When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and The Evolution of American Film

3. There are many books that do this, most notably Ben M. Hall, The Best Remaining Seats: The Golden Age of the Movie Palace (1988), and Ross Melnick and Andreas Fuchs, Cinema Treasures: A New Look at Classic Movie Theatres (2004). A more academic study, although equally nostalgic in its view of the age of the movie palace, may be found in Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the Unites States (1992).

4. This is not to say that unconventional framings might be used to deliberately alter the way we look at a familiar object, a process Erving Goffman refers to as “keying” in a study that explores how framing experience affects our understanding. Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), 40 ff.

5. I intentionally write “spaces” here because I do not want to claim a simple linear development. Broadly construed, theatrical space at the beginning of motion picture exhibition could suggest a variety of architectural configurations, including, as Charlotte Herzog has demonstrated, the circus and fairs. In making this connection, Herzog acknowledges she is “focusing on the exterior of the building,” which makes her concerns different from mine. But the interior space of the circus can be related to the horseshoe design I will be discussing later in chapter 1. Herzog, “The Archaeology of Cinema Architecture: The Origins of the Movie Theater,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.1 (Winter 1984): 13.

6. I use the qualified “pretty much” here because there are instances in the history of exhibition in which the object could be overtly transformed by the theater in various ways: the use of hand-cranked projectors in the silent period, allowing theaters to speed up running times should large crowds lead to an attempt to fit in an extra performance; the lower quality of image illumination not uncommon in second-run theaters of the 1930s; architectural limitations causing reduction in the width of widescreen movies from the 1950s on; from the 1950s through the 1980s, the use of multiple-track stereophonic sound only in big-city first-run theaters; and so on.

7. This derives from an earlier practice in theaters that had tiered rings; while most of the rings above the first floor were fairly shallow, the last ring would generally culminate in a deep and steeply raked seating area. The increasing use of cantilevers in balconies through the late nineteenth century made feasible the deep and capacious balconies that would become a distinctive feature of the movie palace, something I will discuss in more detail in chapter 3.

8. An “Architect’s sketch” of the resultant three theaters may be seen in Boxoffice, Aug. 19, 1968, a24.

9. “Detroit to Have Duplex Theater,” MPW, Sept. 12, 1914, 1525.

10. An article that ran about a month after the theater opened in January 1916 began with the assertion, “The popularity of Detroit’s Duplex theater is said to be exceeding every anticipation.” “Among the Picture Theaters,” MPW, Feb. 12, 1916, 965. By July, it had apparently achieved renown: “Detroit, Michigan, the Home of the Famous ‘Duplex,’ ” MPW, July 15, 1916, 397.

11. This description appeared in the first announcement of the theater, roughly fifteen months before its opening. The sketch in figure I.2 accompanied the article, “Detroit to Have Duplex Theater,” MPW, Sept. 12, 1914, 1525. In an article written two months before this announcement, Lee Dougherty, a “stage director” for Biograph, provided a succinct statement of the “problem” with the feature film: “with the varied program of single and split reels, occasionally boosted by a two or three-reel production, one is always sure of being entertained, no matter what time he enters the theater.” Lee E. Dougherty, “Conditions and Features,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 226.

12. This resistance was part of what Michael Quinn has cited as competing definitions of cinema that emerged in the 1910s, with the emphasis on short films an example of “the ‘variety model’ of cinema”: “a certain kind of cinema which could be called ‘going to the movies,’ where an audience member would simply stop by the theater and spend one or two free hours watching films.” As will become clear in subsequent chapters, these differing models of programming would also become an issue of architecture that continued into the sound period. Michael Joseph Quinn, “Early Feature Distribution and the Development of the Motion Picture Industry: Famous Players and Paramount, 1912–1921” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1998), 47.

13. “Features and Time Schedules,” EH, Jan. 8, 1916, 22.

14. It was, in fact, the commitment of some manufacturers to the smaller theaters that convinced them the short film would always have a future. See, for example, William N. Selig, “Present Day Trend in Film Lengths,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 180; Carl Laemmle, “Doom of the Long Feature Predicted,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 185; “Warner’s Features, Inc.,” MPW, July 18, 1914, 262; John J. Coleman, “The Ultimate Triumph of the Single-Reel Production,” MPW, Oct. 17, 1914, 325; “Kessel Replies to Brady Article,” MPN, Mar. 20, 1915, 58.

15. Postlewait, “The Hieroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and Society, Post–Civil War to 1945,” in Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds., The Cambridge History of American Theatre (1999), 2:162. Postlewait’s notion of reciprocal influences circulating between live theater and motion pictures can, I believe, be profitably expanded to the very sites of performance. In citing Postlewait here, I want to take the opportunity to note an odd imbalance between theater historians and film scholars. Where theater historians are likely to include film in their purview, film scholars are less likely to make theater a part of the cultural context in which films appeared. The most important exception to this is Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (1997). This impressively researched book presents a compelling argument that demonstrates the impact of nineteenth-century staging practices on early American film style, an argument that has been an important influence on my thinking about the impact of live-performance theaters on motion picture theaters as well as the impact of architectural space on the development of American film.

16. Douglas Fox, “The Film Guild Cinema: An Experiment in Theatre Design,” EHW, “Better Theatres” sec., Mar. 16, 1929, 15.

17. The poster appears in a photograph of Kiesler in the exhibition catalogue: Lisa Philips, Frederick Kiesler (1989), 162.

18. Complementing the view of film as a serious art form that became increasingly common through the 1960s, the Anthology Film Archives in New York claimed precisely this distinction with a seating design that isolated audience members from one another to allow a more perfect communion with the screen image: “The patron sinks back, sealed off in the equivalent of a boxlike, high-winged chair, lined with black, fireproof velvet. Neighbors are visible only lap-high, through arm-rest cutouts.” Howard Thompson, “Silence Says a Lot for Film Archives,” NYT, Dec. 4, 1970, 55. Advertising for this theater echoed the way the Film Guild Cinema promoted itself: “The first film museum in the world devoted entirely to film as an art, Anthology Film Archives will open to the public the invisible cinema, a radically new construction for film presentation” (NYT, Nov. 29, 1970, 32).

19. S. B., “The Theater,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9, 1929, 4.

20. Walter Rendell Storey, “Picture Theatres Made to Fit Our Day,” NYT, June 9, 1929, SM8.

21. Fox, “The Film Guild Cinema” (emphasis added).

22. Four months after the Film Guild Cinema’s opening, Storey noted, “The additional machines required for these effects have not yet been installed, so that at present only somber walls look down on the audience” (Storey, “Picture Theaters Made to Fit”). Further, on the basis of a 1977 interview with Lillian Kiesler, Kiesler’s second wife, R. L. Held writes, “Kiesler’s plans were never fully realized. A shortage of funds prevented the fabrication of the special projectors for the ceilings and the walls.” Held, Endless Innovation: Frederick Kiesler’s Theory and Scenic Design (1982), 51.

23. Donald C. Mullin, The Development of the Playhouse: A Survey of Theatre Architecture from the Renaissance to the Present (1970), 152–53. This production of The Miracle was clearly an important point of reference in 1920s American theater. Peter Bauland cites critic Burns Mantle describing the impact of the production: “…‘for some weeks thereafter there was not much else talked about in theatre circles.’ ” Further, Bauland notes, “Articles about The Miracle appeared in almost every major magazine throughout the United States for the remainder of the season. Even Scientific American and Architectural Record, in their April, 1924 issues had extensive pictures, diagrams, and discussion of the complicated technical aspects of the production.” Bauland, The Hooded Eagle: Modern German Drama on the New York Stage (1968), 59–60.

24. In general, there seems to have been a strong association of the “art film” with German cinema in this period, beginning with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which John Larkin Jr., writing in Theatre Magazine in 1926, described in the following manner: “One might well call him [i.e., Caligari] the father of our few art movies and Broken Blossoms the mother.” Larkin, “The Guild Movie Is Here,” Theatre Magazine (May 1926): 62. The German connection was even stronger with the Shadowbox, “the first full time art theatre in the United States” (1925), which “was programmed by the Screen Guild, an organization formed by Joseph Fliesler, a former film critic now working for Ufa-USA, the American sales agent for the German production company, Ufa.” Tony Guzman, “The Little Theater Movement: The Institutionalization of the European Art Film in America,” Film History 17.2/3 (2005): 266.

25. The Theatre Guild’s relationship to O’Neil suggests another connection to Kiesler because Kiesler had designed the setting for a 1923 production of The Emperor Jones in Berlin. R. L. Held describes this production in Endless Innovation, 19–20.

26. For contemporary appraisals of this movement, see Kenneth Macgowan, Footlights Across America, Towards a National Theater (1929), and Sheldon Cheney, The Theatre: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting and Stagecraft (1929), 499 ff.

27. Kiesler, “Building a Cinema Theatre,” in Siegfried Gohr and Gunda Luyken, eds., Frederick J. Kiesler, Selected Writings (1996), 17.

28. See, for example, Sheldon Cheney, The Art Theatre (rev. ed., 1925), and Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow (1921).

29. Richard Southern notes that the word “proscenium” can mean very different things at different times in theater history, noting, for example, that it simply refers to the performing area in the “open stage” theaters of Shakespeare’s time. For this reason, Southern prefers the more precise term “picture-frame stage” to designate the kind of framing I am referring to here. I have used the word proscenium in this instance, however, because it was generally the term used by those attacking conventional picture-frame staging in the teens and twenties and then again, with renewed force, in the post–World War II period. Southern, The Open Stage (1953).

30. Fox, “The Film Guild Cinema,” 70; quotation cited from a review of the opening performance by William Bolitho in the New York World. Here, Bolitho is describing the kind of “audience participation” that would become an increasing concern of avant-garde theater practice.

31. “Film Arts Guild Opens New Theatre,” NYT, Feb. 2, 1928, 20.

1. Mary C. Henderson, Theater in America: 200 Years of Plays, Players, and Productions (1986), 236, 246.

2. Charles Marowitz, “Introduction,” in Martin Bloom, Accommodating the Lively Arts: An Architect’s View (1997), ix.

3. Bloom, ibid., xiii.

4. Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow, 187.

5. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Auditorium Theatre was used as a movie theater as early as 1914. George C. Izenour, Theater Design (2d ed., 1996), 82. Izenour’s lucid exploration of sight lines and acoustics covering more than 2,000 years of theater-building in the West strongly influenced my thinking about the changing ways the cinema image has worked within architectural space.

6. Henderson, Theater in America, 254.

7. Sullivan, quoted in John Szarkowski, The Idea of Louis Sullivan (2000), 36.

8. Felicia Hardison Londré and Daniel J. Watermeier, The History of North American Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico: From Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (2000), 173–74.

9. Mullin, The Development of the Playhouse, 114.

10. Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater (1961), 59.

11. Simon Tidworth, for example, sees a stylization in language (as well as costume and movement) as a consequence of the theater structures. Tidworth, Theatres: An Architectural and Cultural History (1973), 9.

12. Richard Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse (1973), 29. Tidworth sees the Elizabethan theater derived from early performances staged in “the yard of an inn,” although he does acknowledge, “An alternative theory is that they copied bear-baiting arenas. Probably both came into play” (Tidworth, ibid., 60). Whether inn yard or bear-baiting pit, the important point here is that they were multipurpose spaces, much as early motion picture theaters were.

13. In a much acclaimed 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that could give rise to very elaborate scenography as a response to its densely imagistic language, Peter Brook deliberately countered this tradition with a striking bare white stage to restore the primacy of the language. An article responding to the 1971 New York performance of this production noted: “Brook knows that…the only way to prick into life its [the play’s] pulsating germ plasm is through the only thing about it that can be real for us—its language. The white set…is Brook’s way of making a tabula rasa out of our cluttered, encumbered imaginations, but it is also a giant sounding board for Shakespeare’s multi-leveled language.” Jack Kroll, “Placing the Living Shakespeare Before Us,” NYT, Feb. 7, 1971, D1.

14. Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century has an extended discussion of these visual novelties (1990:104 ff). Since these devices are often related to an interest in the reproduction of reality and I will have occasion to write about the reality effect of motion pictures, I want to note that Crary offers an important countercurrent in the simultaneous movement toward an exploration of the limits of human vision, the result of scientific research: “our physiological apparatus is again and again shown to be defective, inconsistent, prey to illusion, and, in a crucial manner, susceptible to external procedures of manipulation and stimulation that have the essential capacity to produce experience for the subject” (92, emphasis in original). In particular, Crary notes it was from the mid-1880s on that the study of the phenomenon of the after-image, the continuing presence of an image on the retina, led to the invention of optical devices for entertainment.

15. Although film scholar Allison Griffiths has written about panorama paintings as an important precursor of mid-twentieth-century widescreen and large-screen film exhibition, my interest in them is somewhat different because the manner of exhibiting panorama paintings did have an impact on film exhibition during the silent era, which I will discuss in chapter 5. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (2008), 37–79.

16. T. Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage: From the First Performance in 1732 to 1901, vol. 3 (1903), 371.

17. Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “All-Embracing” View (1988), 84. In a historical survey of New York theaters, Ruth Crosby Dimmick lists the “Colisuem [sic]” simply as a theater. Dimmick, Our Theatres To-day and Yesterday (1913), 51.

18. See Brown, A History of the New York Stage, 547. See also George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 15 (1949), 197–99.

19. In tracing the impact of painting on theatrical methods, I am following a model established by George Kernodle in an important study of the impact of painting on stage and set design in Renaissance theater, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (1944).

20. Hyde, Panoramania!, 131.

21. Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1970), 66. The moving panorama also effectively anticipated motion pictures with a picture that was literally moving within a delimited frame in order to create the illusion of movement within a stationary space.

22. Although Crary does not write about this, how the panorama painting was staged does effectively reflect the contrary trends that Crary sees in nineteenth-century visual arts. While three-dimensional objects were used to enhance the realism of the painting’s flat surface, the enforced distance of the painting itself reflected an understanding of the limitations of binocular vision in perceiving depth since distance diminishes the importance of binocular vision, giving priority to other depth cues like object-scale.

23. Percy Fitzgerald, The World Behind the Scenes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1881), 79, quoted in Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (1983), 44.

24. Hyde notes, “For a while it seemed that photography might come to the aid of the ailing show-panorama industry. Charles A. Close in 1893 suggested that cycloramic paintings be given a coat of white paint and photographic images projected upon them. He himself devised a way of doing this, exhibiting at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 an Electric Cyclorama. The apparatus he used for projecting his 360° images consisted of a battery of projectors, kinetoscopes, and kinemotographs, accommodated (with their operator) in a giant lantern hung from the ceiling like a vast chandelier…. In 1901 the Lumière brothers, August and Louis, established at 18 rue de Clichy their Photorama, at which photographs of French scenery were projected onto a 360° screen.” Hyde, Panoramania!, 181.

25. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (1991).

26. For details on this showing and how it carefully promoted the Lumière apparatus, see Alan Williams, “The Lumière Organization and ‘Documentary Realism,’ ” in John Fell, ed., Film Before Griffith (1983) 157 ff.

27. In smaller cities and towns, “opera house” was something of a generic term for theater and could in fact designate auditoria no bigger than those commonly used for straight plays in larger cities and possibly smaller.

28. See Robert Allen on the modular form of vaudeville and its receptivity to early motion pictures, which could not sustain an entire evening’s entertainment. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 1895–1915: A Study in Media Interaction (1980), 46 ff.

29. Musser notes that three performers who were appearing at Koster and Bial’s were among the earliest Kinetoscope subjects, “the first of many variety and vaudeville performers to visit the Black Maria over the ensuing year [1894],” and he describes Edison as “an aficionado of variety entertainment” (Musser, Nickelodeon, 39 ff.). This being the case, it is perhaps not surprising that “the principal components of the Edison repertoire from 1894 on were condensations of vaudeville turns, circus acts, and minute excerpts from popular plays.” Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 101–2.

30. Jack W. McCullough, “Edward Kilanyi and American Tableaux Vivants,” Theatre Survey 16 (1975): 25, 27.

31. Although each living picture could suggest a painting or a statue, not all were drawn from specific artworks. An announcement of Oscar Hammerstein’s Living Pictures at Koster and Bial’s stated, “They will include groups of statuary, patriotic scenes, and reproductions of some of the works of great artists.” “Theatrical Gossip,” NYT, May 3, 1894, 8.

32. “Notes on the Stage,” NYT, May 20, 1894, 12; “Theatrical Gossip,” NYT, June 27, 1894, 8; “Theatrical Gossip,” NYT, June 1, 1894, 8; “Notes of the Stage,” NYT, May 27, 1894, 12.

