thissen, ‘Charlie Steiner’s Houston Hippodrome,’ p. 46.
25. For example, ‘Durkh muving piktshurs beganvenen zey a hoyz,’ Forward, 11 January
1910; ‘Lernt zikh ganvenen durkh muving piktshurs,’ ibid., 6 June 1910; ‘Kinder veren
banditen fun muving piktshurs, ibid., 11 June 1910.
26. ‘Lazt nit ayere kinder gehn aleyn in di muving piktshur pletser,’ Forward, 13 May 1910.
See also ‘2 yidishe boys fershikt in sing-sing als kadeten,’ Forward, 31 January 1910;
‘maydlekh ferfihrt in a muving piktshur plats,’ ibid., 23 December 1910; ‘Vider di gefahr
fun di muving piktshurs,’ ibid., editorial, 2 February 1911. For the general context in
which these concerns about movies and white slavery were articulated, see Janet Staiger,
Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minessota Press, 1995), pp. 44–52, 99–103, 120–28.
27. ‘Muving piktshurs un di kinder,’ Tageblatt, 30 January 1911.
28. ‘Interesante kleynigkayten vegn muving piktshurs,’ Forward, 9 January 1914. After a
few weeks, the column was re-titled ‘Interesante fakten vegen muving piktshurs,’ ibid.,
16 February 1914.
29. Moving Picture World, 30 May 1914, p. 1218.
30. Moving Picture World, 22 August 1914, p. 1146 and 29 August 1914, p. 1248.
31. Moving Picture World, 30 January 1915, p. 757 and 6 February 1915, p. 809.
32. Advertisement Grand Theater, Forward, 21 October 1914; ‘A varnung fun yakob p. adler
zum publikum,’ Advertisement People’s Theater, Forward, 24 October 1914.
33. Warnke, ‘Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested Sphere,’ pp. 325–26.
34. Over the last decade, important contributions to the debate about the image-ban have
been made by Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit in Idolatry (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992); Loinel Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image: A Jewish View
(New York: New York University Press, 1997), and Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jews:
Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
35. See for instance, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp (eds), The Art of Being
Jewish in Modern Times (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
36. The wish ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ is also expressed at Yom Kippur, but there is no doubt
that the cartoons refers to Pesach, because it appeared less than two weeks before the
start of this eight day festival. As matter of fact, it is no coincidence that Marcus Loew
opened his new theater around this time, because Pesach was not only a religious festival
but also marked a highpoint in the Yiddish theatrical season. On the first two and final
two days of the holiday, thousands of immigrants flocked to the theaters on the Lower
East Side for special matinees and evening performances, billed ‘lekoved peysekh’—in
honor of Passover.

415
 notes to pages 125–130

37. In addition to the original text, I used R.J. Zwi Werblowsky and Geoffrey Widoger (eds)
The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
38. Ibid., p. 199 (Deuteronomy).
39. Bland, The Artless Jew, p. 60.
40. Michael Steinlauf, ‘Fear of Purim: Y.L. Peretz and the Canonization of Yiddish Theater,’
Jewish Social Studies 1: 3 (Spring 1995), p. 55. The formula ‘bread and circuses’ occurs in
Tractate Avodah zarah (idolatrous worship) 18 b.
41. Michael Steinlauf, ‘Purimshpil to Yiddish Theater: Re-exploring the Connections,’
unpublished paper presented at the Center For Judaic Studies Seminar, Philadelphia,
24 January 2001. I wish to thank Michael for sharing this paper with me.
42. Significantly, Purim is the only Jewish holiday that commemorates events that are
entirely set in the Diaspora. Moreover, the scroll of Esther is a purely secular narrative
which, unlike other text in the Jewish canon, does not contain the word of God even
once. Steinlauf, ‘Purimsphil to Yiddish theater.’ See also Michael Steinlauf, ‘The fear of
Purim: Y.L. Peretz and the Canonization of Yiddish Theater,’ Jewish Social Studies 1:3
(Spring 1995), p. 56.
43. Steinlauf, ‘Fear of Purim,’ p. 56.
44. Warnke, ‘Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested Sphere,’ p. 323.
45. Bernard Gorin, Di geshikhte fun yidishen theater (New York: Literarisher verband, 1918),
vol. 2, p. 189.
46. Jacob Gordin, ‘The Yiddish Stage,’ Yearbook of the University Settlement Society of New
York (1901), p. 28.
47. Typically, the loyfer declaimed a prologue including a demand for money from the
audience and introducing the actors with the formula ‘arayn, arayn … du mayn.’ In the
cartoon, the two functions of the prologue are condensed in the sentence: ‘aher, aher,
yiden! bilig bilig bilig! ale stars un starikes far tsehn cent!’ [This way, this way, Jews!
Cheap, cheap, cheap! all stars for ten cents!].
48. Steinlauf, ‘Fear of Purim,’ p. 55; idem, ‘Purimshpil to Yiddish theater,’ pp. 11–12.
49. See Hadassa Kosak, Culture of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City,
1881–1905 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), especially chapters
five and six.

Chapter 7: ‘Four Hours of Hootin’ and Hollerin’’: Moviegoing and Everyday Life Outside
the Movie Palace
1. My deepest thanks to Mary Annese, Richard McBride and Rita Soplop for their
generous and indispensable contributions to this study. Douglas Gomery, Shared
Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1992), passim; Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass
Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
passim; Russell Merritt, ‘Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914: Building an Audience for
the Movies,’ in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry (Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 83–102; Steven J. Ross, Working-class Hollywood: Silent
Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1998), pp. 173–211.
2. Douglas Gomery offers a useful baseline definition of a movie palace as ‘a large theater
built to screen films and to accommodate live shows, seating over 1,500 people,
constructed with a fan shaped auditorium and much non-functional decoration.’ Gomery,
‘The Picture Palace: Economic Sense or Hollywood Nonsense?’, Quarterly Review of Film
Studies 3.1 (1978), p. 24.

416
 notes to pages 1 30 – 1 32

3. Peter Stead, Film and the Working-class: The Feature Film in British and American Society
(London: Routledge, 1989), p. 18.
4. Richard Testa, ‘Movie Exhibition Practices and Procedures During the Hollywood
Studio Era in Providence Rhode Island,’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland,
1992, pp. 177–78. The term ‘moron’ was not uncommon in the discourse of reformers
and cultural elites at the time and, as Richard Maltby has found, was ‘widely used to
refer indirectly to the immigrant working class.’ Maltby, ‘The Production Code and the
Hays Office,’ in Tino Balio (ed.), Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise
1930–1939 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 45.
5. Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of
American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), p. 103.
6. Testa, ‘Movie Exhibition Practices and Procedures,’ p. 173.
7. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, pp. 34–56.
8. Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire, p. 104.
9. Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie
Theater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 89.
10. Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture
1915–1928 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), pp. 9–10; Miriam Hansen, Babel
and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991), p. 100.
11. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial
City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 212. The
limited mixing of social classes in industrial cities may not have been confined only to
a downtown palace versus neighborhood theater split. In addition, it is possible patrons
from different classes self-selected into attendance at entirely different movie palaces,
or into different blocks of seats within a single palace, largely due to cost factors and/or
taste preferences. For an empirical study exploring this possibility, see Jeffrey Klenotic,
‘Class Markers in the Mass Movie Audience: A Case Study in the Cultural Geography of
Moviegoing, 1926–1932,’ The Communication Review 2.4 (1998), pp. 468–73, 487–89.
12. Thomas Doherty, ‘This is Where We Came In: The Audible Screen and the Voluble
Audience of Early Sound Cinema,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds),
American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London:
BFI Publishing, 1999), pp. 143–63; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial
Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Mary Carbine, ‘The Finest Outside the Loop: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s
Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,’ Camera Obscura 23 (May 1990), pp. 8–41. The question
of how deep into the 1930s any given neighborhood theater remained a vital center of
social activity remains an open one. Steven Ross, for instance, argues that working-
class patrons quickly grew to prefer the movie palace over the local, the latter being
attended only during the week and even then with some distaste. As Ross rightly
observes, ‘we should not romanticize the neighborhood theater’ given its often run-
down architecture, uncomfortable seats, narrow aisles, poor film prints, lack of ushers,
and status as hangout for ‘juvenile delinquents, loose women, and exceedingly loud
children’ (Ross, Working-class Hollywood, p. 192). Still, whatever questions exist over
how to characterize or periodize the neighborhood theater (not to mention the even
more fundamental question of whether we can do so without essentializing this type
of theater), the larger theoretical issue at stake remains crucial. Namely, that practices
carried out under the sign ‘moviegoing’ are part of a process of social communication
and bear the property of multi-accentuality. If juvenile delinquents, ‘loose’ women,
and loud children attended certain neighborhood theaters, and if some patrons defined
these groups’ attendance as undesirable, this underscores the point that the meaning

417
 notes to pages 1 32 – 1 3 7

of moviegoing—the meaning we make of our attendance as well as the meaning made

of our attendance by others—is open to competing definitions. The scenario Ross
describes also reminds us that however disreputable or distasteful the practices of
neighborhood theaters looked to some at the time, the movie palace was not the only
form of reception operative during the 1920s and 1930s. For an excellent overview of
moviegoing practices at many neighborhood theaters during the 1930s, see Richard
Butsch, ‘American Movie Audiences of the 1930s,’ International Labor and Working-
Class History 59 (Spring 2001), pp. 106–120.
13. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 88. In addition to the abovementioned work on
industrialized cities, recent studies documenting moviegoing in rural and small town
settings also suggest the diversity in film exhibition and audience formation both during
and after the period of early cinema. See Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small
Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1996); Gregory A. Waller, ‘Another Audience: Black Moviegoing,
1907–1916,’ Cinema Journal 31.2 (1992), pp. 3–25; Gregory A. Waller, ‘Hillbilly Music
and Will Rogers: Small-town Picture Shows in the 1930s,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard
Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound
Era (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), pp. 164–79.
14. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridg, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 6.
15. See V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press,
1973).
16. See Janet Staiger’s work for an excellent example of this ‘reading formation’ approach to
studying the historical conditions of film reception. Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in
the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1992).
17. Drawing from Bourdieu, I discuss one way moviegoing might be conceptualized as both
open to cultural agency and structured in relations of social and economic power in
my essay, ‘Class Markers.’ That essay also provides a fuller discussion of the theoretical
framework through which moviegoing can be understood as a stage in a process of social
communication.
18. These theaters have been identified through Price and Lee’s Spring field City Directory as
well as an exhaustive reading of Springfield’s three daily newspapers. It is difficult to
determine when Price and Lee collected information for each year’s directory, so it is
possible a theater listed in a given year was actually out of business by the start of that
year if Price and Lee based their listings on information gathered from the year before.
Seat capacity figures should also be considered approximate, since these capacities often
changed during this period of intense theater renovation.
19. ‘State Theater Opens,’ Spring field Sunday Republican, 6 September 1931, p. 5C.
20. The reduction in seats at Fox-Poli’s Palace was due to renovations, particularly installation
of larger seats designed for greater comfort.
21. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, p. 56.
22. For a more detailed discussion of the changing history of theater ownership in
Springfield, see Jeffrey Klenotic, ‘A Cultural Studies Approach to the Social History of
Film: A Case Study of Moviegoing in Springfield, Massachusetts,’ Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1996.
23. See H. Paul Douglass, The Spring field Church Survey: A Study of Organized Religion with
Its Social Background (New York: George H. Doran, 1926).
24. Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Spring field Massachusetts and the Meaning of Community
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
25. Springfield City Planning Board, A City Plan for Spring field, Massachusetts: Report by the

418
 notes to pages 137–138

Planning Board, 1923 (Springfield, MA: Springfield Printing and Binding Company,
1923).
26. Population figures drawn from Douglass’s Spring field Church Survey, Price and Lee’s
Spring field City Directory (1926–1932), and the Springfield City Planning Board’s A City
Plan for Spring field.
27. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, pp. v–vi. Given the significance of Douglass’s survey
to this study, it is necessary to address its status and use as an historical document.
Trained as a social scientist, Douglass helped start the Committee on Social and
Religious Surveys, founded in 1921 in New York City. A year later the Committee
became the Institute of Social and Religious Research. The Institute was charged to study
‘organized religion with its social background,’ and sought to generate empirical research
that could help Protestantism adapt to rapidly changing patterns of social demography
and geographic mobility. To this end, the Institute collaborated with local churches and
civic organizations to fund and develop extensive protocols and data bases with which to
survey the social and religious geography of a given site, with Douglass serving as field
director.
In the case of Springfield, the Institute employed a variety of methods to map the
city’s social and cultural geography during the 1920s into areas distinguished by ‘natural
boundaries and homogeneity of population’ (p. 263). In the end, the survey divided
Springfield into eleven districts that it believed accurately captured the cultural contours
of the city as it was lived. The delineation of these eleven districts in some cases shadowed
the boundaries of the eight wards of the city, but overall the survey’s identification of
social and cultural fault lines was more organic, nuanced and fine-grained than what
ward boundaries typically allow. To draw out social dimensions of each district, the
survey amalgamated data from, among other sources, a door-to-door census of more than
16,000 residents undertaken as part of the survey itself, federal census records including
data at the enumeration district level, city school censuses, local polling records, court
and police records, charitable relief records, and extant records indicating the zoning
and location of city industries.
The survey was not, however, a neutral or unbiased document. Its purpose was to
evaluate each district according to an index of ‘social quality’ that formed the basis of
‘popular distinctions between ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ sections of the city’ (p. 265).
As the survey described its measure of ‘social quality’: ‘It is assumed that a district with
a large population of foreign birth or foreign antecedents, many Negroes, a high degree
of industrialization and congestion of housing, with many children at work, much
illiteracy, juvenile delinquency and charity, represents a less desirable combination of
human fortunes than one in which opposite conditions exist, and that the ranking of
districts on this basis approximately places their people in the scale of human welfare’
(pp. 265–66). Given the cultural orientation behind this measure of social quality and
neighborhood status, it is unsurprising that the survey maintains its results ‘demonstrate
conclusively that Protestantism has also a strong affinity for more desirable sections of
the city [and that] … the largest proportion of Protestants and the best social quality
go together’ (p. 274).
The bias in the survey does not undermine its usefulness as an historical document.
On the contrary, when read against the grain, the survey reveals the anxiety of a
dominant group confronting the reality of urban transformation, and it stands as a record
of this group’s attempt to map this transformation for the purpose of asserting control
over it. Whatever we think of ‘social quality’ rankings, the survey remains useful precisely
because it gives access to an elite perception of the changing city. This perception can
then be held in tension against non-elite visions of city space, such as those gleaned
here through oral histories.

419
 notes to pages 1 3 8 – 14 2

28. On the development of Springfield’s commercial and industrial base, see Donald
J. D’Amato, Spring field—350 years: A Pictorial History (Norfolk, VA: The Donning
Company, 1985); Michael Konig and Martin Kaufman (eds), Spring field 1636–1986
(Springfield, MA: Springfield Library and Museums Association, 1987), pp. 146–83;
and Frank Bauer, At the Crossroads: Spring field, Massachusetts 1636–1975 (Springfield,
MA: U.S.A. Bicentennial Committee of Springfield, 1975), pp. 88–101.
29. Women constituted 28.6 per cent of employed labor and worked in clerical occupations
(clerks, stenographers, bookkeepers) and domestic/personal service occupations (domestic
servants, waitresses, housekeepers, nurses), and as school teachers. Douglass, Spring field
Church Survey, pp. 78–79.
30. Spring field City Directory (New Haven, CT: Price & Lee, 1920–1933).
31. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, pp. 64, 78, 405.
32. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, p. 65.
33. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, p. 65; Michael H. Frisch, ‘Town into City: A
Reconsideration on the Occasion of Springfield’s 350th Anniversary,’ in Konig and
Kaufman (eds), Spring field 1636–1986, p. 114.
34. Frisch, ‘Town into City: A Reconsideration,’ p. 113.
35. See Bauer, At the Crossroads.
36. Studio publicity for the grand opening of the Paramount was enormous, tracking
construction of the theater for months and culminating with a full ten-page special section
in the Spring field Daily Republican. ‘Paramount Theater,’ Spring field Daily Republican, 29
September 1929, pp. 1G–10G. By comparison to the cost of the Franklin, the Paramount’s
air-cooling system alone was estimated at $100,000. ‘Air Cooling Plant of Modern Type,’
Spring field Sunday Republican, 29 September 1929, p. 2G; ‘New Paramount Theater
Largest, Most Modern in Western Massachusetts,’ Spring field Sunday Republican, 29
September 1929, p. 2G. The cost to construct the Franklin is taken from the theater’s
building permit, ‘Application for Permit to Build,’ No. 22609, Ward 2, which is archived
at the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts.
37. The North End had been without its own theater since 1925 when the Globe, a vaudeville
and motion picture house, closed after fourteen years.
38. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, pp. 265–67.
39. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, pp. 265, 407.
40. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, p. 265.
41. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, p. 410.
42. Mary Annese, personal interview, 13 July 1994. Annese is a second generation American
of Polish and Italian heritage. Her family moved to Springfield, and to the North End,
in 1926. She was seven. Her father worked on the railroad. Her mother worked in textile
mills before coming to Springfield. Mary lived in the same house in the North End, less
than 500 feet from the Franklin Theater, for 34 years. A long time resident of the North
End, she directly participated in the culture of everyday life described in this study, and
witnessed many changes to her former neighborhood at first hand. She knew the Semanie
family that built the Franklin Theater, as they lived in the same neighborhood, though
not on the same street. Although Mary lived near the Franklin, she acknowledged being
in the theater only ‘about a half-a-dozen times, because I wasn’t much of a movie-goer.
I was one that always went to the girls club.’ When the Franklin sold at public auction
in 1940, it was demolished and replaced by the new home of the Springfield Girls
Club, where Mary worked for ten years. Annese’s interview, like the other interviews
for this study, was done face-to-face, recorded on tape with the participant’s permission,
transcribed, and excerpted as close to verbatim as possible (without sacrificing coherence)
from those transcripts. In keeping with an ‘ethno-historical’ approach to social film
history, I have tried to be reflexive in my use of interviews, understanding these not as

420
 notes to pages 14 2 – 147

unproblematic pipelines into the past but as forms of discourse with their own unique
social and psychological contexts of production. See Annette Kuhn, ‘That Day Did
Last Me All My Life: Cinema Memory and Enduring Fandom,’ in Melvyn Stokes and
Richard Maltby (eds), Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies
(London: BFI Publishing, 1999), pp. 135–46.
43. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, p. 265.
44. Richard McBride is a second generation American of Irish and French Canadian heritage
who was born in Springfield and lived in the North End throughout his childhood
and early adulthood. His mother was a homemaker and his father worked as a night
supervisor at a downtown restaurant. Richard lived in a multi-family home about one-
half mile north of the Franklin Theater, and would regularly walk to movies there. He
was seven in 1926 and remembers attending the Franklin at least once a week (Saturdays),
often more, throughout the early 1930s. He did not often attend many theaters outside
the North End. As he says, ‘We who were in the smaller group, the less affluent group,
we’d wait ’til they came to our theaters, ones we could walk to. It would be rare for us
to go to a big one.’
45. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
46. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
47. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, p. 265.
48. These industries included, among numerous others, F.M. West Box Company and
Lumber Yard, Cheney Biglow Wire Works, Hampden Brass Company, E.S. Decker
Lumber Yard, Davitt Iron Foundry and Iron Works, Walsh Boiler and Iron Works,
Springfield Breweries Company, and H.W. Carter Paper Company.
49. Douglass, Spring field Church Survey, pp. 407–08.
50. Mary Annese, personal interview, 13 July 1994.
51. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 92.
52. Details drawn from the theater’s building permit, as well as from a photograph of the
building.
53. ‘Congress Street Vice is the Chief Issue Says Louis,’ Spring field Daily News, 14 October
1929, p. 2.
54. Rita Soplop, personal interview, 30 June 1995.
55. Preliminary genealogical information on the Semanie family (whose name may formerly
have been Assemani) was obtained via a message board discussion posted to the web-
based family history service Ancestry.com.
56. Spring field City Directory (New Haven, CT: Price & Lee, 1920–1933); Mary Annese,
personal interview, 13 July 1994.
57. Franklin Advertisements in Spring field Daily News, 15 October 1929, p. 2; Spring field
Daily News, 21 October 1929, p. 6; Spring field Daily News, 25 October 1929, p. 2;
Spring field Evening Union, 24 October 1931, p. 7.
58. ‘Special Notice,’ Spring field Daily News, 25 October 1929, p. 2.
59. Klenotic, ‘Class Markers,’ pp. 482–83.
60. For more on the Knights of Labor, see Holly Allen, ‘Gender, The Movement Press,
and the Cultural Politics of the Knights of Labor,’ in William S. Solomon and Robert
W. McChesney (eds), Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communication History
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 122–50.
61. Bauer, At the Crossroads, pp. 91–92.
62. Paul Seale, ‘A Host of Others: Toward a Nonlinear History of Poverty Row and the
Coming of Sound,’ Wide Angle 13.1 (1991), pp. 93–94.
63. Richard Maltby offers an excellent discussion of Hollywood’s classification of film
audiences between 1929 and 1933 ‘into a series of overlapping binary distinctions between
“class” and “mass”, “sophisticated” and “unsophisticated”, “Broadway” and “Main Street.”’

421

Maltby et al, Going to the movie421 421 22/11/2007 13:17:01

 notes to pages 147 – 1 5 7

Richard Maltby, ‘Sticks, Hicks and Flaps: Classical Hollywood’s Generic Conception
of Its Audiences,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds),” Identifying Hollywood’s
Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), p. 25.
64. ‘Seed Coming to Franklin Theater,’ Spring field Evening Union, 24 October 1931, p. 6.
65. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
66. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 4.
67. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920–1940
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 132–40.
68. Mary Annese, personal interview, 13 July 1994; Richard McBride, personal interview,
21 October 1994.
69. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
70. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
71. For more on the activities of child audiences at neighborhood theaters, and the attempt to
reform these activities, see the case study presented in Jeffrey Klenotic, ‘“Like Nickels in
a Slot”: Children of the American Working-classes at the Neighborhood Movie House,’
The Velvet Light Trap 48 (Fall 2001), pp. 20–33.
72. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
73. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
74. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
75. Mary Annese, personal interview, 13 July 1994.
76. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.
77. Mary Annese, personal interview, 13 July 1994.
78. Richard McBride, personal interview, 21 October 1994.

Chapter 8: Cinemagoing in the United States in the mid-1930s: A Study Based on the
Variety Dataset
1. The number of cinemas varied slightly because some of the smaller venues reported
irregularly. Also, cities came and went. For example, New Orleans was included in 1934
but then dropped from the reports in 1935.
2. ‘Bank nights’ were lotteries that an audience member entered by buying an admission
ticket. ‘Giveaways’ typically offered customers a piece of crockery for the price of
admission.
3. The cities reported in the tables were Birmingham, Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Chicago,
Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City (Missouri), Los Angeles,
Minneapolis, Montreal, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland,
Providence, St Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, and Washington, D.C. Reports
from a further six cities are included in the text of Variety, but not in the monthly
tables, and so these cities are not included here. They are Baltimore, Cleveland, Lincoln,
Louisville, Newark and Omaha.
4. Films included in the sample are those whose principal billing, as reported in Variety, was
during the twenty-five months between 4 October 1934 and 29 October 1936. The records
of films released before 4 October 1934 but exhibited predominantly during and after this
month will be included. Likewise included are the records of films released during October
1936 and receiving subsequent exhibitions in November and December 1936.
5. A ‘single’ bill could include a live stage show. The ‘single’ aspect indicates the presence
of only one feature film on the programme.
6. The figure of 18 per cent is likely to be an underestimate. This is because the tables in
some instances do not report on live acts, and it has not been possible to review all of
the weekly text reports. Future studies, in this respect, will need to make more extensive
use of the text reports.

422
 notes to pages 1 5 7 – 16 0

7. The International Motion Picture Almanac, 1936–37 (New York, 1937), p. 992.
8. Ibid.
9. International Motion Picture Almanac, 1946–7 (New York, 1947). The populations of the
cities from which the sample set of cinemas is drawn sum to just under 26 million, out of
a total U.S. population of 128 million for the mid-1930s. U.S. Department of Commerce,
Bureau of the Census, U.S. Historical Statistics: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC,
1975), Appendix One.
10. Gomery states that in some large cities there could be as many as eleven runs. Douglas
Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 17.
11. John Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2000).
12. Richard Maltby, ‘Sticks, Hicks and Flaps: Classical Hollywood’s Generic Conception
of its Audiences’, in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), Identifying Hollywood’s
Audiences: Cultural Identification and the Movies (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 25–29.
13. Mark Glancy, ‘MGM Film Grosses, 1924–48: The Eddie Mannix Ledger’, The Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 12 (1992), pp. 127–144; Mark Glancy, ‘Warner
Bros. Film Grosses, 1921–51: The William Schaefer Ledger,’ The Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television, 15 (1995), pp. 55–74; Richard Jewell, ‘RKO Film Grosses,
1929–51: The C.J. Tevlin Ledger,’ The Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 14
(1994), pp. 37–51.
14. John Sedgwick, ‘Product Differentiation at the Movies: Hollywood, 1945–65,’ Journal
of Economic History, 62 (2002), pp. 682–83.
15. Variety, 25 October 1934, p. 8.
16. Variety, 30 October 1935, p. 8.
17. Variety, 2 April 1936, p. 8.
18. Variety, 31 October 1935, p. 12.
19. Variety, 11 December 1934, p. 11; and Variety, 18 December 1934, p. 11.
20. Birmingham was the only city in the deep South that Variety covered. This has been
attributed to the poor box-office returns of the region. See Thomas Cripps, ‘The Myth
of the Southern Box-Office: A Factor in Racial Sterotyping in American Movies,
1920–40,’ in J.C. Curtis and L.L. Lewis (eds), The Black Experience in America: Selected
Essays (Austin, TX and London, 1970), pp. 116–44.
21. In Birmingham, for example, Temple’s Dimples, The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel
placed among the 20 top earning films during this period; and one of the city’s leading
cinemas, the Strand, regularly offered week-long engagements to low budget Westerns
of stars such as Richard Dix, George O’Brien and Randolph Scott.
22. The Barretts of Wimpole Street was declared to be ‘too snooty,’ ‘too stylish’ and ‘too
highbrow’ for Birmingham audiences, and it lasted only one week at the Alabama
Theatre, where it earned $6,500. The week before, Will Rogers’ Judge Priest had earned
$8,500 in the same venue. Variety, 30 October 1934, p. 8. Modern Times earned a
remarkable $230,500 during the six weeks it played New York’s Rivoli Theatre, but this
proved to be 38 per cent of its total earnings, indicating that its success elsewhere was
not so great.
23. The house, said to be worth $16,000, also included home insurance and groceries for
a full year. The lottery took place in Denver and four first-run cinemas participated.
Denver’s Orpheum, which is included in the sample, was one participant. Variety, 4
September 1935, p. 4.
24. The Louis-Schmeling fight film was reported to be a significant attraction in Boston,
Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Montreal, Portland, San
Francisco and St Louis. See Variety, 25 June 1936.
25. Variety, 23 October 1935, p. 9.

