ally's back room with its three

chairs and seven peepholes

was arguably the nation's first
motion-picture theater.
and technical ski ll.
The projector that bore Edison's name
had, in fact, been invented by Thomas
Armat, a Washington, D.C., bookkeeper, and his partner, C. Francis Jenkins, a government stenographer. After
months of tinkering, separately and
together, the two men had in the summer of 1895 put together a workable
projector, named it the Phantoscope,
and arranged to exhibit it at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, in September of the same year.

he partners borrowed money from

relatives to erect an outdoor tent
theater on the fairgrounds, arranged for a series of newspaper
articles on their wondrous invention,
and printed complimentary tickets.

When the expected crowds failed to

materialize, in large part because fairgoers were not willing to pay a quarter
for an amusement they knew nothing
about, Armat and Jenkins hired a barker who invited visitors to enter free
and pay at the exit only if they were
satisfied. The offer worked, but the customers it attracted entered the theater
with only the vaguest idea of what
they were going to see. Never having
viewed projected moving pictures before, they did not know that the theater had to be darkened. "The moment the lights were turned off for the
beginning of the show a panic ensued,"
wrote the film historian Terry Ramsaye some thirty years later. "The visitors had a notion that expositions were
dangerous places where pickpockets
might be expected on every side. This

The audience peeped through the holes on the back wall of Thomas Tally's first movie parlor.
80 AMERICAN HERITAGE NOVEMBER 1993

was, the movie audience thought, just

a new dodge for trapping the unwary
in the dark."
Jenkins and Armat never did figure
out how to introduce their moving pictures to prospective audiences. They
ended up losing the fifteen hundred
dollars they had borrowed, and the
rights to their projector were eventually sold to the company that licensed
and distributed Edison's peep-show
machines.
The Los Angeles debut of the Phantoscope, renamed Edison's Vitascope,
went off without a hitch. The Orpheum Theater was filled with vaudeville patrons who, though not accustomed to sitting in the dark, had no
reason to fear that they would be assaulted by those seated next to them.
The Los Angeles Times carried a complete description of the exhibition for
those who had been unfortunate or
unadventurous enough not to buy tickets in advance or to secure standing
room at the last minute:
"The theatre was darkened until it
was as black as midnight. Suddenly
a strange whirling sound was heard.
Upon a huge white sheet flashed forth
the figure of Anna Belle Sun, [a dancer
whose real name was Annabelle Whitford] whirling through the mazes of
the serpentine dance. She swayed and
nodded and tripped it lightly, the filmy
draperies rising and falling and floating
this way and that, all reproduced with
startling reality, and the whole without
a break except that now and then one
could see swift electric sparks ....
Then, without warning, darkness and
the roar of app lause that shook the
theater; and knew no pause till the

TOP: JOHN RIPlEY COLLECTION , KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY, TOPEKA; BOTTOM: BETTMANN ARCHIVE

next picture was flashed on the screen.