33. Lee E. Dougherty, “Conditions and Features,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 224.

34. Some of this paradox is captured in a term used to describe Kilanyi’s living pictures in 1894: “animate art.” “Theatrical Gossip,” NYT, May 30, 1894, 8.

35. “Kilanyi’s Glyptorama,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Dec. 7, 1895, 19 (emphasis added).

36. As Tom Gunning has argued, illusion is as central as realism to the way motion pictures were perceived. Gunning places particular importance on the manner in which the first Lumière films were shown: “the films were initially presented as frozen unmoving images, projections of still photographs. Then, flaunting a mastery of visual showmanship, the projector began cranking and the image moved…. As in the magic theatre the apparent realism of the image makes it a successful illusion, but one understood as an illusion nonetheless.” Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 34–35.

37. In similar fashion, panorama entertainments, another form that sought to create a perfect illusion of reality by combining a painted background with three-dimensional objects in the foreground, found itself eclipsed by movies. Hyde notes, “In the opening years of the twentieth century the effect of the cinema on the panorama was even more calamitous than the effect in the 1960s of television on the cinema. In the face of cinema competition virtually every rotunda in the world shut up shop.” Hyde, Panoramania!, 199.

38. “Immensity in Living Pictures,” NYT, Nov. 25, 1895, 9.

39. “Kilanyi’s New Living Pictures,” NYT, Dec. 3, 1895, 6.

40. “Edison’s Vitascope Cheered,” NYT, Apr. 24, 1896, 5.

41. The description of the Vitascope program is taken from “Edison’s Vitascope Cheered,” ibid., and Charles Musser, The Emergence of the Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990), 116. The specific quotations are from the Times article. Musser identifies the films that were shown: “Six films were shown, but only five by the Edison Company. The first to be projected was a tinted print of Umbrella Dance, with the Leigh sisters. Subsequent views included Walton and Slavin (a burlesque boxing bout from 1492), Finale of 1st Act of Hoyt’s ‘Milk White Flag’ (not listed on the programme), and The Monroe Doctrine…a comic allegory that was overtly political…. The final film was of a skirt or serpentine dance…. Opening night critics were most impressed by the second film shown, Rough Sea at Dover,” an “actuality” made by Edison’s “English competitor Robert Paul.” Musser, Nickelodeon, 62–63.

42. “Kilanyi’s Glyptorama,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Dec. 7, 1895, 19.

43. “Edison’s Vitascope Cheered,” NYT, Apr. 24, 1896, 5.

44. “Edison’s Latest Invention,” NYT, Apr. 26, 1896, 10. There is some reason to question the accuracy of the measurements since the resulting aspect ratio would be far different from the 1.33:1 of the Vitascope image. If the 20-foot width is accurate, the resulting image would actually be closer to the Glyptorama frame (20 x 15 vs. 20 x 14). There was another interesting discrepancy that turned up in the two Times articles on the premiere: the first (“Edison’s Vitascope Cheered”) specified, “The moving figures are about half life size,” while the second (“Edison’s Latest Invention”) noted, “Figures appear a trifle over life-size on the screen.”

45. Julius Cahn, ed., Julius Cahn’s Official Theatrical Guide (1896), 67.

46. “Queen Isabella’s Art Gallery,” NYT, Mar. 22, 1894, 5; quoted in McCullough, Theatre Survey 16:31.

47. I have not come across any writing in this period that dictates placement of the screen, as would become common later. But contemporary illustrations always show the screen right at the proscenium, as contemporary description also points to that placement. The fact that the image is also often shown as much larger than what was actually projected could perhaps make these illustrations open to question, but calling the screen a “curtain,” for reasons noted in the text, makes the downstage position seem most likely.

48. The following indicates common practice in vaudeville theaters in 1910: “It [the screen] is often found taking the place of a drop curtain where vaudeville is shown, and rolled up and down at least twice at every performance.” “A Picture Lover,” “Chicago Notes: Helpful Hints to Exhibitors,” MPW, Apr. 2, 1910, 501.

49. Charles A. Whittemore, “The Motion Picture Theater: IV. Heating and Ventilating and Type of Plan,” Architectural Forum 27.1 (September 1917): 72.

50. Sachs, Modern Opera Houses and Theatres, vol. 1 (1896, reissued 1968), 3.

51. Mullin, Development, 146.

52. A photograph of the Schermerhon Symphony Center, home to the Nashville Symphony, may be seen in Allan Kozinn, “Foreclosure Is New Blow to Nashville Symphony,” NYT, June 8, 2013, C1, C4.

53. “The first half of the seventeenth century saw the formation of all the essential features of what one calls the modern theatre (though the term is now out of date)—the picture-frame stage and its horseshoe-shaped auditorium with tiers of galleries or boxes.” Tidworth, Theatres, 65.

54. Brooks McNamara, “The Scenography of Popular Entertainment,” The Drama Review: TDR 18.1 (Mar. 1974): 21.

55. Leacroft, Development of the English Playhouse, 150; Arthur S. Meloy, Architect, Theatres and Motion Picture Houses: A Practical Treatise on the Proper Planning and Construction of Such Buildings and Containing Useful Suggestions, Rules and Data for the Benefit of Architects, Prospective Owners, Etc. (1916), 3. A more modern understanding of acoustics makes the issue more complicated than mere distance: Vern Knudsen demonstrates under certain conditions the human voice may be clearly heard up to 102 feet away. See Knudsen, “Acoustical Deign of Multiple-Use Auditoria,” in Izenour, Theater Design, 460–78.

56. How important this was to contemporary viewers may be seen by the comment in a Chicago Tribune article about the Dankmar Adler Central Music Hall (1880) whose main balcony was “like the shape of a horseshoe, and extending it back over the lobby or foyer, the entire dress circle is exposed…. This will enable the entire audience to see itself.” Cited in Joseph M. Siry, The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan’s Architecture and the City (2002), 54. Nevertheless, within nine years, Adler working with Louis Sullivan would radically reorient the seating plan, drawing on the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. But old forms die hard: Siry notes that, according to Frank Lloyd Wright, “the wealthy of Chicago wanted a ‘golden horseshoe’ of boxes like that found in the Metropolitan Opera House” (394). In Theater Design, Izenour provides a longitudinal perspective of the new design (227) and notes the compromise form “resulted in virtually the prototype of that which was to occur 80 years later in the design of the new Metropolitan,” which also sought to combine a modern theater with tiered rings (281).

57. “Edison Vitascope Cheered,” NYT, Apr. 24, 1896, 5.

58. George Blaisdell, “Nicholas Power Urges Standardization,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 223.

59. But staging could not correct everything. When the late-eighteenth-century Drury Lane Theatre made one of the side boxes by the proscenium the royal box, the Duke of York reportedly exclaimed, “the worst box in the theatre for seeing a play!” even though much of the action likely took place on the forestage. Leacroft, Development of the English Playhouse, 162.

60. The advent of perspectival scenery in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries effectively limited the playing area of the stage: “One unavoidable difficulty about this otherwise convenient economy was that the entrance of any actors near the back of the stage was to be avoided, since they would be out of proportion with the vanishing lines of the architecture of the scene at that point.” Richard Southern, The Seven Ages of Theatre (1961), 225.

61. “Music Hall Notes,” NYT, Oct. 20, 1896, 5.

62. A brief item on the premiere of the cinématographe noted, “The moving pictures it shows are unusually clear and free from vibration.” “Notes of the Summer Shows,” NYT, June 30, 1896, 4.

63. “The Summer Shows,” NYT, July 5, 1896, 10.

64. “Vitascope to Cast Figures on Canvas at Koster & Bial’s,” NYT, Apr. 14, 1896, 5.

65. The Times article claimed that Frohman’s remarks “put into the mind of Mr. Edison another possibility,” and then detailed Edison’s plan to film two train engines crashing into each other as well as plans to film Pope Leo XIII in Rome, two things that could not be seen otherwise on the vaudeville stage, unlike the other films at the premiere program.

66. See Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, Lost Broadway Theatres (rev. ed., 1997), and William Morrison, Broadway Theatres: History and Architecture (1999).

67. Mary Henderson alludes to this in passing: “At the beginning of the era [1870], the deep stage, proscenium boxes, and horseshoe auditorium prevailed, but by 1900 they were supplanted by the shallow picture-frame stage and the smaller fan-shaped auditorium with boxes on the side walls above the orchestra.” Mary C. Henderson, “Scenography, Stagecraft, and Architecture,” in Wilmeth and Bigsby, eds., 2:489. I have found no commentary that directly relates staging practices to architectural innovation.

68. Hiram Kelly Moderwell, The Theatre of To-day (rev. ed., 1928), 31.

69. While praising the D’Oyly Carte Opera House in London, he notes, “if there be anything to complain of, it is that the uppermost tier has been continued so as to form a deep ‘well’ or chute which, to my mind, is a disgrace to a modern theatre that claims to provide for the comfort of the audience” (Sachs, Modern Opera Houses 1:36). He offers a similar complaint about another London theater (1:38) as well as the Paris Opera House (Sachs, 2:7).

70. “It was the first theater in the United States in which the fan-shaped, curvilinear auditorium departed completely from the traditional prevailing horseshoe shaped designs and in which most of the seats on several levels faced the stage.” Londré and Watermeier, The History of North American Theater, 173.

71. Reprint of article from The Builder (London) in American Architect 106.2017 (Aug. 19, 1914): 107.

72. Mullin notes an increase in capacity at the end of the eighteenth century with the added tiers effectively forcing a closeness because of sound and sight problems: “The increase in capacity compelled the actors to play down center in order to be heard…[while] those at the ends of the horseshoe had difficulty in seeing more than the front of the stage” (Development, 138).

73. Wagner was not the actual architect of the Festspielhaus, but the double proscenium and the frontal seating were ideas that originated with him. See Juliet Koss, Modernism After Wagner (2009), 25–66.

74. Mullin claims the Festspielhaus “changed the course of the playhouse in a single stroke…. [Its] advantages…for producing and viewing realistic drama were so obvious that they could not but sweep the field” (ibid., 144). I think he is right to connect design to issues of staging, although all of his examples are drawn from the twentieth century. Siry, on the other hand, does trace the way the Festspielhaus influenced the Auditorium (Chicago Auditorium, 106–7).

75. In a recent book, my colleague Pannill Camp argues that the ideological underpinnings of such changes were forged in the 1770s in France, challenging the settled narratives that locate the roots of stage realism in the nineteenth century. Camp, The First Frame (2014).

76. Richard and Helen Leacroft, Theatre and Playhouse (1984), 120. Since it was a convention of theaters in this period to use a raked stage floor to enhance the perspectival illusion of the scenery, the Leacrofts note that box sets were installed with some difficulty; the first flat stage in England they cite is from 1897. The raked stage plus the difficulty of changing scenes possibly impaired large-scale adoption in Europe. There is some evidence the situation was different in the United States. (See note 78.)

77. A leaflet for the theater cited in Richard Southern, “The Picture-Frame Proscenium of 1880,” Theatre Notebook 5.3 (Apr.–June 1951): 60. Southern does provide a critical contemporary view worth noting here: the writer posits the gilded frame “seems to reduce what is going on upon the stage to a mere picture overpowered by a heavy and elaborate setting” (61). The writer clearly sees this as a negative, but he does effectively grant setting a kind of expressiveness it did not have previously, a point I will develop below.

78. Contra Bergman and other theater historians, Brewster and Jacobs claim “a whole series of pressures tended to drive the action to the front of the stage, and helped to retain small forestages through most of our period” (Theatre to Cinema, 151). They are equally skeptical about the use of the box set. But there is much evidence to the contrary. For example, “The German theatre man Edw. Devrient, who visited Paris in 1839 and eagerly studied the new mise-en-scène, in one of his letters raised the question how the box set was illuminated…. Devrient confirms…that he had been able to study the mimics of the actors even in the background of the room furthest from the footlights.” Gösta M. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (1977), 262.

79. Bergman does note that Wagner later claimed this was due to a mistake and in later performances “a faint light filtered down from sources near the ceiling” (300).

80. This is from Percy Fitzgerald in the book Lamb’s Dramatic Essays with a commentary by Percy Fitzgerald (cited in Bergman, Lighting, 294). This is the same Percy Fitzgerald who compared new staging practices to panoramas, noted earlier in this chapter.

81. On an Edison compilation DVD set, Charles Musser notes that there were many films of “serpentine dances.” If there were any others from 1895, it might well have been a different film. But based on observation of extant films, it is very likely all of the films were staged in similar fashion. Edison: The Invention of the Movies (DVD set, New York: Kino Video–MoMA, 2005).

82. Musser notes of these early films, “The dark background also placed its subjects in bold relief in a manner that recalls Edweard Muybridge’s serial views” (Emergence, 78).

83. Here is the description of the film from a contemporary review: “When the hall was darkened last night…an unusually bright light fell upon the screen. Then came into view two precious blonde young persons of the variety stage, in pink and blue dresses, doing the umbrella dance with commendable celerity. Their motions were all clearly defined. When they vanished, a view of an angry surf breaking on a sandy beach near a stone pier amazed the spectators” (“Edison’s Vitascope Cheered”). The only visual specification here is color, which suggests hand-tinting. But Charles Musser has written there are two striking continuities in the early Edison films: “the black backgrounds and the frontal organization of the mise-en-scène” (Nickelodeon, 34). Since there are many extant Edison films of women dancing which have this arrangement, it is likely that “Umbrella Dance” was similar.

84. Musser writes that it was common practice to show a film a half dozen times. Further, because Koster and Bial’s used two projectors, it is likely the repetitions were timed to the preparation of the other projector: “while one film was being shown on one machine, the subject on the other could be taken off and replaced by a new one (a process that took approximately two minutes)” (Emergence, 117).

85. N.Y. Mail and Express, Apr. 24, 1896, 12, cited in Musser, Emergence, 116.

86. Brooks McNamara, “Scene Design and the Early Film,” from Jay Leyda and Charles Musser, curators, Before Hollywood: Turn-of-the-Century Film from American Archives (1986). McNamara does see an explicit connection between set design and lighting that is worth keeping in mind because clearly the move to electric light did not happen overnight: “typically three-dimensional detail was merely painted on a drop or flat and did not bear very close inspection. The best of such scenery, however, was certainly effective on the rather dimly lit stages still found in many theaters” (53). Implementation was likely delayed in smaller cities and towns because electric lighting was more expensive than gaslight (Bergman, Lighting, 287). Although McNamara thinks shooting on real locations had some impact on set design in early narrative film, he still sees live performance theater as a key influence: “The film industry’s move toward the creation of detailed realistic interiors was not simply an attempt to bring them into line with the real exteriors that were being used. Another obvious influence was the popular realism of Broadway producer-director David Belasco and his imitators in the theater” (56).

87. In a collection of Biograph Bulletins that reprints many newspaper responses to the earliest showings of the Biograph in a variety of cities, there is frequent comparisons to the Vitascope and claims for the superiority of the Biograph, but never once is a large-size image mentioned. A few articles state the image is the size of the theater curtain, but then often use the familiar phrase, “life-size.” The only specific mention of screen size is 40 square feet, which is not credible because it would be much too small. Kemp Niver, American Biograph Bulletins (1971), 9–33.

88. N.Y. Mail and Express, Oct. 17, 1896; reproduced in ibid., 14.

89. “The Biograph at Olympia,” NYT, Oct. 13, 1896, 5.

90. The Times article on the premiere lists the other titles: “Niagara Falls,” “A Stable on Fire,” “Joseph Jefferson in the Drinking Scene of ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ ” “Trilby and Little Billie,” and “The Washing of a Pickaninny by His Mother.” As with the Vitagraph show, this program draws on actual stage performances, but it also has more of a balance between them and events in the real world staged for the camera. “Niagara Falls,” which was singled out for praise in the article, seems intended as a parallel to “Rough Sea at Dover” (“The Biograph at Olympia”).

91. A third report citing the terror of the train went further in audience reaction, but was also spatially ambiguous:

92. A Scientific American cover story on the Biograph has a series of sketches showing different aspects of the new invention, one of a performance in a theater. This is often taken as representing the premiere performance, but the interior is very clearly not the Olympia Music Hall. In any case, the screen is located at the curtain line, where the image fills the entire proscenium. This seems unlikely for reasons I state in note 87, and it was fairly common to exaggerate the size of the screen in these drawings, perhaps to reflect the impression of a dynamic film image. Scientific American, Apr. 17, 1897.