423
 notes to pages 162 – 17 1

26. Earnings for Cleopatra reached a moderately successful $415,500, but this was below the
level of earnings reached by other costume dramas. The grosses for The Crusades and The
Last Days of Pompeii were much lower, at $212,900 and $186,400, respectively.
27. See, for example, Nick Roddick, A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the
1930s (London: BFI, 1983); Peter Roffman and James Purdy, The Hollywood Social
Problem Film: Madness, Despair and Politics from the Depression to the 1950s (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1981); and Colin Shindler, Hollywood in Crisis: American
Cinema and Society, 1929–39 (London: Routledge, 1996).
28. Brian Taves, ‘The B Film: Hollywood’s Other Half ’, in Tino Balio (ed.), Grand Design:
Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930–1939 (New York: Scribner’s, 1993),
p. 321.
29. The ‘Spanish’ films were actually Spanish-language films, and many of these came from
Mexico and South American countries, but the report does not categorise them in this
way. See Variety, 1 January 1936, p. 43.
30. The discrepancy in running times is between the time listed for the original British
release and the (shorter) time listed for the American release. For example, Evergreen was
cut from 92 to 82 minutes; First a Girl from 93 to 78 minutes, Things to Come from 110 to
96 minutes, Scrooge from 78 to 72 minutes; and Man of Aran from 80 to 70 minutes.
31. For further analysis of London Films and the American market, see Sarah Street,
Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (London: Continuum, 2002),
chap. two.
32. For further analysis of Gaumont-British’s efforts in the USA, see Sedgwick, Popular
Filmgoing, chap. ten; the American release of The 39 Steps is considered in Glancy, The
39 Steps: A British Film Guide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002).
33. One exception to this was the British and Dominions film Escape Me Never, which earned
$189,950, but the company’s other films had very few engagements and earnings levels
far below this.
34. Taves, ‘The B Film,’ pp. 318–20.
35. This method does under represent those very strong ‘A’ films, such as San Francisco, that
occasionally played on double bills with much less popular films. This is an unavoidable
problem, but also a slight one. As we have seen, the major ‘A’ films were actually the
least likely to appear on double bills.
36. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 77.
37. Variety, 25 September 1934, p. 9.
38. To give one example, when MGM’s It’s in the Air was paired with Universal’s Fighting
Youth at the Broadway in Portland, the report commented that audiences were coming
‘chiefly for Air.’ Variety, 30 October 1935, p. 9.
39. Polling was reported to have included 725,824 people. Variety, 12 August 1936, p. 5.
40. For example, it was said that while one of the films might be ‘suitable for children, the
second feature generally is not’ Variety, 12 August, 1936, p. 34.
41. Variety, 8 July 1936, p. 5.
42. Variety, 12 August 1936, p. 34.
43. Variety, 16 October 1934, p. 49.
44. Variety, 1 January 1935, p. 115.
45. Variety, 4 September 1935, p. 17.
46. Variety, 1 April 1936, p. 20.
47. Variety, 13 November 1934, p. 17. Of course, such reports suggest that the earnings of
The Scarlet Empress and other films that played with prominent live acts should perhaps
be altered to take account of another significant attraction on the programme. However,
there is no clear and obvious method of doing this. Instead, we have chosen to draw

424
 notes to pages 17 1 – 2 0 0

attention to the presence of live acts when reporting box-office grosses. See Tables One,
Three, Four and Five and Appendix One for examples of this.
48. Variety, 22 January 1935, p. 49.
49. Gregory Waller, ‘Hillbilly Music and Will Rogers: Small Town Picture Shows in the
1930s,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From
the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI, 1999), p. 171. See also
Richard B. Jewell, ‘Hollywood and Radio: Competition and Partnership in the 1930s,’
The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 4 (1984), pp. 125–51.
50. The Roxy Theatre, for example, paid $6,000 for the Bowes stage show to support the
Republic film Laughing Irish Eyes. Variety declared that this was a ‘fair gamble’ given the
‘weak picture.’ The week’s earnings, at $24,000, were twice as high as the film earned
in any other engagement. Variety, 8 April 1936, p. 19.
51. Variety, 1 April 1936, p. 6.

Chapter 9: Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts, and Lily White Palaces: Desegregating the
Motion Picture Theater
1. Variously reported in ‘Atty. Gen’ Kennedy on Desegregation,’ The Film Daily, 29 October
1963, p. 3; ‘Kennedy Calls for Theatres to Lead Desegregation Fight,’ Motion Picture
Herald, 13 November 1963, p. 22; and Abel Green, ‘Levine, Hub’s Biggest Bean,’
Variety, 30 October 1963, pp. 7, 22. Variety later noted that ‘many exhibs expressed
embarrassment and annoyance about that booing after Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy’s theater desegregation speech.’ ‘TOA: Take Over Americana,’ Variety, 6
November 1963, p. 20.
2. Though not forbidden by law from entering race houses, white moviegoers ‘for reasons of
caste snobbery … wouldn’t be seen at [such] houses.’ ‘Negroes-Only House in Carolina
Has Own Separate But Equal Ideas; Sues for Same Dates as Whites,’ Variety, 26 June
1957, p. 3.
3. The touchstone source on motion picture exhibition in America is Douglas Gomery,
Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison, WI.:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
4. ‘Southern Theatre,’ Motion Picture Herald, 12 October 1957, p. 6.
5. ‘Drops Jim Crow Policy,’ The Crisis (March 1953), p. 161.
6. See, however, ‘Movie Theaters for Black Americans,’ in Gomery, Shared Pleasures,
pp. 155–70.
7. Robert J. Landry, ‘Negro Only: Hazy Outlook,’ Variety, 14 August 1963, p. 5.
8. On 23 September 1952, in a brutal contest that boxing aficionados laud as one of the
greatest fights of all time, Italian-American challenger Rocky Marciano stepped into the
ring to challenge African American champion ‘Jersey Joe’ Walcott for the heavyweight
crown. In the first round, Walcott landed a devastating right hook that dropped
Marciano to the canvas for the first time in forty-three fights. By the twelfth round,
ringside scorecards put Walcott well ahead on points. In the thirteenth round, Marciano
rallied and knocked out Walcott with a roundhouse right cross.
9. ‘Negro-White Theatre in Memphis Nixed By Binford on Walcott Pix,’ Variety, 8 October
1952, pp. 3, 27. Binford was notorious for his ‘weirdly capricious’ decisions, as Variety
noted upon the forced retirement of the eighty-eight year-old censor in 1955. See
‘Memphis Powders Blue Nose,’ Variety, 14 December 1955, p. 5.
10. John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 48.
11. Antoinette S. Demond, ‘On Sitting,’ The Crisis (November 1955), p. 525.
12. ‘Segregated Theater Cracking,’ Variety, 2 June 1954, pp. 1, 63.

425
 notes to pages 200 –208

13. ‘Kick Virginia Law But Circuit Meanwhile Ends Separate Negro Areas,’ Variety, 3 July
1963, p. 16.
14. See Abel Green, ‘Show Biz: Pain-in-the-Brain,’ Variety, 8 January 1958, p. 56. This
article also marks the first time Variety’s annual year-end wrap-up of motion picture
trends included an extensive discussion of racial issues.
15. Marian A. Wright, ‘Integration Trends in the South,’ The Crisis (March 1959),
pp. 137–46.
16. ‘Unsegregated Cinema,’ The Crisis (April 1954), pp. 221–22.
17. ‘So. Carolina Negroes “Trespassed” On Theater, Fined $1, Take Appeal,’ Variety, 8 May
1963, p. 25; ‘Sidewalk Sitting By Negroes,’ Variety, 5 May 1963, p. 25.1.
18. ‘So. Carolina Negroes “Trespassed” On Theatre, Fined $1, Take Appeal,’ Variety, 8 May
1963, p. 25.
19. ‘Klansman in Front of Theatre; Remembrance of Griffith’s “Nation,”’ Variety, 6 November
1963, p. 6.
20. “Dixie Widely Picketed,” and “Racial Pickets Multiply in Dixie,” Variety, February 15,
1961: 14.
21. ‘Negro Collegians Plot Stand-Ins Vs. Dixie Theaters,’ Variety, 15 February 1961, p. 14.
22. ‘Duke U. Studes Give Segregated House Hard Time,’ Variety, 28 March 1962, p. 18.
23. ‘Double Dose of Theatre Bias for Sit-Ins,’ The Chicago Defender, 21 April 1961, p. 18.
24. ‘White Student Jailed for Sitting in Balcony,’ Variety, 7 March 1962, p. 17.
25. Abel Green, ‘Megatons and Moody Mirth,’ Variety 10 January 1962, p. 52.
26. ‘College Faculty Pickets Theaters,’ The Chicago Defender, 15 April 1961, p. 12.
27. ‘Negroes in Boycott,’ The New York Times, 30 April 1957, p. 23; ‘Urge Negroes to Boycott
“10 Commandments” Under Segregated N.C. Set-up,’ Variety, 8 May 1957, p. 3.
28. ‘Whites-with-Negroes Still Testing As Interstate Rigidly Segregated,’ Variety, 13
December 1961, p. 22.
29. ‘Negroes in Louisville Can’t See “Porgy” Film,’ Variety, 13 January 1960, p. 14; ‘Negro
Junket to “Porgy” (Indpls) When Downtown L’ville Bans Attendance,’ Variety, 8
February 1960, p. 2.
30. ‘Ozoners’ Big Negro Draw,’ Variety, 3 August 1949, p. 4.
31. Franklin H. Williams, ‘Sunshine and Jim Crow,’ The Crisis (April 1954), p. 206.
32. Odie Anderson, ‘Reluctant Race Reforms,’ Variety, 18 October 1963, p. 18.
33. ‘Negro Motorists Seek Drive-In Entrance,’ Variety, 1 August 1962, p. 63.
34. ‘Atlanta to Admit Negroes,’ Variety, 4 April 1962, pp. 7, 13.
35. ‘Washington Segregation,’ The Crisis (April 1953), p. 226.
36. Maggie Dent, ‘Art, Campus, and Racial Policy,’ Variety, 12 June 1963, pp. 7, 11.
37. ‘Anti-Segregationists Picket Theatres,’ Motion Picture Herald, 18 February 1961, p. 6.
38. Robert J. Landry, ‘Nashville Quietly De-Races,’ Variety, 20 December 1961, pp. 20,.
39. Lewis, Walking With the Wind, p. 129.
40. ‘Negroes Arrested in Nashville Demonstrations,’ Motion Picture Herald, 4 March 1961,
p. 6.
41. Robert J. Landry, ‘Nashville Quietly De-Races,’ Variety, 20 December 1961, pp. 3, 20.
42. ‘Only Negro Balcony in Atlanta Closed; City Stands as 100% Segregated,’ Variety, 13
December 1961, p. 22.
43. ‘Quietly, Downtown Atlanta Theaters Admit Negroes,’ Variety, 23 May 1962, pp. 3,
63.
44. Ibid.
45. For accounts of variations on the theme, see ‘Charlotte Latest Dixie Community to
Desegregate,’ Variety, 3 July 1963, p. 16; ‘Dallas Opens All Seats to Negroes,’ Variety,
10 July 1963, p. 16; ‘Controlled Integration Leading to Open Door Starts in Durham,
N.C.,’ Variety, 24 July 1963, p. 1; ‘Negro-Only Site Now Admits Whites,’ Variety, 14

426
 notes to pages 2 0 8 – 2 18

August 1963, p. 5; Odie Anderson, ‘Reluctant Race Reforms,’ Variety, 18 October 1963,
pp. 1, 18.
46. E.H. Kahn, ‘Theater Desegregation Makes Progress in the South,’ Motion Picture Herald,
29 April 1964, pp. 13, 24.
47. Robert J. Landry, ‘Nashville Quietly De-Races,’ Variety, 20 December 1961, pp. 3, 20.
48. ‘Atlanta to Admit Negroes,’ Variety, 4 April 1962, p. 13.
49. Odie Anderson, ‘Reluctant Race Reforms,’ Variety, 16 October 1963, p. 18.
50. ‘Progress of U.S. Negroes,’ Variety, 9 January 1963, p. 52. This was the first time Variety
devoted a special sidebar to the issue of theater desegregation in its annual review of the
show business highlights.
51. ‘Close Negro Part,’ Variety, 15 February 1961, p. 14.
52. ‘Negroes Go In at $5 Per Ticket; Arrest Pickets,’ Variety, 7 August 1963, p. 11.
53. ‘Village Showman’s Race Dilemma,’ Variety, 3 July 1963, p. 16.
54. ‘Theatres and the Race Issue,’ Motion Picture Herald, 26 June 1963, p. 5.
55. ‘Kennedy’s “Desegregate!” Plea,’ Variety, 29 May 1963, p. 3; ‘Dixie’s Hesitation Waltz,’
Variety, 29 May 1963, pp. 3, 19.
56. ‘Step-Up in Theatre Desegregation Sought,’ Motion Picture Herald, 12 June 1963,
pp. 38–39.
57. Harry Lando, ‘Exhibs Told to Desegregate,’ The Film Daily, 28 May 1963, pp. 1, 13.
58. ‘Step-Up in Theatre Desegregation Sought,’ Motion Picture Herald, 12 June 1963,
pp. 38–39.
59. Harry Landon, ‘JFK in Huddle With 30 on Segregation,’ The Film Daily, 4 June 1963,
pp. 1, 8; Harry Lando, ‘Theaters Desegregating Fast,’ The Film Daily, 5 June 1963, pp. 1,
6.
60. Harry Lando, ‘Theaters Desegregating Fast,’ The Film Daily, 5 June 1963, pp. 1, 6.
61. ‘Desegregate,’ Variety, 5 June 1963, p. 3.
62. In 1958, Robert J. Landry discerned ‘a growing tendency among Hollywood producers
to “cater” to [the African American] market.’ ‘“Race”: Boxoffice But Booby-Trapped,’
Variety, 8 January 1958, p. 15. See also, ‘Of Entertainment Market Interest: Big Rise in
Dixie Negro Income,’ Variety, 16 January 1963, p. 12.
63. ‘Desegregation Progress in Dixie,’ Variety, 26 June 1963, p. 7.
64. Odie Anderson, ‘Reluctant Race Reforms,’ Variety, 18 October 1963, p. 18.
65. Robert J. Landry, ‘Negro Only: Hazy Outlook,’ Variety, 14 August 1963, p. 5.
66. ‘Theatre Desegregation Surveyed in 10 Cities,’ Motion Picture Herald, 7 August 1963,
p. 33.
67. Martin Quigley, Jr., ‘President Kennedy and Exhibition,’ Motion Picture Herald, 11
December 1963, p. 5.
68. ‘New Orleans Last Big Dixie Key With “Jim Crow” Policy,’ Variety, 13 November 1963,
p. 1.
69. ‘New Orleans Takes on Civil Rights in Stride,’ Variety, 8 July 1964, p. 1.
70. ‘Theaters in South Comply with new Civil Rights Act,’ Motion Picture Herald, 22 July
1964, p. 14.

Chapter 10: The Reel of the Month Club: 16mm Projectors, Home Theaters and Film
Libraries in the 1920s
1. See for instance Gregory Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial
Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1995); Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-town Audiences and the Creation
of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Shelley
Stamp, Movie Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon

427
 notes to pages 2 18 – 2 2 2

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Melvyn Stokes and Richard
Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound
Era (London: BFI, 1999).
2. Charles Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003). See also Richard Maltby, ‘“Nobody Knows Everything”:
Post-Classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment,’ in Steve Neale and
Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 21–44.
3. For an engaging discussion of the changing dynamics of screen size and dimension, as
well as film gauge standardization see John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992).
4. Barbara Klinger, ‘The New Media Aristocrats: Home Theater and the Domestic Film
Experience,’ The Velvet Light Trap 42 (Fall 1998), pp. 4–19. An expanded version of this
article is reprinted in Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the
Home (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 17–53.
5. Klinger, ‘The New Media Aristocrats.’ See also Barbara Klinger ‘The Contemporary
Cinephile Film Collecting in the Post-Video Era,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard
Maltby (eds), Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Patterns of Cinema Audiences (London:
BFI Publishing, 2001), pp. 133–51; Charles Tashiro, ‘The Contradictions of Video
Collecting,’ Film Quarterly 50 (Winter 1996–7); Anthony Slide, Before Video: A History of
Non-Theatrical Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992); Ben Singer, ‘Early Home
Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,’ Film History 2 (1988), pp. 37–69;
Chris Anderson, Hollywood TV (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Charles
Acland, ‘Cinemagoing and the Rise of the Megaplex,’ Television and New Media 1.4
(2000), pp. 375–402.
6. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1933), pp. 210–11.
7. Moya Lucket usefully explores similar issues in relation to general ideas about home
movie systems, focusing on movie making with some attention to related ideas about
what she terms domestic spectatorship. Her discussion concentrates on questions of
gender, middle-class ideas about film reform, and a generalized nostalgia for Victorian
domestic values. Her study is not gauge specific and focuses on select discourses
circulating primarily in the teens. See Moya Lucket, ‘Filming the Family: Home Movie
Systems and the Domestication of Spectatorship,’ The Velvet Light Trap 36 (Fall 1995),
pp. 21–32.
8. ‘Ganz: Highlights From the News’ [advertisement], Amateur Movie Makers, 2.7 (1927),
p. 4. For brief historical details on Ganz, see Anthony Slide, Before Video, p. 9.
9. For the most thorough discussion of the history of amateur moviemaking see Patricia R.
Zimmerman, Reel Familes: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington, IN: University
of Indiana, 1995), esp. chaps 2 and 3. Though Zimmerman’s book focuses on filmmaking
and the paired concepts of amateur and professional, her overview and analysis of these
areas remains invaluable. For an examination of the parallel developments in television,
see William Boddy, ‘The Amateur, the Housewife and the Salesroom Floor: Promoting
Postwar US Television,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998), pp. 129–42;
and in radio, see Michelle Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1997), esp. chap. 2.
10. Lucket and others have argued that discourses about movies in the home existed from
the beginnings of the medium. Lucket rightly identifies a growing vogue for home movie
systems during the 1910s, evident in publications such as the Sears Catalogue, and
magazines such as Literary Digest, Scientific American, and Outlook (‘Filming the Family’,
p. 31). One of the key differences between the 1910s and 1920s is the aggressive entry

428
 notes to pages 222–226

of Kodak into the home cinema market. Kodak was one of the world’s most formidable
advertising powerhouses, building an empire on its clever transformation of photography
from clumsy machine to easy everyday activity. With the standardization of the 16mm
format, the company promptly expanded the venues in which its own home systems were
being sold, piggybacking on its strategies for snap-shot photography. Thus the venues for
home movie ads grew to include a vast range of newspapers and the emergent generation
of picture magazines, visual education journals, and, important for our purposes here,
mass distributed women’s magazines. Also pivotal was the internationally distributed
magazine entitled Amateur Movie Makers (later shortened to Movie Makers) which began
publishing in 1926, a prominent site for advertising a whole range of home movie systems
and film rental services. For more on the history of Kodak’s advertising see Nancy
Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of
Virginia, 2000), esp. chap. 1.
11. For an overview of early developments in this equipment, see Alan D. Kattelle,
Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979 (Nashua, NH: Transition
Publishing, 2000).
12. Zimmerman, ‘Reel Familes’; Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinema,
Television (London: BFI, 1996). See also Moya Lucket “Filming the Family.”.
13. Pathé already had a well established extra-theatrical rental system in place, which used its
own 28mm and, as of 1922, a 9.5mm gauge. Yet 16mm proved so successful so quickly
that even Pathé began to issue its films in the new gauge. For more on these early
film libraries see David Pierce, ‘Silent Movies and the Kodascope Libraries,’ American
Cinematographer (January 1989), pp. 36–40; and ‘The Legion of the Condemned—Why
American Silent Films Perished,’ Film History 9 (1997), pp. 5–22. See also Ben Singer,
‘Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,’ Film History 2
(1988), pp. 37–69.
14. Kodascope had secured the rights to films featuring Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse,
Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Constance Talmadge, Douglas Fairbanks, Pola Negri,
Emil Jannings and many other stars of the silent screen.
15. Pierce notes that Kodak often edited their films in order to fit them on a minimum
number of reels. As it was, most available projectors could only hold a maximum of one
400 ft reel. Depending on projection speed, this resulted in a running time of between
11 and 15 minutes per reel. While most films seem to have been edited for length
rather than content, there is some evidence that ‘racy’ scenes were eliminated. It seems
that Kodak actively tailored their films for ‘wholesome’ audiences. David Pierce, ‘Silent
Movies,’ p. 40.
16. ‘Political Story’ [Pathégrams advertisement], Movie Makers 3.9 (1928), p. 565.
17. ‘Cinegraphs’ [advertisement], Amateur Movie Makers 2.7 (1927), p. 30.
18. Eastman Kodak, Inc., Kodak Cinegraphs [catalogue] (Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak,
Inc., n.d.), inside front cover.
19. ‘World War Movies’ [Cinegraphs advertisement], Amateur Movie Makers 2.11 (1927):
inside back cover. Advertisements for the War films also clearly tried to appeal to a
certain desire for ‘being there-ness.’ They advertised: ‘Taken in action. Made under
actual service conditions in France. Compiled and edited by military experts. A film in
which you, yourself, or someone near and dear to you were probably one of the actors.’
‘Cinegraphs: “World War Movies”’ [advertisement], Amateur Movie Makers 2.10 (1927):
inside back cover.
20. Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 15. For more on the cross-media interests
of Hollywood during the 1920s and 1930s, see Michelle Hilmes, Hollywood and
Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

429
 notes to pages 226–228

21. The idea of connecting the home to the world was not limited to news events but also to
Hollywood. Show-at-Home Film Library, supported by Universal Pictures, advertised a
‘new era in motion pictures for the home.’ They promised to bring ‘the World’s Greatest
Stars to the Home,’ guaranteeing ‘the best and only the best for the American Home.’
With no substantial theatrical holdings of its own, Universal early on marketed its
films and its stars to these expanded cinematic stages. ‘Show-at-Home Film Library’
[advertisement], Amateur Movie Makers 2.10 (1927), p. 3.
22. ‘Talkers in 2,000,000 Homes Confidently Looked for in Future by Device Makers,’
Variety 98.12 (2 April 1930), p. 3. A few weeks later Variety exclaimed that a ‘moving
film in radio cabinet’ was expected to garner $1,000,000,000 a year in film rentals and
equipment sales. As such, ‘the picture industry is seriously set for the first time to invade
thousands of American homes.’ 16mm was deemed to be the gauge of choice. ‘Moving
Film in Radio Cabinet,’ Variety 99.3 (30 April 1930), pp. 1, 60.
23. ‘48 Brands of Home Talker Sets by Xmas,’ Variety 100.2 (23 July 1930), p. 5. The
featured unit in this article was a ‘three way home show’ that contained ‘A television,
camera and recording attachment where by a family can shoot its own pictures and do
its own recording, plus the expected radio and phonograph.’ Also important for the entry
of Hollywood into the home was the design of a continuous sound-on-film reduction
printer by Victor-RCA in 1933. This was some six years before the first sound cameras,
emphasizing the importance of 16mm exhibition and its distinct impact on exhibition
as opposed to production.
24. John Archer, ‘Suburbia and the American Dream House,’ in Daniel R. Rubey and
Barbara McKelly (eds), Redefining Suburban Studies: Searching for a New Paradigm (New
York: Greenwood Press, 2003); Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History
of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981) and Gail Radford, Modern
Housing for American; Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1996).
25. For the key analysis of these trends see Ruth Cowan Schwartz, More Work for Mother: The
Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic
Books, 1983).
26. These women’s magazines are a hitherto untapped source for work on home film
entertainment. Hollywood studios also advertised their films regularly in these same
venues. Celebrities frequently endorsed products sold in these magazines. Phonographs
and radios appeared with equal regularity. It was also in such magazines that public
officials published treatises on the ‘Better Homes Movement’ and the importance of the
home for national prosperity, suggesting the relevance of this particular readership to
emergent federal policies. This also indicates rich links between cultures of domesticity
and cultures of cinema. For a more specific discussion of women’s magazines with an
emphasis on Ladies Home Journal’s relationship to gender politics see Sally Stein, ‘The
Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle-class Women’s Magazine, 1919–
1939,’ in Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 145–62.
27. It is crucial to note that images of watching movies at home published in women’s
magazines were inseparable from the marketing campaigns enacted by Kodak to sell
home movie cameras. The screens necessary for showing home movies were simulta-
neously linked to an expanded complement of films made outside of the home yet
appropriate for in-home audiences. This link between early home movie theaters and
home movie-making is, I think, key to future work on the history of home theaters
generally. It provides a material and ideological connection between self-imaging and
images of the world, both intended to affirm not just the bourgeois self but also the
bourgeois family.

430
 notes to pages 228–240

28. For example, in 1928 the Kodascope B Projector was listed as $300 ($3,648.00 in 2007
dollars). Projectors ranged in price from $60.00 to $450 ($729.60 to $5,472.00 in 2007
dollars). According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 65 per cent of families reported
income less than $1,999.00 and 82 per cent of families reported income less than
$2,999.00 for the year 1929. This suggests that the most expensive projector unit designed
for the home would require well over 10 per cent of most family budgets, an unlikely if
not impossible purchase. The least expensive units constituted a minimum of 2 per cent
of total family income for 82 per cent of American families, still a formidable expense
(Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, part
1. Washington, DC, 1975).
29. This survey also announced that on average owners of home movie equipment retained
three or more servants, far above the average even for the paper’s clearly affluent
readership. J. Walter Thompson, Co. ‘Eastman Kodak Survey, December 1930,’ Reel
#198, J. Walter Thompson Collection, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and
Marketing History, Duke University), 8.
30. One could imagine a very different study that co-articulated tool ownership, fishing
pole equipment and hunting paraphernalia with camera acquisition. For an excellent
analysis of masculinized contemporary discourses see Barbara Klinger, ‘The New Media
Aristocrats.’
31. See Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: the Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and
Middle-class Desire (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); see also
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 1992).
32. See, for instance, Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex.