In the front of his store, Tally had set nation's first moving-picture theater.
up
automatic phonograph and peep- But although the technology for proThis was long, lanky Uncle Sam who
was defending Venezuela from fat little show machines that provided cus- jecting moving images was in place,
John Bull, and forcing the bully to his tomers, for a nickel a play, with a few people turned out to be reluctant to enknees. Next came a representation of minutes of scratchy recorded sound ter a dark room to see pictures proHerald Square in New York with street- or a few seconds of flickering moving jected on a sheet. Unable to lure cuscars and vans moving up and down, images. Tally now partitioned off the tomers into his " theater," Tally did
then Cissy Fitzgerald 's dance and last back of his parlor for a "vitascope" the next best thing. He punched holes
of all a representation of the way May room. To acquaint the public with in the partition separating the larger
Irwin and John C. Rice kiss. [The May what he billed as the "Wizard's latest storefront from the vitascope room
Irwin Kiss, perhaps the most popular wonder," he took out ads in the Los and, according to Terry Ramsaye, inof the early films, was a fifvited customers to "peer in
teen-second close-up of the
at the screen while standing
embrace in the closing scene
in the comfortable security
of the musical comedy The
of the well lighted phonoWidow Jones.] Their smiles
graph parlor.... Three peep
and glances and expressive
holes were at chair level for
gestures and the final joyous,
seated spectators, and four
overpowering, luscious oscusomewhat higher for standees
lation was repeated again and
-standing room only after
again, while the audience fairthree admissions, total capacly shrieked and howled apity seven. The price per peep
hole was fifteen cents."
proval. The vitascope is a
won der, a marvel, an out'l'he 19th Century Ka.rvel
As Tally and other storestanding example of human
front proprietors quickly dis--AAKONG TBI: VIEWS '1'0 Bl: SKOW'lfingen uity and it had an incovered, it was not going to
Village Blaclumith . .
Spanish .Artillery
be easy to assemble an audistantaneous success on this,
Portion of the Proceuion attend- Chica.go Police Parade
the Ceremonies atthe<Jor<>an old Bllilding
ence for moving pictures. Proits first exhibition in Los Annation of the Czar of Ru.aia 8treet Dances, London
at Moscow
Whirlpool Rapids
geles."
jectors were difficult to run
Loading a Coke Oven at Car- Arrival of Fast Mail, Paria
France
Spanish
Infantry
maux,
It was through length y
and impossible to repair; the
lila-reb of the French African Game of Carda
newspaper descriptions like
electrical current or batteries
Children at Play
Soldiere
Trewry in hit famoua Gardner
Boy
this one that prospective custhey ran on seldom worked
Rtbhon Act
Quarreling Babies
Caravan ofCamela, Egypt
Arrival of Family
properly; and the films were
tomers first learned about the
Street in Carlo
, Aquarium
German
St. Narc, Venioe
magic of moving pictures .
expensive, of poor quality,
Hurdle .J\\mptog.
Ruaaian Danos, Eto
Note how the article begins
and few. But most important,
with mention of the darkcustomers balked at entering
ened theater and refers to the
darkened rooms to see a few
darkness again in mid-paraminutes of moving pictures.
graph. Note too the reference
In April 1902 Tally tried again
to "swift electric sparks." Neito open an "Electric Theater"
ther audiences nor critics unbut was forced to convert it
to vaudeville after six months.
derstood how the projectors
It was the same story everyworked, nor were they con- A very early movie playbill promises to "confound the spectators."
where. As a disgusted Osvinced that the electricity used
to project the pictures was harmless. Angeles newspapers: "Tonight at Tal- wego, New York, operator reported,
ly's Phonograph Parlor, 311 South at first the vitascope drew "crowded
fter two weeks of sold-out per- Spring St, for the first time in Los An- houses on account of its novelty. Now
formances, the projector and its geles, the great Corbett and Courtney everybody has seen it, and, to use the
operators left the Orpheum for a prize fight will be reproduced upon a vernacular of the 'foyer,' it does not
tour of nearby vaudeville houses. great screen through the medium of 'draw flies."'
Although projected films failed to
But it turned out that theaters outside thi s great and marvelous invention.
Los Angeles could not provide the elec- The men will be seen on the stage, life attract customers to storefront thetrical power needed to run the projec- size, and every movement made by aters during their first decade of life,
tor, so the machine was hauled back to them in this great fight will be repro- they were nonetheless being introduced
to millions of vaudeville fans. "Dumb"
Los Angeles and installed in the back of duced as seen in actual life."
Thomas Tally's amusement parlor.
Tally's back room was arguably the acts-animals, puppets, pantomimists,

Farragut Theatre

To-NIGHT
IIIION'I

82 AMERICAN HERITAGE NOVEMBER 1993

BETIMANN ARCHIVE

arry Davis, a Pittsburgh

showman, attached the tony
Greek word for theater to
the lowly five-cent coin.
magic-lantern slides, and tableaux vivants- had traditionally opened and
closed the show because, being silent,
they would not be disturbed by late
arrivals or early departures. The movies were, the managers now discovered, the perfect dumb acts: they were
popular, cheaper than most live performers, didn't talk back or complain
about the accommodations, and could
be replaced weekly.
Most of the early projectors held
only fifty feet, or sixteen seconds, of
film, which if looped and repeated five
or six times could be stretched out to
almost two minutes. Seven or eight
films, displayed one after another in
this fashion, lasted fifteen to twenty
minutes, the perfect length for a vaudeville "turn."

tomers into a moving-picture theater.