93. Brewster and Jacobs minimize the effect of distortion from side seats: “Although film viewers in extreme positions see a distorted picture in which figures are laterally or vertically compressed, those figures have the same relationship to one another for the whole audience, however small their angular separation might have been for the camera” (Theatre to Cinema, 171). However, as subsequent chapters will show, audiences were disturbed by the distortion in the side sections of the movie palaces and even in the side seats closer to the screen in small store theaters, neither of which offered viewing angles as extreme as those in a horseshoe theater. As someone who saw North by Northwest (1959) in its premiere showing at a very crowded Radio City Music Hall, and forced to sit in the furthest side section on the left in the front third of the auditorium, I can testify that the distortion was a constant disturbance and subsequent theatrical viewings of this film were very different. And even from this vantage point, the distortion would have been less than what someone seated in the front box of the Olympia would have seen.

94. Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect,’ ” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19.2 (1999): 189.

95. N.Y. Mail and Express, Oct. 12, 1896, reprinted in Niver, Bulletins, 12.

96. Julius Cahn’s Official Theatrical Guide, 61.

97. Brewster and Jacobs have an excellent discussion comparing handling of depth onstage and in a movie, graphically demonstrating how the film image creates an extreme change in size as it denotes distance (Theater to Cinema, 170–71).

98. As part of the promotion for Richard Schickel’s series, The Men Who Made the Movies (1973), I had the good fortune of having lunch with Raoul Walsh, who had begun his filmmaking career in 1916. Over the hour-and-a-half conversation about his films, he repeatedly used the phrase “big head,” never “close-up.”

99. A contemporary theater guide cites the capacity of the Olympia Music Hall as 3,815 seats: 509 seats were in the orchestra while 500 were in the gallery, the only two locations along with a limited number of boxes that had a more or less frontal view of the stage. This should give some indication of how many viewers actually had a bad view of the screen. Julius Cahn’s Official Theatrical Guide of 1896, 69.

100. The New York Times article on the Vitascope premiere noted a difference: “In only two of the pictures shown Thursday night were the colors brought out” (“Edison’s Latest Invention”). The only example I’ve come across of a contemporary viewer questioning the realism of a black-and-white image is from a Maxim Gorky essay quoted by Tom Gunning: “For Gorky, the cinématographe presents a world whose vividness and vitality have been drained away: ‘…before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours—the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.’ ” Gunning, “Astonishment,” 34.

101. These are issues dealt with extensively by Rudolf Arnheim in Film as Art (1957) precisely to claim that film is not a transparent re-creation of reality.

102. N.Y. Mail and Express, Oct. 13, 1896, 5; cited in Musser, Emergence, 152.

103. “Edison’s Latest Triumph,” NYT, Apr. 14, 1896, 5.

104. As an example, a 1907 article uses “canvas” to indicate “flat” in the theatrical sense of painted scenery: “In the moving picture factory…scene painters are constantly at work making new canvasses for the picture dramas.” “How the Cinematographer Works,” MPW, July 13, 1907, 299.

105. “The Modern Moving Picture Theatre—Ch. V, Showing the Picture,” MPW, Oct. 16, 1909, 520.

106. Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow, 178–79.

107. Brewster and Jacobs see the cutting strategies that begin to be deployed in the period of this film as a response to the limitations imposed on the pictorial style by the relatively small width of the film image compared to the stage (Theatre to Cinema, 189 ff.).

108. While the reverse-angle cutting creates a spatial reality not possible on the realistic stage, Tom Gunning, in a fine analysis of this sequence, suggests character psychology as the key motivation for the cutting: “the psychological development of a character, primarily conveyed by editing, forms the basis of a film…. By intercutting the play and Johnson’s reaction, Griffith allows the film to take place—so to speak—in the character’s mind.” Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1991), 169.

109. In writing this I am not claiming motion pictures as the inevitable outcome of nineteenth-century theater as A. Nicholas Vardac does in Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (1949). Rather, I aim to use theater history as a way of positing the horizon of expectation through which contemporaries experienced the first film showings.

1. S. S. Hutchinson, “Kinematography in the United States,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 175–76.

2. Eileen Bowser has cautioned, “It would be impossible to count accurately the number of nickelodeons existing at any one time. They were constantly going out of business and springing up anew. Most of the available figures do not distinguish true nickel showplaces from every other place where motion pictures were exhibited.” Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (1990), 4.

3. Robert Grau, “Vaudeville in Moving Picture Theatres,” MPW, May 7, 1910, 726.

4. “A Newly Invented Cinematograph Screen That Does Not Need Darkness,” EH, May 6, 1916, 26.

5. MPW, July 11, 1914, 175–76.

6. Q. David Bowers and Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, One Thousand Nights at the Movies: An Illustrated History of Motion Pictures (2013), 74.

7. Ross Melnick has an extensive description of Rothapfel’s work at his first theater in his biography, American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothapfel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1915 (2012), 39–55.

8. “Exhibiting as a Fine Art,” MPW, Feb. 12, 1910, 202.

9. S. L. Rothapfel, “Observations by Wide-Awake Exhibitors—Management,” MPW, Mar. 12, 1910, 373.

10. Rothapfel, “Management of the Theater (con’t.),” MPW, Apr. 9, 1910, 548 (emphasis added).

11. H. F. Hoffman, “Picking a Show,” MPW, May 7, 1910, 726–27.

12. See Melnick, American Showman, 351–69.

13. MPW, July 11, 1914, 176.

14. A brief article in MPW charted the change in production from November 1906 to March 1907: in November, 10,000 feet of “new film subjects” were “placed upon the American market”; in March, the number jumped to 28,000. The following observation specifically relates this increase to the demands of store theaters: “Two Nickelodeons located in one block, changing reels three times weekly, each using new subjects only, were forced to show the same pictures more than half the time in November, 1906, while in March there was no need of duplicating at any time.” “For the Nickelodeon,” MPW, May 4, 1907.

15. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 212–13.

16. Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film.

17. Preceding the rise in narrative film production Allen cites, Charles Musser notes that dramatic films had rentals in higher proportion than their percentage of production: “A statistical analysis of Edison production records for 1904–1905 shows that staged or acted films sold approximately three and a half times as well as actualities, a ratio that remained constant for the following two years of this survey and was probably typical of the wider industry” (Emergence, 375). This suggests the possibility that the nickelodeon was a response to the popularity of the narrative film and then in turn helped to promote that popularity. See also Musser, “Moving Towards Fictional Narratives: Story Films Become the Dominant Product, 1903–1904,” in Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer, eds., The Silent Film Reader (2004), 87–102. In The Red Rooster Scare, Richard Abel argues that the French firm Pathé, which had “shifted into a factory system of production,” fueled the nickelodeon boom because it was able “by 1905–1906 to produce and deliver a variety of films of high quality, en masse and on a regular, relatively predictable basis” (1999), 29–36.

18. “Photoplay New Literature,” Exhibitors Film Exchange, Sept. 4, 1915, 19.

19. Rollin Summers, “The Moving Picture Drama and the Acted Drama. Some Points of Comparison as to Technique,” MPW, Sept. 19, 1908, 211 (emphasis added).

20. Quoted without citation in Bowers and Fuller-Seeley, One Thousand Nights, 54 (emphasis added).

21. Rick Altman has argued against the status of the store theaters as the first dedicated motion picture theaters: “A more satisfactory approach to the nickelodeon phenomenon would recognize the fundamentally multimedia nature of the storefront theater program. While a few nickel theaters concentrated exclusively on film, by far the majority of nickelodeons combined film with illustrated songs or vaudeville” (Altman, Silent Film Sound [2004], 182). One problem with this claim is that Altman, like many other historians of early cinema, makes no distinction between the terms used for these theaters. Countering this is the very theater that Altman uses to make a claim for “by far the majority of nickelodeons,” Keith’s Nickel Theatre in Providence. While it had become, as its name indicates, a nickel theater featuring mostly movies, it did not occupy a store lot, but was rather a freestanding theater which had previously functioned as a playhouse hosting traveling stock companies and eventually a Keith vaudeville house (185–90). As a vaudeville house, it had some claim to fame: “It is said that it was at this house that the ‘continuous performance’ had its origin” (Providence Magazine 18 [Oct. 1916]: 653). Because of an oversupply of theaters, many poor-performing theaters like this one were being turned over to movies alongside the burgeoning growth of the store theater. In fact, a contemporary source reports of the Nickel, “This was the first real theater used for five-cent shows in this country” (M. B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management [New York: Broadway Publishing, 1912], 171; emphasis added). Altman is correct that song slides were often used between films, albeit in limited fashion: the presence of one or two illustrated songs does not seem to me sufficient reason to claim the store theater was anything other than a movie theater. If we were to eliminate all theaters making use of some kind of live musical performance as part of the movie show, then we would have to conclude there were no movie theaters in the entire silent period.

22. “Report of Jury Award,” The Brickbuilder 23.2, “The Moving Picture Theatre Special Number” Supplement (Feb. 1914): 6.

23. “The Brickbuilder Annual Architectural Terra Cotta Competition,” The Brickbuilder 22.11 (Nov. 1913): xxxviii.

24. In his Motion Picture Work (1915; rpt., 1970), David Hulfish has a section on the requirements for starting a theater. For him a motion picture specifically means “A Store-Front City Theater Building,” which he illustrates with a rectangular plan that would fit within a roughly 25 by 50 foot lot. For him, theaters “having a 50-foot front and seating five hundred or more people” would be “vaudeville theaters rather than simple picture houses” (176–88).

25. “The New Era in Film Construction,” MPN, Nov. 11, 1914, 72.

26. “The Moving Picture Theatre,” Architect’s and Builder’s Magazine 42.8 (1910–1911): 319–22. By contrast, Jean-Jacques Meusy has noted, in France “there were no architects specializing in the construction of cinemas before the First World War.” Consequently, although France appears to have built grander dedicated movie theaters earlier than the United States, “exhibition companies constructed their halls in the image of the theaters.” Meusy, “Palaces and Holes in the Wall: Conditions of Exhibition in Paris on the Eve of World War I,” The Velvet Light Trap 37 (Spring 1996): 89.

27. MPW, Oct. 16, 1915, 417.

28. MPW, Apr. 23, 1910, 635.

29. MPN, Nov. 1, 1913, 36.

30. In spite of this early specialization as a business practice, general histories of architecture rarely have any information on theater architecture beyond ancient Greek theaters. Movie theaters are mentioned almost never, with Radio City Music Hall the singular exception because of its art deco features.

31. “A New Department,” MPN, Apr. 11, 1914, 17.

32. EH, May 6, 1916, 23.

33. The earliest article I have found in either a trade journal or an architecture journal about movie theater architecture focuses entirely on the exterior: “Architecture for Nickelodeons,” MPW, Feb. 1, 1908, 75. More recently, we have a book whose title makes the focus clear: Maggie Valentine, The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee (1994). Finally, the sixty-six photos of store theaters and nickelodeons that appear in Bowers and Fuller-Seeley are all of exteriors (One Thousand Nights, 59–90).

34. Charlotte Herzog, “The Archaeology of Cinema Architecture: The Origins of the Movie Theater,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.1 (Winter 1984): 13.

35. Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance (1989), 118.

36. Of the twelve theaters that line 42nd Street from Seventh to Eighth Avenues, seven had narrow fronts with passageways leading to auditoria on 41st and 43rd Street. See the map of theaters in Van Hoogstraten, Lost Broadway Theatres, 2–3.

37. Photographs of exteriors in Herzog as well as in Q. David Bowers, Nickelodeon Theatres and Their Music (1986), generally follow this pattern, occasionally inverting it to place the most eye-catching element on top (Bowers, 30). Herzog traces these façades to the circus tent shows, and the presence of the box office as part of the façade does seem to show the circus influence (Herzog, 20). Otherwise, it seems to me the more immediate influence of live theater is equally credible and perhaps more pertinent.

38. F. H. Richardson, “Plain Talk to Theatre Managers and Operators—Ch. XXV, Decoration—Facades,” MPW, Nov. 20, 1909, 713.

39. William M. Hamilton, “Has the Motion Picture Business Come to Stay?” MPW, May 9, 1908, 412.

40. “W. C. DeMille Talks on the Drama,” MPW, Oct. 9, 1915, 258. DeMille does seem to be deliberately echoing voices for an advanced theater that had already begun to be heard, most especially in reaction against the performance practices of David Belasco.

41. John M. Bradlet, “Motion Picture Theatre Construction Department,” MPN, Nov. 1, 1913, 36, 38.

42. “Illumination in the Modern Theatre,” MPN, Aug. 15, 1914, 42.

43. Edward Bernard Kinsila, “Modern Theater Construction,” MPW, Oct. 16, 1915, 417 (emphasis added).

44. A 1916 article by W. T. Braun, “the foremost architect of motion picture theaters,” specifies “50 feet wide 100 feet deep…is about the average city lot,” a number identical to the lot size proposed for the Brickbuilder contest. A subsequent article on a suburban theater suggests a similar lot size: “50 feet frontage by 125 feet in depth.” The relative consistency of lot size at this point suggests two things: the earliest store theaters occupied half a lot, while the subsequent movie palaces may have had to find ways of fitting within an increasingly crowded urban landscape, but they did not conform to conventional lot sizes. W. T. Braun, Architect, “Theater Planning and Building,” EH, May 6, 1916, 24, and Braun, Architect, “Theater Planning and Building: The Suburban Theater,” EH, May 20, 1916, 25.

45. Writing in 1916, when “very few of the remodeled store buildings still house moving picture exhibitions,” W. T. Braun noted that alleyways on either side were required by law in most localities. W. T. Braun, Architect, “Theater Planning and Building,” EH, May 6, 1916, 23. Nevertheless, for newly built theaters within both urban and suburban blocks, Braun still proposes a long and narrow theater.

46. The number of exits would depend upon the theater’s capacity. If only one exit was needed, which is the case in figure 2.2, symmetry could be maintained with an alcove to the other side of the screen, here used as the space for a piano.

47. F. H. Richardson, “Projection Department,” MPW, June 27, 1914, 1826.

48. John M. Bradlet, “The Construction and Conduct of the Theater,” MPW, Apr. 23, 1910, 635.

49. “Colonial Theater, Wichita, Kan,” MPW, Feb. 24, 1912, 677.

50. John M. Bradlet, “On the Road,” MPN, Oct. 25, 1913, 31.

51. Grau, “Vaudeville in Moving Picture Theatres,” MPW, May 7, 1910, 726.

52. C. Y., “The Lighting of Theaters,” MPW, May 7, 1910, 743.

53. “Screens and What to Know About Them,” MPN, Aug. 15, 1914, 33.

54. MPW, Jan. 6, 1911, 76.

55. MPW, Mar. 16, 1912, 987. Was there any evidence of the effectiveness of the curved screen outside of the advertisements? The only seeming independent observation comes from a 1912 article that does a comparison with a flat screen with less compelling results: when viewing the image from the extreme side angle of box seats, the writer notes, “it cannot be said that all distortion disappeared, but the foreshortening did not seem too obvious.” On the other hand, the article appeared in a journal with a good deal of advertising for this very screen. H. F. H., “The Perfection Concave Screen,” MPW, Mar. 23, 1912, 1057.

56. “Conversation Heard in the Office of a Dealer in Motion Picture Machines,” MPW, May 4, 1907, 138.

57. See Bowser, Transformation, 94–95, and Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (165–70).

58. “Too Near the Camera,” MPW, Mar. 25, 1911, 633. I have found one early—and unusual—dissenting voice: “The moving picture may present figures greater than life size without loss of illusion…” Summers, “The Moving Picture Drama and the Acted Drama,” MPW, Sept. 19, 1908, 211.

59. “Editorial—The Factor of Uniformity,” MPW, July 24, 1909, 115.

60. J. M. B., “The Size of the Picture,” MPW, Mar. 11, 1911, 527.

61. The excessively long theater in New Haven mentioned above did have a comparably larger screen, specifically 19 feet. Richardson, “Projection Department,” MPW, June 27, 1914, 1826.

62. F. H. Richardson, Motion Picture Handbook: A Guide for Managers and Operators of Motion Picture Theatres (1910; 2d ed., 1912), and Richardson, Bluebook of Projection (6th ed., 1937).