Chapter 11: Early Art Cinema in the U.S.: Symon Gould and the Little Cinema
Movement of the 1920s
1. Anne Morey would like to acknowledge generous support for the research for this chapter
from the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and a College of
Liberal Arts Faculty Research Enhancement Grant at Texas A&M University. National
Board of Review materials are quoted courtesy of National Board of Review of Motion
Pictures, Records, Manuscripts, and Archives Division, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. David Bordwell, ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of
Film Practice’ Film Criticism 4.1 (Fall 1979), p. 56.
2. Steve Neale, ‘Art Cinema as Institution’ Screen 22.1 (1981), p. 15.
3. Daniel Czitrom, ‘The Redemption of Leisure: The National Board of Censorship and the
Rise of Motion Pictures in New York City, 1900–1920’ Studies in Visual Communication
10 (Fall 1984), p. 4.
4. Mike Budd, ‘The National Board of Review and the Early Art Cinema in New York: The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as Affirmative Culture’ Cinema Journal 26.1 (Fall 1986), p. 5.
5. Francis G. Couvares, ‘Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor the
Movies before the Production Code,’ in Couvares (ed.), Movie Censorship and American
Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), p. 139.
6. David H. Pratt, ‘“Fit Food for Madhouse Inmates”: The Box Office Reception of the
German Invasion of 1921’ Griffithiana 48/49 (October 1993), p. 101.
7. Pratt, ‘Fit Food’, p. 101.
8. Budd, ‘The National Board of Review,’ p. 4.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 6.
11. Wilton Barrett to A.W. Newman, 1 November 1927, The National Board of Review

431
 notes to pages 240 –248

of Motion Pictures Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, ‘Subjects Correspondence—Little
Theatre Movement’ folder.
12. I am indebted to Janet Staiger for bringing this reference to my attention.
13. Howard Thompson Lewis, ‘Century Theater,’ Cases on the Motion Picture Industry Harvard
Business Reports, volume 8 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1930), p. 543.
14. Lewis, ‘Century Theater,’ p. 543.
15. Symon Gould circular to delegates of the Second National Better Films Conference,
January 1926, National Board of Review Records, ‘Film Alliance-Film Exchange’
folder.
16. Lewis, ‘Century Theater,’ p. 544.
17. Lewis, ‘Century Theater,’ p. 544.
18. Symon Gould press release, 9 February 1927, National Board of Review Records, ‘Film
Alliance-Film Exchange’ folder.
19. Herman G. Weinberg, typescript of ‘The Film Arts Guild,’ National Board of Review
Records, ‘Film Alliance–Film Exchange’ folder, p. 5.
20. The New York Telegram, 8 June 1926, reprint of ‘Round the Town’ column by Symon
Gould, National Board of Review Records, ‘Film Alliance-Film Exchange’ folder.
21. Harry Alan Potamkin, ‘The Ritual of the Movies’ The National Board of Review Magazine
8.5 (May 1933), p. 3.
22. Lenox Little Theatre circular, National Board of Review Records, ‘Lenox Little Theatre’
folder.
23. Alfred Kuttner to Montgomery Evans, 24 August 1928, National Board of Review
Records, ‘John Milligan’ folder.
24. Anne Friedberg, ‘Introduction: Reading Close Up, 1927–1933,’ in James Donald, Anne
Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 12.
25. Film Arts Guild press release, 19 January 1926, National Board of Review Records,
‘Film Alliance-Film Exchange’ folder.
26. The New York Telegram, 8 June 1926, reprint of ‘Round the Town’ column by Symon
Gould, National Board of Review Records, ‘Film Alliance-Film Exchange’ folder.
27. Symon Gould to Wilton Barrett, 14 August 1929, National Board of Review Records,
‘Film Alliance-Film Exchange’ folder.
28. Film Arts Guild circular, 20 November 1929, National Board of Review Records, ‘Film
Alliance-Film Exchange’ folder.

Chapter 12: Free Talking Picture—Every Farmer is Welcome: Non-theatrical Film and
Everyday Life in Rural America during the 1930s
1. Thanks to Jason McEntee and Anna Froula for their work as research assistants, and to
Brenda Weber for so many conversations that helped shape this project. “Directory of
Agricultural Films,” Educational Screen 11 (1932), p. 178.
2. For background on the development of 16mm for industrial and educational uses and
a general overview of non-theatrical film during this period, see Anthony Slide, Before
Video: A History of the Non-Theatrical Film (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 19–
43. Arthur Edwin Krows’ ‘Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres,’ an invaluable, fact- and
anecdote-filled chronicle of the history of non-theatrical film up to the late 1930s, ran
in fifty-eight monthly instalments in Educational Screen from September 1938 through
June 1944.
3. My focus in this chapter is on the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, the 1920s. An area for
future research is the role of agricultural film in the development of the non-theatrical

432
 notes to pages 2 4 8 – 2 51

film industry in the United States during the 1910s. In 1915 alone, the relevant material
in the Moving Picture World includes descriptions of screenings intended specifically for
farmers (for example, at Henderson, Kentucky [Moving Picture World, 27 February 1915,
p. 1320]), the use of film by schools of agriculture in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska
(Moving Picture World, 25 September 1915, p. 2209), farm-related ‘industrialogs’ like
International Harvester’s The Dawn of Plenty (Moving Picture World, 30 October 1915,
p. 831), and the marketing of a portable projector to ‘rural community clubs and county
farm bureaus’ (Moving Picture World, 25 September 1915, p. 2220).
4. As Anne B. Effland argues, ‘“rural” isn’t synonymous with “agricultural,” which, in turn,
is distinct from the “agrarian ideal.”’ She calls for historians to examine the ‘full texture
of rural experience.’ Effland, ‘When Rural Does Not Equal Agricultural,’ Agricultural
History 74:2 (2000), p. 500.
5. See, for example, ‘Hillbilly Music and Will Rogers: Small-Town Picture Shows in the
1930s,’ in Gregory A. Waller (ed.), Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History
of Film Exhibition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 175–88; idem, ‘Imagining and
Promoting the Small-Town Theater,’ Cinema Journal 44:3 (Spring 2005), pp. 3–19; and
At the Picture Show, my 1993 documentary on moviegoing in Campbellsville, Kentucky
from the 1920s through the 1940s. For material on the small-town theaters in the late
silent era see, in particular, Kathryn H, Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences
and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1996).
6. J.H. Kolb and Edmund de S. Brunner, ‘Rural Life,’ in Recent Trends in the United States:
Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1933), pp. 511, 508, 497, 523–25. Significantly, when de S. Brunner returned to the
subject with Irving Lorge in Rural Trends in Depression Years: A Survey of Village-Centered
Agricultural Communities, 1930–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), they
found more indications that rural villages were marked by the ‘spread of urban services’
in, for example, the number of beauty parlors, drugstores, tourist camps, and liquor stores
(p. 103). They also discovered what was for them a much more encouraging populist
development: the flowering of ‘rural community theaters’ that ‘have in them nothing of
the commercial. They are the voices of the men and women who have struggled through
drought, thaw, drifts, impassable roads, dust, and hail storms’ (p. 196). Meanwhile, the
movie theater—along with a strong bank or a government office—remained one way for
the agricultural village to generate trade (p. 107).
7. Monroe Day (ed.), Family Income and Expenditure: Five Regions: Part 2, Family
Expenditures (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), pp. 330–31. Mary
Neth offers a more nuanced argument focusing on farm youths, placing ‘town-centered’
moviegoing in the context of both commercial and non-commercial forms of recreation.
Neth, ‘Leisure and Generational Change: Farm Youths in the Midwest, 1910–1940,’
Agricultural History 67:2 (1993), pp. 163–84.
8. Family Income and Expenditure, p. 3.
9. Family Income and Expenditure, p. 6.
10. Monroe Day (ed.), Family Expenditures for Education, Reading, Recreation, and Tobacco:
Five Regions (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), pp. 3, 39–40.
11. Family Income and Expenditures, p. 195.
12. Family Income and Expenditures, pp. 286–95. Surprisingly, an article entitled ‘Farmers Go
to the Movies’ in Rural America 16 (September 1938), p. 9, could declare that ‘when farm
families look for entertainment, one of the favorite diversions is “going to the movies.”’
13. See Nicholas Peter Sargen, ‘Tractorization’ in the United States and Its Relevance for the
Developing Countries (New York: Garland, 1979); Robert C. Williams, Fordson, Farmall,
and Poppin’ Johnny: A History of the Farm Tractor and Its Impact on America (Urbana, IL:

433
 notes to pages 2 51 – 2 5 5

University of Illinois Press, 1987); Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, The Diffusion
of the Tractor in American Agriculture: 1916–1960 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau
of Economic Research, 2000); R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History
(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, rev. edn 2002); and Deborah Fitzgerald,
Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2003). After the ‘tractor wars’ of the 1920s and early 1930s
(which involved extensive advertising campaigns that included moving pictures), by
1936 International Harvester, Allis-Chalmers, and John Deere accounted for almost 80
per cent of the farm equipment market. See Wayne G. Broehl, John Deere’s Company: A
History of Deere & Company and Its Times (New York: Doubleday, 1984), p. 528.
14. Cited in Kolb and de Brunner, ‘Rural Life,’ p. 538.
15. Winamac[Indiana] Republican, 25 June 25 1936, pp. 2–3.
16. Winamac [Indiana] Republican, 21 July 1938, p. 8.
17. Park City Daily News [Bowling Green, Kentucky], 23 January 1935, p. 6.
18. Park City Daily News [Bowling Green, Kentucky], 4 February 1936, p. 2.
19. Park City Daily News [Bowling Green, Kentucky], 21 January 1936, p. 3.
20. Park City Daily News [Bowling Green, Kentucky], 24 January 1938.
21. Taylor County [Kentucky] News-Journal, 28 January 1938, p. 4; 12 December 1940.
22. Adair County News [Columbia, Kentucky], 23 February 1938.
23. Winamac [Indiana] Republican, 27 May 1937, p. 8.
24. According to 1000 and One: The Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films (Chicago, IL:
Educational Screen, 4th edn 1926).
25. Williams, Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin’ Johnny, p. 54.
26. Slide, Before Video, p. 48.
27. Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films (1926).
28. Motion Pictures of the United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1927), p. 17.
29. Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films (1926), p. 18. A different sort of tribute to the heavy
machinery industry and its extensive use of motion pictures for promotional purposes
came from one of America’s most widely circulated magazines, the Saturday Evening
Post, which published William Hazlett Upson’s long-running series of comic stories
concerning the misadventures of Alexander Botts, a traveling sales representative for the
Earthworm Tractor Company. (Botts was brought to the screen by Joe E. Brown in the
1937 comedy, Earthworm Tractors.) Upson’s stories cast a broad satiric net: the highly
competitive agricultural machinery business, the Hollywood way of moviemaking, and
the tactics of the advertiser all merit comic deflation. In ‘More Trouble with the Expense
Account’ (17 September 1932), for example, Botts concocts a successful scheme to acquire
a high-quality tractor film by allowing a motion-picture company on location to use
an Earthworm tractor for a spectacular chase scene; in exchange, the Hollywood crew
agrees to film additional footage of the tractor hauling a load of stone up a mountain.
In later stories, like ‘Good News’ (29 June 1935) and ‘Hollywood is Wonderful, but—’
(31 August 1935), the ever-hustling tractor salesman actually goes to Hollywood, where
he makes the most of product placement possibilities and almost convinces a studio head
to back a whole series of heavy-machinery-laden melodramas.
30. For information on innovations in tractor design and the state of the highly competitive
farm equipment industry in the 1920s and, particularly, in the 1930s, see, in addition to
works already cited, in-house histories and case studies such as Wayne G. Broehl, John
Deere’s Company: A History of Deere & Company and Its Times (New York: Doubleday,
1984), pp. 468–543; and Walter Fritiof Peterson and C. Edward Weber, An Industrial
Heritage, Allis-Chalmers Corporation (Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee County Historical
Society, 1978), pp. 237–79. Williams’s Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin’ Johnny offers an

434
 notes to pages 2 5 5 – 2 58

extremely thorough bibliography of the literature on tractors in specialized and more

popular periodicals through the mid-1980s.
31. ‘Who Is the Most Extensive Commercial User of Motion Pictures?’ Educational Screen,
11 (1932), p. 272.
32. ‘Industrial Subjects,’ Educational Screen 15 (1936), p. 318. In 1934, DeVry Corporation
announced the sale of nineteen sound portable 16mm projectors to the Armstrong
Cork Company, sixty to Firestone, and 150 portable 35mm sound projectors to Ford
(‘Unprecedented Orders from Big Business for “Talkie Units,”’ Educational Screen 13
[1934] p. 198).
33. Information about International Harvester’s films in the mid-1930s comes from 1000
and One: The Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films (Chicago, IL: Educational Screen, 10th
edn 1934), p. 123. See also Arthur Edwin Krows, ‘Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres,’
Educational Screen, 23 (1943), pp. 200, 223.
34. ‘Industrial Pictures for Selling Programs,’ Educational Screen 13 (1934), p. 216. Partners
was actually made by Ray-Bell Films (based in St. Paul, Minnesota) under contract to
John Deere. Promotional material rarely indicates exactly who made the films produced
by farm equipment companies, though a notice in Educational Screen from 1937 indicates
that Ray-Bell would continue to produce a diverse array of industrials, including films
for John Deere, Ford, and International Harvester (‘Ray-Bell Film-Ad Productions,’
Educational Screen, 16 [1937] p. 170.) Krows claims that Ray-Bell ‘possibly holds a
record for the production of agricultural subjects, notably for the John Deere companies’
(‘Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres,’ Educational Screen 19 [1940] p. 195).
35. ‘Reaper Most Widely Used Industrial,’ Educational Screen 10 (1931), p. 217.
36. Chesterton Tribune, 12 February 1931. I found this ad reprinted on a
family genealogy webpage: http: worldconnect.rootsweb.com.cigin/igm.cgi?
op=GET&db=tetzloff&id=1831.
37. A.P. Hollis, Proceedings and Addresses, Eight Session National Conference on Visual Education
and Film Exhibition and Year Book of Visual Education (Chicago, IL: DeVry Foundation,
1936), pp. 150, 152, 182, 230. See also Slide, Before Video, p. 26.
38. Hollis, Proceedings and Addresses, pp. 95, 97.
39. An apparently earlier International Harvester foray into motion pictures was Romance
of the Reaper, which was mentioned in the Moving Picture World, 10 (October 7, 1911),
p. 60 as an ‘educational entertainment’ about ‘implement making.’
40. Hollis, Proceedings and Addresses, p, 13. See Slide, Before Video, pp. 49–50, for more
information concerning this 1912 production, which he identifies as Back to the Old Farm.
The Lexington [Kentucky] Leader reported on 11 February 1925, that Back to the Farm was
screened for students at a local school, suggesting how long this particular ‘industrial’
stayed in circulation.
41. Broehl, John Deere’s Company, p. 543.
42. Christiana Campbell, The Farm Bureau and the New Deal: A Study of Making of National
Farm Policy, 1933–40 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 3.
43. Krows also notes that AFBF’s two-reel The Homestead was produced, as was My Farm
Bureau (1924), by Homestead Films, located in Chicago (‘Motion Pictures—Not for
Theatres,’ Educational Screen 19 [1940] p. 193).
44. ‘Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres,’ Educational Screen 18 (1939), p. 192.
45. Nancy K. Berlage, ‘Organizing the Farm Bureau: Family, Community, and Professionals,
1914–1928,’ Agricultural History 75 (2001), pp. 420, 436. See Verna L. Hatch, ‘Social and
Educational Ideals,’ Hoosier Farmer, 15 March 1928, pp. 3, 42–43, for a contemporary
statement of this ideology.
46. American Farm Bureau Community Handbook (Chicago, IL: Home and Community
Department, American Farm Bureau Federation, 1928), p. 15. Berlage discusses these

435
 notes to pages 2 58 – 2 62

‘highly organized social events,’ which ‘offered traditional as well as new forms of
entertainment for members and non-members alike—picnics, Fourth of July celebrations,
plowing matches, chicken-calling contests, baseball leagues, showings of bureau-produced
films, and community plays and “sings”’ (‘Organizing the Farm Bureau,’ pp. 429–30).
47. American Farm Bureau Community Handbook, p. 120.
48. ‘Farm Bureau Film Activities,’ Educational Screen 11 (1932), p. 74. The 4-H Club was
a youth organization, sponsored by the USDA, providing education in agriculture and
home economics.
49. ‘Farm Bureau Film Activities,’ p. 74; see also Campbell, Farm Bureau, p. 4.
50. ‘Farm Bureau Film Activities,’ p. 74.
51. ‘Farm Bureau Film Activities,’ p. 74. This preference for actors over non-actors came
at time when national firms were developing advertising campaigns for magazines like
Country Gentleman featuring ‘real’ farmers, such as the Erdman family of Jefferson,
Wisconsin, satisfied users of Lava Soap (Country Gentleman, February 1934, p. 34), and
the Mullinnix family of Lone Tree, Iowa, who appeared in a testimonial ad for John
Deere tractors (Country Gentleman, February, 1936, p. 36).
52. ‘Farm Bureau Film Activities,’ p. 74. For information on the Atlas Educational Film
Company of Chicago, see Krows, ‘Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres,’ Educational Screen
19 (1940), p. 193.
53. ‘Farm Bureau Film Activities,’ p. 74.
54. ‘Farm Bureau Film Activities,’ p. 74.
55. ‘Two American Farm Bureau Productions,’ Educational Screen 10 (1931), p. 159. This
same review also praised All in the Same Boat, a 2-reel AFBF film made in cooperation
with Armour and Company, which ‘in story form … treats interestingly and vividly the
economic causes of fluctuations in the price of meat—cold storage facilities, feast days,
employment conditions, etc.’
56. Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films (1934), p. 22.
57. ‘County Agent Wins Motion Picture Contest,’ Hoosier Farmer, July 1934, p. 25.
58. De Brunner and Lorge, Rural Trends in Depression Years, pp. 189–90. See also Ethel
W. Gardner, ‘Rural Recreation,’ Rural America 15 (September 1937), pp. 12–13, which
is indicative of the programs promoted in Rural America, the monthly journal of the
American Country Life Association.
59. C.R. Hoffer, ‘The Home and Leisure Time,’ Rural America 12 (January 1934), p. 12.
60. See my essay, ‘Hillbilly Music and Will Rogers,’ and documentary film, At the Picture
Show, which describe live performances in a rural small-town theaters, particularly
during the Depression.
61. Department of Commerce, Composite List of Non-Theatrical Film Sources (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1935).
62. The information about Venard is drawn from Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Film, (1941).
63. Alan E. Fusonie, ‘The Heritage of Original Art and Photo Imaging in USDA: Past,
Present and Future,’ Agricultural History 64:2 (Spring 1990), pp. 300–18, describes color
illustrations and photographs in the USDA archives, but makes no mention of motion
pictures as ‘original art’ produced by the USDA.
64. For background on the formation and subsequent development of the USDA film
unit, see Slide, Before Video, pp. 47–48; Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Film: A
Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings House, 1973),
pp. 52–55; and Krows, ‘Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres,’ Educational Screen 21 (1942),
pp. 33–34.
65. See List of Technical Workers in the Department of Agriculture and Outline of Department
Functions (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935), p. 2.
66. Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Film (1926), p. 18.

436
 notes to pages 2 6 3 – 2 67

67. Information on individual titles from Motion Pictures of the United States Department of
Agriculture (1926).
68. Motion Pictures of the United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1931), pp. 4, 18.
69. See Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Film (1934), p. 127.
70. ‘Music by Service Bands in New Motion Pictures,’ Educational Screen 13 (1934), p. 76;
‘New U.S. Agriculture Films,’ Educational Screen 11 (1932), pp. 301–02.
71. ‘New Directory Lists Seventeen New Pictures,’ Educational Screen 18 (1939), p. 214.
72. Motion Pictures of the United States Department of Agriculture (1935), pp. 1–7.
73. ‘New U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Films,’ Educational Screen 12 (1933), p. 278.
74. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film
Institute, 1995), p. 70. See, for example, Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the
Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 114–21.
75. Raymond Evans, ‘The Motion Picture Policy of the United States Department of
Agriculture,’ Educational Screen 16 (1937), pp. 283–84.
76. Cited in Hollis, Proceedings and Addresses, pp. 57–58. Hearon’s remarks were also
delivered to an audience at New York University in February 1938 and published as
‘The Motion-Picture Program and Policy of the United States Government,’ Journal of
Educational Sociology 12:3 (November 1938), pp. 147–62.
77. See William Stott’s influential account of this debate in Documentary Expression and
Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
78. Evans, ‘Motion Picture Policy,’ p. 284.
79. Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Films (1941), pp. 13, 18.
80. MacCann, People’s Film, pp. 53–54.
81. Cline M. Koon, Motion Pictures in Education in the United States: A Report Compiled for
the International Congress of Educational and Instructional Cinematography (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 33.
82. Arthur Edwin Krows, ‘Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres,’ Educational Screen 21 (1942),
p. 14.
83. United States Department of Agriculture, Use of Motion Pictures in Agricultural Extension
Work (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926), p. 2.
84. ‘U.S. Agriculture Film Record,’ Educational Screen 10 (1931), p. 298.
85. Use of Motion Pictures in Agricultural Extension Work, p. 2.
86. Koon, ‘Motion Pictures in Education,’ p. 34.
87. Raymond Evans, ‘Motion Picture Activities of the U.S. Department of Agriculture,’
Educational Screen (1932), pp. 268. In like manner, the U.S. Bureau of Mines had its
own preferred network of non-theatrical screening sites, distributing its 400 reels ‘on
mineral and allied industries’ primarily to schools, but also to ‘engineering and scientific
organizations, civic and business associations, clubs, churches, miners’ local unions and
the various service schools of the Army and Navy’ (‘Bureau of Mines Motion Picture
Film Collection Continues to Grow,’ Educational Screen 10 [1931] p. 78).
88. This proviso, which occurs in all the USDA motion picture catalogues for this period,
suggests that farm films were frequently vehicles for ‘commercial advertising matter.’
89. Lexington [Kentucky] Herald, 4 June 1924, p. 3; Lexington [Kentucky] Leader, 29 October
1924, p. 1.
90. Lexington [Kentucky] Herald, 28 April 1922.
91. Don Carlos Ellis and Laura Thornborough, Motion Pictures in Education: A Practical
Handbook for Users of Visual Aids (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1923, pp. 29–30;
E.J. Giering, Jr., ‘Motion Pictures as an Aid in Agricultural Extension Work,’ Educational
Screen 16 (1937), pp. 90–91, 94. What is needed is more research on the circulation of
agriculture films in the 1910s; the exhibitor columns in the Moving Picture World are

437
 notes to pages 2 67 – 2 7 7

one important source. See, for example, ‘Farmers’ Films,’ an account of a screening in
Henderson, Kentucky (Moving Picture World, 27 February 1915, p. 1320) and accounts
of Bumper Harvest, a film shot in North Dakota (Moving Picture World, 9 October 1915,
p. 203; 30 October 1915, p. 830).
92. Use of Motion Pictures in Agricultural Extension Work, pp. 12–14.
93. For a discussion of the program in the 1930s, see Eric Smoodin, Animating Culture:
Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1993), pp. 44–70.
94. Ruth Hogeland, ‘Personality and Personalities,’ Country Gentleman 105 (November
1935), p. 68.
95. This particular phrase comes from a Lux soap ad, Country Gentleman, 108 (April 1938),
p. 71.
96. Goodrich ad, ‘The Surrender of Old Man Winter—A Newsreel Short,’ Country
Gentleman, 106 (February 1936), p. 39; Lava soap ad, ‘A Lava Soap Movie with Real
People,’ Country Gentleman 103 (September 1933), p. 45.
97. Wolverine Shell Horsehide work shoes ad, Country Gentleman, 106 (June 1936), p. 85.
Of course, moviegoing could also serve as the epitome of unwholesome urban excess. An
illustration for a 1934 story about a married couple who move to the city after striking it
rich when oil is discovered on their farm shows the wife getting a manicure and explains
that she is ‘growing fat and soft. She went to the movies too often, and to the beauty
parlor too often’ (Country Gentleman, 104 [May 1934] p. 12).
98. ‘Farm Bureau Film Activities,’ p. 74.
99. ‘Insuring the Future,’ Country Gentleman, 105 (August 1935), p. 20.
100. Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Culture Theory: An Introduction (New York: Routledge,
2002); and Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader (New York: Routledge,
2002).

Chapter 13: Cinema’s Shadow: Reconsidering Non-Theatrical Exhibition

1. This description is paraphrased from FilmAidInternational.org.
2. The film and radio adaptations are available on the DVD special edition of Rebecca.
3. Ibid. The site reports that 1.2 million Afghanis lost their homes in 2001 and approximately
2 million fled to camps across the border in Pakistan. A northern city in Afghanistan
for the internally displaced, Gardez, is the world’s largest refugee camp.
4. Connie Billips and Arthur Pierce, Lux Presents Hollywood: A Show-by-Show History of
the Lux Radio Theatre and the Lux Video Theatre, 1934–1957 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland
& Company, Inc., 1995). Other Hitchcock titles adapted for ‘Lux’ were Suspicion (1941),
Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945),
Notorious (1946), and The Paradine Case (1948).
5. As Michele Hilmes points out, despite advantages to both parties, the relationship
between film and radio was not without controversy and contentiousness. See Hilmes,
Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1990), especially 26–77.
6. FilmAidInternational.org.
7. Ben Singer, ‘Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,’ Film
History 2 (1988), pp. 42, 44–45.
8. For more on the importance of family home entertainment, including cinema, to families
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Moya Luckett, ‘“Filming the
Family”: Home Movie Systems and the Domestication of Spectatorship,’ The Velvet Light
Trap 36 (1995), pp. 21–32.
9. Singer, ‘Early Home Cinema,’ pp. 44–48; Anthony Slide also discusses the early non-

438
 notes to pages 27 7–288

theatrical distribution of films in Before Video: A History of the Non-Theatrical Film

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992).
10. Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), p. 8.
11. Patrick R. Parsons and Robert M. Frieden, The Cable and Satellite Television Industries
(Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1998), pp. 199, 244.
12. See Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting, pp. 78–115 for a more detailed analysis of the
structure of a ‘Lux’ presentation of a Hollywood film.
13. Slide, Before Video, pp. 96–97. See also Eric Smoodin, ‘“The Moral Part of the Story
was Great”: Frank Capra and Film Education in the 1930s,’ Velvet Light Trap 42 (Fall
1998), pp. 20–35. In his study of the film education movement in the 1930s, Smoodin
shows how common the conversion of feature films into pedagogical tools was, as film
appreciation and other courses stressing the art and morality of cinema to young people
grew across the nation.
14. Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 3–17; Gregory A. Waller, Main
Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930
(Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press), pp. 23–64. See, also, a 58-
part series of essays by Arthur Krows, ‘Motion Pictures—Not for Theaters,’ that appeared
in Educational Screen from 1938 to 1944.
15. Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University
Press, 2001), pp. 1–2.
16. Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1982),
pp. 130–31.
17. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, ‘From the Imperial Family to the Transnational
Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization,’ in Rob Wilson and Wimal
Dissanayake (eds), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary
(Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 161.
18. For pioneering scholarship that focuses on the power cultural displacement exercises on
media interpretation and consumption, see Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures:
Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
and Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995).
19. Kerry Segrave, Movies at Home: How Hollywood Came to Television (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999), p. 92.
20. Peter Krämer, ‘The Lure of the Big Picture: Film, Television, and Hollywood,’ in John
Hill and Martin McLoone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: Relations between Film and
Television (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1996), pp. 9–46.
21. Roy Rosenzweig, ‘From Rum Shop to Rialto: Workers and Movies,’ in Gregory A.
Waller (ed.), Moviegoing in America (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), p. 33; Janet
Staiger, ‘Writing the History of American Film Reception,’ in Melvyn Stokes and
Richard Maltby (eds), Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences
(London: British Film Institute, 2001), pp. 20–26.
22. Uma Dinsmore-Tuli, ‘The Pleasures of “Home Cinema,” or Watching Movies on
Telly: An Audience Study of Cinephiliac VCR Use,’ Screen 41: 3 (Autumn 2000),
pp. 315–27.
23. Charles Musser, ‘The Early Cinema of Edwin Porter,’ Cinema Journal 19:1 (Fall 1979),
p. 23.
24. André Bazin, ‘Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,’ in James Naremore (ed.), Film
Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 26.

