Have we got the right location for the Rita Theatre? The last comment (by Jawaha75243) on this photo of the Texan Theatre at Flickr says that “…the Rita… was the first building to the east of Kress right across from the courthouse.” That would put the Rita at the northwest corner of Lee and Johnson Streets, a block east of Stonewall Street. That lot is now the site of an outdoor café associated with the Landon Winery, which has taken over the old Kress building. I’ve been unable to find any other references to the location of the Rita Theatre.
An article titled “Touring Texas Small Towns” in the September 30, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World has a paragraph about E.J. Lamkin, operator of the Savoy:
“At Greenville I found to my surprise that the city had turned around since my last visit there five years ago. E. J. Lamkin, who is perhaps the oldest exhibitor in Texas, has for numerous years back been the leading amusement man in this city. I do not recall any man in the business who has been at it longer than Lamkin. He opened the first show in Greenville about fifteen years ago, and has had first one and then sometimes two and sometimes three shows at one time there. Since five years ago the business part of town has shifted several blocks leaving what was once the old Savoy Theatre now away off on a side street. Needless to say it is not there now. Mr. Lamkin has built one of the most magnificent little theatres in Texas in the heart of the city. It is the most perfectly ventilated place I was ever in and he has two expert musicians with some kind of musical contrivance that furnishes the best music I have ever listened to. It sounds really like an orchestra and yet there are but two musicians, but they are certainly artists. I understand that these are not bought contrivances but were invented by the&e two geniuses. Mr. Lamkin also has another theatre across the street and his competition houses are run by a local corporation. These houses were formerly managed by Johnny Jones, now of Amarillo, but I was unable to find the present manager while in Greenville, as it was very late at night. All the theatres in Greenville are up-to-date as befits one of the most up-to-date little cities in Texas. Cement roads extend for ten miles in every direction and I could still see the bright glow of Greenville even when I was forty miles away.”
The March 18 issue of MPW had mentioned an E. J. Lumpkin, operating the Colonial Theatre in Greenville. An item in the local newspaper in 1921 refers to a Mrs. E. J. Lamkin, so I would imagine that is the correct spelling. The Colonial Theatre was at 2608 Lee, so it was probably the house “across the street” from the Savoy.
The Rita Theatre is mentioned in the October 17, 1934, issue of Motion Picture Daily. The Rita was operated by Otis U. Sullivan in partnership with J. C. Clemmons' Jefferson Amusement Company. Sullivan and Jefferson Amusement also operated the Texan Theatre at Greenville. The company was a Paramount affiliate.
The earliest (and only) mention of the Colonial Theatre on this timeline of Greenville history is November 16, 1914, when the house presented the first amateur movie made in Greenville.
The Colonial Theatre was mentioned in the March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. E. J. Lumpkin was the operator.
The Greenville Morning Herald had advertisements for the Colonial and two other movie theaters on this page of its issue of October 2, 1918.
Google Street View shows that the modern address where the El Monte Theatre’s entrance used to be is 11006 Valley Mall. Current ground floor tenants are a pharmacy and what might be a clothing outlet or might be a garment industry sweatshop, or maybe both.
The January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily reported that a new theater being built at Fremont, Michigan, for Harold Hedler would be completed about March 1. The architect was Joseph Krenek, who was also the contractor. The 468-seat house opened as the Oz Theatre, and was listed under that name in the Film Daily Yearbook at least as late as 1970. Sometime between then and 1982, when this photo was taken, it was renamed the Fremont Theatre. Its site is now partly occupied by a pedestrian passage to the parking lot behind the shops along the block.
The fire at the Frolic Theatre in April, 1943, is confirmed by an article in the January 6, 1944, issue of The Film Daily. The Frolic was one of the theaters suffering a fire the previous year that had received permission from the War Production Board to rebuild. This is the portion of the article dealing with the Frolic:
“The second approval was for reconstruction of the Frolic Theater, Midland, Mich., owned by W. A. Cassidy of that city. Cost for repair of extensive fire damage to this 1,008-seat theater, which occurred last April, is estimated at $21,500. In justifying this application OCR pointed out that booth equipment and second hand chairs were on hand, that the Midland area now has a population of 20,000 with an additional 5,000 expected. (Dow Chemical has a large plant in Midland). Little additional critical material is required and the local labor situation is reported favorable, with all public utility connections available.”
The Loma Theatre was rebuilt in 1944 following a disastrous fire the previous April. The delay was the result of wartime restrictions on civilian construction projects. The January 6, 1944, issue of The Film Daily said:
“Approval was granted by WPB also for construction to replace a burned theater at Coloma, Mich., With Mrs. Louis Alquire permitted to erect a new 584-seat house. The fire there occurred last April, too. Coloma, site of several important food processing factories, is now without pix facilities, and the theater has served, in fact, as the only public hall in the town. Omission of marquise was recommended. Booth and sound equipment is on hand, with opera chairs to be second hand and rebuilt. There is no great difficulty on materials or labor, and utilities connections are available.”