63. F. H. Richardson, “Plain Talk to Theatre Managers and Operators—Ch. XIX, The Curtain,” MPW, Oct. 2, 1909, 444.

64. F. H. Richardson, “Trouble Department,” MPW, Nov. 5, 1910, 1050.

65. Is the long and narrow theater a distinctively American form? This is a question well worth asking if it does have an impact on American film production. Unfortunately, it is hard to determine from sources I have been able to locate, but there is some evidence that things were different in Europe. A 1910 article on a new “de luxe” London theater that seats 450–500 specifies dimensions of 40 feet wide by 68 feet long. “The screen is 14 by 12 feet, and is set in a beautifully finished proscenium.” An American theater at this time would likely have used length rather than width to achieve this capacity. “A London Moving Picture House De Luxe,” MPW, Feb. 26, 1910, 293.

66. “W. C. DeMille Talks on the Drama,” MPW, Oct. 9, 1915, 258.

67. Charles A. Whittemore, “The Moving Picture Theatre,” The Brickbuilder 23.2, “The Moving Picture Theatre Special Number” Supplement (Feb. 1914): 41.

68. John M. Bradlet, “Construction Decorations,” MPW, Jan. 21, 1911, 134.

69. “Seating and Interior Decoration—Seating a Theatre,” MPN, Aug. 15, 1914, 31.

70. Thomas Bedding, “The Eternal Feminine and Her Hat,” MPW, Apr. 9, 1910, 546.

71. Bowers, Nickelodeon Theaters, 97, 34. Eileen Bowser quotes a 1909 Moving Picture World article stating, “All theaters should have a sloped floor. The day of the flat floor is past.” Bowser does question this, but provides no counter-evidence: “That might be, but more theaters still had flat floors than sloped ones” (Bowser, Transformation, 126).

72. “The Princess of Milwaukee,” MPW, Oct. 22, 1910, 938; “New Empire, Detroit, Mich.,” MPW, Dec. 5, 1914, 1369.

73. See Ben Singer, “Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors,” Cinema Journal 34.3 (Spring 1995): 5–35, and the series of replies that followed in its wake: two replies in the Spring 1996 issue together with a response from Singer and then another two articles in Summer 1997 with another reply by Singer.

74. W. Stephen Bush, “The Triumph of the Gallery,” MPW, Dec. 13, 1913, 1256. Musser notes a similar hostility in the U.S. (Emergence, 432).

75. Frohman, “The Moving Picture and Its Place in American Drama,” The Brickbuilder 23.2, “The Moving Picture Theatre Special Number” Supplement (Feb. 1914): 4.

76. H. L. Nella, “Technical Talks,” EH, June 17, 1916, 23.

77. “A London Moving Picture House De Luxe,” 293. For the dimensions and seating capacity of this theater, see note 72.

78. “Amongst the ‘Gods,’ ” MPW, Jan. 29, 1910, 118. Throughout this period, Moving Picture World repeatedly lobbied for higher prices as a way of raising the class status of motion pictures. For this reason, the editorial goes on to note, ruefully, “Here in New York City the exigencies of the building laws forbid the erection of a proper moving picture palace with seats ranging in costs, let us say, from a dollar down. Were those laws abrogated, no doubt some capitalist would come forward and give New York what it does not at present possess, and that is a proper moving picture palace.” When that palace did in fact arrive, with the opening of the Strand, differential pricing was not crucial to its success.

79. “The Modern Moving Picture Theatre—Ch. IV, Handling the Visitor,” MPW, Oct. 9, 1909, 482.

80. Untitled, MPW, Apr. 13, 1907, 88 (emphasis added).

81. “The Comet and the Solar Screen,” MPW, Sept. 10, 1910, 572. Smell was also connected to light in this East Side tenement theater; this sentence immediately follows the description of the perfuming usher: “Most noticeable was the amount of diffused light throughout the auditorium.”

82. John M. Bradlet, “The Construction and Conduct of the Theater. II.—Flooring,” MPW, Apr. 30, 1910, 679.

83. W. Stephen Bush, “The Coming Ten and Twenty Cent Moving Picture Theater,” MPW, Aug. 29, 1908, 152 (emphasis added).

84. Henry C. Montague, “Necessary Precautions in the Interior Construction of Moving Picture Theaters,” MPW, Mar. 21, 1908, 228.

85. “Caput Augmenti,” MPW, Aug. 21, 1909, 247.

86. Will Hemsteger, “Explaining the Picture” (letter), MPW, Aug. 13, 1910, 359.

87. “Coliseum Theater, Seattle, Wash.,” MPW, July 15, 1911, 26.

88. “Saxe’s Orpheum Theatre,” MPW, Feb. 24, 1912, 675.

89. Fred Mariott, “An English View of the American Moving Picture,” MPW, July 24, 1909, 116.

90. For this reason, a European theater that wasn’t dark could be treated as news of progress by American journals, as this report on a new theater in Berlin demonstrates: “The new theatre contains one featured which is an absolute novelty in German motion picture houses, namely, that it does not require to be darkened while the films are being shown.” Untitled, MPN, Jan. 4, 1913, 7.

91. “America First in Picture Theatres,” MPN, Mar. 21, 1914, 25.

92. On the other hand, the late-nineteenth-century darkening of the auditorium discussed in the last chapter could initially be associated with danger in the European theaters as well. Iain Mackintosh has noted: “The gradual darkening of the auditorium at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign convinced the righteous churchgoer once again that the ‘pit’ of the theater was well named…. Darken the auditorium and…scouts from the neighboring brothels might overstep the limits of decency. A semi-darkened auditorium was therefore a dangerous place.” Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience, 37.

93. “Keith and Proctor and the Picture. Valuable Appreciation and Progress,” MPW, Jan. 14, 1911, 70.

94. “Vitagraph Picture Theater,” MPW, Feb. 14, 1914, 786.

95. “Chicago Notes: Helpful Hints to Exhibitors. By a Picture Lover,” MPW, Apr. 2, 1910, 507.

96. John M. Bradlet, “Construction Decorations,” MPW, Jan. 28, 1911, 184.

97. F. H. Richardson, “Projection Department”—“Lighted Auditoriums,” MPW, Jan. 27, 1912, 259 (emphasis added).

98. C.Y., “The Lighting of Theaters,” 741.

99. F. H. Richardson, “Trouble Department,” MPW, Oct. 29, 1910, 989.

100. Theater historian John Gassner writes, “illusion can be created for the works of nineteenth-century realists and their twentieth-century successors only when the acting area is treated as both geographically and psychologically distinct from the area occupied by the audience.” Gassner, Directions in Modern Theatre and Drama (1965), 55. One might reasonably object that film by its nature does not need to make such a distinction, in which case the architectural solutions that sought to set the screen in a different space from that of the auditorium are similar to the injunction not to look at the camera.

101. F. H. Richardson, “Plain Talk to Theatre Managers and Operators—Ch. XIX, The Curtain,” MPW, Oct. 2, 1909, 444.

102. George B. Rockwell, “Framing the Screen,” MPW, Sept. 23, 1911, 874. In the same column, Rockwell pointed to another value for black masking at the time: “Many exhibitors make the mistake of putting a frame around the screen and then go hunting for a lens to fill the space left, with the result that as [sic] it is practically impossible to procure a lens that will fit the curtain exactly to the edges. The picture will be either too small or will overlap the frame and if the frame is gilded as it is in most cases, the dancing shadows prove very distracting to the eye of the audience and in no way help to produce good results.”

103. Charles E. Schneider, “The So Called Daylight Screens,” MPW, Apr. 15, 1911, 824.

104. “A Screen Suggestion,” MPW, Apr. 8, 1911, 754.

105. F. H. Richardson, “Trouble Department,” MPW, Nov. 12, 1910, 1109. Richardson also notes, “In Australia they are projection moving pictures 35 feet wide,” a much greater size than almost all U.S. theaters.

106. “A Plate Glass ‘Curtain,’ ” MPW, July 31, 1909, 166.

107. Advertisement for “Silverine Curtain Coating,” MPW, July 31, 1909, 166.

108. Montague, “Necessary Precautions in the Interior Construction of Moving Picture Theaters,” MPW, Mar. 21, 1908, 228.

109. “A Newly Invented Cinematograph Screen That Does Not Need Darkness,” 26. An article in The Brickbuilder detailing the specific architectural requirements for the film theater explains one reason for this law that speaks to concerns about the dangers of motion pictures: “at stated intervals the lights shall be turned on to relieve the strain on the eyes.” Whittemore, “The Moving Picture Theatre,” The Brickbuilder 23.2 (Feb. 1914): 42.

110. A 1908 article suggests placing the screen at the front of the theater and the projection booth at the rear for greater safety, and even claims that “many of the new places being opened are so arranged.” However, I have not come across any other description of theaters from this period that were in fact so designed. “A Hint to Builders,” MPW, Mar. 28, 1908, 256.

111. In fact, one kind of theater that emerged in the late 1920s regularly used projectors behind the screen, but it disappeared from the urban landscape as a consequence of television: the newsreel theater, which, not unlike a latter-day store theater, showed a mix of short films, cartoons, and newsreels, usually running about an hour. Space in this instance seemed the primary concern since a system of mirrors facilitated projection in a small space behind the screen, while the lack of a booth in the auditorium allowed for higher seating capacity.

112. See, for example, “Old Albany Theatre Closes” MPN, Aug. 8, 1914, 22.

113. “A New Department,” MPN, Apr. 11, 1914, 17.

114. “America’s Biggest Picture Theatre,” MPN, Mar. 14, 1914, 19.

115. Ibid. Additional information of the size and shape of the theater has been taken from “American Theater, Salt Lake City, Utah,” MPW, July 10, 1915, 275.

116. I should caution I am not claiming one-to-one causation here. Constance Darcy Mackay, for example, in what is I believe the first study of the Little Theater movement traces it “back to 1887 when the first small experimental theatre was established in Paris by André Antoine.” Mackay, The Little Theatre in the United States (1917), 2. There are certainly many factors that play into the Little Theater movement. I simply want to claim the store theater as one of those factors.

117. Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (2004), 4.

118. Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (2001), 52.

1. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (1975), 2.

2. I have previously referenced Robert C. Allen, on movies and vaudeville, and Charlotte Herzog on circus and traveling shows. See also Charles Musser, with Carol Nelson, High-Class Motion Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (1991).

3. “Longest Projection in the World,” MPW, June 27, 1914, 1816.

4. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 325. Similarly, Charlotte Herzog’s statement that “the vaudeville theater made a significant contribution to the architectural style of the nickelodeon” (22) would not apply to the store theater, but tautologically to the vaudeville-theater-turned-nickelodeon (Herzog, “The Archaeology of Cinema Architecture,” 11–32).

5. Allen, “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906–1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon,” Cinema Journal 18.2 (Spring 1979): 10.

6. Since, as has often been noted, the term “feature,” as it emerged from the store theater period, often signified quality rather than length, I have opted here to use the term “feature-length.” Because a vaudeville-style program would effectively limit the length of each “act” for the sake of overall variety, the programming strategies of small-time vaudeville would hardly encourage feature-length production. I address this issue more fully later in this chapter in the section, “The Vaudeville Legacy and the Variety Debate.”

7. In tracing his straight line from small-time vaudeville to the movie palace, Allen briefly mentions the legitimate theater as a site for feature exhibition, but overlooks the systematic role these theaters played in the development of the feature-length film.

8. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 231–32.

9. Irvin R. Glazer, Philadelphia Theaters: A Pictorial Architectural History (1994), 5.

10. Irvin R. Glazer, Philadelphia Theaters, A–Z: A Comprehensive Record of 813 Theatres Constructed Since 1724 (1986), 183.

11. Allowing 3 feet for each row, a standard figure in this period, would result in a depth of 141 feet, with the likelihood of some standing room space behind the last row adding to the depth.

12. Oddly, while the biggest opera houses had distances of a bit over 100 feet, the second longest was not a tiered horseshoe theater at all, and in fact had its seating all on one level: Warner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus at 108 feet, 3 inches. The only greater distance was the People’s Theatre at Worms, which Edwin O. Sachs writes was directly influenced by Bayreuth, but “only to a limited degree,” using something of a modified horseshoe. Sachs, Modern Opera Houses and Theatres, 1:29–32.

13. Nathan Myers, “Architecture and Construction,” MPN, Apr. 18, 1914, 27.

14. “Million-Dollar Theatre Opens,” MPN, Apr. 18, 1914, 23. I list the capacity as approximate because there were somewhat different claims in contemporary reports, ranging from over 3,000 up to 3,500. A 1913 floor plan by Thomas Lamb lists the capacity as 2,979, but I could not determine if this represented what was on the final blueprint. Another floor plan from the early 1920s shows the addition of seats to the back of the orchestra, which possibly accounts for the higher capacity in later theater directories, such as those published by the Film Daily Year Book. These floor plans are held in the Thomas W. Lamb architectural records, Dept. of Drawings and Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

15. Measurements here are approximate because they are based on architectural plans published in American Architect that do not indicate specific distances. Because the external dimensions of 155 feet by 277 feet were published (the remaining space taken up with stores and offices), it is possible to establish a scale for other spaces in the building. The orchestra was 112 feet wide for only about two-thirds of its depth since the seating area narrowed as it approached the stage. “The Strand,” American Architect 106.2022 (Sept. 23, 1914): pl. 2. I also need to qualify the claim of a square since the space of the orchestra and the space of the balcony differed in that the balcony was built up and over a lobby area behind the orchestra. So, while the auditorium appeared square from the orchestra, the balcony pushed back a bit toward a rectangle.

16. Kinsila, “Modern Theater Construction,” MPW, Nov. 20, 1915, 1485, and MPW, Dec. 25, 1915, 2348.

17. Kinsila, “Modern Theater Construction,” MPW, Mar. 4, 1916, 1459.

18. I. T. Frary, “The Allen Theatre,” The Architectural Record 50.5 (Nov. 1921): 359.

20. W. Stephen Bush, “Opening of the Strand,” MPW, Apr. 18, 1914, 371.

21. With the move to frontal seating in the twentieth century, side boxes were conceived as a way of echoing the horseshoe design without having a horseshoe.

22. W. Stephen Bush, “Opening of the Strand,” MPW, Apr. 25, 1914, 502.

23. Siry, The Chicago Auditorium Building, 22–24.

24. Ibid., 5. This was not a completely disinterested ambition: “Peck also envisioned access to cultural privilege as a politically effective counterweight to labor agitation and violence” (121).

25. And this rejection had more than an aesthetic purpose: “above all, the Auditorium was to be the prime symbol of Chicago’s aspirations to a regionally distinctive cultural life that professed a socially inclusive, democratic character. This ideological aim compelled Adler and Sullivan to rethink conventions of nineteenth-century European and American opera houses and to create a room that was a critique of this type” (Siry, Chicago Auditorium, 197).

26. The Builder, May 23, 1865, as quoted in Mackintosh, Architect, Actor and Audience, 43.

27. W. Sidney Wagner, “The Stillman Theatre, Cleaveland, Ohio,” The Architectural Record 43.4 (Apr. 1918): 307, 310.

28. Henderson, “Scenography, Stagecraft, and Architecture,” 2:493.

29. The total capacity comes from a contemporary theater directory. It does not offer a breakdown by section, but a photograph allows an estimate of balcony capacity. Gus Hill, ed., Gus Hill’s National Theater Directory, (1914), 614.

30. J. A. A., “Regent Theatre, New York City,” MPW, Dec. 20, 1913, 1402. The Regent did not attract much attention until Samuel Rothapfel took over management in November, and subsequent commentary for the most part focused on Rothapfel’s programming practices rather than the theater’s architecture.

31. Seating capacities are taken from Gus Hill’s National Theatrical Directory (1914–15).

32. Consider, for example, this description of a theater in Rochester that sounds like a smaller version of the Strand, complete with its democratizing of the distinct spaces of the theater: “The balcony is built on the new method of cantilevering that has of late years come into vogue and which makes possible the construction of a modern theatre without the use of constructive columns on the first floor; instead of the usual high ceiling on the first floor the space between the first floor and balcony has been devoted to a spacious mezzanine with larger openings from same to first floor, which give a view of the audience from the mezzanine.” “Sacrificing Seating Capacity for Ideal Projection,” MPN, Jan. 9, 1915, 98.

33. Thomas W. Lamb architectural records, Columbia University.

34. Gregory Waller discusses this practice and how it was used in limited fashion in film theaters in the small southern city of Lexington, Kentucky, as well as theaters specifically designated for a black audience. Waller, Main Street Amusements (1995), 161–79. The city was small enough that the problem of palace architecture with its large open balconies apparently did not arise. In Shared Pleasures, Douglas Gomery also mentions a separate entrance to a blacks-only balcony in the South, a practice carried over from live theater, as well as blacks-only theaters, but does not indicate how palaces handled segregation (155–70). Matthew Bernstein, who has studied exhibition in Atlanta, however, has told me in conversation that the palaces there did have a separate entrance to an area of the balcony that was partially walled off from the rest, overtly hierarchizing the democratic space.