439
 notes to pages 294 –298

Chapter 14: Changing Images of Movie Audiences

The analysis in this chapter is developed further in Richard Butsch, The Citizen Audience:
Crowds, Politics and Individuals (New York: Routledge, 2007).

1. Paul Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2000).
2. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: Norton, 1959), pp. 7, 110ff; E.P. Thompson,
‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,’ Past and Present,
50, February 1971. For a critique of Thompson, see John Bohsteadt, Riots and Community
Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1983).
3. Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, from Stage to Television, 1750–1990
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chaps 1–3.
4. Likewise the emerging industrial working class, organized at work, began also to
organize outside work and preferred the permanence of unionization to momentary riot.
Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, p. 124.
5. Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
6. Gilje, passim; Butsch, American Audiences, chaps 4–5.
7. Bruce McConachie, ‘Pacifying Theatrical Audiences,’ in Richard Butsch (ed.), For Fun
and Profit (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 47–70.
8. J. Albert Brackett, Theatrical Law (Boston, MA: C.M. Clark Publishing, 1907),
pp. 232–33.
9. Joel Prentiss Bishop, A Treatise on Criminal Law (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1923),
pp. 248–49.
10. Anon, ‘Americans at the theatre,’ Every Saturday, 18 May 1871, p. 451.
11. Butsch, American Audiences, chap. 8.
12. John Collier, ‘Cheap Amusements,’ Survey, 11 April 1908, p. 74; Mary Heaton Vorse,
‘Some Picture Show Audiences,’ Outlook, 24 June 1911, p. 445; Sherman Kingsley, ‘The
Penny Arcade and the Cheap Theatre,’ Charities and the Commons 8 June 1907, p. 295;
Barton Currie, ‘The Nickel Madness,’ Harper’s Weekly, 24 August 1907, p. 1246; see
also Judith Mayne, ‘Immigrants and Spectators,’ Wide Angle 5:2 (1982), pp. 32–40;
Elizabeth Ewen, ‘City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies,’ in
Catharine R Stimson et al. (eds), Women and the American City (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 42–63; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will:
Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991). On crowds as masses in cities see Eugene Leach, ‘“Mental Epidemics”:
Crowd Psychology and American Culture, 1890–1940,’ American Studies 33:1 (1992),
pp. 5–29; Mary Gabrielle Esteve, ‘Of Being Numerous: Representations of crowds and
anonymity in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century urban America,” Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Washington, 1995. During this period, fear of movies stirring
audiences to act collectively was revealed by censorship of strike scenes in early movies.
See Steven J. Ross, Working-class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
13. Jaap Van Ginneken, ‘Crowds, Psychology and Politics, 1871–1899,’ Academisch
Proefschrift, University of Amsterdam, 1989; Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd
Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London:
Sage 1975); see also Eugene Leach and Mary Gabrielle Esteve on the twentieth-century
evolution of crowd psychology into theories of masses of isolated individuals typical in
these stories of audiences.

440
 notes to pages 2 9 8 – 3 01

14. Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century
America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 63–64, and Jeffrey
Sconce, Haunted Media: electronic presence from telegraphy to television (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000), discuss some of these connections.
15. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (New York: The Viking Press, 1960, first pub. in 1898),
pp. 31–36, 39–40, 117–18, 158. Also see Nye, Origins of Crowd Psychology; Erika G.
King, Crowd Theory as a Psychology of the Leader and the Led (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen
Press, 1990), pp. iii–v, 25–33, 56–68, 110–23.
16. Reverend H.A. Jump, ‘The Social Influence of the Moving Picture,’ New York:
Playground and Recreation Association of America, 1911; Maurice Willows, ‘The
Nickel Theater,’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July 1911,
pp. 95–99; Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan,
1912), p. 76.
17. Harpers Weekly, 18 January 1913, p. 22; C.H. Claudy, Photo Era, March 1909, p. 121.
These stories refer to ‘youth’ as distinct from children; the term ‘teenager’ was not yet
coined Copy-cat theory can be traced back at least to Goethe, when a novel of his
allegedly influenced many German youth to commit suicide. See Ray Surette (ed.), The
Media and Criminal Justice Policy: Recent Research and Social Effects (Springfield, IL: C.C.
Thomas, 1990), pp. 63, 88–89).
18. George Elliot Howard, ‘Social Psychology of the Spectator,’ American Journal of Sociology,
July 1912, pp. 33–50.
19. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: Arno Press, 1970,
first pub. in 1916), p. 95; also see Allan Langdale (ed.), Hugo Munsterberg on Film (New
York: Routledge, 2002); on Sidis see Eugene Leach, ‘Mental Epidemics,’ American Studies
33:1 (1992), pp. 14–15.
20. Matthew Hale, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of
Applied Psychology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980), pp. 60–63, 186;
Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 36; Münsterberg, The Photoplay,
pp. 96, 98–99.
21. Poffenberger from Robert E. Davis, Response to Innovation: A Study of Popular Argument
About New Mass Media (New York: Arno Press, 1976), p. 263; Ross quote in Norman
Denzin, Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 104;
Burgess quoted by Henry Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillan,
1933), pp. 5–6.
22. Christian Century, 15 January–12 February 1930.
23. Garth Jowett, Ian Jarvie and Katherine H. Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media
Influence and the Payne Fund Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
24. Motion Pictures and Youth (New York: Macmillan, 1933; e.g. Ruth Peterson and Louis
Thurstone, Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children (New York: Macmillan,
1933), pp. 14–15; Frank Shuttleworth and Mark May, The Social Conduct and Attitudes
of Movie Fans (New York; Macmillan, 1933), p. 85; Forman, Our Movie Made Children;
see also Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller, Children and the Movies, passim. Blumer became one
of the most important figures in American sociology. His graduate students became
particularly well-known for their research on the urban working class.
25. Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 74.
26. Blumer, Movies and Conduct, pp. 127, 193, 197. Also see Norman Denzin, Symbolic
Interactionism, pp. 106–12; Patricia Clough, ‘The Movies and Social Observation:
Reading Blumer’s Movies and Conduct,’ Symbolic Interaction 11:1 (1988), pp. 85–97.
27. The work of Paul Cressey, in a Payne Fund study entitled ‘Boys, Movies, and City
Streets,’ represents an exception to this, but Cressey’s manuscript was unfinished, and

441
 notes to pages 3 01 – 3 0 6

remained unpublished until 1996, when it was published as ‘The Community—A Social
Setting Study for the Motion Picture,’ in Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller, Children and the
Movies. See also Richard Maltby, ‘Why Boys Go Wrong: Gangsters, Hoodlums, and
the Natural History of Delinquent Careers,’ in Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet and
Peter Stanfield, eds., Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 41–66.
28. James B. Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the
1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 75; Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and
Teenpics: The juvenilization of American movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, rev. edn, 2002).
29. David Jobes et al., ‘The Kurt Cobain Suicide Crisis,’ Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior
26:3 (Fall 1996), pp. 260–69; Michel Marriott, ‘A Thin Line between Movie and
Joystick,’ New York Times, 20 February 2003, G1, p. 8.
30. Timothy Hickman, ‘Drugs and Race in American Culture: Orientalism in the turn-
of-the-century discourse of narcotic addiction,’ American Studies 41:1 (Spring 2000),
pp. 71–91; Jill Jonnes, HepCats, Narcs and Pipe Dreams (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996); David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
31. Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars and the Culture of Celebrity (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), pp. 160, 168, 173, 175; Margaret Thorp, America at the Movies (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), p. 5. Caricatures of soap opera fans have
been even more extreme. See James Thurber, The Beast in Me and Other Animals (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), pp. 151–61; Tania Modoleski, Loving with a Vengeance:
Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, CT: Arcon Books, 1982), pp. 85–109;
Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth, ‘“Don’t treat
us like we’re so stupid and naïve”: Toward an ethnography of soap opera viewers,’ in
Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (New York: Routledge, 1989),
pp. 241–47.
32. Joli Jensen, ‘Fandom as Pathology: The consequences of characterization,’ in Lisa Lewis
(ed.), Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992);
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
33. Jane Gaines, ‘Political Mimesis,’ in Gaines and Michael Renov (eds), Collecting Visible
Evidence (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 90–91.
34. Linda William, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, genre and excess,’ Film Quarterly 44:4 (Summer,
1991), pp. 2–13.
35. Psychologist Hadley Cantril compared speakers and radio to make a similar argument
about radio’s influence in the 1930s. See Butsch, ‘Class and Audience Effects: a history
of research on movies, radio and television,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 29:3
(Fall 2001), pp. 112–20.
36. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
37. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. by Thomas
Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), esp. chap. 3.
38. Butsch, ‘American Theater Riots and Class Relations, 1754–1849,’ Theatre Annual, 48
(1995), pp. 41–59.
39. Butsch, American Audiences, pp. 118–10, 126–38.
40. Butsch, American Audiences, pp. 54–56, 78.
41. The continued belief in this image of audiences is testified by the popularity of Robert
D. Putnam’s work, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

442
 notes to pages 30 6 – 3 0 9

42. A related argument on this point was made about everyday resistances of working
class African Americans in Robin Kelly, ‘“We are not what we seem”: rethinking black
working class opposition in the South,’ Journal of American History 80:1 (June 1993),
p. 76. Kelly emphasized the collective nature of these resistances.

Chapter 15: ‘Healthy Films from America’: The Emergence of a Catholic Film Mass
Movement in Belgium and the Realm of Hollywood, 1928–1939
1. Pope Pius XI, extract from the Encyclical Letter on the Motion Picture, Vigilanti Cura,
given at Rome, 29 June 1936. The complete text of the Encyclical can be found on the
Vatican website. See: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/
hf_p-xi_enc_29061936_vigilanti-cura_en.html.
2. For research on the Legion of Decency see Gregory Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality
Codes, Catholics and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), James
Skinner, The Cross and the Cinema: The Legion of Decency and the National Catholic Office
for Motion Pictures, 1933–1970 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), and Frank Walsh, Sin and
Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1996). For wider work on the influence of the Legion and Catholic
figures demanding self-censorship in the USA, see Lea Jabobs’ discussion and book
review of Black’s Hollywood Censored, in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television,
16: 1 (1996), pp. 103–7.
3. See e.g. Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault & Tom Gunning (eds), Une Invention
du Diable? Cinéma des Premiers Temps et Réligion (Laval: Presses de l’Université Laval,
1992).
4. The OCIC (Office Catholique International du Cinématographe) was founded during a
conference in The Hague (23–25 April 1928), bringing together organizations from 15
different nations. During a decisive conference in Brussels (29 September–1 October 1933)
the OCIC decided to reorganize the network and to locate its central office in Brussels.
See OCIC, L’Office Catholique International du Cinématographe (Brussels: OCIC, 1937).
5. See, for example, the letter on the film problem by Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius
XII, (‘Lettre de S.E. le Cardinal Pacelli au Président de l’OCIC’) sent on 27 April 1934
to the Belgian OCIC president Brohée. In this very important letter, the future Pope
Pius XII praises OCIC for ‘the work already done, as well as the action programme it
proposes for the near future’ The letter was published in different languages and formats,
including a special OCIC brochure in French (Lettre de S.E. le Cardinal PACELLI au
Président de l’Office Catholique international du Cinématographe, Louvain: OCIC, 1934)
and articles in Catholic newspapers and magazines (for instance in German: Ecclesiastica,
29 December 1934; Italian: Osservatore Romano, 18 May 1934).
6. John T. Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for
Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), p. 11. See also Rutger Penne, Veertig jaar christelijke filmcultuur (Leuven:
dissertation, 1987).
7. Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood, p. 213.
8. For a similar argument on France, see C. Bonnafoux, Les Catholoques français devant le
cinéma entre désir et impuissance (paper for the 4th International Symposium of History
and Film, Madrid, 27–29 November 2002).
9. This paper is part of the research project ‘Forbidden Images: the history of controversial
movies, the official and Catholic film censorship in Belgium’ (Scientific Research
Council, 2003–6).
10. For an overview, see Marc Reynebeau, ‘Mensen zonder eigenschappen’, pp. 13–73 in R.
Gobbyn & W. Spriet (eds), De Jaren ‘30 in België (Gent: Ludion/ASLK).

443
 notes to pages 3 0 9 – 31 2

11. Ivo Blom, Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2003).
12. Before World War I, there were approximately 650 cinemas in the Kingdom for a population
of 7.5 million; see Guido Convents, ‘Les Catholiques et le Cinéma en Belgique (1895–
1914),’ pp. 21–43 in Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault & Tom Gunning (eds), Une
Invention du Diable? Cinéma des Premiers Temps et Réligion (Laval: Presses de l’Université
Laval, 1992). Compared to other European countries with quite similar population sizes
and socio-economic contexts, Belgium had a wide film exhibition sector. By the beginning
of the 1930s, Belgium counted 740 theaters, the Netherlands 266 and Switzerland 330.
See Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 141.
13. See Film Year Book 1929 (New York: J. Alicoate, 1929), p. E.
14. See the various editions of Jack Alicoate’s Film Year Books; Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood,
pp. 213, 222.
15. Mike Walsh, ‘Options for American Film Distribution: United Artists in Europe, 1919–
1930,’ in Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (eds), ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’:
Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
1999), p. 142.
16. Film Year Book 1929, pp. 1049–56; Film Year Book 1930 (New York: J. Alicoate, 1930),
pp. 1051–56.
17. Film Year Book 1924 (New York: J. Alicoate, 1924), p. 391.
18. Film Year Book 1928 (New York: J. Alicoate, 1928), p. 948.
19. Film Year Book 1934 (New York: J. Alicoate, 1934), p. 1014.
20. Film Year Book 1938 (New York: J. Alicoate, 1938), p. 1175.
21. Jozef Van Haver, Voor U Beminde Gelovigen: Het Rijke Roomse Leven in Vlaanderen
(Lannoo: Tielt, 1995), pp. 249–50.
22. Convents, p. 31.
23. Felix Morlion, ‘Even nadenken na het volksverzet tegen de “Heldhaftige Kermis,”’ De
Standaard (14.2.1936).
24. The Catholic film movement operated in the language of both major cultural communities
in Belgium: Dutch in Flanders and Brussels, and French in Wallonia and Brussels. For
the sake of clarity, we will only use Dutch-language abbreviations. ‘Een algemene
vergadering te Brussel. Katholieke filmactie,’ De Standaard (27.9.1928).
25. Felix Morlion, Filmleiding (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 1932), p. 7.
26. Jean-Pierre Wauters, ‘50 jaar K.F.A. in België,’ Film en Televisie, vol. 25, no. 282 (1980),
pp. 21–43.
27. In Flanders, the daily press has long been highly dominated by Catholic newspapers.
28. Father Lunders claims that DOCIP articles and lists of movies appear in sixty newspapers
and magazines. De Film, Moderne Grootmacht (Roeselare: Hernieu­wen-uitgaven, 1937),
p. 59.
29. Morlion, Filmleiding, p. 15. In another article, Morlion claimed that by September 1934
‘the press agency DOCIP covered all Catholic newspapers in country, organizing quicker
than foreseen newspapers in Luxembourg, Saarland, Alsace and France.’ F. Morlion, De
les uit Amerika, in De Standaard (28.9.1934).
30. This Catholic censorship board was another initiative by Father Morlion. See internal
document ‘Commission de Censure Catholique’ (20.4.1932, KADOC/KFA box 39,
Louvain). The board was recognized as a separate service within the film movement in
1931, but only reached its full role in 1932. The board mainly classified movies according
to their moral and religious value, but it soon also looked at the artistic and commercial
value of them as well. The censorship board produced standard questionnaires for
the priests, lay men and women, who were engaged in classifying movies. These

444
 notes to pages 31 2 – 31 5

questionnaires were sent to the Brussels headquarters, where the central censorship
board (KFK), headed by priests, gave a final classification. The results of this rather
bureaucratic process were publicized through leaflets, posters, DOCIP film reviews, etc.
See internal document ‘Directives de la Commission Catholique de Sélection’ (July 1934,
KADOC/KFA box 40, Louvain).
31. Internal document, ‘Commission de Censure Catholique’ (20.4.1932, KADOC/KFA
box 39, Louvain). [My translation].
32. Wauters, ‘50 jaar K.F.A. in België,’ p. 23; Morlion, Filmleiding, p. 18; Brohée &
Cartuyvels, Het Middenbestuur der Katholieke Filmaktie (Brussels: KFA, 1933), p. 25.
33. After World War II, Morlion, an enigmatic figure, became the founder of the Vatican
Intelligence organization ‘Pro Deo.’
34. Morlion, Filmleiding, p. 19 [my translation].
35. Brohée & Cartuyvels, Het Middenbestuur, p. 8. See also: Undated internal document ‘De
Katholieke filmliga naar eigen productie’ (probably May/June 1933, KADOC/KFA box
43).
36. The future Pope wrote to Brohée that OCIC should arouse the interest of ‘good people’
in the industry for ‘the production of high class films,’ which ‘protect good manners’
Lettre de S.E. le Cardinal PACELLI au Président de l’Office Catholique international du
Cinématographe, 1934, p. 4.
37. For a case study, see D. Biltereyst & S. Van Bauwel, ‘Emerging regional cinema, folk art
and nationalism: the case of De Witte (1934),’ in E. Mathys, Cinema in the Low Countries
(London: Wallflower, 2004).
38. Felix Morlion mentioned the start of the KFL in his booklet Filmleiding, pp. 21–24. See
also Wauters, ‘50 jaar K.F.A. in België,’ p. 23.
39. See the literal reference in Lunders, De Film, Moderne Grootmacht, p. 59.
40. Lunders, De Film, Moderne Grootmacht, pp. 59–60; Wauters, ‘50 jaar K.F.A. in België,’
p. 24.
41. Wauters, ‘50 jaar K.F.A. in België,’ p. 24.
42. More research needs to be done on the international orientation of such organizations
as DOCIP, but several sources indicate that this information, documentation and
propaganda machinery did not limit its range of action to the Belgian press and media
only. It seems that, in the wake of OCIC’s move to Brussels, DOCIP played a supra-
national role in bringing together data from Belgian and foreign Catholic press releases,
film information and censorship data. It seems that in the mid- and later 1930s, French
and Swiss Catholic newspapers and magazines also used DOCIP film articles, censorship
data and information. A major archival problem deals with the confiscation (and probably
destruction) of pre-war DOCIP material when the Gestapo came in Brussels in 1940.
Wauters, ‘50 jaar K.F.A. in België,’ p. 23.
43. For information on the interwar Catholic film movements in the Netherlands, see Ansje
Van Beusekom, Kunst en Amusement (Haarlem: Arcadia, 2001), pp. 268–75; and Bert
Hogenkamp, De Nederlandse documentaire film 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep,
1988), pp. 67–80; for France, see C. Bonnafoux, Les Catholoques français devant le cinéma
entre désir et impuissance (paper for the 4th International Symposium of History and Film,
Madrid, 27–29 November 2002); and Colin Crisp, The Classic French Cinema 1930–1960,
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 255–63.
44. Lunders, De Film, Moderne Grootmacht, p. 44; Reynebeau, ‘Mensen zonder eigenschappen,’
p. 66; Van Haver, Voor U Beminde Gelovigen, pp. 249–53.
45. Brohée & Cartuyvels, Het Middenbestuur der Katholieke Filmaktie, p. 19.
46. Undated internal report, ‘Legion of Decency,’ KADOC/KFA box 42, probably 1934.
47. Felix Morlion, ‘Het Filmvraagstuk voor de Katholieke Pers’ (undated internal document,
KADOC/KFL box 44, probably 1935, pp. 4–5).

445
 notes to pages 31 5 – 32 3

48. Felix Morlion, ‘Hollywood huivert, zuivert … huichelt’, De Standaard, 17 August

1934.
49. Undated internal report, Legion of Decency, KADOC/KFA box 42, p. 1.
50. Undated internal report, Legion of Decency, KADOC/KFA box 42, p. 1.
51. See Higson and Maltby, ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America,’ pp. 7–16.
52. J.B., ‘De Vlaamsche Katholieken tegenover het Filmprobleem,’ De Standaard, 29 January
1929 and 5 February 1929.
53. A.J. Nuyens, Waarheen met de film? (Antwerp: Geloofsverdediging, 1932), pp. 17–18.
54. Nuyens, Waarheen met de film?, pp. 20–22.
55. J.B., ‘De Vlaamsche Katholieken tegenover het Filmprobleem.’
56. Felix Morlion, ‘La conscience devant le cinéma,’ KADOC/KFA box 37, p. 1.
57. Felix Morlion, ‘De Grondlagen van de Kommunistische Film?,’ De Standaard, 3 March
1934; Morlion, ‘De Kommunistische mirakelfilm en wij,’ De Standaard, 4 May 1934.
See also Van Beusekom, Kunst en Amusement, p. 270.
58. Morlion, ‘La conscience devant le cinema,’ KADOC/KFA box 37, p. 2.
59. Morlion, ‘La conscience devant le cinema,’ KADOC/KFA box 37, p. 4.
60. Morlion, ‘Het Filmvraagstuk voor de Katholieke Pers,’ p. 2.
61. See KADOC/KFA box 31.
62. Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, pp. 258–60.
63. Felix Morlion De Fransche Film, in De Standaard, 14 September 1934; F.M. Grootheid
en ellende van de Fransche Film, in De Standaard, 12.10.1934.
64. Morlion, Filmleiding, p. 17; Paul Léglise, Histoire de la Politique du Cinéma Française
(Paris: Pichon & Durand-Auzias, 1970), p. 247; Crisp, The Classic French Cinema,
pp. 259–60.
65. Throughout the 1930s, Belgium lived through a period of intense conflicts of varying
kinds. The kingdom saw the rise and success of more extremist political formations on
the left and right, often associated with linguistic and nationalist aspirations. In a highly
polarized society, these conflicts were unsurprisingly interwoven with questions on the
role of the state, trade unions and the church. See K. Deprez & L. Vos (eds), Nationalism
in Belgium (London: Macmillan Press, 1999).
66. Felix Morlion, ‘Even nadenken na het volksverzet tegen “Heldhaftige Kermis,”’ De
Standaard 14 February 1936. For a more extended discussion of the public debate on La
Kermesse Héroïque, see Benoît Mihaïl, ‘La Kermesse héroïque, un hommage à la Flandre?
La polémique autour du film de Jacques Feyder en Belgique (janvier–mars 1936),’ BEG,
10:1 (2002), pp. 43–78.
67. Filmliga, 4: 6 (November 1936), p. 4.
68. ‘Filmnieuwtjes,’ De Standaard, 3 August 1934.
69. Jeanne De Bruyn, ‘De Film en het Katholieke Leven,’ Nieuw Vlaanderen, 19 September
1936, p. 22. See also Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, p. 258.
70. Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Exeter: Exeter University
Press, 1997).
71. Ian Jarvie, review of Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television, 18:2 (1998), pp. 302–304.

Chapter 16: The Child Audience and the ‘Horrific’ Film in 1930s Britain
1. This chapter is considerably extended from ‘“Horrific” films, cinema memory and
constructions of childhood,’ Screen Studies Conference, Glasgow, June 2000; and
‘Children, “horrific” films and censorship in 1930s Britain,’ Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television, 22:2 (2002). My thanks to Ian Conrich for his very helpful feedback
and comments.

446
 notes to pages 32 3 – 32 8

2. For a summary of the international position in the mid-1910s, see National Council of
Public Morals, Cinema Commission of Inquiry, The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future
Possibilities (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917), pp. 313–31. For a résumé covering the
period to the mid-1920s, see Sarah J. Smith, Angels With Dirty Faces: Children, Cinema and
Censorship in 1930s Britain, Ph.D. thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2001, pp. 43–48.
3. PRO/HO45/11008, Report of Bradford MOH, 1917; report on a deputation of
educationalists, 29 May 1916.
4. The Times (London), 5 January 1915.
5. National Council of Public Morals, Cinema Commission of Inquiry, The Cinema: Its
Present Position and Future Possibilities. On the involvement of discourses of ‘social purity’
and ‘social hygiene’ in early debates on cinema in Britain and on social class issues
motivating concerns about the cinema audience, see Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship
and Sexuality, 1909 to 1925 (London: Routledge, 1988), especially chaps 6 and 7.
6. In 2002, responsibility for the BBFC was moved from the Home Office to the
Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
7. United Kingdom. Home Office, ‘The censorship of cinematograph films,’ 6 July 1923.
For a brief account of the BBFC’s history, see Annette Kuhn, ‘British Board of Film
Censors/Classification,’ in Derek Jones (ed.), Censorship: A World Encyclopedia (London:
Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).
8. United Kingdom. Home Office, ‘The Cinema and Children,’ 16 December 1929.
9. Fawcett Library, National Vigilance Association Archive, S.1s, Cinema Censorship;
Public Record Office (PRO), HO45/14731, local ban upheld by justices, January 1931;
Richard Ford, Children in the Cinema (London, 1939), p. 92.
10. PRO, HO45/14731, Report on questionnaire findings, October 1931. See Smith, Angels
With Dirty Faces, pp. 74–76, for a summary of the report’s findings.
11. British Film Institute Special Collections (BFI), BBFC Verbatim Reports, 1930–31
bound volume, Deputation to BBFC from London PMC, 3 April 1930; BFI, BBFC
Verbatim Reports, 1930–38 folder, Deputation from Parliamentary Film Committee
to Home Secretary, 15 July 1930; PRO, HO45/14275, NCW report of visit to Home
Office, July 1930. Verbatim reports were commissioned by an anxious BBFC.
12. BFI, BBFC Verbatim Reports, bound volume 1930–31, Notes on a meeting convened by
Birmingham Cinema Inquiry Committee, 7 November 1930; also PRO, HO45/14275.
13. PRO, HO45/14276, circular letter from BBFC, 1 January 1931.
14. Birmingham Cinema Inquiry Committee, The Influence of Cinema on Children, April
1930-May 1931; PRO, HO45/14276, Deputation from BCIC, 8 May 1931; PRO,
HO45/15206, Deputation from BCIC, 6 April 1932.
15. PRO, HO45/14731, Sheffield Social Survey Committee inquiry into children’s cinema
matinees, July 1931; Birkenhead Vigilance Committee, A Report of Investigations,
June–October 1931 (Birkenhead, 1931); PRO, HO45/14277, National Council of Women,
‘Report of an Inquiry into Film Censorship’, May 1931, PRO, HO45/14277, Mothers’
Union, ‘Moral Influence of Cinema Films’, July 1931.
16. PRO, HO45/14275, BCIC deputation, 7 November 1930.
17. See PRO, HO45/14276 and PRO, HO45/14276 for details of BCIC deputation, 8 May
1931; BFI, BBFC verbatim report of BCIC deputation, 8 May 1931; PRO, HO45/14276,
reply to BCIC request for public inquiry, 10 July 1931.
18. PRO, HO45/14275, Summary of proceedings of LPMC private conference, 12 January
1931; also in BFI, BBFC Verbatim Reports, bound volume 1930–31.
19. PRO, HO45/14277, National Council of Women, ‘Report of an Inquiry into Film
Censorship’, May 1931.
20. PRO, HO45/14276, Proposed consultative committee, February 1931; PRO, HO45/15208,
notes on first meeting of FCCC, 26 November 1931.