In the 1939 Film Daily Yearbook, Fremont has a house called the Ideal, with 300 seats. In 1940, it has houses called the New, with 300 seats, and the Oz, with 468 seats. The Oz is the house at (approximately) 32 West Main, and the New must be the Ideal renamed, and is probably house at 7 East Main. Its marquee in the period photos says New Fremont on it. Both the Oz and the New are listed in FDY through 1947, but in 1948 only the Oz is listed, so the New Fremont must have closed in 1947 or 1948.
The Ideal Theatre is listed in the FDY as far back as 1926 (the first year the Yearbook provided a complete list of theaters,) but was in operation earlier. It was mentioned in multiple issues of Michigan Film Review in 1918. I haven’t discovered how much earlier the Ideal existed. A theater was operating in Fremont by 1915, when a movie and vaudeville house called the Lyric was gutted by a fire, as reported in the December 8 issue of The Moving Picture World. It could be that the Lyric reopened as the Ideal.
There were at least two houses called the Fremont Theatre in Fremont. The one in the photo Lost Memory linked to in the previous comment was the second. It was on West Main Street (approximately 32 W.,) and has been demolished. The theater in the photo at the top of our page was the older one (though its marquee says New Fremont on it) and its building is still standing at 7 E. Main Street, now housing the Fremont Area Chamber of Commerce. I’ve set Street View to that location.
Fremont also had a small multiplex called the Fremont Cinemas, located at 1027 W. Main Street, last operated by NorthStar Cinemas, but it closed a couple of years ago.
The January 27, 1939, issue of The Film Daily had the Boone Theatre in Columbia,Missouri, on its “Theatres Planned” list. The projected cost of the 400-seat house was only $10,000. Judging from that, and the photo we have, I suspect that this was an old building being converted into a theater on a low budget. It might even have been an old theater long closed being reopened under a new name. The item said that the architect for the project was named Dick O'Rear.
ArchitectDB says there is a “d” in the architect’s name: Heitschmidt. He worked on some pretty impressive projects, but usually as the associate of some better known lead architect.
The Strand must have been the Schine house listed in the “Theaters Planned” column of the January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily: “Oswego, West Second St.; Builder: Schine Theater Corp.; Architect: J. Eberson; Cost: $200,000.”
The January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily ran this somewhat belated item it its “Theater Openings” column:
“Baraboo — ‘The Juliar,’ 450 seats, 415 Broadway; Builder: Henry E. Ringling; Architect: J. J. Flad; Cost: $60,000; Operator: Henry Ringling; To be completed 12-31-38.”
John J. Flad & Associates, the architectural firm founded by J. J. Flad at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1927, is still in operation as Flad Architects, now headquartered in Atlanta and with branches in Madison and four other cities, though they don’t appear to be designing theaters these days.
ejellise: The brief item I quoted was all there was in the magazine. I found two other references to William Leucht, one from 1927 and one from 1929. The 1927 item said that he had recently bought the Cozy Theatre, and the 1929 item mentioned him briefly as operator of the Savoy.
Scans of some issues of Exhibitors' Trade Review and other trade publications are online, the largest collection being at The Internet Archive, which is a rather difficult site to search as their cataloging system is, well, a mess, but there are probably other references to Leucht in the trades. I’ll keep an eye out for them, as new items are occasionally added to the various digital archives. I’ll also see if I can discover who operated the Rialto in the late 1950s.
If The Grocery Boy was an entirely local project it would be unusual. Most “local talent” movies were actually made by itinerant production companies. One outfit in operation as early as 1920, Community Photoplay, sent crews from their Los Angeles studio to cities all over the country. Essentially these companies would make the same movies over and over in different places with different players.
They would make arrangements with a local theater owner, then advertise a casting call for the production in the local newspaper, select the most likely players at the call, scout locations for filming, then spend a few days shooting the movie from the pre-written scenario. After the film was developed it would be edited and then presented in the theater which had contracted for the movie. The whole process would be completed in about two months, and the crew would be on to the next town on their list.
Nobody knows how many “local talent” movies were made during the silent era, but there must have been hundreds, if not thousands. Still, even though the production company “owned” the movie, they usually didn’t keep a copy. The negatives would be discarded and the only print (or prints) would stay with the local theater operator, who could show it as often as he liked, in whatever theater he chose. This is one of the reasons so few of these movies survived. Local theater operators didn’t know enough about preserving the unstable nitrate film over a long time.
The “local talent” business declined rapidly when talking pictures came along, due mostly to the far greater cost and complexity of making sound movies. In any case, local actors who could learn lines quickly and deliver them convincingly would have been much harder to find than people who could mug and posture for the silent camera.