35. “Million Dollar Theatre Opens,” MPN, Apr. 18, 1914, 23.

36. For example, a contemporary article in American Architect, noted, “This is a feature often prominent in Continental theatres, but rarely introduced into the plan of theatres in this country, as it absorbs large spaces that are usually demanded for seating.” The Strand did, of course, have high seating capacity, but this was accomplished by the unusual depth and raking of its balcony, which then freed up space for the rotunda. By being tied directly to the balcony and serving as a transitional space from the orchestra, it departed from European opera houses. J. Victor Wilson, “Strand Theatre, New York,” American Architect 106.2022 (Sept. 23, 1914): 184.

37. Cornelius Ward Rapp and George Leslie Rapp were the architects for Chicago-based Balaban & Katz theaters, which were eventually acquired by Paramount.

38. Charles A. Whittemore, “The Motion Picture Theater I. Comparison of Two Types of Plan,” Architectural Forum 26.6 (June 1917): 174.

39. Bush, “Opening of the Strand,” MPW, Apr. 25, 1914, 502.

40. Since Siry sees this as a prime impulse behind the building of the Auditorium Theatre, he provides an extensive history of class relations and particularly the importance of theater in nineteenth-century Chicago.

41. “Crowds Flock to Strand Opening,” MPN, Apr. 25, 1914, 18.

42. W. Stephen Bush, “The Quest of Quality,” MPW, Oct. 17, 1914, 308. This article is a prescient insight into inevitable conflicts between exhibitors, who depend on the regular attendance of their patrons, and the studios, which depend on regular output of product. Since Moving Picture World was a trade journal for exhibitors, it is hardly surprising that Bush would like to see the power residing in the hands of the exhibitor, who should have the freedom to choose product on the “open market” as a way of ensuring quality rather than having to take a “feature service,” a forerunner of what would eventually be called “block booking.”

43. Bush, “Opening of the Strand,” MPW, Apr. 25, 1914, 502.

44. “Crowds Flock to Strand Opening,” MPN, Apr. 25, 1914, 18.

45. W. Stephen Bush, “A National Moving Picture Theater,” MPW, Aug. 8, 1914, 809.

46. Kinsila, “Modern Theater Construction,” MPW, Oct. 16, 1915, 417.

47. Quoted in Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (1996). Fuller provides a useful discussion of the importance of the Strand and other urban palaces to small-town exhibition. Fuller mistakenly identifies Paramount as part-owner of the Strand; the fact that Paramount did not own it but nonetheless featured it in advertising points to its importance for national exhibition.

48. “The Moving Picture Theatre,” Architecture and Building 43.8 (May 1911): 319.

49. George K. Spoor, “Value of Short Length Subject—The Feature: Its Use and Abuse,” EH, July 15, 1916, 47.

50. “Achievements of ‘Nineteen-Eleven,’ ” MPW, Jan. 13, 1912, 106.

51. Alfred H. Saunders, “A Forecast,” Moving Picture News, Jan. 4, 1913, 6. This article appeared about ten months before the journal changed its name to Motion Picture News (see chapter 6).

52. “Facts and Comment,” MPW, Dec. 25, 1915, 2329.

53. Michael Quinn “Distribution, the Transient Audience, and the Transition to the Feature Film,” Cinema Journal 40.2 (Winter 2001): 40.

54. Indeed, at least four different distributors provided films for the opening of the Strand, something that would be very unlikely only a decade later.

55. The New York Times quotation is from April 12, 1914. The others are from MPW, April 25, 1914. Because the official program for the opening did not list all the entertainments, the description of the program is a composite, drawn from coverage in the Times and the trade press. The only thing missing from this list that would become standard in later palace programs up through the 1950s is the short animated film, but even this early Rothapfel was taking note of animation’s possibilities, noting the “comic cartoon, which has lately come into vogue, is another gain for variety on the program.” “The Art of Exhibition,” 324.

56. “The Art of Exhibition,” 324 (emphasis added). In the course of the interview, Rothapfel does note, “I realize, though, that the film of greater length, or if you will, the feature, has come to stay, but I think it will be materially shortened in the future.” Rothapfel’s programming strategy was a key factor in determining the length of the feature.

57. According to an article on the opening, the Strand was “originally intended to be a home for big musical productions at popular prices.” “New Strand Opens; Biggest of Movies,” NYT, Apr. 12, 1914, sec. 3, 15.

58. William N. Selig, “Present Day Trend in Film Lengths,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 181.

59. Carl Laemmle, “Doom of Long Features Predicted,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 185.

60. Spoor, “Value of Short Length Subject,” EH, July 15, 1916, 47.

61. W. Stephen Bush, “Is the ‘Nickel Show’ on the Wane?” MPW, Feb. 28, 1914, 1065. Rick Altman has proposed seeing Hollywood genres as inherently mixed forms. Might we consider the variety aesthetic as one reason for this? Altman, Film/Genre (1999).

62. “Weak Spots in a Strong Business—VII,” MPN, Mar. 20, 1915, 33.

63. “San Francisco Greets Two Eastern Showmen Heartily,” MPW, Jan. 4, 1919, 48.

64. “Weak Spots in a Strong Business—VII,” 33. It is worth noting that Plimpton’s comments begin with a strong defense of the short film not just as an element in palace programming, but also for the “smaller exhibitor,” who would show nothing but short films, an exhibitor who would in fact no longer exist by the end of the decade. My calculation, following F. H. Richardson, is based on a running time of 18 minutes for each reel: “Twenty-five minutes is the extreme limit of time for 1,000 feet of film. Fifteen to twenty minutes is ordinary time for most subjects, and only once in a great while will you get a thousand foot film that may be run in less than fifteen minutes—none more than one minute less. Ordinary time for ordinary reels of film is about eighteen minutes.” Richardson, “Plain Talk to Theatre Managers and Operators—Ch. XV, Speed,” MPW, Aug. 21, 1909, 249.

65. In the article Plimpton specifically dismisses the absence of dialogue as a reason for shorter running times. Seemingly, for him, the causation is external, the need to allow time for other elements in the program.

66. “Crowds Flock to Strand Opening,” MPN, Apr. 25, 1914, 18.

67. “Booming the Feature Film,” MPN, Jan. 17, 1914, 32.

68. “Is the Short Length Film Doomed?” MPN, Oct. 25, 1913, 14.

69. “Public Wants Larger Films, Says David Horsley,” EH, Jan 15, 1916, 28.

70. Richard Koszarski describes both practices in An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1921–1928 (1990), 53–59.

71. W. Stephen Bush, “The Regular Program,” MPW, Sept. 5, 1914, 1345.

72. Selig, “Present Day Trend in Film Lengths,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 180.

73. One of the earliest calls for different kinds of theaters, a 1910 article in The Nickelodeon, still assumes a variety format of short films interspersed with musical entertainment. It is only the quality of the films that calls for the different architectural spaces. (H. I. Dillenback, “Looking Into the Future,” The Nickelodeon, Mar. 15, 1910, 143–44.) By 1914, calls for theater classification became more common in the trade press for a simple reason: the emergence of the feature-length film provided a rationale rooted entirely in an emerging difference in production.

74. W. Stephen Bush, “Gradations in Service,” MPW, May 2, 1914, 645.

75. W. Stephen Bush, “The Single Reel—II,” MPW, July 4, 1914, 36 (emphasis added). It seems likely that Bush’s change of opinion derived from a simple fact: “We cannot close our eyes to the fact that theaters with small capacity using mostly single reels are going out of business all around us.”

1. “Film Drama Supreme in New Orleans,” MPN, Aug. 8, 1914, 14.

2. John J. Coleman, “The Ultimate Triumph of the Single Reel Production,” MPW, Oct. 17, 1914, 325 (emphasis added). Coleman, a writer and director of single-reel films, offered this observation with some misgiving, as he did not think the move to features was an entirely good thing.

3. Hugh Hoffman, “The Father of the Feature,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 272.

4. “George Kleine’s Production ‘Quo Vadis,’ ” MPN, June 7, 1913, 13 (emphasis added).

5. Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750–1932 (1964), 10; first published in Equity (July 1930–Feb. 1932).

6. Ibid., 35–37. Twice at this point in his discussion Bernheim compares theater circuits to chain stores. Writing for an audience that has witnessed the explosive growth of the chain store over the previous decade, Bernheim clearly intends this as no more than a suggestive analogy, for in each instance he goes on to specify how theater circuits were not like chain stores.

7. “Little Items Gathered in the East,” The Nickelodeon, Apr. 1, 1910, 172. Richard Abel cites part of this quote as evidence of the chain store influence, in spite of the insistent use of the word “syndicate” here. Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914 (2006), 282.

8. “From the spring of 1909, for about three or four years, the wars between the Shuberts and the Syndicate was at its fiercest” (Bernheim, Business, 70).

9. Quinn, “Early Feature Film Distribution,” 141.

10. Richard Abel claims a run-clearance-zone “system innovated by General Film” in the nickelodeon period, but if Quinn is correct, it might be more accurate to say that both this and Paramount’s practice had their roots in legitimate theater. See Abel Americanizing, 47–48.

11. “Paramount Pictures Corporation,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 264. Tellingly, this economic motivation was cast as a quality issue, as W. W. Hodkinson, president of Paramount, noted: “Under our system of handling features of merit the producer will, to a very large extent, participate in the actual profits of his productions. These profits will be in proportion to his quality. Can you imagine a greater incentive to a capable and ambitious producer? You see it is in the very nature of our plan to force quality.”

12. “Paramount in Combine with Klaw & Erlanger,” Exhibitors Film Exchange, Nov. 6, 1915, 3.

13. “Shuberts and World Film in Big Deal,” MPW, June 20, 1914, 1700.

14. “Vitagraph Leases Broadway Theatre,” MPN, Nov. 15, 1913, 17. This did not mean only Klaw and Erlanger, since it was announced early on that Marcus Loew would subscribe to service from a combine of Biograph and Klaw and Erlanger (“Biograph Company and Klaw & Erlanger to Combine and Form the Protective Film Company,” Moving Picture News, June 21, 1913). But the connection with a major legitimate theater chain could help open doors to other venues. Loew, however, would mean small-time vaudeville, which suggests that Biograph did not conceive of the feature film in the same terms as Paramount, and this perhaps finally doomed Biograph’s efforts to enter into feature production.

15. Frick, “A Changing Theatre: New York and Beyond,” in Wilmeth and Bigsby 2:198.

16. In a discussion of the decline of the road in the teens, theater historian Jack Poggi notes: “the critics (notably Walter Prichard Eaton) blamed the producers for lowering standards and exploiting the public by misleading advertising. In one New England town, Eaton wrote, a musical comedy advertised as a ‘second company’ arrived with six musicians, shabby scenery, poor actors, and worse singers.” Jack Poggi, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870–1967 (1968), 33–34.

17. The need to send out a set for a performance taking place on film might seem the oddest feature of these companies. This is an issue I will look at more fully in the next chapter.

18. “ ‘Big Parade’ Breaks Long Run Record,” MPN, Jan. 28, 1927, 293.

19. “Belasco and the Famous Players,” MPN, May 10, 1913, 141. An article on the formation of Paramount Pictures the following year showed the advantage of movies by contrasting two imaginary announcements: “ANY LEGITIMATE THEATER Broadway, New York City Any Date First Performance ‘HIS MASTERPIECE’ by David Belasco All-star cast.——ANY PICTURE THEATER New York or Elsewhere (Same date as above) First Presentation ‘HIS MASTERPIECE’ by David Belasco Original Cast and Production.” “Paramount Pictures Corporation,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 264.

20. See Poggi, Theater in America, 28–45.

21. “Booming the Feature Film,” MPN, Jan. 17, 1914, 32.

22. MPW, Mar. 21, 1914, 1602. Eventually a Los Angeles showing would achieve an importance second only to New York because of the national attention that a Hollywood premiere could garnish. Still, advertising in the trade press was always more likely to refer to a Broadway run of a film rather than Los Angeles.

23. MPN published subsequent surveys of smaller cities and towns, but this first one in many ways was most significant because it would include all first-run theaters, which generated the most income for the producing companies. J. S. Dickerson, “21,766,366 Weekly Attendance in Key Cities,” MPN, Nov. 6, 1926, 1751. The date is also worth noting because both the Times Square Paramount and the Roxy opened after this survey was taken. That is to say, there was a great deal of very large palace-building that followed the survey, which suggests that weekly attendance figures by the end of the decade could well have gone a good deal higher.

24. Although he does not seem aware of the marked difference in the size of the New York City audience, Robert Sklar argues that performance at the weekly-change movie palaces affiliated with the major studios by the 1930s was crucial for a film’s exploitation in the rest of the country. In a case study of the Strand, Warner Bros.’s Broadway palace, in the mid-1930s, he cites a key reason: “the Strand’s weekly grosses seem to predict, in a strikingly stable way, final domestic rental income” (201). Sklar’s focus is chiefly on palace showings, which leads him to minimize the continuing importance at the time of long-run exhibition, which I discuss below. Sklar, “Hub of the System: New York’s Strand Theater and the Paramount Case,” Film History 6.2 (Summer 1994): 197–205.

25. For a brief overview on how the shift away from the tiered exhibition system related to changes in production, see William Paul, “The K-Mart Audience at the Mall Movies,” Film History 6.4 (Winter 1994): 487–501.

26. “Future of Moving Pictures,” MPW, June 18, 1910, 1044 (emphasis added). The article is listed as “By Daniel Frohman, in the New York ‘Sun,’ “but it is not actually authored by him; rather, it contains extensive quotations from an interview. Not everyone agreed with Frohman at this point. A 1911 Moving Picture World article, written as “The Italian films are just beginning to arrive in this country, and they are creating a furore [sic],” claimed that the great increase in the number of movie theaters had not “reduce[d] the patronage extended to the higher priced stage offerings.” “The Ever Potent Moving Picture,” MPW, Sept. 2, 1911, 612.

27. Bernheim provides a chart with the number of road shows on tour for the first week in April and the first week in December; the numbers presented here are his averages for April and December (75). I should note that Bernheim does not grant motion pictures the primary role in the decline. In a very nuanced history, he outlines a number of internal reasons for the decline, reasons that should not be ignored. But Bernheim does tend to treat movies monolithically, overlooking the great changes in film exhibition taking place in this period. I suspect the two stages of decline reflect those changes. The first stage coincides not just with roadshow exhibition of big features, but also with Robert Allen’s timeline for the ascent of small-time vaudeville as a key venue for film exhibition, an exhibition strategy that did convert many existing theaters into movie theaters. (See Allen, Vaudeville, 230 ff.) And, of course, the second, more dramatic fall coincides with the rise of the feature film not just in roadshow exhibition, but also in the palaces that begin being built around the same time.

28. Frank E. Woods, “What Are We Coming To?” MPW, July 18, 1914, 442.

29. Quoted in “Film Drama Supreme in New Orleans,” MPN, Aug. 8, 1914.

30. Poggi, Theater in America, 35.

31. “William A. Brady on ‘Films and the Stage,’ ” EH, Jan. 8, 1916, 16.

32. This is not to say that all of these theaters were used solely for feature films. It was not unusual for some to adopt a small-time vaudeville program or a program of short films. But venues that wanted to present themselves as first-class were more likely to gravitate toward the feature film.

33. The kind of theater determining a zone more than geography led to a striking oddity when most of the live-performance theaters that lined 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues were converted to movies houses. Construed as a separate zone, these theaters showed movies in second-run that had recently played around the corner at nearby palaces. Given the extended-run strategy described below, it became possible for a movie to go from a prerelease booking to a palace showing and then into a neighborhood theater without ever leaving Times Square.

34. “New Blood in New Programs,” MPW, June 6, 1914, 1394.

35. Rothapfel, quoted in James S. McQuade, “The Rothapfel-Mutual Tour Banquet,” MPW, Nov. 27, 1915, 1645.

36. “P. A. Powers to Provide Exclusive Films,” MPN, Aug. 9, 1913, 15.

37. “Warner’s Features, Inc.,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 262.

38. “This significant development gives the Mutual a total of six multiple reel feature releases a week—the greatest feature output of any releasing organization in the world today.” “Mutual Bids for Dominant Place in Film World,” EH, Dec. 18, 1915, 3.

39. W. Stephen Bush, “Stop the Vandals,” MPW, Nov. 28, 1914, 1210. Since “nickelodeon” did not signify size, capacity should not be seen as a factor in this rule.