447
 notes to pages 32 9 – 3 32

21. BFI, BBFC Verbatim Reports, 1932–35 bound volume, BCIC National Conference on
Problems Connected with the Cinema, 27 February 1932.
22. PRO, HO45/15208, Minutes of 4th meeting of FCCC, 4 April 1932.
23. PRO, HO45/15208, Minutes of 7th meeting of FCCC, 10 October 1932.
24. PRO, HO45/17036, FCCC report to Home Office on Children and ‘A’ Films, 21
December 1932; United Kingdom. Home Office, ‘Children and “A” Films,’ 6 March
1933.
25. PRO, HO45/17036, LCC minutes, 20 June 1933.
26. For memories of frightening films in the 1930s, see Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic/
Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I B Tauris, and
New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 66–80. Bad dreams caused by films
was one of the issues investigated in the early 1930s in the U.S. Payne Fund Studies of
young people’s cinemagoing: see W.W. Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth (New York:
MacMillan, 1933); S. Renshaw and others, Children’s Sleep (New York: MacMillan,
1933).
27. For examples, see Kinematograph Weekly, 7 September 1933 (Birmingham); Kinematograph
Weekly, 16 November 1933 (St Helens); Today’s Cinema, 1 November 1935 (London
County Council, Middlesex County Council); Today’s Cinema, 2 November 1935
(Devon, Cornwall); Kinematograph Weekly, 7 November 1935 (Exeter); Today’s Cinema,
4 December 1935 (Surrey County Council); Today’s Cinema, 13 January 1936 (Torquay);
Today’s Cinema, 22 January 1936 (Margate); Daily Film Renter, 7 December 1936 (Essex
County Council); Today’s Cinema, 19 December 1939 (Margate).
28. ‘Film Censorship Today,’ speech to CEA, 24 June 1936; Today’s Cinema, 31 July 1936,
8 August 1936, 23 September 1936. The introduction of the ‘H’ certificate is relatively
well documented: see, for example, Tom Johnson, Censored Screams: the British Ban on
Hollywood Horror in the 1930s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997); Frank J. dello Stritto,
‘The British “ban” on horror films of 1937,’ Cult Movies, 14 (1995), p. 26.
29. From a note in the MPPDA case file on Son of Frankenstein, cited in David Skal, The
Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror (London: Plexus, 1993), p. 205.
30. For a list of films given the advisory ‘H’ label (1933–36) and the ‘H’ certificate (1937–50),
see James C. Roberstson, The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain,
1896–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 183–84.
31. Earlier inquiries into children’s film preferences include London County Council Education
Committee, ‘School Children and the Cinema’ (London: London County Council, 1932);
John MacKie, ‘The Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry: Being an investigation conducted into the
influence of the film on schoolchildren and adolescents in the city’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Cinema Enquiry Committee, 1933). See also William Farr, ‘Films for children—plea for
co-operation,’ Cinematograph Times, no. 12, September (1936); British Film Institute,
‘Report of the Conference on Films for Children, November 20th and 21st, 1936,’ in Films
for Children (London: British Film Institute, 1936).
32. British Film Institute, ‘Films for Children: a First List of Films Recommended for
Special Performances for Children in Cinema’ (London, 1937); PRO, HO45/21118,
Odeon Theatres report on children and the cinema, October 1938; William Farr,
‘Analysis of questionnaire to adolescents 14–18 years’ (London: British Film Institute,
[1939]).
33. Richard Ford’s 1939 book, Children in the Cinema, encapsulates this new way of
thinking. For a discussion of these developments in terms of shifting conceptualisations
of childhood, see Kuhn, An Everyday Magic/Dreaming of Fred and Ginger, pp. 81–84.
34. See Ellen Wartella and Byron Reeves, ‘Historical trends in research on children and the
media, 1900–1960,’ Journal of Communication, 35:2 (1985), for an overview of research
on children’s use of film, radio and television.

448
 notes to pages 3 32 – 3 3 7

35. Quoted in ibid., pp. 130–31.

Chapter 17: Hollywood in Vernacular: Translation and Cross-Cultural Reception of

American Films in Turkey
1. Miriam Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular
Modernism,’ Modernism/Modernity (1999) 6:2, p. 60.
2. Will H. Hays cited by Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood 1918–39 (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 1997), p. 21.
3. Victoria de Grazia, ‘Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to
European Cinema, 1920–1960,’ Journal of Modern History (1989), pp. 61, 79–81; Armand
Mattelart, C.X. Delcourt and M. Mattelart, International Image Markets: In Search of an
Alternative Perspective (London: Comedia, 1984), pp. 94–98.
4. See Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America Since
1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1969); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger
and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production
to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985); Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America
in the World Film Market 1907–34 (London: BFI, 1985); de Grazia, ‘Mass Culture and
Sovereignty’; Mattelart et al., International Image Markets.
5. Jacques Malthête, ‘Méliès et le conférencier,’ Iris (1996), pp. 122–23.
6. Hansen, ‘Mass Production of the Senses,’ p. 68.
7. The Production Code of 1930 stated that ‘the history, institutions, prominent people,
and citizenry of other nations shall be represented fairly.’ Donald Crafton, The Talkies:
American Cinema’s Transition to Sound 1926–1931 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1997), p. 437.
8. For a wider conception of cinema as vernacular modernism see Kaveh Askari and Joshua
Yumibe, ‘Cinema as ‘Vernacular Modernism’ Conference, University of Chicago, 18 May
2002,’ Screen (2002) 43:4 pp. 432–37.
9. Hansen, ‘Mass Production of the Senses,’ p. 68.
10. Ironically, after the First World War, the movie theatre was renamed the Russo-
Americain in 1920. Mustafa Gökmen, Eski İstanbul Sinemaları (Istanbul: İstanbul
Kitaplığı Yayınları, 1991), p. 221.
11. Attila İlhan, ‘Seyirci’yi “Yüceltmek” mi, “Kullanmak” mı?,’ Cumhuriyet 1 January
2001.
12. World Trade In Commodities, VI:4, no. 21, p. 2.
13. Even before its release the movie was promoted as an epic on ‘Turkish’ (!) heroism.
Paramount invited a journalist from Turkish film magazine Holivut [sic] to the
filming. The conversation between journalist İsmet Sırrı and director Cecil de Mille is
revealing:.
Sırrı: ‘This is a film made for Christian audiences; I hope you do not misrepresent
the heroism of Turkish leader Salahaddin.
de Mille: ‘I want to assure you that the real hero of this film is Salahaddin. I did
not hesitate to represent Richard Coeur de Lion’s inferior position.’
See Ismet Sırrı, ‘Atatürk’ün ünü Hollywood stüdyolarında,’ Holivut 5:26 (1935), pp. 8–9;
idem., ‘Salahattin-i Eyyubinin Kılıncı,’ Holivut 5:27 (1935), p. 7.
14. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 74.
15. For more information on movie programmes see Behzat Üsdiken, ‘Beyoğlu’nun
Eski Sinemaları-I,’ Toplumsal Tarih (1995) 4:22 pp. 12–18; idem, ‘Beyoğlu’nun Eski

449
 notes to pages 337–343

Sinemaları-II,’ Toplumsal Tarih (1995) 4:23 pp. 12–18; Atilla Dorsay, Benim Beyoğlum
(Istanbul: Çağdaş Yayıncılık, 1991); and Giovanni Scognamillo, Cadde-i Kebir’de
Sinema (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1991).
16. See Yıldız, 15 October 1946 (16:185), pp. 8–9.
17. Dorsay, Benim Beyoğlum, p. 84.
18. Kerry Segrave, American Films Abroad: Hollywood Domination of the World’s Movie Screens
from the 1890s to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), p. 197.
19. Alim Şerif Onaran, Sinematoğrafik Hürriyet (Ankara: İçişleri Bakanlığı Tetkik Kurulu
Yayınları, 1968), p. 179.
20. According to the Istanbul Film Censorship Commission, 68 dubbed foreign films were
released in 1947, and 116 in 1948. Onaran, Sinematoğrafik Hürriyet, p. 176.
21. Hülya Arslanbay, ‘Faruk Kenç,’ Antrakt 24 (1993), p. 25; Mediha Sağlık, ‘Sinemamızın
İlk Yılları: Faruk Kenç İle Söyleşi,’ Kurgu 14 (1996), p. 100.
22. Holivut 4:49 (1934), p. 5.
23. Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public
Sphere,’ in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press), p. 139.
24. Segrave, American Films Abroad, pp. 202–203.
25. Gökhan Akçura, Aile Boyu Sinema (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995), pp. 59–60.
26. Gökmen, Eski İstanbul Sinemaları, p. 61.
27. Mücap Ofluoğlu, Bir Avuç Alkış (Istanbul: Çağdaş Yayınları, 1985), p. 65.
28. Gökhan Akçura, ‘Dublaj Tarihimizde Yeri Doldurulamayan Bir Efsane: Ferdi Tayfur-1,’
Antrakt 5 (1992), p. 43.
29. Memet Fuad, Gölgede Kalan Yıllar (Istanbul: Adam Yayınları, 1997), p. 298.
30. Cited by Gökhan Akçura, Aile Boyu Sinema (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995),
p. 170.
31. Martine Danan, ‘Hollywood’s Hegemonic Strategies: Overcoming French Nationalism
with the Advent of Sound,’ in Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (eds) ‘Film Europe’
and ‘Film Americ’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939 (Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1999), p. 231.
32. Tim Bergfelder, ‘Reframing European Cinema—Concepts and Agendas for the
Historiography of European Film,’ Lähikuva 4 (1998), p. 13.
33. Agah Özgüç, Başlangıcından Bugüne Türk Sinemasında İlk’ler (Istanbul: Yılmaz Yayınları,
1990), p. 46.
34. Charles Musser, ‘Ethnicity, Role-playing, and American Film Comedy: From Chinese
Laundry Scene to Whoopee (1894–1930),’ in Lester D. Friedman (ed.), Unspeakable Images:
Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1991), p. 56.
35. Musser, ‘Ethnicity,’ p. 62.
36. E.g. Il medico dei pazzi (Eduarda Scarpetta, 1954, Turkish title: Toto Tımarhanede)
(Scognamillo, Cadde-i Kebir’de Sinema, p. 74).
37. Ofluoğlu, Bir Avuç Alkış, p. 140.
38. Ian C. Jarvie, ‘Stars and Ethnicity: Hollywood and the United States, 1932–51,’ in Lester
D. Friedman (ed.), Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Urbana and
Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 82–111.
39. Mark Betz, ‘The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and
Polyglot European Art Cinema,’ Camera Obscura, 16:1 (2001), p. 34.
40. Antje Ascheid, ‘Speaking Tongues: Voice Dubbing in the Cinema as Cultural
Ventriloquism,’ The Velvet Light Trap 40 (1997), pp. 39–40.
41. Instead of censorship the officials preferred the more ‘neutral’ term of control.
42. A former member of the commissions reports that, an officer from the Army’s First

450
 notes to pages 343–350

Division permanently joined the commission in Istanbul which censors foreign films.
Onaran, Sinematoğrafik Hürriyet, p. 153.
43. Oğuz Makal, ‘Le cinema et la vie politique: le jeu s’appelle “vivre avec la censure,”’
in Mehmet Basutçu (ed.), Le Cinema Turc (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996),
p. 134.
44. Nijat Özön, Karagözden Sinemaya: Türk Sineması ve Sorunları, vol. 2 (Ankara: Kitle
Yayınları, 1995), p. 316.
45. The films were banned in 1953, 1962, 1966 and 1962 respectively. The decision on The
Ten Commandments was overturned by the Court of Appeals and the film was later
released. Özkan Tikveş, Mukayeseli Hukukta ve Türk Hukukunda Sinema Filmlerinin
Sansürü (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1968), p. 177.
46. These two movies could only be screened during the 1990s on television.
47. Özön, Karagözden Sinemaya and Tikveş, Mukayeseli Hukukta ve Türk Hukukunda Sinema
Filmlerinin Sansürü.
48. Onaran, Sinematoğrafik Hürriyet, p. 174.
49. 25.1.1962, File: 91123/901.
50. 11.3.1966.
51. 8.10.1971, File no: 91123/983. I would like to thank Dilek Kaya Mutln for letting me
use the censorship committee’s reports. For a thorough analysis of these reports see Nezih
Erdoğan and Dilek Kaya, ‘Institutional Intervention in the Distribution and Exhibition
of Hollywood Films in Turkey,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22:1
(2002), pp. 47–59.
52. Özkan Tikveş, Mukayeseli Hukukta ve Türk Hukukunda Sinema Filmlerinin Sansürü
(Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1968).
53. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (London and New York:
Routledge, 1988), p. 127.
54. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York:
The Free Press, 1964), p. 25.
55. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, p. 119.
56. R.D. Robinson, cited by Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, p. 120.
57. Lerner, Passing of Traditional Society, p. 28.
58. For an insightful critic of Lerner’s study see Reşat Kasaba, ‘Kemalist Certainties and
Modern Ambiguities,’ in Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba (eds), Rethinking Modernity
and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,
1997).

Chapter 18: Cowboy Modern: African Audiences, Hollywood Films, and Visions
of the West
1. J.M. Burns, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 2002), pp. 53–54.
2. A.R. Baeta, ‘The Two Worlds,’ Sight and Sound 17 (1948), pp. 5–8.
3. Baeta, ‘The Two Worlds’, p. 5.
4. Baeta, ‘The Two Worlds’, p. 5.
5. Burns, Flickering Shadows, esp. pp. 37–59.
6. I developed this argument in ‘Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in
Northern Rhodesia,’ American Historical Review 106 (2001), pp. 81–105.
7. Baeta, ‘The Two Worlds’, p. 7.
8. Richard Maltby, ‘Introduction,’ in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), Identifying
Hollywood’s Audience: Cultural Identity and the Movies (London: British Film Institute,
1999), p. 3.

451
 notes to pages 350 –355

9. Charles Ambler, ‘Mass Media and Leisure in Africa,’ International Journal of African
Historical Studies 35 (2002) pp. 119–36.
10. Note Thelma Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South
Africa: 1895–1940 (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1972, first pub. in 1946); and Brian
Larkin, ‘The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria,’ in Faye D. Ginsburg,
Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 319–36.
11. Robert Donald, ‘Films and the Empire,’ The Nineteenth Century, 100: 596 (1926),
pp. 497–510, quote p. 498.
12. Donald, ‘Films and the Empire,’ p. 499.
13. Donald, ‘Films and the Empire,’ p. 499.
14. Lawrence Levine, ‘The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and its Audiences,’
American Historical Review 97 (1992), p. 1396.
15. Catherine M. Cole, Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press: 2001), p. 72.
16. Cole, Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre, p. 72.
17. Cole, Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre, pp. 73–77.
18. Catherine M. Cole, ‘“This is Actually a Good Interpretation of Modern Civilisation”:
Popular Theatre and the Social Imaginary in Ghana, 1946–66,’ Africa 67 (1997),
p. 371.
19. Cameron Duodu, The Gab Boys (Bungay, Suffolk: Fontana Books, 1969, [1967]), p. 54.
20. Steve Salm, ‘“Rain or Shine, We Gonna Rock”: Dance subcultures and identity
construction in Accra, Ghana,’ in Toyin Falola and Christine Jennings (eds), Sources
and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, Unearthed (Rochester, NY: University
of Rochester Press, 2003).
21. Ambler, ‘Popular Films and Colonial Audiences,’ p. 100.
22. Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa: The Human Situation on the
Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 254–72.
23. Harry Franklin, Director of Information, Northern Rhodesia, quoted in James Burns,
‘Watching African Watch Films: Theories of Spectatorship in British Colonial Africa,’
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20 (2000), p. 208.
24. Robert Stem and Louise Spence, ‘Colonialism, Racism and Representation: An
Introduction,’ Screen 24 (1983), pp. 4–20.
25. Though see Douglas Gomery’s book, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in
the United States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Melvyn Stokes
and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the
Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Melvyn Stokes and Richard
Maltby (eds), Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (London:
British Film Institute, 1999); and Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical
Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
26. Burns, Flickering Shadows, esp. pp. 37–59.
27. Fifth Report from the Select Committee on Estimates (1950) quoted in Peter Morton-
Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria: A Field Study of the Impact of Fundamental-education
Films on Rural Audiences in Nigeria (Ibadan: Federal Information Services, 1953), p. vi.
28. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, p. vi–vii.
29. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, pp. vi–vii.
30. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, Introduction and pp. 1–7.
31. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, pp. 4–6.
32. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, p. 3.
33. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, p. 45.
34. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, pp. 29–30, 79, 122.

452
 notes to pages 3 5 6 – 3 61

35. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, pp. 35, 37.

36. Roan Antelope Mine Welfare Office, Annual Report, 1952–1953, Zambia Consolidated
Copper Mines, Archives. This screening is examined in greater depth in Ambler,
‘Popular Films and Colonial Audiences,’ p. 98.
37. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, p. 42.
38. Morton-Williams, Cinema in Rural Nigeria, p. 58.
39. Gutsche, History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, p. 379. Also,
Ambler, ‘Popular Films and Colonial Audiences,’ pp. 81–82.
40. Shimmer Chinodya, Harvest of Thorns (Harare: Baobab Books, 1989), p. 78.
41. I explored this issue at some length in Ambler, ‘Popular Films and Colonial Audiences,’
pp. 83–87. Even James Burns’s important new book, Flickering Shadows, focuses largely
on the production and reception of propaganda films. An important exception to the
generalization is Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture
and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994).
42. Sembene Ousman, God’s Bits of Wood (Oxford: Heinemann, 1986 [1960]), p. 154.
43. P.E.H. Hair, ‘The Cowboys: A Nigerian Acculturative Institution (ca. 1950),’ History in
Africa 28 (2001), pp. 83–93.
44. Peter Fraenkel, Wayaleshi (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959), p. 78.
45. Fraenkel, Wayaleshi, p. 148.
46. J.A.K. Leslie, A Survey of Dar es Salaam (London: Oxford University Press, 1963),
pp. 112–13.
47. Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), p. 86; and Bill Nasson, ‘“She Preferred Living in a Cave with
Harry the Snake-catcher”: Towards an Oral History of Popular Leisure and Class
Expression in District Six, Cape Town, c.1920s–1950s,’ in Philip Bonner et. al. (eds),
Holding their Ground: Class, Locality and Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South
Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989), p. 286.
48. David J. Gainer, ‘“Man, the People would Really Go Wild Then”: The Bioscope and
Cape Town Audiences,’ African Studies Association, Annual Meeting, Washington,
DC, December 2002, p. 22.
49. Nasson, ‘Towards an Oral History of Popular Leisure,’ pp. 286–94.
50. Gainer, ‘The Bioscope and Cape Town Audiences,’ pp. 1, 6.
51. Gainer, ‘The Bioscope and Cape Town Audiences,’ pp. 6, 13–14, 21; Modikwe Dikobe,
The Marabi Dance (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 72, 109; and Ezekiel Mphahlele,
Down Second Avenue (London: Faber and Faber, 1971 [1959]), p. 96.
52. Judith Thissen, ‘Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New York City, 1905–14,” in Melvyn
Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century
to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999), pp. 15–28.
53. Gainer, ‘The Bioscope and Cape Town Audiences,’ pp. 10–12.
54. Dan Mattera, Sophiatown: Coming of Age in South Africa (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1989 [1987]), p. 75.
55. Godfrey Moloi, My Life: Volume One (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), pp. 27–30,
73–75.
56. Powdermaker, Copper Town, pp. 255–56.
57. Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 270.
58. Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 264.
59. I address the discourse of censorship in relationship to gender, class, and race in ‘Popular
Films and Colonial Audiences,’ pp. 89–94.
60. Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 258.
61. Powdermaker, Copper Town, pp. 260–61.
62. Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 262.

453
 notes to pages 3 62 – 3 67

63. Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 263.

64. Powdermaker, Copper Town, p. 267. In fact, censors were probably more concerned about
such negative judgements than they were about the possible impact of film imagery
and narrative on African behavior. Ambler, ‘Popular Films and Colonial Audiences,’
p. 100.
65. Charles Ambler, ‘Mass Media and Leisure in Africa,’ International Journal of African
Historical Studies 35 (2002), pp. 119–36.
66. Ernie Wolfe, III, ‘Adventures in African Cinema, 1975–1998,’ in Wolfe (ed.), Extreme
Canvas: Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana (New York: Dilettante Press, 2000),
pp. 17–33.
67. For a study of the role of video in reinforcing the seclusion of Muslim women on the
Kenya coast, see Minou Fuglesang, Veils and Videos: Female Youth Culture on the Kenyan
Coast (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1994).
68. ‘Mortal Combat Rages, but “Mortal Kombat” Rules,’ New York Times, 10 June 2003.
69. Wolfe, Extreme Canvas.
70. Jonathan Haynes (ed.), Nigerian Video Films (Athens: Ohio University Press, rev.
edn, 2000); Ola Balogun, ‘Africa’s Video Alternative’ (www.unesco.org/courier/1998);
Norimitsu Onishi, ‘Step Aside, L.A. and Bombay, for Nollywood,’ New York Times, 16
September 2002.

Chapter 19: ‘Opening Everywhere’: Multiplexes and the Speed of Cinema Culture
Acknowledgement. The author thanks Peter Lester for research assistance.

1. Samuel Fuller, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking (New York:
Knopf, 2002), p. 277.
2. ‘EDI Box Office News: More Shelf Space for Films,’ Variety, 5–11 January 1998,
p. 30.
3. Nielsen/EDI, ‘Box Office News,’ Variety, 16–22 February 2004, p. 23.
4. ‘Variety Box Office,’ Variety, 24 February–2 March 2003, p. 21; ‘Variety International Box
Office,’ Variety, 24 February–2 March 2003, p. 23.
5. Don Groves, ‘“The Matrix” Takes Over the World,’ Variety, 17–23 November 2003, p. 17.
Doing so resulted in an extraordinary box office gross of $204 million in 96 countries
in the first five days of release. Laura M. Holson, ‘An Elf and a Bear Trip up the final
“Matrix,”’ New York Times, 10 November 2003, C2.
6. Sharon Waxman, ‘“Rings” Shows Trend toward Global Premiers,’ New York Times, 22
December 2003, E1.
7. Some, including the U.S. Federal courts, saw this policy as detrimental to non-major
distributors whose films are not easily available otherwise, leading the MPAA to reverse
its stance.
8. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation (New York: Routledge,
2000).
9. Important exceptions include Tino Balio, ‘“A Major Presence in All of the World’s
Important Markets”: The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s,’ in Steve Neale and
Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 58–73; Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell, Global
Hollywood (London: BFI Publishing, 2001); Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria,
Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI Publishing, 2005);
Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire, ‘The Best Place to See a Film: The Blockbuster, the
Multiplex, and the Contexts of Consumption,’ in Julian Stringer (ed.), Movie Blockbusters
(New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 190–201; and Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby

454
 notes to pages 3 67 – 3 7 2

(eds), Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange (London: BFI Publishing,
2004).
10. ‘Screaming into Iqaluit,’ Globe and Mail, 9 December 1997, A15.
11. John Belton, ‘Digital Cinema: A False Revolution,’ October 100, spring 2002, p. 114.
12. Cf. Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 213–23.
13. Belton, ‘Digital Cinema,’ p. 105.
14. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament,’ in ed. and trans., Thomas Y. Levin, The Mass
Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, originally
published in 1927), pp. 75–86. Kracauer defined ‘the Ratio of the capitalist economic
system’ as an abstracted form of reasoning that did not encompass the organically human.
In this essay, he used the concept to compare the mechanised division of factory labour
under Taylorism to the performance and consumption of manufactured visual spectacle,
using the regimented patterns created by the Tiller Girls dance troupe as his example: ‘The
ratio that gives rise to the ornament [spectacle] is strong enough to invoke the mass and
to expunge all life from the figures constituting it … it is the rational and empty form of
the cult, devoid of any explicit meaning, that appears in the mass ornament’ (p. 84).
15. Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament,’ p. 76.
16. Rita Felski, ‘The Invention of Everyday Life,’ New Formations 39 1999, p. 15.
17. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the
Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1992); Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (eds), Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences:
Cultural Identity and the Movies (London: BFI Publishing, 1999); Melvyn Stokes and
Richard Maltby (eds), American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the
Early Sound Era (London: BFI Publishing, 1999); Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby
(eds), Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (London: BFI
Publishing, 2001).
18. Cf. Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness,’ Yale French Studies 73 (1987),
pp. 7–11.
19. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I, 2nd edn, trans. John Moore (New
York: Verso, 1958).
20. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steve Rendall (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1984), p. xiv.
21. Amy Dawes, ‘Global Batmania Lifts Warners to Foreign Mark; Success Mirrors 1989
U.S. Results; Firm Cites Euro Screen Proliferation,’ Variety, 28 February 1990, pp. 7,
16.
22. Richard Gold, ‘Globalization: Gospel for the ’90s,’ Variety, 2 May 1990, S–1, S–104.
23. Larry Leventhal, ‘Cinema Trade Show Makes Euro Debut,’ Variety, 29 June 1992, pp. 61,
62.
24. Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1994); Acland, Screen Traffic, pp. 85–106.
25. Don Groves, ‘Prexy Predicts Global Golden Age,’ Variety, 11–17 September 1995,
p. 56.
26. Ibid. In actuality, by 2000, the split for box office rental was 55.6 per cent domestic and
44.4 per cent international. Don Groves, ‘B.O. World is Flat; Local Pix, Strong Dollar
Hurt Yanks o’seas,’ Variety.com, 11 June 11 2002, last accessed 25 June 2002.
27. Millard L. Ochs, ‘Cost Considerations in Developing the International Market,’
Boxoffice, February 1992, SW-16, SW-18.
28. Peter A. Ivany, ‘The Development of the International Market,’ Boxoffice, February 1992,
SW–17, SW–19.