I don’t know of anyone who is researching local talent movies. I can’t even find the term mentioned on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s web site. Still, there are so many people researching silent movies that there must be a few who specialize in local talent productions. Again, I’ll keep an eye out for information about the subject.
As William Leucht originally would have had what might have been the only print of The Grocery Boy, the most likely place to search for information about what became of it would be among his descendants. There could still be a few living in St. Joseph, though Google searches on the name fetch mostly obituaries. Still, obituaries might reveal the married names of daughters, and in my experience women usually remember more family history than men do. The most recent Leucht connected with St. Joseph that I’ve seen is a Geralyn (Geri) Leucht, who is listed at Classmates.com as a 1971 graduate of Central High School.
Good luck tracking down the print of The Grocery Boy. If it still exists, and you can find it, it will be of great interest to fans of silent movies.
Dave Price is probably right. Work on E. J. Sparks' new theater on Las Olas Boulevard was “well under way” according to an item in the January 13, 1939, issue of The Film Daily. The Warnor and Colony were the downtown Fort Lauderdale theaters that opened in 1941. The Florida must have opened fairly early in 1939.
Boxoffice is moving its online archive to a new format. For the time being the old archive is still online, but it no longer has direct internal links from one page to the next, so here is a link to the second page of the article Tinseltoes linked to in the previous comment.
Back in 2010 I linked to a Boxoffice article about theater renovations which included a photo of the Denis Theatre in Mount Lebanon. That link is dead. The bad news is that Boxoffice is reconfiguring its digital archive and will be moving everything to a new format. The good news is that, for now at least, the old archive is still online, though somewhat altered, and I don’t know for how long.
In any case, while it lasts, here is the page with the photos of the Denis, from the issue of October 15, 1938. You can’t navigate directly from one page to the next anymore, so here is a direct link to the second page of the article with the text about the Denis.
The March 24, 1939, issue of The Film Daily announced the start of construction on this theater:
“Santa Fe, N. M. — Construction
has begun on the new theater being erected by Col. Nathan Salmon and Col. E. John Greer of the Lensic and Paris Theaters, on West San Francisco St., opposite the Lensic. S. L. Kirk, is the contractor. The new theater will be known as the "Burro Alley Theater” and will have a seating capacity of 750, and will be of Spanish architecture.“
A photo of the Alley Theatre appears on page 107 of Santa Fe: A Walk Through Time, by Kingsley Hammett (Google Books preview.) The building, directly across San Francisco Street from the Lensic Theatre, currently houses two retail shops.
The April 10, 1935, issue of Film Daily reported that the Rialto Theatre in North St. Paul had installed 400 new seats. The April 30 issue said that the Rialto had been reopened with new seats and improved sound.
I’m glad to help. If a print of the movie was still around in the late 1950s, and in condition to be screened, someone must have been taking care of it. The nitrate film stock that was used in the 1920s was very unstable, and had to be carefully preserved. If somebody was looking after it for more than thirty years, chances are they continued to do so. The Grocery Boy might still exist in someone’s private collection.
An item in the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had information about the Ashland Theatre:
“Ashland to Seat 2,000.
“R. Stedman, manager of the Ashland theater, 24th and Elmwood, Kansas City, is remodeling his theater from a seating capacity of 1,000 to one that will hold 2,000 people. When this is completed, Mr. Stedman will have practically the largest capacity of any of the residence district theaters. The Apollo, when its new balcony is done, will also be among the largest, but the seating capacity will not quite equal that of the Ashland.”
The McDonald’s that occupies one side of the Sugg Theatre’s site is at 2027 S. 4th Street, so the Sugg’s address was probably 2027 or 2029.
The January 2, 1940, issue of The Film Daily ran this brief item about the destruction of the theater:
“Chichasha Theater Burns
“Chickasha, Okla. — This city’s largest theater, the Washita, owned by Consolidated Theaters, Inc., Griffith subsidiary, was destroyed by a $50,000 fire.”
Have we got the right location for the Rita Theatre? The last comment (by Jawaha75243) on this photo of the Texan Theatre at Flickr says that “…the Rita… was the first building to the east of Kress right across from the courthouse.” That would put the Rita at the northwest corner of Lee and Johnson Streets, a block east of Stonewall Street. That lot is now the site of an outdoor café associated with the Landon Winery, which has taken over the old Kress building. I’ve been unable to find any other references to the location of the Rita Theatre.
An article titled “Touring Texas Small Towns” in the September 30, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World has a paragraph about E.J. Lamkin, operator of the Savoy:
The March 18 issue of MPW had mentioned an E. J. Lumpkin, operating the Colonial Theatre in Greenville. An item in the local newspaper in 1921 refers to a Mrs. E. J. Lamkin, so I would imagine that is the correct spelling. The Colonial Theatre was at 2608 Lee, so it was probably the house “across the street” from the Savoy.The Savoy Theatre in Greenville, Texas, was playing vaudeville in early 1920, as noted in the January 31 issue of The Billboard.