40. “Picture Theatres and Others,” MPN, Dec. 20, 1913, 18.

41. Quigley, “Made-in-America Films,” Exhibitors Film Exchange, Oct. 23, 1915, 10.

42. “Manufacturers as Exhibitors,” Moving Picture News, Sept. 27, 1913, 30.

43. “The Candler Opens with a Fine Film,” NYT, May 8, 1914, 13.

44. Edward Bernard Kinsila, “Modern Theater Construction,” MPW, Oct. 16, 1915, 417.

45. “ ‘Spartacus’ at the Auditorium,” MPW, May 23, 1914, 1121.

46. Horace G. Plimpton, “The Development of the Motion Picture,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 197.

47. “Picturizing Broadway,” MPN, Jan. 2, 1914, 18.

48. Advertisement in NYT, May 14, 1914, 20.

49. “Motion Picture Criticism,” EH, Nov. 13, 1915, 10 (emphasis added).

50. Here are a couple of other examples connecting dignity to the feature film. The president of the William L. Sherry Film Company noted “the big features have done more to increase the high-class patronage of the motion picture theatre than any other single agency. A conservative estimate would credit them with a fifty per cent increase as to quantity and a far greater average with reference to dignity of the industry.” (William L. Sherry, “Do Features Pay?,” MPN, Mar. 21, 1914, 19. Sherry is billed as a “state-rights feature buyer.”)

Adolph Zukor, the founder of Famous Players, the first company devoted exclusively to feature film production, stressed “the necessity and advisability of connecting with one of the foremost legitimate producers [i.e., Daniel Frohman].” Zukor claimed his Famous Players strategy of high-class features had the “primary power to elevate the motion picture to a dignity and distinction hitherto unhoped for and a stage equal to the better element of the legitimate drama” (“Adolph Zukor, the Benefactor of Posterity!” Moving Picture News, Jan. 25, 1913, 14–15; emphasis added). In all these cases, “dignity” is specifically connected to legitimate theater/drama, a connection which made the venue itself of greatest importance.

51. Adolph Zukor, with Dale Kramer, The Public Is Never Wrong (1953), 11.

52. The connection between the feature and the upper classes was repeatedly stressed in the trade press. In a 1914 interview, feature producer Jesse L. Lasky stated, “Features, to my mind, proffer a concrete, lasting future in that, within their short year of existence, they have accomplished what the ‘one-real’ [sic] subjects failed to attain in fifteen years, viz., to interest the classes” (Jesse L. Lasky, “Accomplishments of the Feature,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 214). A Motion Picture News editorial the same year claimed that features appealed to the “well-to-do classes” (“Keep the Feature Above Reproach!” MPN, Mar. 21, 1914, 34).

53. As noted in my discussion of the investor’s desires for the Chicago Auditorium Theatre, the ambition for uplift was not unknown in the late-nineteenth-century theaters. But theater could never afford to charge so little for its product as motion picture producers could in the late stages of a film’s run.

54. “Film Company Gets Criterion Theatre,” NYT, Nov. 3, 1913, 9. Vitagraph apparently was forthright in its purpose for the theater, since almost precisely the same language appears in a trade press report which noted that Vitagraph intended “to use the house as a sort of an advertising venture for the films of the producing company.” For a contemporary audience, the article suggested the prestige of the venue by noting the timing of the premiere: the Vitagraph would follow the run of David Belasco’s latest play. “Vitagraph Leases Broadway Theatre,” MPN, Nov. 15, 1913, 17.

55. “Vitagraph Picture Theater,” MPW, Feb. 14, 1914, 786.

56. Wm. A. Johnston, “A New Departure,” MPN, Feb. 21, 1914, 13.

57. Advertisement in MPW, Mar. 7, 1914, 1281.

58. “Vitagraph Picture Theater,” MPW, Feb. 14, 1914, 787.

59. “Vitagraph Theater Changes Bill,” MPW, Aug. 22, 1914, 1085. This was, of course, not unlike the short at the opening of the Strand that showed the Strand itself. The key difference here was that the Strand’s short promoted the individual theater, while the self-reflexive gestures in the Vitagraph show were to promote the studio and, most importantly, its feature film output.

60. George Blaisdell, “Vitagraph Company Not Exhibiting,” MPW, Apr. 11, 1914, 192. One of the most insistent statements throughout this article is that Vitagraph does not intend to compete with other exhibitors, that the theater is there to help exhibitors. The theater could operate for Vitagraph like the legitimate theater in one other way: how the film worked in its New York showing could lead to editing, additional scenes being shot, or changed intertitles before the film was put into general release. In fact, The Wreck was re-released in 1919 with additional footage shot to bring it up to the then standard five-reel length and presumably make good on its initial financial failure. The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1911–1920, vol. F1 (1988), 1072.

61. Vitagraph was actually behind the curve in not realizing the potential for expansion this theater offered: “This theatre may prove the entering wedge in realizing that long-cherished dream of many motion-picture producers and theatrical firms—the alliance of a picture company and a chain of theatres.” Wm. A. Johnston, “A New Departure,” MPN, Feb. 21, 1914, 13. This would, of course, become the primary means by which the largest production companies established their dominance in the 1920s.

62. The only other discussion I have found of this bifurcation is in Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010), 41–61, but the presentation is fairly garbled because they are unaware of the connection between the combination system and roadshow exhibition, they ignore different levels in A-list production, and they do not distinguish between extended-run/reserved-seat and extended-run/grind or pre-release films and programmers. Particularly off-base is the claim that “in the 1920s…the major companies began to provide premiere runs at higher prices on Broadway for nearly all their feature productions” (44). This essentially collapses the differentiation in features that was central to studio production policies, most importantly the opposition between specials and programmers. Finally, the claim of a “standardization of exhibition” (96) ignores the continuing use of pre-release exhibition into the 1950s.

63. “Discussion of ‘Longer Runs,’ ” EH, Nov. 20, 1915, 19.

64. Vidor, King Vidor: A Tree Is a Tree (1953), 111.

65. NYT ad for The Crowd, Feb. 25, 1928, 11.

66. John Frick reports on a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin playing 100 performances in Troy, New York, in 1852. The production then moved to New York City and played 300 consecutive performances from 1853 to 1854. Frick, “A Changing Theatre,” 199–200.

67. NYT, advertisement for The Big Parade, May 29, 1927, sec. 7, 3.

68. NYT, Aug. 19, 1925, 14. Even in the unlikely event that Gould had personally selected the film, she did not exactly have a free hand. As a Loew’s house, the Embassy limited its fare to MGM films, and, inevitably, some of the studio’s biggest-budgeted films of the year. As a way of bolstering the exclusivity of the films, the theater was never billed as Loew’s; rather in its initial showings, advertisements listed it as Gloria Gould’s Embassy Theatre. Even a New York Times article on the opening of the theater made no mention of Loew’s. “Embassy Theatre to Open,” NYT, Aug. 23, 1925, sec. 7, 3.

69. NYT, Sept. 8, 1925, 28.

70. A 1926 Film Daily article on “road shows” states the following: “It concentrates entirely on the production being shown without interpolation of news reels, comedy, educational, prologue or variety act.” FD, Aug. 1, 1926, 4.

71. Var., Aug. 22, 1928, 10.

72. Var., Nov. 27, 1929, 8.

73. “Paramount’s 3d Run House,” Var., June 23, 1926, 8. See chapter 6 for a discussion of the screen at the Rivoli.

74. As a way of presenting a more nuanced view of the transition to the feature film, Ben Brewster proposes that “short film cinema and feature cinema in the early 1910s were essentially parallel institutions.” But the development of the extended-run theater suggests another way of looking at this: while there was a period of overlap, the presentation house was an evolution out of the nickelodeon, also with its roots in vaudeville, while the extended-run theater, with its roots in the legitimate theater, was the parallel institution to both nickelodeon and palace. Brewster, “Periodization of Early Cinema,” in Keil and Stamp, 74.

75. “Roxy Theatre Added to Fox Chain,” MPN, Apr. 8, 1927, 1254.

76. MPW, Apr. 4, 1925, 442.

77. In addition to these alignments, New York offered so many theaters that it was always possible to lease one for a specific film. So, for example, during the almost two-year run of The Big Parade, the two reserved-seat theaters MGM regularly used were not sufficient, and so it had to lease legitimate theaters, having as many as four road shows running simultaneously in this period.

78. “Schenck Organizes Film Theatre Chain,” NYT, May 24, 1926, 24. Joseph Schenck, chairman of United Artists’ board, made a precise distinction: “This does not mean in any sense of the term that we are building first run houses. The term ‘pre-release’ simply means that instead of hiring a legitimate theater…we shall first show the films simultaneously in the theaters of the new circuit. In a word, establishment of pre-release motion picture theaters means substitution of our own theaters for special legitimate houses.” “United Artists Enters Exhibition; 20 Key City Pre-Release Houses,” FD, May 24, 1926. It should be noted that Schenck specifically opposes pre-release theaters to “first run houses.” The new chain would soon lead to U.A. taking over half ownership with Paramount of the New York Rivoli, which, as discussed earlier in the text, Paramount had made an extended-run theater in 1926, the same year Schenck proposed the pre-release circuit.

79. “ ‘U’ Road Shows ‘All Quiet’ in Shubert Houses,” MPN, May 24, 1930, 81. Reserved-seat engagements of this film were already under way in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, and Baltimore, all big enough cities for Universal to have been able to make arrangements on its own. But box office warranted expanding the reserved-seat range, and for that it needed legitimate theaters. This article specifies that the film will have a $2 top at all houses.

80. After its first two feature films, when Famous Players needed to regularize output in order to be assured of access to appropriate theaters, “To produce sufficient films, Famous Players developed a new production strategy known as the ‘Thirty Famous Features a Year’ program and divided its productions into A, B, and C classes; with the original goal of producing theatrical adaptations [applying] only to films in the A class…. Famous Players’ new program set in motion the firms’ transition to what Motion Picture World called ‘regular features.’ No longer was each Famous Players film an adaptation of a major play with a major stage star, making it a special event. The company also produced a number of films with limited budgets, lesser known stars, and original scenarios, all in less time.” Notably, “theatrical adaptations” signified the highest level of production, that is, the kinds of films that would play in legitimate theaters, not the vaudeville-style palaces. Quinn, “Distribution,” 50.

81. “Schedules Tend to ‘Programs’: PFL Shooting Seven; M-G-M Six,” EHW, Mar. 17, 1928, 27.

82. MPN, Nov. 20, 1926, 1933.

83. It might be possible to claim this for Sunrise as well since Donald Crafton has detailed how the long run in New York was actually manufactured by Fox and not warranted by actual attendance. Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (1997), 425–528. The Life Begins example suggests there might be another way of looking at this, namely, that Sunrise did in fact live up to what the advertising promised, as the critics’ response indicated. This alone might have been reason to manufacture the run, even at a loss to the studio, since there could be a payoff down the road, as Crafton seems to acknowledge with a successful run in its subsequent Los Angeles engagement. But by 1928, this was already an established practice in motion picture exhibition, as I had pointed out in my discussion of the Vitagraph Theatre, and one that explicitly followed the practice from the legitimate theater: be willing to take a loss on the New York engagement in order to increase profits in subsequent exhibition.

84. Life Begins advertisement, NYT, Sept. 6, 1932, 15.

85. NYT, Feb. 24, 1928, 14.

86. “Roxy Did $29,463 on Holiday,” Var., Feb. 29, 1928, 7.

87. “When we go all through running ‘The Cockeyed World’ and using a very short magazine [i.e., newsreel] we found we had four minutes left for entertainment. We had to use a big symphony orchestra, a line group, and principals in four minutes. We got away with it.” “Stage Shows in Picture Theatres Out, Says Roxy,” MPN, July 12, 1930, 51.

88. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), 160. See also Bordwell, “The Classical Hollywood Style,” in Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985), 25 ff.

89. Sennwald, “Two for the Price of One,” NYT, Sept. 15, 1935, sec. 9, 3.

90. “Producer Says Crisis Faces Film Industry,” NYT, May 8, 1940, 29.

91. Ferguson, “Weep No More, My Ladies.” The article on double features and block booking originally ran in The New Republic (June 3, 1940); reprinted in Ferguson, The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson, ed. and with a Preface by Robert Wilson (1971), 298.

92. Of the palace-owning companies with road shows in smaller theaters, MGM had three (not an unusual situation for MGM in this period), Warner Bros. had two, Fox had one, and Paramount had one. In addition, Paramount had two films at extended-run grind theaters. Of the remaining roadshow bookings, United Artists had two, while Universal, First National, Pathé, and Sono-Art each had one. “13 Films on B’Way at $2.”

93. This is not to say there was no more building in this period, most significantly in 1932, with Radio City Music Hall and its sister theater, the RKO Roxy, which might be fairly described as the last two palaces. Subsequent theater-building in the 1930s and 1940s tended to be smaller neighborhood theaters or, especially after the war, small theaters for art films.

94. Warner Bros. did run a four-page advertisement in Film Daily with the headline “Profits, the Final Consideration!” and then listed the attendance figures for nine cities with extended-run presentations, the larger cities with a $2 top, the smaller cities at $1.50. It is not surprising that both New York (listed first) and Chicago (slightly higher) had over a half million customers. But there were also 110,000 patrons listed for Bridgeport, Connecticut, a city with a population of 146,716 in 1930 (www.ct.gov/ecd/cwp/view.asp?a=1106&q=250674), with the advertisement boasting more patrons to come: “Still going strong.” FD, Feb. 27, 1927, 6. There is some uncertainty about whether the film was run road show or grind; Crafton claims grind (The Talkies, 82), but the prices listed in this advertisement suggest road show.

95. “Stage Shows in Picture Theatres Out, Says Roxy,” MPN, July 12, 1930, 51.

96. “Expansion of Short Subjects Indicates a Limitless Field,” FD, May 30, 1926, 4–5.

97. Susan Ohmer provides a well-researched overview of the growth of the double bill, the debates around the practice, and the polling on it in. Ohmer, George Gallup in Hollywood (2006), 91–119.

98. “ ‘Presentation’ Making Films Chasers for Vaudeville,” MPN, Dec. 2, 1927, 1697.

99. “Double-Featuring Reaching Alarming Proportions and Crowding Out Shorts,” MPN, Nov. 15, 1930, 35.

100. In a 1943 article, Frank S. Nugent directly connected the double bill to vaudeville: “Historically movies killed vaudeville; and vaudeville, from its death bed, put the curse of double features on the nation.” Nugent, “Double, Double, Toil and Trouble,” NYT Magazine, Jan. 17, 1943, 11. Furthermore, in her study of double feature exhibition in the 1940s, Janet Staiger establishes that variety was the primary attraction not just for patrons, but also for exhibitors: “the double-billing policies and frequent program changes in most subsequent run-theaters offered variety of a different sort—variety in terms of the sheer volume of films being booked in the local theater and the different types of films included in the programs.” Staiger, “Duals, B’s, and the Industry Discourse About Its Audience,” in Thomas Schatz, ed., Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s (1997), 76. Since neighborhood theaters generally changed their bills twice weekly, double bills would yield a crop of over 200 films per year for these theaters.

101. “Double Features,” NYT, Apr. 16, 1933, sec. 9, 3.

102. Thomas Brady, “Hollywood Has ‘Double’ Trouble,” NYT, July 7, 1940, sec. 9, 3.

103. “Battle Proposed Anti-Dual Bill Limiting Ill. Shows to 135 Mins.,” Var., July 12, 1939, 6.

104. Doris Lockerman, “Double Feature Ban Called Both Fine and Ruinous,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 2, 1939, 5; “Horner Vetoes Measure to Bar Double Movies,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 28, 1939, 7; “Horner Veto of Anti-Dual Bill Measure Is Upheld,” Boxoffice, Dec. 23, 1939, 14.

105. Harold Heffernan, “Double Feature Programs Will Come to an End on First of December,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 8, 1942, 18.

106. Goldwyn, quoted in A. H. Weiler, “By Way of Report,” NYT, Feb. 11, 1945, sec. 2, 3.

107. Goldwyn, “What’s the Matter with Movies?” NYT Magazine, Nov. 29, 1936, 7–8.

108. Goldwyn, “Hollywood Is Sick,” Saturday Evening Post, July 13, 1940, 18–19, 44.

109. “50% of U.S. Now Dualing,” Var., Feb. 27, 1934; “Hollywood Is Sick,” 18; Frank S. Nugent, “Double, Double, Toil and Trouble,” NYT Magazine, Jan. 17, 1943, 11.