455

Maltby et al, Going to the movie455 455 22/11/2007 13:17:05

 notes to pages 37 3–375

29. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986),
pp. 35, 58, 84.
30. Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1969), pp. 130–31.
31. Leonard Klady, ‘Locals Boost B.O.: Plexes, Homegrown Heroes Pump Global 100,’
Variety, 9–15 February 1998, p. 30; Don Groves, ‘New Multiplex Building Boom May
Reshape Euro Film Biz,’ Variety, 13 June 1990, pp. 1, 20, 21.
32. Kim Williamson, ‘A Small World After All,’ Boxoffice, July 1994, p. 26.
33. ‘Euro screen growth: Multiplex Boom Continues,’ Variety, 23–29 June 1997, p. 53;
Stephen Mackey, ‘Foreign Exhibs Fuel Boom,’ Variety, 15–21 June 1998, p. 71; Stephen
Mackey, ‘Madrid’s Megaplex Mania,’ Variety, 20–26 April 1998, p. 33; Don Groves,
‘TW Announces Co-ventures for European Hardtops,’ Variety, 27 May 1991, pp. 35,
39; John Nadler, ‘Cineplex Enters Turkey,’ Variety, 27 April–3 May 1998, p. 16; John
Nadler, ‘Multiplex Mania Strikes Exhib Biz,’ Variety, 18–24 May 1998, p. 64; ‘Multiplex
Mania Hits Exhibitors,’ Variety, 26 September–2 October 1994, p. 55.
34. Rick Richardson, ‘Underscreened Market Soldiers On,’ Variety, 15–21 June 1998, p. 78;
John Nadler, ‘More Multis Mean More Magyar Moviegoers,’ Variety, 15–21 June 1998,
p. 82; Cathy Meils, ‘Arthouses Hopping in Prague,’ Variety, 15–21 June 1998, p. 82; Tom
Birchenough, ‘Slow Progress for Soviets,’ Variety, 15–21 June 1998, p. 86; Cathy Meils,
‘Politics Plays Havoc with Plexes,’ Variety, 15–21 June 1998, p. 86.
35. Nancy Tartaglione, ‘Arthouse Exhibs Fight Back,’ Variety, 15–21 June 1998, p. 49.
36. Andrew Paxman, ‘Southern Renaissance: Corporate Ventures Multiply Region’s Booming
Multiplexes,’ Variety, 23–29 March 1998, p. 43.
37. ‘Exhibition explodes in Asia,’ Variety, 3 May 1993, p. 37; ‘Exhibs gear for multiplex era,’
Variety, 22–28 August 1994, p. 41; Cathy Meils, ‘Austria’s Plexes Target Small-town
Expansion,’ Variety, 5–11 January 1998, p. 26
38. Martin Peers, ‘Loews Lines up World: Shugrue tapped to lead exhib in global moves,’
Variety, 15–21 June 1998, p. 12.
39. UCI backed away from this venture, and the new owners renamed it Palace Cinemas in
1999.
40. Baharudin Latif, ‘Chan, Godzilla battle it out on Malaysian Screens,’ Variety, 30
November–6 December 1998, p. 36.
41. Don Groves, ‘Multiplying Multiplexes,’ Variety, 12–18 June 1995, p. 42.
42. ‘Special Report: Giants of exhibition,’ Boxoffice, February 2004, http://www.boxoffice.
com/index.html, last accessed 15 March 2004.
43. AMC planned to divest its Swedish cinemas (not included here) claiming that film policy
there gave local chains advantages in acquiring hit films. Should this transpire, it would
be an example of what happens when a chain is not able to influence local policy to its
own advantage. ‘AMC to exit Swedish Exhibition Sector,’ Screen Digest, December 2003,
p. 374.
44. In early 2004, WBIT announced their intention to get out of the Taiwan market. Don
Groves, ‘WB, Village eye exit of Taiwan exhib’n,’ Variety.com, 3 March 2004, last
accessed 15 March 2004.
45. Don Groves, ‘Teuton Exhibs follow Many Yankee Missteps,’ Variety, 3–9 March 2003,
A8; Jon Herskovitz, ‘Japanese Biz Thriving in Face of Economic Troubles,’ Variety,
30 November–6 December 1998, p. 32; Bryan Pearson, ‘South African Exhib Builds
on Euro Stake,’ Variety, 30 August–5 September 1999, p. 45. UCI Central Europe
acquired some of Ster Century’s European screens, though the antimonopoly office of
Slovak Republic did not approve this acquisition as it would limit competition. Decision
No. 2003/FH/3/1/007, 23 January 2003, www.antimon.gov.sk, last accessed 15 March
2004.

456

Maltby et al, Going to the movie456 456 22/11/2007 13:17:05

 notes to pages 375–37 7

46. ‘Major Consolidation in Global Exhibition Sector; Acquisitions shrink number of

international players,’ Screen Digest, July 2003, p. 198. Note that this source did not
provide a breakdown for what countries appeared in each of these tallies. It is highly
likely that several do not conform to accepted geographical standards; for instance,
Mexico probably appears in the Latin America count and not the North American
one.
47. Don Groves, ‘Exhib Battle Goes Global,’ Variety, 26 July 1993, pp. 23, 32.
48. Balio, ‘“A Major Presence,”’ p. 60.
49. Marcelo Cajuiero, ‘Cinemark Targets Brazil with 6 Plexes,’ Variety, 6–12 April 1998,
p. 17.
50. Linda Moore, ‘Spain: The multiplex pick-me-up arrives late but strong,’ Variety, 29 June
1992, p. 62.
51. Jennifer Clark, ‘Italy: Setting houses in order after decades of neglect,’ Variety, 29 June
1992, p. 62.
52. See Mark Jancovich’s chapter in this book for a discussion of a comparable instance in
Britain.
53. Adam Dawtrey, ‘Euros Go on Screen-building Spree,’ Variety, 6–12 February 1995,
p. 1.
54. Gwen Robinson, ‘’Plexes Proliferate amid Downward Box Office Trend,’ Variety, 6–12
March 1995, p. 49.
55. Richard Gold, ‘U.S. Pix Tighten Global Grip: Major studios speed up their foreign
openings to synch with U.S. push,” Variety, 22 August 1990, pp. 1, 96.
56. The degree of coordination of interests can be seen in the cross-membership of boards
of directors. To take one example, in 2002 Isaac Palmer, Senior VP of Corporate
Development for Viacom Entertainment Group, was on the board of UCI (Asia, Europe
and South America), Famous Players (Canada) and WF Cinema Holdings LLP (U.S.),
which owns and runs the Mann Theater chain. Each of these chains operates in different
territories, and functions as a distinct corporate entity, and yet, they are ultimately
accountable to some identical members on their governing boards. The history of WF
Cinema Holdings is instructive in itself. In the major studios’ rush back into exhibition in
the mid-1980s, Warner and Paramount entered a joint venture with the chain Cinamerica.
Seen as too intimate a corporate relationship, they divested themselves of this operation
in 1997, selling it for $165 million to WestStar Holdings, which already included the
Mann Theater circuit. WestStar filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1999, at
which point Warner and Paramount (now owned by Viacom, itself owned by the National
Amusement chain), bought it back for $91 million, creating WF Cinema Holdings with
54 theaters and 357 screens. Most of these screens were shut, until only 123 remained
at some 21 theatres in 2004. When all is said and done, Warner’s participation in WF
Cinema Holdings gives them a U.S. domestic chain to complement their international
ones. And, in fact, the corporate unit that oversees these domestic U.S. theatres is
Warner Bros. International Cinemas. Isaac Palmer promotion, http://www.writenews.
com/2002/101102_soundbytes.htm, last accessed 15 March 2004; ‘Business Brief—WF
Cinema Holdings LP: Assets of WestStar Cinemas to be bought for $91 million,’ Wall
Street Journal, 13 January 2000, p. 1; ‘WestStar Cinemas: Viacom and Warner Bros. to
Acquire Assets,’ January 2000, http://bankrupt.com/TCR_Public/000114.MBX, last
accessed 15 March 2004.
57. ‘Two Become One,’ Food Chain Magazine: The Business of Food and Drink, November/
December 2003, www.foodchain-magazine.com, last accessed 15 March 2004.
58. ‘Cinemark Pushes Deeper into Latin America,’ Screen Digest, July 2003, p. 193.
59. ‘Major Consolidation in Global Exhibition Sector,’ p. 198; Don Groves, ‘Screen Surge
Submerged by Saturation in Global Market,’ Variety, 3–9 March 2003, A2.

457
 notes to pages 37 7–381

60. ‘New Major Strips down by Selling Exhibitor,’ Screen Digest, April 2002, p. 103.
61. Andrew Willis, ‘Onex Puts Loews Cineplex on Sales Block,’ Globe and Mail, 13 March
2004, B3. At the same time, Cinemark sold its 296 theaters to investment concern
Madison Dearborn for $1.5 billion in 2004. ‘Theater Chain plans $1.5 Billion Merger,’
New York Times, 14 March 2004, p. 16.
62. ‘Uneven Pace of European Cinema Development: Circuit consolidation as multiplexes
spread,’ Screen Digest, September 2001.
63. ‘Half of all European Screens are Multiplexed,’ Screen Digest, November 2003, p. 324.
64. Mary Sutter, ‘Auds Flock to Theaters despite Area’s Recession,’ Variety, 3–9 March 2003,
A10.
65. Sutter, ‘Auds Flock to Theaters,’ A10.
66. ‘Global Cinema Exhibition Markets,’ Screen Digest, October 2003, p. 299.
67. ‘Global Cinema Exhibition Markets,’ p. 298; ‘World Cinema Fails to Keep up with
U.S.A.; Global spending now close to $17 billion,’ Screen Digest, September 1999,
p. 22.
68. Henri-Pierre Penel, ‘Deux innovations pour une révolution,’ Science et Vie Avril 2000,
p. 128; Michel Marriott, ‘Digital projectors use flashes of light to paint a movie,’ New
York Times, 27 May 1999, G7; ‘Major Studios Agree to Set Digital Standards,’ Globe and
Mail, 4 April 2002, R2.
69. Cf. William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and its Critics (Champaign, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1990).
70. Digital Cinema Initiatives, Digital Cinema System Specifications, 20 July, Hollywood:
Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC, 2005.
71. The coalition was said to have been responsible for blocking Boeing’s rising power
in d-cinema, leading them to put their Boeing Digital Cinema division up for sale.
‘Profile—Working towards digital cinema—year 4—limbo, not launch,’ Screen Digest,
February 2003, p. 54; ‘Boeing to sell its digital cinema division,’ Screen Digest, December
2003, p. 375.
72. ‘Profile—Working towards digital cinema,’ p. 55.
73. ‘Hot Number,’ Variety, 21–27 March 2005, p. 6.
74. ‘Profile—Working towards digital cinema,’ p. 53; Tim Lee Master, ‘China’s Digital
Dreams,’ Far Eastern Economic Review, 17 April 2003, p. 50; ‘China Plans Large-scale
e-cinema Network,’ Screen Digest, February 2004, p. 51.
75. Some of the chains active in these tests are Famous Players (Canada), UCI (UK,
Germany and Brazil), Odeon (UK), Emagine Entertainment (US), and Network Event
Theatres (US). ‘Exhibitors Eye Alternative Revenue Streams,’ Screen Digest, October
2003, p. 291.
76. Marcelo Cajueiro, ‘Arthouse Circuits win Digital Race,’ Variety, 2–8 August 2004,
pp. 11, 13.
77. ‘Regal e-cinema Network Half-way Completed,’ Screen Digest, February 2003, p. 37.
78. ‘Microsoft e-cinema Network Expands,’ Screen Digest, April 2003, p. 100.
79. ‘U.K. Film Council Funds Art-house Digital Cinema,’ Screen Digest, August 2003,
p. 242; ‘First Digital Cinema Chain for UK Launched,’ Screen Digest, October 2003,
p. 314.
80. ‘Disney Abolishes Video Rental Window,’ Screen Digest, October 2003, p. 306.
81. ‘Summer Cinema Titles for Early Video Release,’ Screen Digest, September 2003,
p. 283.
82. A.O. Scott, ‘Even later, “28 Days” hedges its ending,” New York Times, 21 July 2003,
B1, B4.
83. Newspaper advertisement for Dawn of the Dead, New York Times, 14 March 2004,
AR12.

458
 notes to pages 381–385

84. Andrew Paxman, ‘Latin B.O. Surges 13%: Regional revs up but stock market blasts
Brazil,’ Variety, 19–25 January 1998, p. 21; ‘The multiplexing of Latin America,’ Variety,
23–29 March 1998, p. 68.
85. Paxman, ‘Southern Renaissance,’ p. 43.
86. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),
p. 125. Italics are in the original.
87. Some theorists who have pointed the way here are Kevin Robins, Into the Image: Culture
and Politics in the Field of Vision (New York: Routledge, 1996); Anne Friedberg, Window
Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1993); and James Hay, ‘Piecing Together What Remains of the Cinematic City,’ in David
B. Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 212.
88. Bruce, Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York
University Press, 1999).

Chapter 20: ‘Cinema Comes to Life at the Cornerhouse, Nottingham’: ‘American’

Exhibition, Local Politics and Global Culture in the Construction of the Urban
Entertainment Centre
1. John Tomlinson, Globalisation and Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 80. See also
Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood
(London: BFI, 2001).
2. Stuart Hanson, ‘Spoilt for Choice? Multiplexes in the 90s,’ in Robert Murphy (ed.),
British Cinema of the 90s (London: BFI, 2000), p. 51.
3. Hanson, ‘Spoilt for Choice?’, p. 51.
4. Tomlinson, Globalisation and Culture, passim.
5. Duncan Webster, Looka Yonder! The Imaginary America of Populist Culture (London:
Routledge, 1988), passim.
6. Herbert I. Schiller, ‘Electronic Information Flows: New Basis for Global Domination,’
in Philip Drummond and Richard Paterson (eds), Television in Transition (London: BFI,
1985), p. 19; E.S. Herman and R.W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries
of Global Capitalism (London: Cassell, 1997).
7. Tomlinson, Globalisation and Culture, p. 84.
8. Christopher Bigsby, Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe (London: Paul
Elek Books, 1975), p. 6.
9. Duncan Webster, ‘“Whodunnit? America Did”: Rambo and the Post Hungerford
Rhetoric,’ in Cultural Studies 3:2 May 1989, pp. 173–93.
10. Martin Woolacott, ‘The Mouse that Soared,’ The Guardian 19 August 1985, p. 12.
11. For further discussion, see Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mass Culture as
Woman: Modernism’s Other,’ in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical
Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986); and
Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire with Sarah Stubbings, The Place of the Audience: Cultural
Geographies of Film Consumption (London: BFI, 2003).
12. This promise or brand guarantee is not total, however. McDonalds meals and Starbucks
coffees are not identical in every location, as customer complaints testify. Similarly,
American films have to be re-edited and re-recorded for different markets.
13. See Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Marc
Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso,
1995).
14. Jean Baudrillard, quoted in Tomlinson, Globalisation and Culture, p. 88.
15. Tomlinson, Globalisation and Culture, pp. 111–12.

459
 notes to pages 3 8 6 – 39 1

16. See, for example, Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Oxford: Blackwells, 1991); and
John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (London:
Routledge, 1998).
17. Ulf Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,’ in Mike Featherstone (ed.),
Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalisation and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990), p. 241.
18. Nicolas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of
Information (London: Sage, 1990).
19. See for example, Annette Hill, Shocking Entertainment: Responses to Violent Movies
(Luton: University of Luton Press, 1997).
20. Hollows, Feminism, Femininity and Popular.
21. Tomlinson, Globalisation and Culture, p. 118.
22. For an extended discussion, see Jancovich and Faire with Stubbings, The Place of the
Audience, passim.
23. For example, in his account of the multiplex, Stuart Hansen refers to ‘the star site in
Birmingham [that] will incorporate a 50,000 shopping and restaurant complex’ although
he acknowledges that it is ‘technically in the inner city.’ Hanson, ‘Spoilt for Choice’,
p. 50.
24. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and David
Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and
Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995).
25. Estates Gazette, 8 March 1997, p. 132.
26. Paul Grainge, ‘The World is Our Audience: Warner Village, Brand Space and the Local
Everyday,’ in Richard Maltby (ed.), Hollywood in the World (forthcoming). See also
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
27. Nottingham Evening Post (hereafter NEP), Nottingham Commercial Property Weekly,
12 April 1998.
28. Estates Gazette Interactive, 6 December 1997, http://www.egi.co.uk/.
29. John Lett, the London Planning Advisory Committee, quoted in Estates Gazette, 4 July
1998, p. 113.
30. NEP, 24 July 1997.
31. NEP, 17 April 1998.
32. NEP, 25 August 1998.
33. See John Beckett (ed.), A Centenary History of Nottingham (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997).
34. NEP, Commercial Property Weekly, 21 April 1998.
35. NEP, 20 November 1998.
36. NEP, 20 November 1998.
37. NEP, Commercial Property Weekly, 24 November 1998, NEP, 20 November 1998.
38. Information from Nottingham City Council’s Inward Investment Team, http://www.
nottinghamcity.gov.uk/busin/default.asp.
39. Letter to NEP, 28 April 1998.
40. Letter to NEP, 7 May 1998.
41. Letter to NEP, 8 May 1998.
42. Letter to NEP, 8 May 1998.
43. NEP, 4 July 1996.
44. See, for example, David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); and
The Urbanization of Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
45. Sharon, 37, lecturer. This article is based upon the findings for an AHRB funded research
project that involved archival research and the collection and analysis of questionnaires
and oral histories.

460
 notes to pages 39 1 – 39 3

46. Estates Gazette, 8 March 1997, p. 131.

47. Estates Gazette, 4 July 1998, p. 83.
48. NEP, 18 August 2000.
49. Letter to NEP, 8 May 1998.
50. NEP, 23 February 2001.
51. NEP, 15 March 1997.
52. NEP, 23 February 2001.
53. Tomlinson, Globalisation and Culture, p. 96.
54. Tomlinson, Globalisation and Culture, p. 96.

461
 Index

A-Mus-U Theater, Robeson County 49 Advancement of Colored People

Abel, Richard 5–6, 119; ‘Patchwork Maps (NAACP); segregation
of Moviegoing’ 94–112 After Office Hours (film) 162
Acland, Charles R. 19; ‘Opening Ah, Wilderness (film) 160, 189
Everywhere’ 364–82 Aitken, Harry and Roy 6
adaptations: Bazin’s ‘pyramid’ 288–9; alcohol: Women’s Christian Temperance
control of forms 286; short 16mm Union 79
versions 281 Allen, Gracie 171
Addams, Jane 299 Allen, Robert C. 4, 7, 8; bourgeois
Adler, Jacob P. 115, 118; Michael audiences 77; challenging biases 47;
Strogoff 123–4 ‘Race, Religion and Rusticity: Relocating
Adler, Sarah 124 U.S. Film History’ 25–44
Adler’s Grand Theater, NYC 6 Allis-Chalmers farm films 251, 253, 257
advertising and promotion: box-office Almost a Tragedy (film) 108
success 159; film openings and 365; Altenloh, Emilie 5, 95
local cinemas 145; merchandise 356–7; Ambler, Charles 18; ‘Cowboy
star testimonials 269 Modern’ 348–63
Afghanistan: FilmAid exhibitions 275; AMC 375, 376, 377
Wizard of Oz in 282–4 America, America (film) 344
Africa: cowboy culture 357–62; American Farm Bureau Federation
decolonization 362; filmmakers (AFBF) 10–11, 252; Community Hand
and video industry 363; growth of Book 258; farm films of 257–62
cinema in 350–3; interpretation of American Federation of Labor (AFL) 116
films 18, 353–7; Kung Fu films 362–3; American Journal of Sociology (journal) 299
reaction to blackface 351; Western American Theatre, Norfolk, Virginia 82
representations 348–50 Americanization 11–12; consumerism 20–
African-Americans: attending Jim Crow 2; as contested term 16; immigrant
theatres 39–41; black camp 71–3; Jews 114–15, 118–29; multinational
civil rights campaign 202–14; cinemas 19–20, 373–8; not in
humiliation in theaters 199; population Nottingham 390–1; uniformity of
in Robeson 47–8; rural-urban place 383–7
demographics 34–5; segregation of Amos ‘n’ Andy 171
cinemas 4–5; separation from Native amusement parks 33
Americans 50–9; ‘white Negros’ 73; Anderson, Broncho Billy 99
see also National Association for the Andy Hardy series 250

462
 inde x
Animal Crackers (film) 341 Bain, Dr. E.L. 86
Anna Karenina (film) 162, 176 Balio, Tino 375
Annese, Mary 142, 144, 145, 149 The Barbarian (film) 336
Annie Oakley (film) 194 Barbas, Samantha 302
Anthony Adverse (film) 161, 174, 179, 181, Baron, Caroline 274
189, 191, 192 Barrett, Wilton 240
Arlette et ses Papas (film) 317, 320 The Barretts of Wimpole Street (film) 160,
Arrah-Na-Pogue (film) 107, 110 161–2, 174, 184
art/independent cinema 10, 392; Barry, Iris 237
in Hollywood context 235–6; Barton’s Theater, Norfolk, Virginia 83–4
National Board’s role 236–40; urban Batman (film series) 372
audiences 238 The Battle of the Red Men (film) 94, 108
Art Institute of Chicago 236 Baudrillard, Jean 346
Asian multiplex chains 373 Bauer, Frank 140
Astaire, Fred 162, 168–9 Bauman, Zygmunt 36
Atherton productions 177 Bazin, André 288–9
Atkins, Mark 388 Beam Jr, Russell 52
Atlanta, Georgia 207–8 Beatty, Jerome: ‘Hitch Your Wagon’ 269
Atlanta Independent (newspaper) 69 Beau Brummell (film) 245
Atlas Educational Film Company 259 Becky Sharp (film) 162, 175
The Attack (film) 344 Behold My Wife (film) 171, 179, 192
Attucks Theatre, Norfolk, Virginia 69, Belediye, Konya 338
71 Belgium: Catholic film strategy 15, 308–14;
Aubert films 310 Flemish-Wallonian divide 15, 310–11,
audiences: adapting for foreign cultures 11; 320; influence on Vatican action 321–
alienation of elderly 20; anonymity 2; interwar film market 309–14;
of 62; attendance 21, 100–2; big urbanization 309; views of foreign
versus small screen 287–90; blamed films 314–21
for accident 117; bourgeois 7; Bell and Howell 222, 223, 248–9
community of 366; as crowds 293–5, The Belle of the Nineties (film) 175, 185, 186,
303–4; cultural contexts 281–4; 188, 191, 193
in darkness 295–8; distracting Belton, John 369
behaviour 285; early rural 31–3; Ben Hur (film) 344
fans 302–4; farm films 257–8; Benedict, Barbara 73
foreign 17–18; historical study of 1–3, Bennett, Joan 269
20–2; as individuals 295–303; Jewish Benny, Jack 171
community 115–29; new films Bergfelder, Tim 340
and 368; preferred films 159–63; in Berle, Milton 171
public sphere 304–5; socio-cultural Berry, Chuck 197
contexts 132–4; various motivations Betz, Mark 342
of 94–6; as weak and suggestible 12, Bibi la Purée (film) 317
298–306 The Bible (film) 344
Augé, Marc 385 The Big Broadcast of 1937 (film) 172, 175,
Australia 27 188, 189
Australian Amalgamated Holdings 375 The Big Trail (film) 147
The Auto Bandits of Paris (film) 108 Bigsby, Christopher 384
Biltereyst, Daniel 15–16; ‘Healthy Films
from America’ 307–22
Bachelor Bait (film) 167 Binford, Lloyd T. 199
Back Street (film) 320 Biograph studios 277
Baeta, A.M. 348–50, 353, 354 Birkenhead Vigilance Committee 327

463
 g oing to the mov ies
Birmingham Cinema Inquiry Committee British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 16;
(BCIC) 327–9 children’s films 323; powers of 325; UK
The Birth of a Nation (film) 201, 237 ‘A’ and horror films 325–32
Black Fury (film) 163 British Film Institute (BFI) 331
Blackboard Jungle (film) 301 British International productions 178
Blade Runner (film) 287 Broadway Bill (film) 163, 174, 182, 194
Bland, Kalmen 126 The Broadway Melody of 1936 (film) 175,
Blockbuster 223, 277 179
Blomley, Nicholas 39 Brohée, Canon 313
Blood and Sand (film) 245 brothels and prostitution 79, 93; Yiddish
The Blot (film) 87 music halls and 121
Blu, Karen 47 Brown, Joe E. 270
Blumer, Herbert 300, 301; Movies, Brown Theatre, Louisville, Kentucky 204
Delinquency and Crime (with Hauser) 13 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education 8, 200
Blumin, Stuart 31–2 Brunner, Edmund S. de 249, 260
Bogle, Donald: A Separate Cinema 71 Buckingham, David 14
Boles, John 171 Budd, Mike 237, 238, 239, 247
Bollywood films 20, 392–3 Bullets and Justice (film) 147
Book-of-the-Month Club 221, 230, 246 Bullets or Ballots (film) 163
Booker, Rev. G.E. 83 The Bull’s Eye (film) 75
Bordwell, David 3–4, 235, 236 Burgess, Ernest 300
Bourdieu, Pierre 148, 223, 230 Burleigh, Pastor William 83
Bowling, R.H. 93 The Burning Brand (film) 108
Bowling Green, Kentucky 252–4 Burns, George 171
Bowser, Pearl 75 Butsch, Richard 15; ‘Changing Images of
box-office figures: double-billing 166–8; Movie Audiences’ 293–306
foreign earnings 372; foreign
films 164–6; live acts with films 168–
72; Oct. 1934–Oct. 1936 183–95; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film) 238, 239,
première weekends 364–5; production 247
companies 177–8; promotion and 159; Cahan, Abraham 6, 115–16, 118, 121–2,
top earners 159–63, 173–6, 179–82; 124
Variety data 155–9 Cain and Mabel (film) 162, 182
Boxoffice (journal) 373 The Call of the Wild (film) 162
Boys, Movies and City Streets Calloway, Cab 171
(Cressey) 13–14 Cameo Theatre, New York City 10, 240–7
Brabo distribution 313 Campbell, Christina McFadyen 257
Brackett, Albert 295 Campeau, Frank 92
Brazilian cinemas 377–8 Cantor, Eddie 171, 339, 341
Breakout (film) 368 Capra, Frank 163
Brent, George 269 Caprice (film) 111
The Bride Comes Home (film) 176, 181, 185, Captain Blood (film) 176, 184
190 Carbine, Mary 57
The Bride of Frankenstein (film) 186 Caribbean cinemas 374
The Bride Walks Out (film) 181 Carr, C.S. 84
Bright Victory (film) 200 Carroll, Noël 3–4, 72
Britain 165–6; children and horror 16; cartoons: ‘Abie and Izzie’ 122, 123
children’s cinemagoing 323–5; film The Case of Lucky Legs (film) 187
research in 27; multiplexes in 377; Riot The Case of the Velvet Claws (film) 166, 188
Act 294–5; urban regeneration 20, Casino Theater, Des Moines, Iowa 97
387–92 Caterpillar Tractor Company 255, 257