What made the moment right was the
fact that after 1903 the manufacturers-as the film producers referred to
themselves-grew concerned that their
customers were weary of the same old
"actualities" and began to make pictures that told stories.
Although it was not possible to tell
much of a story in a few silent minutes,
audiences were captivated by the new
films. As demand increased, the manufacturers developed assembly-line production methods, distributors streamlined the process of getting the films
to exhibitors, and businessmen opened
storefront theaters to exhibit the in-

creasingly sophisticated prouuct.

The first freestanding muv ing-pic
ture theater was probably thl work of
Harry Davis, Pittsburgh's m0st prosperous showman. In Apr il of 1904
Davis opened an amusement arcade
near his Grand Opera Hou se. When a
fire burned it down, he rented a larger
storefront, but instead of Outfi tting it
as an arcade, he filled the ruom with
chairs, gaily decorated th e exterior,
and, attaching the high-tor ed Greek
word for theater to the lowlv five-cent
coin, advertised the opening of a "nickelodeon." It was an instant success.
Although Davis was cet ra inly the
first exhibitor to use the na .. e nickel-

he first moving pictures, shot in

Edison's Black Maria studio in
New Jersey, had been of vaudeville, musical theater, and circus
acts. But audiences turned out to prefer
pictures that moved across the frame:
waves crashing onto a beach, trains
barreling down their tracks, soldiers
parading, horses racing. At the vitascope's debut performance at Koster
& Bial's vaudeville theater in New
York City, the crowd cheered loudest
on seeing Rough Sea at Dover, the one
picture shot outside the studio. Still,
in the vaudeville halls the "living pictures" constituted one act among many.
Only in the middle of the first decade
of the 1900s, after enormous improvements in the quality of the projectors
and the production and distribution
of films, was a new generation in show
business ready to try again to lure cus-

similar experiments were taklace in other

of the
P Loew on a visit to his Cmcmcade in 1905 learned from his
ar
h .
.
that a rival across t e nver m
Kentucky, had come up
ftVllllt.:. v<<>
a marvelous new "idea in enter I went over with my
manager- it was on Sunday . . .
1 never got such a thrill in my life.
show was given in an old-fashbrownstone house, and the prohad the hallways partitioned
with dry goods cases. He used to go
the window and sell the tickets to
che children, then he went to the door
and took the tickets, and after he did
that he locked the door and went up
and operated the machine . .. . I said to
tiJ.Y companion, 'This is the most reThe opening-nigbt movie audience throngs the rather spartan Rex in Hannibal, Missouri, 1912.
rkable thing I have ever seen.' The
was packed to suffocation." Loew
cally, 'this line is a Klondike."'
to Cincinnati and opened his tonight, and a shrieking comedy from
It is, from our vantage point in the
screen show the following Sunday. real life, all for five cents. Step in this 1990s-suffused as we are by televifirst day we played I believe there way and learn to laugh!"
The din became such that local shop- sion, radio, CD players, and VCRsseven or eight people short of
difficult to recapture the excitement
thousand and we did not adver- keepers comp lained it was interfer- caused by the appearance of these first
at all. The people simply poured ing with business. In Paterson, New nickel theaters. For the bulk of the
the arcade. That showed me the Jersey, the Board of Aldermen out- city's population, until now shut out of
possibilities of this new form of lawed "phonographic barkers" after its theaters and commercial amuse
"Back in New York City, complaints from storekeepers, among ments, the sudden emergence of not
rented space for similar picture- them M. L. Rogowski, who claimed one but five or ten nickel shows withtheaters alongside each of his that the "rasping music, ground out in walking distance must have been
for hours at a time, annoyed his milnothing short of extraordinary.
Across the country arcade owners liners until they became nervous."
Imagine for a moment what it must
off the backs of their storefronts
have
meant to be able to attend a show
ith the aural accompaniment of
rented additional space for picture
for
a
nickel in your neighborhood.
the barkers, the visual displays
while vaudeville managers, travCity
folk
who had never been to the
of glittering light bulbs, and
exhibitors, and show businesstheater
or,
indeed, to any commercial
word of mouth, city residents
left their jobs to set up their own
amusement
(even the upper balcony
began to throng the new theaters. Conpicture shows.
at
a
vaudeville
hall cost a quarter)
There was a great deal of money to temporary commentators used terms could now, on their way home from
made in the fledgling business, but like madness, frenzy, fever, and craze work or shopping or on a Saturday
owners had to work hard to describe the rapidity with which evening or Sunday afternoon, enter the
introduce their product. They could nickel theaters went up after about darkened auditorium, take a seat, and
afford to advertise heavily in the 1905. By November of 1907, a little witness the latest technological wonbut they could and did design more than two years after the opening
ders, all for five cents.
storefront facades to call attention of the first one, there were already, acOne understands the passion of the
their shows- with oversized en- cording to Joseph Medill Patterson of early commentators as they described
attraction boards, posters, and The Saturday Evening Post, "between in the purplest of prose what the movmany light bulbs as they had room four and five thousand [nickel shows] ing-picture theater meant to the city's
To draw the attention of passersby, running and solvent, and the number is working people. Mary Heaton Vorse
set up phonographs on the street still increasing rapidly. This is the concluded a 1911 article in The Outand hired live barkers: "It is boom time in the moving-picture busi- look by referring to the picture-show
five cents ! See the moving-picture ness. Everybody is making money ... audiences she had observed on Bleecksee the wonders of Port Said as one press-agent said enthusiasti-