110. “Double-Bills Lead Here,” NYT, June 21, 1948, 17. The article also revealed that “theatres in the New York film exchange area lead in the double-feature field, with 76.6 per cent of the houses presenting twin bills regularly.” In making sense of this figure, it is worth keeping in mind that neighborhood theaters in New York greatly outnumbered first-run theaters because of the city’s population, and also these theaters were often the size of palaces in most other cities, so they were more dependent on attracting capacity crowds.

111. Susan Ohmer has an excellent history of the release of GWTW based on archival materials. But she has one assertion worth questioning: “MGM withdrew Gone with the Wind from theaters in July 1940 with the intention of re-releasing it again in January 1941” (Gallop, 181). Factually this is not accurate since GWTW continued its reserved-seat engagement at the Astor into the fall, when it was finally replaced by Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in early October 1940. More pertinent to my concerns is the fact that none of the sources Ohmer draws on describe the 1941 performances of GWTW as a re-release because it was all part of the orchestrated initial release of the film. I mention this not to be captious, but rather to suggest how little we know of releasing strategies in this period. For example, in an article on the January 1941 engagements of GWTW, which Ohmer calls a “re-release” and Film Daily terms a “general release,” it is explicitly contrasted to the road show, according to an MGM executive: “We plan to get behind the general release of ‘Gone with the Wind’ with advertising and publicity campaigns just as we would any other big picture coming out of roadshow engagements. It’s still brand new to the great mass of theatergoers and it will be exploited and handled accordingly.” Quoted in “May Eliminate Profit Guarantees on GWTW,” FD, Oct. 17, 1940, 3 (emphasis added).

112. Bosley Crowther, for example, suggested that “there is always the possibility that the producer, by making long pictures, is intentionally striking a blow at double features” (Crowther, “Length Vs. Strength,” NYT, July 14, 1940, sec. 9, 3). Furthermore, a 1944 article specified longer running times as Hollywood’s deliberate strategy “for ridding the screen of double features” (Fred Stanley, “The Hollywood Slant,” NYT, Aug. 6, 1944, sec. 2, 1). Nevertheless, as features did get longer in the 1940s, wily distributors could get around this seeming impediment by doing a reissue of two older movies and cutting both to fit in a three-hour time slot. Decades ago, I rented a 35mm print of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) for a class and, having assumed it was a theatrical print, was surprised to discover it missing about twenty minutes. There was nothing artful about the cuts: whole sequences missing, with the deletions made obvious by abrupt termination of soundtrack music.

113. Nugent, “How Long Should a Movie Be?,” NYT Magazine, Feb. 18, 1945, 10. As a way of driving home his point that the new lengths were unwarranted, Nugent contrasted running times of fairly routine movies from the previous year and found them close to running times from large-scale spectacle films of the 1920s.

114. Throughout the 1940s, only seventeen films opened in New York in reserved-seat engagements. Strikingly, British imports accounted for 30 percent of the reserved-seat films and more than half in the postwar period. (For the importance of British films in the postwar years, see the Conclusion.)

115. A 1949 article took note of this: “…during the war years when pictures enjoyed exceptionally long runs at theatres and, as a consequence, production schedules were scaled down.” “ ‘B’ Pictures Facing New Hurdle?” NYT, Mar. 27, 1949, sec. 2, 5.

116. NYT, May 14, 1950, sec. 2, 3.

117. The ad also specified: “There will be no increase in prices,” likely since the palace size guaranteed a high gross (advertisement, NYT, Sept. 24, 1950, sec. 2, 4). A subsequent advertisement offered a qualification: “When we originally announced a policy of Scheduled Performances, only Loge Tickets were placed on sale in advance.” This was actually a policy long in place at Radio City Music Hall, albeit with no reserved seats elsewhere. The subsequent Roxy advertisement asserted response had been so high that all seats would be available in advance (NYT, Oct. 8, 1950, sec. 2, 3).

118. NYT, Oct. 22, 1950, sec. 2, 4.

119. “Extended Runs, B’way Showcasing Make a Nat’l Release Theoretical,” Var., Oct. 30, 1946, 6.

120. “ ‘B’ Pictures Facing New Hurdle?” NYT, Mar. 27, 1949, sec. 2, 5.

121. Goldwyn, “Hollywood in the Television Age,” NYT, Feb. 13, 1949, 47.

122. Loew’s State on Broadway, which “had advertised itself as ‘the nation’s leading vaudeville theatre,’ ” closed December 23, 1947. The article announcing the closing did note, “Vaudeville is still shown in the city on the Radio-Keith-Orpheum circuit and various neighborhood theatres on a weekly or irregular basis,” but that would soon end as well. “Vaudeville Bids Broadway Adieu,” NYT, Dec. 24, 1947, 12.

1. “Announcement,” Moving Picture News, Sept. 27, 1913, 15.

2. “An Acknowledgment,” MPN, Oct. 25, 1913, 14. The change was also possibly a marketing strategy to distinguish itself from its chief competitor, Moving Picture World.

3. Reprinted from The Photo-Era (Boston) in MPN, Dec. 13, 1913, 22 (emphasis in original).

4. Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (1978), 211–20; Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (1981); Musser, The Emergence of the Cinema, 17–27; Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 132–36; and Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (1995), esp. “Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” 140–67.

5. Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31–36.

6. “Pepper’s Ghost” is described by both Castle, The Female Thermometer (151; illus., 153); and Altick, Shows, 504–5.

7. “What Is the Kineplastikon?,” MPN, Dec. 20, 1913, 30. “Kineplastikon” was the name for the process in Germany, where it had been developed; “Photoplast” was the name given the process by its American importer. The most detailed description of how the process works may be found in F. H. Richardson, “Projection Department,” MPW, June 19, 1915, 1938.

8. F. H. Richardson, “Photoplast,” MPW, Oct. 24, 1914, 494 (emphasis added). The only instance I have been able to find of this “stunt” exhibited in an actual theater was as part of a very elaborate vaudeville show that also included a feature film. This show took place at the Hippodrome, the cavernous New York theater designed for elaborate stage spectacles, but just converted to film shows as a way of improving its frequently uncertain economical status: “a new variety of film, the Kineplasticon picture, illustrating operas, while the chorus and orchestra render them in actuality.” “Hippodrome Succumbs to Most Popular Amusement,” MPN, Apr. 3, 1915, 44.

9. Joseph and Barbara Anderson have detailed the unfortunate persistence of the persistence of vision as the erroneous explanation for movement in movies in “Motion Perception in Motion Pictures,” in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (1980), 76–95.

10. Over the history of movies, there have been various attempts to perfect shutterless projectors because they offered potentially greater screen illumination and fewer opportunities for film breakage. In 1913, the same year that Motion Picture News changed its name, a continuous run projector, the Vanoscope, was announced. Contemporary commentary indicates an awareness that persistence of vision was not necessary for the illusion of movement, that in fact persistence of vision necessitated by intermittent projectors was a constraint on the illusion of movement:

11. Wertheimer, cited in Joseph and Barbara Anderson, “Motion Perception,” 81.

12. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916; reprinted in 1970 as The Film: A Psychological Study, 26–27).

13. I use the term “natural magic” deliberately here for connotations that date back at least to the Renaissance. In The Magician and the Cinema, Erik Barnouw discusses “the old philosophical issue between ‘natural’ magic—supposedly used for instructive amusement and scientific enlightenment—and exploitative magic using or claiming supernatural means, akin to sorcery and witchcraft” (107–12).

Sir David Brewster used the term in Letters on Natural Magic (1832) specifically to signal demystification: “The human mind is at all times fond of the marvelous…. When knowledge was the property of only one caste, it was by no means difficult to employ it in the subjugation of the great mass of society” (Letter I). This is an approach that already had a long history behind it; see Charles Musser’s consideration of “the demystification of the projected image” in the writing of seventeenth-century scientist Athanasius Kircher (Emergence, 17–20).

14. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1 (1967), 13.

15. Bazin’s invention of the “mummy complex” as a psychoanalytic explanation of the desire for realism in art does offer a way of connecting his realistic theory to the realm of magic. I think this worth lingering over here because it does oddly echo Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the uncanny that I will discuss later in this chapter. For Bazin, the plastic arts may satisfy a basic human desire embodied in the “mummy complex”: “by providing a defense against the passage of time it [i.e., “the continued existence of the corporeal body”] satisfied a basic need in man, for death is but the victory of time.” This then grants the “first Egyptian statue…a mummy” a magic function, which Bazin acknowledged. But he goes on to claim that “The evolution, side by side, of art and civilization has relieved the plastic arts of their magic role.” One might say a demystification takes place similar to the demystification of the projected image discussed in note 13. But Bazin acknowledges the demystification is never complete: “Civilization cannot, however, entirely cast out the bogy of time. It can only sublimate our concern with it to the level of rational thinking.” In this notion of sublimation and the inscription of the rational over the irrational, Bazin comes strikingly close to Freud’s notion of the uncanny. If Bazin himself did not recognize this, it was because he was finally more concerned with the role of realism over that of magic, but we might say that his theory of realism always allows for the return of the repressed magical. Bazin, What Is Cinema? 1:9–10.

16. Musser, Emergence, 15–22. Musser’s remarks on the “demystification of the projected image” (17–19) are particularly relevant to my concerns here.

17. Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre (1975), 7.

20. Mordercai Gorelik, New Theatres for Old (1940), 164–65. See also Marker, Belasco, 63, 141–42.

21. I think it also likely that financial considerations or space limitations of the stage could dictate a trompe l’oeil effect like foreshortening even for constructed environments. Still, the desire to reproduce as accurately as possible seems to dominate the period.

22. Gorelik, New Theatres for Old, 165.

23. “What the Motion Picture Theatre Replaces,” MPN, Dec. 20, 1913, 28.

24. Here follows a number of random examples from trade journals writers and film practitioners of the period:

25. Gunning, “Astonishment,” 116.

26. When Belasco was invoked as a model or D. W. Griffith was praised as the Belasco of the screen, realism was obviously the key issue. In this context, it might seem odd that theater manager Samuel Rothapfel would be praised as the Belasco of the screen, but the comparison invokes the practice of “staging the picture,” which is explained in the next section of this chapter. James S. McQuade, who made the comparison, seems to acknowledge a tension inherent in the realism of the film image by praising Rothapfel for making the image more real: “How he…transforms what were only shadows into living sentient beings.” The way he does this, however, brings him even closer to Belasco since he creates a spectacle around the movie image, which demonstrates his “great resourcefulness…in the staging of his pictures.” McQuade, “The Belasco of Motion Picture Presentations,” MPW, Dec. 9, 1911, 796.

27. Although I finally want to make something very different out of this, Christian Metz focuses precisely on the distinctive play in the screen image between absence and presence as a way of distinguishing it from our experience of stage performance. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (1982), 61–68.

28. Louis Delluc, “Beauty in the Cinema,” in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, vol. 1 (1988), 137.

29. “The Modern Moving Picture Theatre—Ch. V, Showing the Picture,” MPW, Oct. 16, 1909, 520. This article appeared as part of a series—hence “Chapter V”—of unsigned articles on new approaches to movie theaters.

30. A 1908 article noted that “two regular playhouses…have been permanently given over to the moving picture shows in Brooklyn,” while in 1909 F. H. Richardson already saw the nickelodeon yielding to larger theaters similar to legitimate theaters: “That the ‘store room theater’ will gradually disappear seems certain, but their place will be taken by especially built theaters, seating from five hundred to a thousand, most of them giving a mixed bill of motion pictures and vaudeville at ten cents admission. Many of these are already built and more are projected here in Chicago.” “Moving and Talking Pictures Attract Many,” MPW, June 27, 1908, 541; F. H. Richardson, “What Is in the Future?” MPW, Aug. 28, 1909, 280.

31. MPN Nov. 1, 1913, 38 (emphasis added). Within a year, the screen in the stage setting was a commonplace: a description of the Duplex Theater (Detroit) previously discussed in the introduction comments on “the picture screen…being viewed through a stage setting of scenery of the usual type at the sides and top of the proscenium arch.” MPW, Sept. 12, 1914, 1525 (emphasis added).

32. The large theater was the New Willis Wood Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, a 2,000-seat theater originally built in 1900 for “the highest class of drama and musical comedy. But patronage began to wane, people were going to the picture theaters.” Consequently, the owners remodeled it as a picture house: “The stage has been entirely transformed, all of the old settings have been removed and a permanent setting built instead. In front of the screen is a lattice window which draws apart, disclosing a smaller curtain which when raised shows the screen. Standing in the center of the stage is a small electric fountain which operates during the intermission. Around this are banked hundreds of ferns and flowers.” “Among the Picture Theaters,” MPW, Dec. 5, 1914, 1367.

The smaller theater was the Majestic Theatre in Cleveland, and it tried something sufficiently unusual to suggest the picture settings were still in an experimental stage: “…a special stage setting, the screen removed to one side so that the orchestra could be accommodated on one side. A grassy lawn-like effect was secured by laying a green drop from the stage to the auditorium incline.” The off-center screen, which I have not found elsewhere, was likely necessitated by the small size of the stage. “Unique Stage Setting,” MPW, July 25, 1914, 591.

33. MPW, Mar. 12, 1915, 1587.

34. MPW, May 1, 1915, 705.

35. The New York Clipper, May 21, 1919, 34.

36. MPN, Nov. 22, 1919, 3741.

37. MPN, Jan. 30, 1920, 408.

38. Raymond Fielding, ed., A Technological History of the Motion Pictures and Television (1967; rpt., 1983), 119.

39. N.Y. Mail and Express, Sept. 21, 1897, 2, cited in Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 261–62.

40. MPN, Nov. 21, 1925, sec. 2, 63, and June 12, 1926, sec. 2, 107.

41. “Colonel Varners Opens New House in North Carolina,” MPN, May 30, 1925, 2704; “Stage Treatments: Atmospheric Setting,” MPN, Sept. 2, 1927, 663.

42. The last instance of an entry for “Picture Sets” occurs in MPH, “Better Theatres” sec., Nov. 19, 1932, 55, at which point the number of suppliers had been reduced to three. For reasons that will be discussed in the next chapter, the use of picture sets was abandoned following the introduction of sound. The 1932 date does seem very late, but it is possible that picture settings were in limited use or that the inclusion of the entry was the result of careless copy editing. The latter seems more likely to me since the supply companies themselves had ceased advertising picture sets toward the end of the 1920s. The following year, three of these companies do turn up under a new entry, “Scenic Artist Service”: “Oftentimes an exhibitor is in need of someone to paint a front drop or curtain, or do some special building and painting of sets for a stage prologue. There are several reliable firms that make a specialty of this kind of work.” MPH, “Better Theatres” sec., Oct. 21, 1933, 38.

43. MPN, Jan. 24, 1920, 1846.

44. MPN, sec. 2, June 12, 1926, 51.

45. Since Sigmund Freud’s work has recently, once again, become highly contested in the academy, I would like to explain my invocation of him here. Three assumptions underlie my appropriation: (1) I do not regard Freud as the ultimate arbiter or the final word on the workings of the human mind; (2) I do not intend this chapter to serve as a validation of Freud’s thought; (3) since I am not a psychiatrist, I have no illusion that anyone who is a psychiatrist could take what I am writing here as furthering psychoanalytic thought, nor do I wish that anyone who isn’t a psychiatrist should. Whatever we finally make of the conceptual theories underlying Freud’s observations, I do think that we humanists can find greatest value in his precise description and analysis of human emotions. This is the area where I find Freud’s writing most evocative—and provocative. Most compelling to me—and of particular importance to my argument here—is his acute sense of the way in which seemingly opposed emotions may in fact be connected.

46. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (1917–1919) (1955), 249.

47. It should be noted that television does in fact work by a progression of still images and so is as dependent on the phi effect as movies. My point here is that the sense of contradicting our own rational knowledge of how the images are produced is less forceful with television. This is also not to deny that there is something uncanny in the way broadcast television at least makes visible spectral images that apparently surround us at all times in our daily lives, sending its images “on the air,” but here the uncanny quality if more connected to the physical nature of the world we live in rather than the apparatus itself.

48. “While such a presentation would seem to forbid any reading of the image as reality—a real physical train—it strongly heightened the impact of the moment of movement. Rather than mistaking the image of reality, the spectator is astonished by its transformation through the new illusion of projected motion. Far from credulity, it is the incredible nature of the illusion that renders the viewer speechless.” Castle, The Female Thermometer, 118.