464
 inde x
Catholic Church: Belgian movement 15, Cinegraph see Eastman Kodak
309–14; Belgian view of foreign The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future
films 314–21; classification system 312; Possibilities (National Council of Public
local Protestant alliance 32; moral Morals) 324
influence 93; in Rhode Island 112; uses Cinéma Americain, Istanbul 336
Norfolk theater 84; Vatican praise for ‘Cinema Comes to Life at the
Legion of Decency 307; wider influence Cornerhouse, Nottingham’
of Belgium 321–2 (Jancovich) 383–93
Catholic Film Action 309 Cinema Expo International 372
censorship: in Belgium 15, 312, 319–21; ‘Cinemagoing in the United States
children’s viewing 323–5; film classifi- in the mid-1930s’ (Glancy and
cations 16; National Board opposition Sedgwick) 155–95
to 239; Turkey 343–6; UK ‘A’ and Cinema Journal: ‘Film History’
horror films 325–32; Virginia 87 colloquium 25–6
Central African Federation 360 Cinemark cinemas 375, 377
Centrale Catholique du Cinéma 311 ‘Cinema’s Shadow: Reconsidering Non-
Centre Catholique d’Action Theatrical Exhibition’ (Klinger) 273–90
Cinématographique 313 cinemas/theaters: Americanization
Certeau, Michel de 371 and 383–7; audience behaviour 295–
Chained (film) 162, 193 8; ‘Blue Laws’ 5; capacity in
‘Changing Images of Movie Audiences’ Springfield 134–6; costs and
(Butsch) 293–306 earnings 102–3, 108–9, 110, 208,
Chaplin, Charlie 92, 93, 275; Gold 240–1; double-billing 7–8, 163;
Rush 147; Modern Times 160; popular earliest venues 32–3; enforcing
in Africa 356; production company 177; decorum 131; food in 149, 152;
in refugee camps 282 interior designs of 241, 242–3;
Charlie Chan in Paris (film) 167 international chains 19–20, 372–8; Jim
Charlie Chan in Shanghai (film) 181 Crow seating strategies 68–71; late
Charlie Chan in Singapore (film) 186 night showings 69; legal definition
Cheaper by the Dozen (film) 336 of space 39–40; live acts 168–72;
Chesterfield productions 178 local 132, 153; multiplexes 19–20,
Chicago, Illinois: African-American 368, 382; non-theatrical exhibition
audiences 34–5 and 219; Norfolk churches use 76–93;
La Chienne (film) 319 number of screens 157, 378; as
‘The Child Audience and the “Horrific” film optimum exhibition 284; ownership
in 1930s Britain’ (Kuhn) 323–32 in Springfield 136–7; palaces and
children: concern in 1930s Britain 323–5; class 130–4; past histories of
delinquency 13–15; Junior Film buildings 95; programs and times 96–
Guild 246; ongoing anxiety about 332; 100; raffles, games and give-aways 161;
pennies for tickets 151; social enjoyment size of 101; sound technology 8; as
of films 150; as suggestible 299–302; spaces of public life 217–18; stadium
UK ‘A’ and horror films 325–32 seating 369–70; staff 131–2; subsequent
China Seas (film) 174, 179, 187, 190, 194 runs 157; Sunday Blue Laws 85, 87–90;
Ching, Barbara 29–30 ticket prices 96, 145, 151, 159, 166; UK
Chinodya, Shimmer 357 censorship responsibility 325; see also art
Chiselers of Hollywood (film) 147 house/independent cinemas; box-office
Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll! earnings; film industry; non-theatrical
(documentary) 197 exhibition; segregation
Church Federation, Norfolk 79, 80 Cinematograph Act (1909) 324–5
El Cid (film) 344, 345 Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association
Cinderella (film) 107 (CEA) 329

465
 g oing to the mov ies
La Cinématographie Française Cripps, Thomas 42
(magazine) 321 Crisis (film) 344
citizenship 110 Crisis (newspaper) 198
Citzen Kane (Welles) 344 Crosman Theater, Norfolk, Virginia 83
Civil Rights Act (1875) 39 The Crowd (Le Bon) 297, 298
Civil Rights Act (1964) 8, 202, 211, The Crusades (film) 159, 162, 336
213–14 Cry the Beloved Country (film) 356
civil rights movement: integration of cultural contexts: African
theaters 8; lunch-counter sit-ins 38; ­interpreta­tions 353–7; bourgeois
Northern legislation 39; see also enculturation 305; crowds
segregation as mobs 293–7; film and the
class see social class everyday 370–2; international theatre
Clement, Josephine 99 chains 19–20; ‘middle ground’ 16–17;
Cleopatra (film) 162, 186, 189 national stereotypes 348–50; urban
Close Up (magazine) 244–5 versus rural 7–8
Cohn, Harry and Louis 135 Curly Top (film) 176, 180, 192
Colbert, Claudette 269 Custer’s Last Fight (film) 108
Cole, Catherine 351 Czitrom, Daniel 237
Collier, John 297
Colman, Ronald 273, 274
Colonial Theatre, Norfolk, Virginia 77–8, Damrosch, Walter 305
83 Dangerous (film) 171, 179
Columbia Pictures 177 Dante’s Inferno (film) 107, 110
The Coming of Columbus (film) 94, 107, 110 The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (film) 38
Comité Catholique du Cinéma (CCA) 319 David Copperfield (film) 161, 174, 185, 186,
Commonwealth Fund Conference, 2003 27 189, 193
communism 317 Davis, Bette 269
Community Service Pictures (CSP) 49–51, Davis, Walter S. 11, 106, 107, 108, 109
50 Dawn of the Dead (film) 381
Congress of Racial Equality 202, 205–6, De Curtis, Antonio 341
214 De Mille, Cecil B.: The Crusades 336
consumerism 12; Americanization 20–2; Deadline (farm film) 259
home exhibition 228–31, 231; Dealers in Death (film) 167–8
rise of 227–31, 248–9; see also Dean, Colonel John 83
Americanization; globalization Deception (film) 238
Contadin, Fernand 341 Deere (John) Company: community
Cooper, Gary 339 events 268; Depression-era survival
Le coquille et le clergyman (film) 246 257; farm films 10–11, 251, 253–4, 254,
Cotter, Carl 303 256
The Country Doctor (film) 160, 176, 180 DeMille, Cecil B. 203, 279, 320
Country Gentleman (magazine) 268–71 Demond, Antoinette S.: ‘On
County Chairman (film) 193 Sitting’ 199–200
Couvares, Francis 237–8 Dent, Maggie 205
‘Cowboy Modern: African Audiences, The Devil at Four o’clock (film) 344
Hollywood Films, and Visions of the Devil Dogs of the Air (film) 180, 183
West’ (Ambler) 348–63 DeVry National Conference on Visual
Crawford, Joan 162 Education and Film Exhibition 265
Creed, Gerald 29–30 Dietrich, Marlene 170
Cressey, Paul: Boys, Movies and City Digital Cinema Initiatives 379
Streets 13–14 digital projection 369, 378–80
crime films 108 Disney Corporation 377, 380

466
 inde x
distribution see cinemas/theaters; exhibition; Eddy, Nelson 162
production and distribution Edison Moving Pictures 84;
Doctor Zhivago (film) 281, 344 Kinetoscope 277
documentaries: African interpretations 356; Education Screen (journal) 258–9, 267;
Community Service Pictures 49–51, 50; public identity of the non-theatrical 271
see also farm films Eisenhower, Dwight D. 201
Dodsworth (film) 188, 191 Ellis, Don Carlos 267
Doherty, Thomas 8, 40, 132; ‘Race Houses, Ellis, Richard 16
Jim Crow Roosts and Lily White English Heritage 391
Palaces’ 196–216 European multiplex chains 373, 377
Dokumentatie der Cinematographische Pers European Relief Fund 84
(DOCIP) 311–13 Evans, Montgomery 244
Donald, Robert 350 Evans, Raymond 265, 266, 267
Don’t Turn ’em Loose (film) 185 Everett, Anna 66
Dostoievky, Fyodor: ‘Raskolnikov’ 242 Exceptional Photoplays (National Board
Douglass, H. Paul 138, 142, 143, 153 journal) 239–40, 243
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (film) 245, 329 Exclusive Story (film) 171, 179
Dracula (film) 16, 329 exhibition: in Africa 362–3; big and
Dreiser, Theodore 247, 297 small screens 284–90; concern for
Du Maurier, Daphne: Rebecca 273, 274, children’s health 323–4; control of
288–9 films 286; digital projection 369,
dubbing 338–43 378–80; farm films 254–5, 266–7;
Dublin Dan (film) 110 film life cycles 275–9; 16mm 227,
Duchin, Eddie 171 281; non-standard film formats 280–1;
Dumont, Margaret 341 variety of locations 281–4; variety of
Dunne, Irene 269 technologies 275; see also cinemas/
Duodu, Cameron: The Gab Boys 352 theaters; digital projection; home
Durbar in Kinemacolor (film) 107 exhibition
Dust: The Archive and Cultural History Eyes Wide Shut (film) 287
(Steedman) 60
DVDs and videos: in Africa 362–3;
alternate versions 287, 380–1; big Fairbanks, Douglas 92, 93
versus small screen 284–7; lending Famous Players 6, 109, 111
services 233, 234; life cycle of fans: perceived weakness of 302–4
films 275–6, 279, 368, 380–2; as farm films 10–11; AFBF 257–62;
merchandise 365–6; piracy and 278, Country Gentleman on films 268–71;
367; rental and retail 380; rise of 219– historical value of 271–2; machinery
20; see also home viewing companies 251–7; USDA 262–8, 263
Dwan, Alan: Jordan is a Hard Road 92 Felski, Rita 370
Dysinger, William 300 Fetchit, Stepin 171
Feyder, Jacques 310, 320
film and filmmaking: moral discourse 80;
‘Early Art Cinema in the U.S.: Symon non-standard film formats 280–1; see
Gould and the Little Cinema Movement also art cinema; Hollywood system
of the 1920s’ (Morey) 235–47 Film Arts Guild 241, 245
Eastman, Fred 300 Film Censorship Consultative Committee
Eastman Kodak: consumerism 228–31, (FCCC) 328–9, 330
231; home movies 9–10; lending Film Classics Exchange 261
services 222–6, 223, 229, 229–31, 231; Film Daily Yearbook 132
16mm home projection 222–6 Film Guild Cinema, NYC 10
Ebony Motion Picture Company 66, 66, 72 film history 1–2; empirical research 25–7

467
 g oing to the mov ies
Film History 36 case study 132–4; neighbourhood
film literacy: African inexperience 354 society 144–54; photograph of 133;
film reviews 159 programs and prices 145–7; raffles,
Film Society, London 240 games and give-aways 147–9
FilmAid International 274, 275, 282–3, ‘Free Talking Picture – Every Farmer is
290 Welcome’ (Waller) 248–72
Filmavox 311, 313 French language films: Belgian market 310,
Filmliga/Cran (magazines) 311, 321 317–21; imitations of Hollywood 317;
films and filmmaking: adaptation and Turkish censors and 344, 345
amendment 11; diversity of 163–6; Friedberg, Anne 232
editorial control 287–9; importance Frisch, Michael H. 140
of openings 364–8; introduction Frye, Bertha Burgess 42–3
of 16mm 9, 227, 281; life cycles of Fuller, Kathy 84
films 380–2; sound technology 8; see Fuller, Samuel: Fixed Bayonets 364
also art/independent cinema; box office; Fury (film) 163, 167
cinemas/theaters; exhibition; Hollywood
system; production and distribution
Final Destination (film) 381 G-Men (film) 163, 174, 179, 189, 192
The First Baby (film) 182 Gable, Clark 162, 339
Fixed Bayonets (film) 364 Gaines, Jane M. 5, 8, 303; ‘The White in
Flaherty, Robert 167 the Race Movie Audience’ 60–75
Flirtation Walk (film) 186, 191 Gainsborough productions 177
The Flying Ace (film) 64, 65 gambling 79, 93
Flying down to Rio (film) 320 Gangs of New York (film) 365
Flynn, Errol 269 The Gangster (film) 147
Follow the Fleet (film) 162, 174, 180, 182, Gant, Harry 63–4, 64
185, 191 Ganz, William 221–2
Fontaine, Joan 273, 274 Garbo, Greta 159
Ford, John 163, 285, 289 La Garçonne (film) 319–20
Ford Weekly motion pictures 86 Garfield, John 360
Foreign Christian Missionary Society 84–5 Garibaldi, or a Sicilian Heroine (film) 110
Foreign Correspondent (film) 275 Garland, Judy 269
foreign films: art cinema 236; box-office Gastonia, North Carolina 30
of 164–6; double billing and 7–8, 164; The Gaucho (film) 316
Franklin Theater and 147; Turkey’s Gaumont film group 156, 165–6, 177, 310,
censorship of 343–6; see also art house/ 373, 377
independent cinemas The Gay Divorcee (film) 159, 162, 174, 182,
Forman, Henry 300–1 193
Forsaking All Others (film) 162, 175, 194 Germany and German language films 19,
‘Four Hours of Hootin’ and Hollerin’’ 147, 164; film research in 27; Gould
(Klenotic) 130–54 and 245; imitations of Hollywood 317;
Fox Theaters 134, 135, 177, 372–3 little cinema movement 238
Francis (film) 344 Ghana: cowboy culture 359, 360; growth
Franco-Film 310 of cinema in 351–2; video industry
Frankel, S. 84 in 363; Western representations in 348,
Frankenstein (film) 16, 329 349
Frankfurt School 3 The Ghost Goes West (film) 164, 165
Franklin, Howard B. 178 The Ghoul (film) 329
Franklin Theater, Springfield, Gibson, Mel 365
Massachusetts 7; advertising 152; Gilbert, James 301–2
construction of 136, 141; context of Gilfoyle, Timothy 29

468
 inde x
Gilje, Paul: Rioting in America 294 Gürata, Ahmet 17–18; ‘Hollywood in
Girls Gone Wild (film) 147 Vernacular’ 333–47
Glancy, Mark 7–8; ‘Cinemagoing in the Gutsche, Thelma: The History and Social
United States in the mid-1930s’ (with Significance of Motion Pictures in South
Sedgwick) 155–95 Africa 357
Global Hollywood (Miller et al.) 1
globalization 21–2; Bollywood 392–3;
cinema chains 373–8; international Habermas, Jürgen 304
cinemas 381–2; sense of place 385–6; Hahn, Steven 29
tourism versus cosmopolitanism 386; see Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd 30, 63
also Americanization Hancock, Ernest 53
Globe Theater, Pawtucket, Rhode Hands Across the Table (film) 171, 180
Island 106 Hannerz, Ulf 386
God’s Bits of Wood (Ousmane) 357 Hansen, Miriam 31, 32–3, 132, 304–5,
Goin’ to Town (film) 188 338, 370; on ‘vernacular modernism’ 335
Going Highbrow (film) 167 Harlow, Jean 162
Gold Rush (film) 147 Harris, Cheryl I. 41
Goldstein Brothers Theater Hauser, Philip 300; Movies, Delinquency
Corporation 135 and Crime (with Blumer) 13
Goldwyn, Samuel 238 Hay, James 2, 44
The Golem (film) 238 Hays, Benjamin 40
Gomery, Douglas 69, 166, 281 Hays, Will 11, 265, 333
Gone with the Wind (film) 29, 280 Hays Code 344
Goose and Gander (film) 182 ‘Healthy Films from America: The
Gordin, Jacob 127–8 Emergence of a Catholic Film Mass
The Gorgeous Hussy (film) 161, 174, 179, Movement in Belgium and the Realm of
194, 195 Hollywood’ (Bilteryest) 307–22
Gormery, Douglas 136 Heard, C.E. 83
Gould, Symon 10, 240–7 Hearon, Fanning 265, 266
Graham, Billy 42 Hecht-MacArthur productions 177
Grainge, Paul 388 Henderson, Gill 392
Granby Theatre, Norfolk, Virginia 81, 81, Herman, E.W. 384
82, 87 Herrmann, Bernard 274
Grand Theater, New York City 115, 118, Hidden Harvest (film) 253
119–21, 124 Hide Out (film) 171, 179, 192
The Grapes of Wrath (film) 250 Higashi, Sumiko 25–6
Gravey, Fernand 310 Highmore, Ben 272
Grazia, Victoria de 12, 20 Hikmet, Nazim 339
Great Expectations (film) 167 Hill, John Wesley 88
The Great Zieg feld (film) 162, 169, 173, 179, Hilmes, Michelle 232
182, 185, 188, 191, 193 His Brother’s Wife (film) 175, 181, 187
Greater Union cinemas 375 The History and Social Significance of Motion
The Green Pastures (film) 175, 179 Pictures in South Africa (Gutsche) 357
Gregory, Rev. Thomas B. 86 Hitchcock, Alfred 165; radio adaptations of
Grierson, John 265 films 275; restored Vertigo 279
Griffith, D.W.: The Birth of a Nation 201; Hobsbawm, Eric 294
Intolerance 83; Orphans of the Storm 91; Hoffer, C.R. 260
The Unseen Enemy 94 Hogeland, Ruth 269
Guard That Girl (film) 191 ‘Hollywood in Vernacular: Translation and
Guback, Thomas 373 Cross-Cultural Reception of American
Gunning, Tom 80, 232 Films in Turkey’ (Gürata) 333–47

469
 g oing to the mov ies
Hollywood system: adapted releases 11, International Educational Pictures 261
336–8; art cinema and 247; Belgian International Harvester 261; farm
market 310, 317–22; civil rights films 10–11, 251, 255–7
movement and 201; diversity of internet: distribution system and 18–19;
films 163–4; global marketing 11–12, films on 278
16, 372; moral narratives 13; national Interracial Review 202
stereotypes from 348–50; as ‘norm’ 10; Invincible films 178
Paramount Decree 235; premières 364– The Invisible Man (film) 329
5; scandals of 1920s 93; segregation Iowa cinema programs 96–9
and 214; universalism 333–5 Ipek Film 338–9
Holmes, Burton 86 Iron Angels (film) 363
Holmes, Hansel 53–4, 55, 59 Iron Man (film) 185
Holt, Jennifer 19 Islam 282–4
home exhibition 9–10; development It Happened One Night (film) 162
of 276–81; early equipment 227, 229, Italy and Italian language films 345, 376
229–32, 231; lending services 221–6, It’s a Wonderful Life (film) 290
232–4; 16mm 220–34, 278; see also It’s Love Again (film) 165
DVDs and videos Ivany, Peter 372
Home of the Brave (film) 200
Hoopla (film) 320
horror films: British children and 16, Jackson, Peter 365
328–32 James, Henry 297
Hot Tip (film) 183 The James Boys from Missouri (film) 107
Houghton, B.G. 87 Jancovich, Mark 20; ‘Cinema Comes
Houseman, John 274 to Life at the Cornerhouse,
How the West Was Won (film) 281 Nottingham’ 383–93
Howard, George Elliot 299 Jannings, Emil 245
Howe, Lyman 84 Jarvie, Ian 322
Hoyt cinemas 373, 375, 377 Jaws (film) 368
humor: black camp 71–3; collision Jewell, Richard 158
of interpretations 72; Turkish Jewish communities: Americanization 114–
dubbing 338–43 15, 116, 118–29; distrust of popular
Humoresque (film) 245 amusements 124; fears for Yiddish
Hunt, Leigh W. 310 theater 113–14; initial reception of
cinema 115–18; Judaism and visual
art 124, 125–6; labor movement
I Confess (film) 275 and 116, 119; resists cinema 121–4; in
Idle Wives (film) 86–7 Springfield, Mass. 142–3; translating
Iggers, George 3 Jewishness 341–2; working class
Illinois moviegoing 100 audiences 6–7; see also Yiddish theater
Imitation of Life (film) 287 Jewish Daily Forward (newspaper) 6,
imperialism: African interpretations 115–17, 118, 121–2
and 353–7 Jewish King Lear (film) 118
In Old Kentucky (film) 160, 180, 183, 195 Jocelyn (film) 319
In the Bishop’s Carriage (film) 111 Johnson, George P. collection 60–1, 61, 74
In the Grip of Alcohol (film) 107 Johnson, Guy 52
The Inauguration of President Wilson Johnson, Lyndon B. 212
(film) 109 Johnson, Mr and Mrs Martin 178
The Informer (film) 163, 167 Johnson, Noble 60, 63–4, 64, 74, 75
Interdenominational Ministers’ Meeting 79 Jones, Buck 270
International Bible Students’ Association 85 Jones, Janna 40

470
 inde x
Jordan is a Hard Road (film) 92 Audience and the “Horrific” film’ 323–
Joseph of Egypt (film) 85 32; memories of cinemas 43–4
The Journey (film) 345 Kung Fu films 362–3
Kuttner, Alfred 244, 245

Katholieke Film Actie (KFA) 313, 314,

317, 320 labor issues: Franklin Theater 145–6
Katholieke Film Centrale (KFC) 311 see Lac aux Dames (film) 319
Centrale Catholique du Cinéma Ladies in Love (film) 184
Katholieke Film Liga (KFL) 313 Ladies Must Play (film) 147
Katholieke Filmkeurraad (KFK) 312 Landry, Robert J. 198–9, 207
Keith’s Bijou Theater, Pawtucket, Rhode Lang, Fritz 269; Fury 167; Sieg fried 237
Island 106, 111 The Last Days of Pompeii (film) 162
Kelly the Second (film) 190 Last Outlaw (film) 193
Kenç, Faruk 337 Latin American cinemas 374, 377–8
Kennedy, John F. 8, 202; assassination Laurel and Hardy 18, 339–40, 340
of 213; civil rights and 210–14 The Law of Nature (film) 61, 62, 67, 75
Kennedy, Robert F. 8, 196, 211–14 Le Bon, Gustave: The Crowd 297, 298,
Kentucky University College of 303–4
Agriculture 267 LeBeau, F.X. 49
La Kermesse Héroïque (film) 320 Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird 204
Keystone comedies 108, 109, 112 Lee Grieveson, Lee 45
Kieft & Kieft 375 Lefebvre, Henri 370–1
Kiesler, Friedrich 241–3 Legion of Decency 15, 319; Belgian
Kinetoscope 277 movement and 315, 321–2; Vatican
King Jr, Martin Luther 211 praise for 307–8
King Klunk (film) 329 Legong: Dance of the Virgins (film) 164
King Kong (1933 film) 287, 317 Leigh, Vivien 273, 274, 280
King of Burlesque (film) 181 Lenox Little Theatre, New York City 243–
King of Kings (film) 204, 316, 344 4, 246
Kingsley, Sherman 298 Lerner, Daniel: The Passing of Traditional
Kismet (film) 337 Society 346–7
Kleine, George 109 Let’s Sing Again (film) 167
Klenotic, Jeffrey 7; ‘Four Hours of Hootin’ Levine, Lawrence 351
and Hollerin’’ 130–54 Lewis, Howard T. 241
Klinger, Barbara 11, 42, 219, 229, 232; Lewis, John 199, 206
‘Cinema’s Shadow’ 273–90 Lianofilm productions 178
Klondike Annie (film) 193 Libeled Lady (film) 175, 181, 185, 190, 192,
Knight, Arther 74 194
Kodak see Eastman Kodak Liberty productions 177
Kolb, J. H. 249 Lieutenant Petrosino (film) 108, 110
Koon, Cline: Motion Pictures in Education in The Lieutenant’s Last Fight (film) 108
the United States 267 Life Begins at Forty (film) 180
Kosarski, Richard 132 Life of an American Fireman (Porter) 286
Koster and Bial music hall 4 The Life of Moses (film) 86
Kracauer, Sigfried 370 Lincoln Motion Picture Company 63–
Krämer, Peter 285 4, 67, 72; Johnson’s archived
Krows, Arthur Edwin 257, 266 documents 60–1, 61; Noble Johnson’s
Ku Klux Klan 202 stardom 75
Kubrick, Stanley: Eyes Wide Shut 287 Lindvall, Terry 5, 32; ‘Sundays in
Kuhn, Annette 16, 346; ‘The Child Norfolk’ 76–93

471
 g oing to the mov ies
The Little Colonel (film) 175 MacCann, Richard Dyer 266
Little Friend (film) 165 McCarthy, Anna 232, 282
Little Lord Fauntleroy (film) 176 McChesney, Robert W. 384
The Little Minister (film) 175, 181 McClellan, George B. 6, 117
The Littlest Rebel (film) 175, 180, 186 McCoy, Tim 147
Litvak, Anatole: The Journey 345 MacDonald, Jeanette 162
live acts 8; box office information 168–72; McDonaldization see Americanization
with films 157 McFarland Implement and Seed
Live Wire (film) 94 Company 252–3
Lives of a Bengal Lancer (film) 161, 174, McKenna, Christopher J. 4–5, 8; ‘Tri-racial
189–90, 193 Theaters in Robeson County, North
Lloyd, Harold 87 Carolina’ 45–59
The Lodger (film) 275 McKinnon, Judge Henry A. 52
Loew (Marcus) Theaters 107, 113, 114; McLoughlin, William 77
Cineplex 373, 376, 377; Delancey Mädchen in Uniform (film) 164, 167
Street 113; takes over Grand 6, 118, Maid of Salem (film) 281
119–21 Mailer, Norman 73
Lombardo, Guy 171 Makal, Oguz 343
London Public Morality Council Maltby, Richard 158, 370
(LPMC) 327, 328 Man of Aran (film) 167
Long Voyage Home (film) 344 Manhatta (film) 236
Lord, Daniel 12 Mannheim, Germany 95
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (film) Mannix, Eddie 158
366 March of Time 160
Lorentz, Pare: The Plow that Broke the Marciano, Rocky 199
Plains 264; The River 264, 266 Marines Are Coming (film) 193
Lorge, Irving 260 Marshall, Louis 118
Lott, Eric: Love and Theft 72–3 Marx Brothers 171, 339, 341
Louis, Charles W. 145 Mary of Scotland (film) 175
Louis, Joe 160 Mascot productions 177
Lousiana State University Agricultural Massachusetts 96–9, 100–1
Extension 267 The Matrix (film series) 365, 366, 367
Love and Theft (Lott) 72–3 Mattera, Don 360
Love Me Forever (film) 174, 180 May, Mark 300
The Love Parade (film) 317 Maynard, Ken 269
Love Story (film) 345 Meet Nero Wolfe (film) 166
Lowenthal, Leo 3 Méliès, Georges 334
Lubitsch, Ernst 245 Melton, Rev. Sparks W. 88
Lucrèce Borgia (film) 320 The Men (film) 344
Lumbee Indians 4–5, 46–7; population Men in White (film) 162
of 47–8, 53; separation from black merchandise: openings of films and 365–6
audiences 50–9 Merritt, Russell 77
Lumberton Opera House 48–9 Merry Villas Cinematograph Palace, Accra,
Lund, John 273, 274 Ghana 351
Lupino, Ida 273, 274, 280 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 177
Lux Radio Theater 279 Metropolis (film) 290
Mexican cinemas 377–8
Meyrowitz, Joshua 385
McAfee, A.B. 62 Mezzrow, Mezz 73
Macbeth (film) 344 Michael Strogoff (film) 123–4
McBride, Richard 142–3, 148, 149–51, 153 Micheaux, Oscar 63, 64, 67; ‘evangelical