In 1903 it cost a dime to glimpse ''the South Africa" in a Tacoma, Washington, storetront theate"

NOVEMBER 1993 AMERICAN HERITAGE 85

84 AMERICAN HERITAGE NOVEMBER 1993

ickelodeon ow ners realized

they had to meld the
openness of the saloon w ith
the selectivity of the hotel.
er Street and the Bowery in New York
its 1909 annual report, "has gone far
through houses that lacked adtquate
City, "You see what it means to them;
to blast maidenhood .. .. Depraved
exits
was ever-present, especially since
it means Opportunity-a chance to
adults with candies and pennies bethe
film
stock was highly fl am mable.
glimpse the beautiful and strange
guile children with the inevitable result.
There
were
close to one thou sa nd thethings in the world that you haven't
The Society has prosecuted many for ater fires in 1907 alone.
in your life; the gratification of the
leading girls astray through these picWhile nickelodeon owners and ophigher side of your nature; opportuture shows, but GOD alone knows how
erators
were reaping a bonanza, It had
nity which, except for the big moving
many are leading dissolute lives begun
become
apparent to manu fac turers,
picture book, would be forever closed at the 'moving pictures."'
to you."
distributors, and trade-journal LJitors
that the industry had to do something
The nickelodeon's unprecedented exhile the anti-vice crusaders com- about conditions inside the th eaters to
pansion did not go unnoticed by the
plained about the moral dan- forestall government action and broadcritics of commercialized popular culgers, other reformers and a en the audience base. Homer W. Sibture who had for a century complained
number of industry spokesmen ley of Moving Picture World warned
about and organized against the evils
worried about the physical conditions
his colleagues in August of 1911, "the
of sa loons, bawdy houses, honkyinside the "nickel dumps." Not only
'dump'
is doomed , and the sooner the
tonks, prizefights, and variety theaters.
were the storefront theaters dark, dirty, cheap, ill-smelling, poorl y ventilated,
For the anti-vice crusaders and child
and congested, but the stench inside badly managed rend ezvo us for the
savers, the nickel shows presented an
was often overpowering. Investiga- masher and tough makes way for the
unparalleled threat to civic morality,
tors hired by the Cleveland commis- better class of popular famil y theater
precisely because they were so popular
sion investigating local movie thea- the better it will be for th e business
with the city's young and poor.
ters claimed that the "foul air" in the
Although they grossly exaggerated theaters was so bad that even a short and all concerned ."
The enormous success of the nickelthe "immorality" of the pictures and
stay was bound to result in "sneezing, odeon was, paradoxicall y, blocking
the danger to those who saw them,
coughing and the contraction of seri- future growth of the moving-picture
the anti-vice crusaders and reformers ous colds."
business. Potential customers who prewere correct in claiming that never beThe Independent reported in early ferred not to mingle with the lower
fore had so many women, men, and
1910 that the city's "moving picture orders stayed away. In th e vaudeville
children, most of them strangers to
places" had "become foci for the theaters the "refined " cou ld, if they
one another, been brought together to
dissemination of tubercle bacilli," and chose sit safe from the rabble in the
sit in the closest physical proximity in
'
Moving Picture World warned exhib- more expensive
box and orchestra seats.
the dark for twenty to thirty minutes.
itors to clean up their theaters before There were no such sanctuaries in the
The Vice Commission of Chicago beit was too late. "Should a malignant nickel and dime theaters, where cuslieved that "many liberties are taken
epidemic strike New York City, and tomers could sit wherever they pleased.
with young girls within the theater
these conditions prevail, the result
Nickelodeon owners began to realize
during the performance when the place
might be a wholesale closing down that to attract an audience large enough
is in total or semi-darkness. Boys and of these germ factories."
to fill and refill their theaters twenty to
men slyly embrace the girls near them
Tuberculosis and head colds were t h1rty