49. NYT, June 6, 1915, sec. 2, 3.

50. Wm. A. Johnston, “A New Departure,” MPN, Feb. 21, 1914, 13.

51. “Vitagraph Picture Theater,” MPW, Feb. 14, 1914, 287.

52. H. M. Schoenbaum, “Screens and What to Know About Them,” MPN, Aug. 15, 1914, 33.

53. MPW, June 5, 1915, 1613.

54. How common was the fountain? By late summer 1914, Motion Picture News declared the following about fountains “Placed in the center of the apron and just back of the footlight line”: “Electric fountains have ceased to be novelties seen only in a few theatres. Managers are looking upon them as almost a necessary part of the decorative scheme of an up-to-date theatre.” The article then described how colored lights could play on the water, streams could create patterns for “a good water display,” and the water itself could be perfumed. It provided names of a dozen theaters that had ordered fountains, concluding “many other theatres” had as well. “The Electric Fountain,” MPN, Aug. 14, 1914, 33.

In spite of my opposition of fountain to waterfall, I did find one attempt at waterfalls, albeit miniaturized, which essentially made them a picturesque variation of the fountain. The Liberty Theatre in Portland, Oregon, had a stage with the usual tripartite division, the screen centered between the two watery re-creations: “On both sides of the velvet curtains of burnt orange which hide the screen are replicas of Oregon’s famous water falls, Multnomah and Bridal Veil. Here water ripples in true outdoor fashion over miniature rocks and under fairy bridges.” Strikingly, the waterfalls were treated as a separate show, something of an entr’acte between the film showings: “When the center curtain is down hiding the screen, the side curtains are drawn back, disclosing the cascading water falls on each side of the stage.” “New Liberty Theater, Portland, Ore.,” MPW, Sept. 22, 1917, 1840.

55. Of some interest here is Yuri Tsivian’s description of the understanding of the screen in early Russian cinema: “The screen appeared as an ambiguous and elusive membrane, a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that—at the same time—insisted that no boundary existed at all.” Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (1994), 155.

56. A Variety review of the Los Angeles premiere states the film “was directed by Lloyd Brown and Donald Crisp,” as if they deserved equal billings, but subsequent notices made clear that Brown was solely responsible for the stage performance (Var., Feb. 23, 1916, 23). As with other early feature film performances, and in the manner of combination companies, the film was “staged” in New York in the same way that it had been staged in Los Angeles, with Brown supervising both performances. Vardac writes about the New York showing as an example of theater ceding its mission to motion pictures, as if, contrary to the actual performances, the staged action was kept separate from the film: “The stage, recognizing the superiority of the film in pictorial narration, was now satisfied merely to provide introductory material” (Stage to Screen, 83).

57. Advertisement in NYT, Apr. 9, 1916, sec. 10, 10. According to the AFI Catalog, Ramona, “the first film of the Clune Film Producing Co., formed by W. H. Clune after the success of The Birth of a Nation, which had its premiere in Clune’s Auditorium, convinced Clune and his general manager Lloyd Brown that the demand for big productions had not been met by the supply of these films” (755). It is possible that Clune and Brown hoped these interpolations would surpass the prologue for The Clansman. Certainly surpassing the Griffith film seems to have been their ambition, as this review of the Los Angeles showing makes evident: “It is in 14 reels, the largest picture ever shown, outdistancing ‘The Clansman’ by more than 2,000 feet” (Var., Feb. 23, 1916, 23). By the time it reached New York, it had lost two reels.

58. “Notes Written on the Screen,” NYT, Apr. 2, 1916, sec. 10, 11.

59. “Ramona,” MPW, Apr. 22, 1916, 640.

60. “The Screen,” NYT, July 22, 1919, 10.

61. Advertisement for The Fall of Babylon, NYT, July 12, 1919, 12.

62. “A company of dancers and singers accompanied the film to various cities.” AFI Catalog, 260.

63. New York World, July 22, 1920.

64. New York Evening Telegram, ca. July 22, 1920.

65. “Rothapfel Blends Music with the Picture—Langorous [sic] Southland Atmosphere Brought to California Theatre to Aid Picture Presentation,” MPN, Jan. 31, 1920, 1249 (emphasis added). Ross Melnick provides the same quotation, but from a different and earlier source (Los Angeles Evening Examiner), so it is likely the Motion Picture News article was a reprint. Melnick takes the claim of innovation in the source article at face value, concluding, “By not privileging the film more than the live performance, he [Roxy] was able to interrupt its flow with music and dance to create one (largely) harmonious whole.” But since the interpolated stage number occurred only once and to suggest a transition between two distinct settings, the stage performance here does seem more subordinate to the film than in Griffith’s staging five months earlier of The Fall of Babylon, with its constant interpolations, an impression evident in the New York Times review cited above. In any case, the mixing of live performance and film was not exclusive to Roxy and more common than Melnick seems to realize, going back at the least to Ramona. Melnick, American Showman, 182–83.

66. Vardac provides a description of the use of treadmills and moving panoramas in late-nineteenth-century stagings of horse races (Stage to Screen, 75–81). This was precisely the kind of thing that movies should have taken away from the stage, according to Vardac’s argument, but other performances of In Old Kentucky, as will be described later, did feature a live staged horse race.

67. “Exhibitors Advertising,” EH, Mar. 20, 1920, 69 (emphasis added). It is worth noting that Exhibitors Herald saw the stage performance as a kind of advertising (articles about distinctive prologues ran in the “Exhibitors Advertising” section), something that would gain distinction for the individual theater beyond the attraction of the movie itself: “The whole is very neatly done and the management of the Riviera is to be congratulated upon its perfect synchronization. It is a stunt that can be effectively staged in any house and at little expense. The word of mouth advertising the Riviera received more than paid the firm of Balaban and Katz for their enterprise.”

68. J. M. B., “Motion Picture Theatre Construction Department,” MPN, Dec. 6, 1913, 30 (emphasis added).

69. Clarke, quoted in Colby Harriman, “The Theatre of To-Day,” MPW, Dec. 19, 1925, 706.

70. On the other hand, Crafton notes that reviews of the first Vitaphone performances, while full of praise, offered a criticism in similar terms: “The sound quality, however, was characterized by several reviewers as ‘mechanical’ or ‘metallic.’ ” Crafton, The Talkies, 81.

71. Advertisement for In Old Kentucky, Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 3, 1920, 10.

72. Live performers were used in something of a similar fashion at a showing of In Old Kentucky in Minneapolis, which otherwise restricted the performers to a staged prologue: “in the part of the film where the horse race is shown the negro actors [from the prologue] were again called upon to lend color to the scene. In the tense excitement while Queen Bess is neck and neck with the rival pony the cheers and appeals for victory rang out from behind the stage. The audience thrilled to this novel touch and in every instance broke out with cheers and applause.” “The Tale of Some Exploitation ‘What Am,’ ” “Exhibitor Service” section of MPN, Jan. 24, 1920, 1044.

73. “Directors Protest Use of Extravagant Presentations,” EH, Dec. 17, 1921, 39. This protest was in the form of a letter sent to Martin J. Quigley, publisher of the Herald, likely because promoting atmospheric prologues as a way of attracting the public was a policy of the Herald in this period. As a result, this journal ran countless articles suggesting formulas for successful prologues. The Herald insistently presented prologues as a kind of “exploitation,” advertising that could help promote individual films, and it continued to feature articles on notable prologues through the late 1920s.

Donald Crafton (The Talkies, 75) quotes from a John Ford article written in 1927 for Film Daily, in which Ford criticizes the live-performance aspects of film exhibition, suggesting that directors were generally opposed to presentations and prologues. A distinction needs to be made here: presentations were like vaudeville, with the Strand setting the prototype for this kind of show, while prologues were a live entertainment specifically oriented toward the feature film, intended to introduce it, and this dates to some of the earliest showings of feature films in legitimate theaters. The innovation of the 1927–1928 season was the increasing use of prologues in palaces, which was likely responsible for the directors’ renewed campaign against them. Ford writes about both, with presentations seen as destructive to the mood of the film, but he does not reject prologues entirely: “Personally, I prefer a musical prologue—one that is in harmony with the feature picture—something sweet and simple, beautiful and illuminative, sublime and inspiring—just so it is in keeping with the theme of the photoplay.” It is not clear from this if this musical prologue has any visual component, but Ford does add: “It is a significant thing that none of D. W. Griffith’s masterpieces have been accompanied by presentations when released…the orchestral prelude…is practically the only ‘prologue’ to a Griffith opus. To me, that is ideal.” Except for the New York showing of Birth of a Nation, Ford is wrong about Griffith’s major films. But perhaps he does intend to differentiate between presentations and prologues, and by a preference for a “musical prologue” he had in mind the pantomimed performances on stage featured in the Griffith prologues. Ford, “Thematic Presentations a Wish for the Future,” FD, June 12, 1927, 47. I want to thank Don Crafton for providing me with a copy of this article.

74. “Exhibitors Advertising,” EH, June 26, 1920, 69. This article focuses on a theater in Utica, N.Y., where the owner “devised and constructed his own mechanism for the occasion.” The point of the article was to demonstrate the value of live performance even in small cities: “What Mr. Lumberg can do successfully in Utica, Mr. Anybodyelse can do in any other city in the United States.”

75. “Treadmill Race Prologue Precedes ‘County Fair,’ ” EH, Mar. 5, 1921, 56.

76. I have come across one attempt to interpolate a stage race scene into the film itself for a performance of In Old Kentucky at the Madison Theatre in Detroit:

The article claims this “stunt” was a real boon to the box office, but that does not tell us how the contemporary audience experienced the scene, which was, after all, the most famous from the original play. And there is no way I could prove now that contemporary audiences might have felt something of a comedown in the return to the film, but it is worth pondering how that transition might have felt. In any case, there seemed agreement ultimately that it was best to limit such actions to prologues. It should perhaps be noted that this performance preceded the showing at the Riviera in Chicago by about a couple of weeks, so that the Riviera might well have had the model of the staged race at the time it decided to do everything but. “Madison Stages Real Horse Race in ‘In Old Kentucky’ Engagement,” EH, Feb. 21, 1920, 87.

77. As should be evident from the various quotations in this chapter, prologues—as well as other live performance surrounding the films—were frequently reported on in the trade press throughout the silent period. My general comments on the content and form of the prologue is based upon extensive reading in MPW, MPN, and EH.

78. An Exhibitors Herald article in 1920 did take note of a filmed prologue for the feature Sex, but thought the primary value of the prologue was that it provided theaters with the model for a staged prologue: “Those who viewed the production in the projection room were forcibly impressed with the prologue, a carefully and lavishly produced film preface in which the theme of the story was vividly set forth…. The producer should be given especial credit for his foresight in providing exhibitors with this excellent material for guidance in the preparation of presentation features…. Under ideal circumstances it will probably be found most advisable to use such a prologue as a guide, fashioning after it a stage presentation with human players, working into it the best musical arrangement that can be improvised. In such a case, it may be found desirable to dispense with the screen prologue when the picture is exhibited.” If it is not possible to stage a prologue, the article concedes, “Certainly a film prologue is much better than no prologue at all,” as if the audience always needed to be eased into the diegetic world of the film. “ ‘Sex’ Prologue Provides Material for Staging Introductory Feature,” EH, June 5, 1920, 53 (emphasis in original).

79. In a 1926 article about movie exhibition in Berlin, Siegfried Kracauer articulates a critique that offers a different way of looking at the sense of continuity between live and filmed performance I describe here: “Rather than acknowledging the actual state of disintegration which such shows ought to represent, they glue the pieces back together after the fact and present them as organic creations. This practice takes its revenge in purely artistic terms: the integration of film into a self-contained program deprives it of any effect it might have had.” Kracauer (trans. Thomas Y. Levin), “Cult of Distraction,” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 95.

Kracauer writes nothing about picture settings, but I have found one example of their use in Berlin. A 1916 article on the medium-sized Nollendorf Theater describes the beginning of a show: “The curtain rises on a replica of the ancient forum at Rome. There stands the broken columns of this once noble gathering place. In the distance, a Roman arch stands, more perfect in its preservation than the rest. The stage lights are lowered and the scene becomes enshrouded in gloom. Now, it is pitch dark. Then, between the columns of the Roman arch a picture scene unfolds itself.” Edward Bernard Kinsila, “Modern Theater Construction,” MPW, Jan. 22, 1916, 602. Since the use of presentation acts that Kracauer describes seem to take their lead from American exhibition practice, it is possible the picture settings had far more extensive use than this one example. In any case, Kracauer’s final critique, a modernist view that seeks a distinctive essence for each art form, would be perfectly aimed against the theatricality of the stage set: “By its very existence film demands that the world it reflects be the only one; it should be wrested from every three-dimensional surrounding lest it fail as an illusion…. [Movie theaters] will not fulfill their vocation…until they cease to flirt with the theater, anxious to restore a bygone culture” (“Cult,” 96). Kracauer’s desire to wrest the screen “from every three-dimensional surrounding” suggests that picture settings might have been a common practice in Germany as well.

80. “Novel ‘Lost World’ Prologue,” MPN, Mar. 28, 1925, 1328-b.

81. Five years before this showing, Exhibitors Herald was touting the “scrim drop” as a device to effect the transition from stage to movie screen: “It is the long sought device that intimately identifies the stage presentation with the motion picture—essentially simple, as are most long-sought solutions…. At the Capitol theatre, New York…the device was used to bridge the step between stage feature and the opening scenes of ‘The Heart of a Child,’ Nazimova’s current Screen Classics production…. In the Capitol presentation, lights came up on a stage set to resemble as closely as possible the first scenes of the play [i.e., the film story]…. Then the scrim drop was lowered, giving first the impression of London fog, lights being manipulated to further the effect, and by a careful graduation of shading the picture was permitted to strike upon the drop. Naturally, the first scene was seen but vaguely. Within moments, however, the shadings had been so deftly changed that the picture was under way upon the screen without the transition having been realized by the audience…. One instance, it illustrates the effectiveness with which this transition, which has puzzled showmen for so long, may be accomplished.” “Screen Drop Gives Screen Effect to Interpretative Introduction,” EH, May 22, 1920, 57. Multiple examples of the use of projected movie images on a scrim to effect a seamless transition from prologue to the beginning of the feature film may be found in Lester M. Townsend and Wm. W. Hennessy, “Some Novel Projected Motion Picture Presentations,” Transactions of SMPE 12.34 (1928): 345–49.

82. EHW, “Better Theatres” sec., Nov. 23, 1929, 24.

83. To take a much later, albeit simpler, example, Radio City Music Hall, even in the 1960s and 1970s, would distinguish between its vertically cascading gold curtain and a simple curtain that parted in the middle, the latter used solely to distinguish between filmic portions of the program. The cascading curtain, however, would create a more decisive boundary between live and filmed entertainment.

84. The purpose Simon Trussler finds in the first instance of proscenium and curtain in the British theater in the early seventeenth century is of some relevance here: “the court masque…was to be of lasting importance in its introduction to the British theatre of the proscenium arch and its front curtain—behind which [machinist and designer Inigo] Jones would create his wonderful machines through which landscapes, mountains, castles, and artificial seas were created, or transformed one from the other, all with due attention to the illusion of perspective.” Trussler, The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (1994), 98.

85. The screen was, of course, placed within a proscenium from 1896 on when movies appeared in vaudeville houses as an item in a series of acts. Since contemporary description gives little indication of how the shows were staged, I cannot claim here that the feature film saw the first instances of the play of film image between curtain and screen I am describing. What I think is important is how conventionalized this play becomes after the advent of the talking film when the practice of picture settings was abandoned. In this context, the curtain is clearly easing the transition to film image as the picture settings and prologues once did.

86. The earliest references I have been able to find of the use of “canned” to describe movies are from 1914, the year when motion pictures are moving definitely toward features, making them seem something of an equivalent to legitimate plays: “canned drama” in “Paramount Pictures Corporation,” MPW, July 11, 1914, 264; and “ ‘canned’ actor” in Harry L. Reichenbach, “Pictures vs. Actors,” MPW, Nov. 28, 1914, 1221.

87. The earliest example I could find of the need for the human voice in film exhibition came in an article on the opening of the Regent, the same theater described on page 218: “At other intervals the monotony of the ‘silent stage’—there is bound to be some monotony in the long picture, however inspiriting it is—was delightfully broken by the voices of trained singers from the windowed recesses above and at each side of the stage.” However, it was not just the voices that enhanced the image: “Soft lights were played upon these windows [where the singers stood] and also upon the fountain which plays just in front of the orchestra platform.” W. A. J., “A De Luxe Presentation,” MPN, Dec. 6, 1913, 16.