472
 inde x
approach’ 66; white interest in black Mr Deeds Goes to Town (film) 163, 174,
camp 71 182, 183, 194, 195
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (film) 159 Münsterberg, Hugo 3; The Photoplay
Migrating to the Movies (Stewart) 34–5 299–300
Miller, Toby: Global Hollywood 1 Murder at the Vanities (film) 318, 320
Minneapolis Journal 95 Murdock, Graham 14
Minnesota 97 Muse, Clarence: Way Down South 68
The Miracle Man (film) 87 Museum of Modern Art 236, 237
Les Miserables (film) 176 music: jazz and whiteness 73
Modern Times (film) 160, 163, 174, 181, Music Hall, Pawtucket, Rhode Island 106
188, 189, 191 Musser, Charles 79, 89, 286, 341
Monogram productions 177 Mutiny on the Bounty (film) 161, 162, 173,
Moore, Grace 162 179, 180, 184–95
moral issues: Billy Sunday pro- Mutual Films 6, 107, 112
cinema 90–3; effects of cinema 13–15; Mutual v. Ohio 237
Hollywood as pagan 315–16; Jewish My American Wife (film) 182
community 121–2; melodramas 13; My Man Godfrey (film) 163, 174, 182, 188,
moviegoing on Sundays 85, 87–90; 189
narrative development 80; perceived
audience weakness 298–306; white male
envy 73; see also censorship; children Nashville, Tennessee 8, 206–7
Morey, Anne 10; ‘Early Art Cinema in the Nasson, Bill 359
U.S.’ 235–47 National Association for the Advancement
Morgen zhurnal (newspaper) 117 of Colored People (NAACP): civil
Morlion, Father Felix 311, 312, 312–13, rights campaign 203–4; integration
315, 317, 320 of theaters 200–1; on Jim Crow
Morrisey, Charley 49 policies 198
Mortal Kombat (film) 363 National Board of Censorship: Jewish
The Mortal Storm (film) 281 concern and 122; see also National Board
Morton-Williams, Peter 355–6 of Review
Moscow Arts Players 242 National Board of Review: little cinema
Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in and 236–40, 247
America (Newton) 71 National Conference of Visual Education
Motion Picture Association of America and Film Exhibition 256
(MPAA) 367 National Council of Public Morals 324
Motion Picture Herald (newspaper) 40, 208, National Council of Women 327, 328
209–10, 211 National Dairy Council 261
Motion Picture News 77, 77 National Farm Council for Visual
Motion Picture Patent Company Education 260
(MPPC) 6, 107, 117, 237 Native Americans 16–17; see also Lumbee
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Indians
of America (MPPDA) 237; Belgian Naughty Marietta (film) 176, 195
free trade and 309–10; number of Neale, Steve 235
cinemas 157 Netflix 223, 277
Motion Pictures and Youth (Payne Foundation The Netherlands 27
studies) 300–1 New Orleans 213, 214
Motion Pictures in Education in the United New Rialto Theater, Durham, North
States (Koon) 267 Carolina 205
The Moviegoer (Percy) 25 New York City: density of movie
Movies, Delinquency and Crime (Blumer and houses 6; early cinema programs 96;
Hauser) 13 first commercial cinema 4; Jewish

473
 g oing to the mov ies
audiences 6–7; metropolitan experience Odeon Theater, Canton, Ohio 98
of 28; nickelodeon audiences 31 Office Catholique International du
Newman, A.W. 240 Cinématographe (OCIC) 308–9
Newton, Esther: Mother Camp 71 Ofluoglu, Mücap 339, 341
‘Next Year at the Moving Pictures’ Ohio moviegoing 96–102
(Thissen) 113–29 Old Hutch (film) 185
Nicholas Brothers 287 Olivier, Laurence 273, 274
Nickelodeon (magazine) 99 Olympia Theater, Lynn, Massachusetts 101
nickelodeons 9, 281; moral dangers On a trouvé une femme nue (film) 317–18,
of 121; in New York City 116; public 320
sphere 304–5; Rivington Street balcony On the Streets of Istanbul (film) 338
collapse 117; urban experience of 30–1 On Time (farm film) 259–60
Nigeria: cowboy culture 357; film reception Onaran, Alim Şerif 337
in 355–6 One Exciting Adventure (film) 191
Night at the Opera (film) 186 One Night of Love (film) 174, 181, 184, 194
The Nineteenth Century (journal) 350 One-Way Ticket (film) 185
No More Ladies (film) 176 One Way Trail (film) 147
No Way Out (film) 200 Onex cinemas 375, 376–7
non-theatrical exhibition: adapted ‘Opening Everywhere: Multiplexes
releases 11; agricultural and the Speed of Cinema Culture’
documentaries 10–11; FilmAid (Acland) 364–82
International 274–5; itinerant opera houses 33
showmen 9; see also DVDs and videos; Oregon 100
farm films; home showings Orphans of the Storm (Griffiths) 91
Norfolk, Virginia: character and Orpheum Theatre, Norfolk, Virginia 83
demography of 78–9; church use of Orthodox Christian churches 86
cinema 5, 76–93; Protestant–Catholic O’Shaughnessy’s Boy (film) 171, 179
alliances 32; Sunday Blue Laws 85, Osso films 310
87–90 O’Sullivan, Maureen 269
Norfolk Journal and Guide (newspaper) 93 Our Daily Bread (film) 163
Norman, Richard J. 63–4 Ousmane, Sembene 362; God’s Bits of
Norman Film Manufacturing Wood 357
Company 63–4 Out of the Shadows (farm film) 266–7
North Carolina 30; African-American Owl Theater, Chicago 75
demographics 35; civil rights Özön, Nijat 344
campaign 38, 202, 203–4, 209; early
cinemas in 31–2; farm films 267;
opera houses 33; rural history of Pacelli, Cardinal 313
filmgoing 27–8; segregated theaters 38; The Painted Veil (film) 159
see also Robeson, North Carolina Palace Theatre, Louisville, Kentucky 62, 67
Northern Rhodesia: ‘Copperbelt Panaser, Ravinder 392
Cowboys’ 18 Paramount Decree (1948) 235
Nottingham Cornerhouse 387–92 Paramount Pictures 177
Nottingham Cornerhouse multiplex 20 Paramount Theater, Springfield,
Novarro, Roman 339 Massachusetts 141
Paris in Spring (film) 188
The Passing of Traditional Society
Oberon, Merle 269 (Lerner) 346–7
Obey Your Husband (film) 147 Passion (film) 238
Ocansey, Alfred 351 The Passion of the Christ (film) 365
Ochs, Millard 372 The Passion Play (film) 84

474
 inde x
Pastime Theatre, Lumberton, North Pratt, David 238
Carolina 52–5, 53 Pratt, Rev. Frank 83
Pastime Theatre, Pawtucket, Rhode The President Vanishes (film) 163
Island 107–8 Principal productions 177
‘Patchwork Maps of Moviegoing, 1911– Private Number (film) 180, 191
1913’ (Abel) 94–112 Private Worlds (film) 183
Pathé films 310; Pathé Weekly newsreels 94, production and distribution 2; black
99; Pathescope 223, 224, 277 productions 62–71; effect of the
Paton, Alan: Cry the Beloved Country 356 internet 18–19; theatrical release
Patten, Simon N. 21 system 9; top earners 177–8
Pawtucket/Central Falls, Rhode Production Code Administration 301
Island 6; choices for audiences 94–6; Protestant churches: issue of moviegoing 4,
early programs 97, 99; geography 42, 76–7; local Catholic alliance 32;
of 103–6; maps 104, 105; patterns of missionary pictures 84; moviegoing
moviegoing 100, 106–12 on Sundays 85, 87–90; use of films 5,
Pawtucket Chronicle and Gazette (film) 109 76–93
Payne Fund 3, 13–15; Motion Pictures and Providence Sunday Journal (newspaper) 110
Youth 300–1 Prude, Jonathan 29
Peerless Cine News 221 The Psychology of Suggestion (Sidis) 299–300
Pelton, Charles Edgar 107 Public Enemy’s Wife (film) 190
penny arcades 32, 33, 115 public transport segregation 38–9
Percy, Walker: The Moviegoer 25
The Perfect Crime (film) 147
Peterson, Ruth 300 Queen Esther (film) 85
photography: moral issues 90 Queen Kelly (film) 320
Pickford, Mary 92, 93, 111, 177 Queen of Sheba (film) 316
Pinky (film) 200 Quigley Jr, Martin 209, 210, 213
piracy 19, 367 Quigley Sr, Martin 209–10
The Pirate (film) 287 Quincy Adams Lawyer (film) 111
Pittsburgh top earners 179–80 Quo Vadis? (film) 109, 110
Pius XI, Pope: Vigilanti cura and
film 307–8
Plaisir de Paris (film) 319 race, ethnicity and racism: black and
Plessy, Armand du 310 white studies 62–3; black face 72–3,
Plessy v Ferguson 35–7, 39 351; civil rights movement 200–14;
The Plow that Broke the Plains (farm curiosity 73–5; Franklin Theater 7;
film) 264 immigrants 6, 32, 113–29, 138–40,
Poffenberger, A.T. 300 142; Jim Crow laws 35–7; patterns of
Poitier, Sydney 74 moviegoing 101; in Rhode Island 103–
Poli, Sylvester 135 5, 110; seeking a white audience 62–71;
Poli’s Palace, Springfield, social change in USA 200–1; tri-racial
Massachusetts 134, 135 audiences 4–5; tri-racial audiences 52;
Poor Little Rich Girl (film) 175, 181 united on Sunday issue 90; whiteness as
Porgy and Bess (film) 38, 204 property 41–2
Porter, Edwin: Life of an American ‘Race, Religion and Rusticity: Relocating
Fireman 286 U.S. Film History’ (Allen) 25–44
Potamkin, Harry Alan: ‘The Ritual of the ‘Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts and Lily
Movies’ 243 White Palaces’ (Doherty) 196–216
Powdermaker, Hortense 353, 360–2 radio adaptations 274, 275, 279–80, 288–9
Powell, Dick 269 Radio City Music Hall 170
Powers, T.E. 80 Radway, Janice 16, 230

475
 g oing to the mov ies
Raft, George 269, 360 Romance in the Rain (film) 186
Randolph, Rt. Rev. A.M. 82 A Romance of the Coast (film) 94
The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition Roper, Albert L. 84
(film) 60, 62; Noble Johnson’s Rose Marie (film) 174, 179, 194
stardom 75 Rosen, Philip 18
Rebecca (film) 273, 274; versions of 279– Rosenzweig, Roy 132, 285
80, 288–9 Rosier de Mme Husson (film) 319
Rebel Without a Cause (film) 301 Ross, E.A. 300
reception see audiences Rothapfel, S.L. 99
The Red Ace (film) 75 Rowland Theater, Red Springs, North
Red Circle Theater, Norfolk, Carolina 55–6, 56
Virginia 89–90 Ruckmick, Christian 300
Reel of the Month Club 9–10, 221–2, rural life: Country Gentleman on films 268–
223–4 71; Depression-era incomes 250–1;
Regester, Charlene 36, 40, 69 electricity and consumerism 248–9; farm
Reid, Julia 107, 108, 109, 111 machinery sales 257; moviegoing and 4,
religious films: biblical epics 316–17; 249–52; racial segregation 37; rusticity
missionary pictures 84–5; traveling and 29–30; U.S. demographics 28–9;
exhibitors 84 Wells on 78; see also farm films
Rendezvous (film) 195 Russell, Charles Taze 85
Rennie, Rev. Joseph 83
Republic films 177
repurposing 278–9 Sale, Chic 250
Resurrection (film) 108 Salome (film) 245
Rex Theatre, Hannibal, Missouri 69, 70, 71 Salt of the Earth (farm film) 265
Rhodes of Africa (film) 165 Samson’s Betrayal (film) 89
Rhythm on the Range (film) 181 San Francisco (film) 161, 162, 166, 173, 179,
Richardson, Irwin D. 83 180–95
Riot in Cell Block Eleven (film) 344 Saving Time (film) 182
Rioting in America (Gilje) 294 Saxe brothers 100
‘The Ritual of the Movies’ (Potamkin) 243 The Scarlet Empress (film) 170–1
Ritzer, George 383 The Scarlet Pimpernel (film) 164
The River (farm film) 264, 266 Schaefer, William 158
Riverside Theater, Lumberton, North Schiller, Herbert 384
Carolina 56–7, 58 Schmeling, Max 160
RKO  177 Schwartz, Vanessa 232
Roach productions 177 Scorsese, Martin 365
Robbins, Bruce 382 Scream (film series) 368
Roberta (film) 162, 174, 180, 181, 188, 190 Screen Digest 378
Robertson, Rev. Frank 88–9 The Sea Hawk (film) 245
Robeson County, North Carolina 4–5; Seale, Paul 146
Community Service Pictures 49–51, 50; The Secret Agent (film) 165
demographics of 47–8; historical context Sedgwick, John 7–8; British
of 45–6; population distribution 53; cinemagoing 158; ‘Cinemagoing in the
segregated CSP showings 49–51, 50 United States in the mid-1930s’ (with
Robesonian (newspaper) 48–9, 53, 56 Glancy) 155–95
Robin Hood of El Dorado (film) 185 segregation 4, 8; Brown v. the Board of
Robinson, Edward G. 147 Education 200; camp 71; civil rights
Roey, Cardinal van 313 campaign 202–14; controls whites 5,
Rogers, Ginger 162, 168 68–70; costs to cinemas 208; de
Rogers, Will 159–60 facto 198; endurance of 59; Lumbee

476
 inde x
Indians and 46–7; race houses 197; R.F. urban nickelodeons 31; weakness of
Kennedy’s address 196; by screening audiences 299, 301, 305–6; working 6–
times 198; seating strategies 68–71, 7, 116
197, 198, 199–200 Sony Cinema 373
Segret, Mab 73 Soplop, Rita 145
Sekyi, Kobina: ‘The Blinkards’ 351–2 South Africa 359–60
Selig Films 107; Coming of Columbus 94 South Pacific (film) 337
Selznick, David O. 273; Rebecca 288 Soviet Union 345
Semanie, Barbara and Wadie 145–6 Spaak, Charles 310
Senegal 357 Spain and Spanish language films 19, 164
A Separate Cinema: Fifty Years of Black Cast Spence, Louise 75
Posters (Bogle) 71 sports: heavyweight boxing 160, 199
Sequoia (film) 171, 180 Springfield, Massachusetts: character of the
serials 150 North End 141–4; immigration 138–
Sexe Faible (film) 318 41, 142, 144; social quality map 139;
Shattered (film) 238 urbanization of 137–41
She-Devil Island (film) 164 Staiger, Janet 285, 370
The Sheik (film) 336 Stallone, Sylvester 363
Shephard, H.R.L. 87 Stam, Robert 283
Shipwrecked in Icebergs (film) 109 De Standaard (newspaper) 315
Sho West/National Association of Theater Star for the Night (film) 194
Owners 372 Star Theatre, Pawtucket, Rhode Island 6,
Shohat, Ella 283 106–12, 108
Short, Rev. William 301 Star Theater, Lumberton, North
short films 160 Carolina 49
Shortt, Edward 327 Star Wars (film) 368
Show Boat (film) 175 State Fair (film) 250
Show No Mercy (film) 184 Stead, Peter 130
Shuttleworth, Frank 300 Steamboat Round the Bend (film) 160, 183,
Sidis, Boris: The Psychology of 187, 188
Suggestion 299–300 Steedman, Carolyn 62, 63; Dust: The
Sieg fried (film) 237 Archive and Cultural History 60
The Sign of the Cross (film) 87, 317 Steinlauf, Michael 126
silent films 333 Sternberg, Josef von 170
Sing Baby Sing (film) 189 Stewart, Jacqueline 40, 72; Migrating to the
Singer, Ben 28, 277 Movies 34–5
Sins of the Parents (film) 124 Stokes, Melvyn 370
Sitting on the Moon (film) 194 Stone, Lawrence 4
Slums of Berlin (film) 245 The Story of Dr Wassell (film) 337
Small, Sam 79 The Story of Louis Pasteur (film) 159
Smart Money (film) 147 Strand Theater, Memphis, Tennessee 199
Smith, John David 37 Strand Theater, Springfield,
Smith, Lillian 69 Massachusetts 134–5
social class 21; carnival and street Strange Wives (film) 193
parades 294; equal treatment 131–2; Streible, Dan 63
Franklin Theater and 144–54; geography Strike Me Pink (film) 176
of cinemas 111–12; heterogeneous Sturges, Preston: Sullivan’s Travels 251
audiences 130–4; Jewish Sullavan, Margaret 273, 274, 280
community 6–7, 116–17; merchandise Sullivan, Ed 171
give-aways 148; middle 77, 117; Sullivan’s Travels (film) 251
‘respectable’ entertainment 64; Sunday, Billy 5; background of 91–2;

477
 g oing to the mov ies
influence on cinema attendance 76–7; Top Hat (film) 161, 162, 170, 173, 179,
with Mae West 91; support for 182–3, 185–95, 192, 193; Wolverine
cinema 90–3 Shell Horsehides and 270
‘Sundays in Norfolk’: Towards a Protestant Topkapi (film) 344
Utopia Lindvall) 76–93 Topper Takes a Trip (film) 58
Swing Time (film) 162, 168, 173, 180, 184, Touch of Evil (Welles) 288
185, 187 Tower Theater, Dallas, Texas 204
Tracked by Wireless (film) 108, 111
Tracy, Lee 269
Tageblatt (newspaper) 117, 118, 120, 122–3 Tracy, Spencer 339
A Tale of Two Cities (film) 162, 176, 197 Traffic in Souls (film) 88, 112
Tanzania 358–9 Trail of the Lonesome Pine (film) 176, 182,
Taves, Brian 163, 166 183, 193
Tayfur, Ferdi 338–41, 340 Transatlantic M-G-R (film) 184
Taylorism 228 Transatlantic Tunnel (film) 165
television 9; big versus small screen 284– translation: accents 341–2; dubbing
90; broadcasting films 278; in film life for Turkey 337–43; vernacular
cycles 218; see also DVDs and videos; humor 339–41
home viewing Trevlin, C.J. 158
Temple, Shirley 160, 162, 269 ‘Tri-racial Theaters in Robeson County,
The Ten Commandments (film) 203–4, 344 North Carolina’ (McKenna) 45–59
Ten Dollar Raise (film) 192 The Trooper of Troop K (film) 60, 62, 75
Tesh, Rev. Luther 86 Trumpbour, John 308
The Test (farm film) 260 Tucker, George Loane: The Miracle Man 87
Testa, Richard 131 Turkey: censorship 343–6; dubbing 338–
Thanhouser Kid 109 43; Lerner’s study of 346–7; modifying
Thanks a Million (film) 189, 191 Hollywood films for 336–8; reception
‘The Reel of the Month Club’ of American films 18; vernacular
(Wasson) 217–34 modernism 347
Theater Owners of America 196, 213 Turner, Florence 99
The Theatorium, Concord, North Twentieth Century-Fox see Fox
Carolina 32 28 Days Later (film) 380–1
Things to Come (film) 164, 165 Two in the Dark (film) 182
The Thirteenth Chair (film) 330 Two Orphans (film) 107
The 39 Steps (film) 165, 275 The Two Sisters (film) 108
Thissen, Judith 6–7; ‘Next Year at the Tyrrell of Avon, Lord 330
Moving Pictures’ 113–29 Tyson Brother v. Banton 39
Thomas, J.A. 86
Thomashefsky, Boris 124
Thompson, Edward P. 3, 294 UCI 375, 376
Thompson, J. Walter 228–9 Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show
Thornborough, Laura 267 (film) 29
Thorp, Margaret 303 Under Two Flags (film) 175
Thrasher, Frederick 300 United Artists 177
The Three Godfathers (film) 166 United Kingdom Film Council 380
Thurstone, Louis 300 United Nations Children’s Fund
Tibbetts, John 77 (UNICEF) 274
To Kill a Mockingbird (film) 204 United States: cinema as urban activity 4;
Tom Butler (film) 108 civil rights legislation 200–2; civil
Tomlinson, John: on Americanization 383– rights movement 202–14; crowd
5, 386–7; Western culture 393 behavior 295; cultural middle

478
 inde x
ground 16–17; demography of 103; films 318–19; Jewish audiences 6–7,
Depression-era government 250–1; 119; theaters 32, 33
emigration of African-Americans 34–5; vernacular modernism: defined 335; Turkey
geography of movie culture 26–7; and 347
Kennedys and civil rights 211–14; Vertigo (film) 279, 287
low Southern immigration 32; media The Victors (film) 344
marketplace 19; migration of African- Vidor, King 163
Americans 34–5; ‘Othering’ of 384; La vie est à nous (film) 320
patterns of moviegoing 5–6, 100–2; Village Roadshow 375, 377
program and time patterns 96–100; violence and crime: blamed on films 302;
representation in Africa 348–3; rise racial segregation and 37
of consumerism 227–31, 248–9; Virgin Cinemas 375
rural–urban demographics 28–9, 33; The Virginian Pilot (newspaper) 80, 90
Turkish attitudes towards 347–8; Vitagraph studios 277
urbanization and industrialization 137– Vivendi Universal 377
41; whiteness as property 41–2; see also Vorse, Mary Heaton 297–8
Americanization; and under individual Vue de remerciements au public 334, 334
places; segregation
United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) films 10–11, 252, 255, 262–8 Wachowski Brothers 365
United States Supreme Court: Brown v. Walcott, Joe 199
Topeka Board of Education 8, 200–1; Walking on Air (film) 182, 183
Mutual v. Ohio 237; Plessy v. Ferguson Waller, Gregory A. 10–11, 36, 42, 78;
(Jim Crow laws) 35–7, 39; prior ‘Free Talking Picture – Every Farmer
restraint of films 237; segregation is Welcome’ 248–72; intermingling
decision of 1896 4 taboos 62; variety of exhibition 281
Universal Pictures 177 Walsh, Blanche 108
The Unseen Enemy (film) 94 The Wanderer (film) 87
Urban Entertainment Centre, Warheit (newspaper) 120; Abie
Nottingham 387–92 cartoons 122, 123
Warner Bros. 135, 177, 376
Warner Theater, Memphis, Tennessee 199
Valentine, Maggie 132; The Show Starts on Warnke, Nina 124
the Sidewalk 58–9 Wasson, Haidee 9–10; ‘The Reel of the
Valentino, Rudolph 336 Month Club’ 217–34
The Vampire Bat (film) 329 Way Down South (Muse) 68
Vampyr (film) 329 Wayne, John 147, 360
Van Beuren productions 178 Weber, Lois: The Blot 87
Variety (newspaper) 8; box-office Webster, Duncan 383–4
data 155–9, 172–3; double bills 167; Weinberg, Herman 241–2
on Hollywood in Latin America 381; Weiner, Steve 388
on international exhibition 372; leading Welke, Barbara 37
production companies 177–8; live Welles, Orson 273, 274; Citzen Kane 344;
act information 168–72; popular and Rebecca 289; Touch of Evil 288
successful films 159–63; reports on Wells, Carl D. 78
segregation 200, 203, 204, 206–8, 208, Wells, Jake and Otto 77–8, 84, 85
212 Wells Theater, Norfolk, Virginia 81, 81
Vasey, Ruth: The World According to Wesley, John 89
Hollywood 321–2 West, Mae 91
vaudeville 6; attraction to moviegoers 94; westerns 108, 160; African popularity 18,
box office information 168–72; French 356, 357–62

479
 g oing to the mov ies
Whalen, Geoffrey 101 Wonder Bar (film) 318, 318
White, Richard 16–17 Wonderland Theater, Norfolk, Virginia 83
‘The White in the Race Movie Audience’ Woods, Ruth Dial 49, 51
(Gaines) 60–75 Woolacott, Martin 384
Whoopee (film) 341 The World According to Hollywood
Widow from Monte Carlo (film) 185 (Vasey) 321–2
Wife versus Secretary (film) 162, 170, 175, 182 Wright, Marian A. 201
The Wild One (film) 301 Wright, William Lord 77
Williams, Linda 303 Written in Blood (film) 108
Williams, Raymond 382
Williams, Robert C. 255
Williams-Jones, Michael 372 Yelmo Films 373
Winamac, Indiana 252 Yiddish language and theater 118; effect
Winchester Amusement Corporation 135 of cinema 113–14, 114; Jewish
Wings Over Ethiopia (film) 164 elite culture and 127–8; press 7;
Winston, Brian 264 vaudeville 119, 121
Wishart, Walter S. 54 Young, Loretta 269, 273, 274, 280
The Witness Chair (film) 166 Young Men’s Hebrew Association 84
The Wizard of Oz (film) 289–90; shown in Young Mr Lincoln (film) 285
Afghanistan 11, 273, 274, 282–4 Younger, Scott 109
Wolfe III, Ernie 363
Woman in Red (film) 192
women: African cowboy culture 361; Zambia 352, 358, 360
operating home projection 228–9, 229; Zellars Motor Company 252
religious films 86–7 Ziegfeld, Florenz 169
Women’s Christian Temperance Union Zukor, Adolph 6, 107, 115; Grand
(WCTU) 79 Theater 6, 118, 119–21

480
 Going to the
MOVI ES
Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema

Shop girls and factory hands paying a nickel to watch silent

Westerns in a variety bill at the Music Hall; the “sophisticated”
clientele of New York’s modernist art-house cinemas; the sold-
out opening weekends at shopping-mall megaplexes; FilmAid
screenings of Charlie Chaplin in refugee camps in Afghanistan . . .
the ways in which American and global audiences have viewed
movies are as rich and varied a part of cinematic history as
anything shown on the silver screen.

In pioneering essays by many of the leading experts in this rapidly-

developing field of cinema history, Going to the Movies moves
beyond the familiar images of nickelodeons and movie palaces to
analyse the place of movie theatres in local communities, the roles
of race and religion in constructing and segregating audiences, the
links between film and other entertainment media, the varied
forms of non-theatrical exhibition and the historical development
of the globalized audience.

I S B N 978-0-85989-812-6

ISBN 978 0 85989 812 6

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER PRESS
9 780859 898126
www.exeterpress.co.uk

E X E T E R S T U D I E S I N F I L M H I S T O R Y