.
times
a d ay, t hey wou ld have hto
and offer certain indignities." The New
not the only, or even the most serious, meld into one institutional space r e
York Society for the Prevention of Cruthreats to the safety of movie patrons. openness of the saloon and rhe seleclelty to Children presented case after
In the early years of the storefront the- tivity of the hotel. They ha d to weh r
case of such depravities. "This new
aters, the danger of fire breaking out in come all who sought entrance to t ei
form of entertainment," it claimed in
the projection booth and sweeping amusements, while simultaneousIY "ap-

86 AMERICAN HERITAGE NOVEMBER 1993

JOHN RIPlEY COLLECTION, KANSAS STATE

OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTH : COllE

At :;OCIETY.

JOHN MARGOt

y the mid-1910s a huge,

heterogeneous urban public
had been taught to feel
comfortable in movie houses .
pearing" to screen their customers and
admit only those who were, as Henry
James had described the clientele of
the American hotel, "presumably 'respectable,' ... that is, not discoverably
anything else."
The trick of remaining open to the
street and its passersby while keeping out the riffraff was accomplished
by designing an imposing exterior and
entrance. The penny arcades had opened
their fronts to encourage passersby to
"drop in." The nickel theaters re-enclosed them, pulling back their doors
about six feet from the sidewalk, in
effect extending the distance between
the theater and the street. This recessed, sheltered entrance functioned
as a buffer or filter between the inside of the theater and the tumult outside. Framing this recessed entrance,
massive arches or oversized columns

jutted out onto the sidewalk. Thus

the nickelodeon owners colonized the
sidewalks in front of their establishments, shortening-while emphasizing-the distance between the amusements within and the workaday world
outside.
Theater owners did all they could to
convince customers that they would
be safe inside, no matter whom they
sat next to in the dark. To guarantee
their customers' good behavior, the
exhibitors began to hire and parade
uniformed ushers through the largest
theaters and flashed signs on the screen
warning patrons that those who misbehaved would quickly be banished
from the house and prosecuted by
the law.
The industry also accepted new firesafety legislation, but perhaps the most
important step the exhibitors took to

Onaet Ave. ahowlnr New Onaet 'theatre,

Onaet, Masa.

By 1917, when this card was mailed, movies had become so respectable that the government
recruited "Four-Minute Men" to deliver brief, inspiriting harangues before the show.

88 AMERICAN HERITAGE NOVEMBER 1993

allay the public's anxieties about health

hazards was to install new and expensive ventilation systems that, they
claimed, removed not only bad odors
but germs as well. A. L. Shakman,
owner of a Broadway theater, proudly
proclaimed that there were "no clothing or body odors noticeable even during the capacity hours of the 81st Street
Theater, for the simple reason that the
air is changed by dome ventilators every twenty minutes. The air is just as
sweet and pure in the balcony as it is
downstairs. " The Butterfly Theater in
Milwaukee advertised that its "Perfect
Ventilation" system provided customers with a "Complete Change of Air
Every Three Minutes."

o convince the city's respectable

folk that the movie theaters,
though cheap, were safe and comfortable, the exhibitors assiduously courted the local gentry, businessmen, and politicians and invited
them to their opening celebrations.
The Saxe brothers of Milwaukee
launched their Princess Theatre in 1909
with a gala invitation-only theater party, organized, as the owners told the
Milwaukee Sentinel, "in the effort to
secure the patronage of a better class
of people." Mayor DavidS. Rose not
only attended but gave the dedicatory
address.
Gala openings like this had become
routine occurrences by the late 1910s.
Just as Barnum propelled Tom Thumb
into the rank of first-class attractions
by arranging and publicizing the midget's audience with the Queen of England, so did the exhibitors signify that
their theaters were first-class entertainTOP: JOHN RIPLEY COLLECTION, KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL
SOCIETY, TOPEKA; BOTTOM: COllECTION OF JOHN MARGOLIES

ment sites by celebrating the patronage or so critics and audiences alike ap- In that same year, Carl Laemmle, a
of the crowned heads of their com- peared to be growing weary of these distributor who was preparing to manmunities.
histrionics, and pla yers adopted in- ufacture his own films, hired Florence
Even though the moving pictures stead a "more natural" or "slower" act- Lawrence to star in them for the then
would not reach the pinnacle of their ing style. As cameras moved in clos- exorbitant salary of fifteen thousand
respectability until the early twenties, er to capture increasingly subtle and dollars a year. To make sure the public
with the building of the movie pal- personalized expressions, audiences knew that the Biograph Girl would
aces, the industry had by the mid- began to distinguish the players from now be appearing exclusively in IMP
dle 1910s educated a huge and hetero- one another. Since the manufactur- pictures, Laemmle engineered the first
geneous urban public that they could ers never divulged their actors' given publicity coup. In March of 1910 he
visit movie theaters withleaked the rumor that Miss
out danger to their pocket- '2728 - . Uherty Theatre, Third ancf 81/ain Streets, Los Angeles, Cal Lawrence had been killed in
books, their reputations, or
a St. Louis streetcar accident
their health.
and then took out a huge ad
in Moving Picture World to
hen the social researchannounce that the story of
her demise was the "blacker George Bevans was
writing How Workingest and at the same time the
men Spend Their Spare
silliest lie yet circulated by
enemies of the 'Imp.' "
Time in late 1912 and early
1913, he discovered that no
It took only a few years for
matter what the men's parthe picture players to ascend
from anonymity to omniticular jobs, how many hours
presence. The best evidence
a week they worked, whether
we have of the stars' newthey were single or married,
native-born or immigrant,
found importance is the
salaries the producers were
earned less than ten dollars
willing to pa y them. On
or more than thirty-five, they
Broadway Mary Pickford had
unfailingly spent more of
earned $25 a week. In 1910
their spare time at the picture show than anywhere else.
Carl Laemmle lured her away
William Fox claimed that the
from Biograph, her first
movie home, with an offer of
saloons in the vicinity of his
theaters "found the business
$175 a week. Her starting
salary with Adolph Zukor
so unprofitable th at they
at Famous Players in 1914
closed their doors .. . . If we
was $20,000 a year, soon
had never had prohibition,"
raised to $1,000 a week and
he later told Upton Sinclair,
then, in January of 1915, to
"the motion pictures would
$2,000 a week and half the
have wiped out the saloon."
profits from her pictures. In
More and more what drew
these audiences was the emerJune of 1916 another congence of the movie star from The city where the movie par1or was born soon had elaborate ones. tract raised her compensathe ranks of the wholly anontion to 50 percent of the profymous players of a decade earlier. Ac- names, the fans had to refer to them its of her films against a guaranteed
tors in the early story films had bor- by their brand names-the Vitagraph minimum of $1,040,000 a year, includrowed their gestures, poses, grins, and Girl, or the Biograph Girl.
ing at least $10,000 every week, a
grimaces from melodrama and panIt didn't take long for manufacturers bonus of $300,000 for signing the contomime. Villains all dressed, acted, and to recognize the benefits of exploiting tract, and an additional $40,000 for
moved the same way, as did the other their audience's curiosity. Kalem was the time she had spent reading scripts
stock characters: the heroes, heroines, the first to identify its actors and ac- during contract negotiations. And this
and aged mothers. Any child in the tresses by name, in a group photo- was only the beginning.
audience could tell who the villain was graph published as an advertisement
The stars were worth the money because
their appearance in films not
(the man in the long black coat), why in the January 15, 1910, Moving Piconly
boosted
receipts but added a dehe acted as he did (he was evil), and ture World and made available to exgree
of
predictability
to the business, a
what he was going to do next. By 1909 hibitors for posting in their lobbies.

90 AMERICAN HERITAGE NOVEMBER 1993

COllECTION OF JOHN MARGOliES

he reception accorded The

Birth of a Nation m arked the
distance movies had traveled
since their disastrous debut.
predictability that was welcomed by the banks and financiers that in the 1920s would
assume a larger role in the picture business. The most reliable, perhaps the only, predictor of success for any given film
was the presence of an established star.

President of the United States,

as the promotions for the film
asserted, had seen The Birth of
a Nation and was now a moving-picture fan .
The ultimate confirmation
of a picture show's respectability came only a few years
later, during World War I,
when the federal government,
he stars were not only
concerned that its propaganbringing new customers
da messages might not reach
the largest possible audience
in.
into the t heaters
corporatmg a mov1e authrough the available print
d ience scattered over thoumedia, decided to send its
sands of different sites into a
"Four-Minute Men" into the
nation's movie theaters. (The
vast unified public. "Stars"
were by definition actors or
speakers were so named to reactresses whose appea l tranassure audiences and theater
scended every social category,
owners that their talks would
with the possible exception of
be brisk.)
gender. As the theater and
As President Wilson pronow film critic Walter Prichard
claimed in an open letter to
Eaton explained in 1915, "The
the nation's moviegoers in
April 1918, the picture house
smallest town . . . sees the
had become a "great democratsame motion-picture players
BUTTERF"L Y THEATRE, MHwaukU, 'Its
as the largest.... John Bunny
ic
meeting place of the peoMost Luxurious. E"clusive, Reftned
Phe>to-Piay Houlie in Amerlea,
and Mary Pickford 'star' in a
ple, where within twenty-four
Absolutely Ftreproof-Perfect Venttlation.
hundred towns at once."
hours it is possible to reach
Chanlje of
Dail)l.
Complete Change l)f Air Evert 3 M nutu.
The reception accorded The
eight million citizens of all
Birth of a Nation that same
classes." There was nothing
year marked the distance the Refined, safe, and comfortable: the movie house comes of age. wrong with going to the movies while a war was being
movies had traveled since their
disastrous debut in Armat and Jen- to see D. W. Griffith's Civil War epic. fought across the Atlantic, the Presikins's tent just twenty years earlier.
The Birth of a Nation would even- dent declared in his letter: "The GovWhile African-Americans and their tually make more money than any film ernment recognizes that a reasonable
supporters strenuously protested the of its time and be seen by an audi- amount of amusement, especially in war
film's appa ll ing portrayal of blacks ence that extended from prosperous time, is not a luxury but a necessity."
and succeeded in forcing state and theatergoers who paid two dollars in
municipal censors to cut many scenes, the first-class legitimate theaters to the This article is adapted from David
white Americans of every age group, women, children, and men who viewed Nasaw's Going Out: The Rise and Fall
economic status, neighborhood, and it at regular prices in their neighbor- of Public Amusements, published this
ethnicity lined up at the box offices hood moving-picture houses. Even the month by Basic Books.

92 AMERICAN HERITAGE NOVEMBER 1993

TOP: JOHN RIPLEY COLLECTION, KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL

SOCIETY, TOPEKA; BOITOM: COLLECTION OF EMILY GWATHMEY