The Rita Theatre is mentioned in the October 17, 1934, issue of Motion Picture Daily. The Rita was operated by Otis U. Sullivan in partnership with J. C. Clemmons' Jefferson Amusement Company. Sullivan and Jefferson Amusement also operated the Texan Theatre at Greenville. The company was a Paramount affiliate.
The earliest (and only) mention of the Colonial Theatre on this timeline of Greenville history is November 16, 1914, when the house presented the first amateur movie made in Greenville.
The Colonial Theatre was mentioned in the March 18, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World. E. J. Lumpkin was the operator.
The Greenville Morning Herald had advertisements for the Colonial and two other movie theaters on this page of its issue of October 2, 1918.
Google Street View shows that the modern address where the El Monte Theatre’s entrance used to be is 11006 Valley Mall. Current ground floor tenants are a pharmacy and what might be a clothing outlet or might be a garment industry sweatshop, or maybe both.
The January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily reported that a new theater being built at Fremont, Michigan, for Harold Hedler would be completed about March 1. The architect was Joseph Krenek, who was also the contractor. The 468-seat house opened as the Oz Theatre, and was listed under that name in the Film Daily Yearbook at least as late as 1970. Sometime between then and 1982, when this photo was taken, it was renamed the Fremont Theatre. Its site is now partly occupied by a pedestrian passage to the parking lot behind the shops along the block.
The fire at the Frolic Theatre in April, 1943, is confirmed by an article in the January 6, 1944, issue of The Film Daily. The Frolic was one of the theaters suffering a fire the previous year that had received permission from the War Production Board to rebuild. This is the portion of the article dealing with the Frolic:
The Loma Theatre was rebuilt in 1944 following a disastrous fire the previous April. The delay was the result of wartime restrictions on civilian construction projects. The January 6, 1944, issue of The Film Daily said:
In the 1939 Film Daily Yearbook, Fremont has a house called the Ideal, with 300 seats. In 1940, it has houses called the New, with 300 seats, and the Oz, with 468 seats. The Oz is the house at (approximately) 32 West Main, and the New must be the Ideal renamed, and is probably house at 7 East Main. Its marquee in the period photos says New Fremont on it. Both the Oz and the New are listed in FDY through 1947, but in 1948 only the Oz is listed, so the New Fremont must have closed in 1947 or 1948.
The Ideal Theatre is listed in the FDY as far back as 1926 (the first year the Yearbook provided a complete list of theaters,) but was in operation earlier. It was mentioned in multiple issues of Michigan Film Review in 1918. I haven’t discovered how much earlier the Ideal existed. A theater was operating in Fremont by 1915, when a movie and vaudeville house called the Lyric was gutted by a fire, as reported in the December 8 issue of The Moving Picture World. It could be that the Lyric reopened as the Ideal.
There were at least two houses called the Fremont Theatre in Fremont. The one in the photo Lost Memory linked to in the previous comment was the second. It was on West Main Street (approximately 32 W.,) and has been demolished. The theater in the photo at the top of our page was the older one (though its marquee says New Fremont on it) and its building is still standing at 7 E. Main Street, now housing the Fremont Area Chamber of Commerce. I’ve set Street View to that location.
Fremont also had a small multiplex called the Fremont Cinemas, located at 1027 W. Main Street, last operated by NorthStar Cinemas, but it closed a couple of years ago.
The January 27, 1939, issue of The Film Daily had the Boone Theatre in Columbia,Missouri, on its “Theatres Planned” list. The projected cost of the 400-seat house was only $10,000. Judging from that, and the photo we have, I suspect that this was an old building being converted into a theater on a low budget. It might even have been an old theater long closed being reopened under a new name. The item said that the architect for the project was named Dick O'Rear.
ArchitectDB says there is a “d” in the architect’s name: Heitschmidt. He worked on some pretty impressive projects, but usually as the associate of some better known lead architect.
The Park Theatre was on the “Theaters Planned” list in the January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily:
I can’t find anything about Joe Rosette on the Internet. Rosette is a real surname, or I’d be inclined to think the magazine had made a mistake.The Strand must have been the Schine house listed in the “Theaters Planned” column of the January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily: “Oswego, West Second St.; Builder: Schine Theater Corp.; Architect: J. Eberson; Cost: $200,000.”
The January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily ran this somewhat belated item it its “Theater Openings” column:
John J. Flad & Associates, the architectural firm founded by J. J. Flad at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1927, is still in operation as Flad Architects, now headquartered in Atlanta and with branches in Madison and four other cities, though they don’t appear to be designing theaters these days.ejellise: The brief item I quoted was all there was in the magazine. I found two other references to William Leucht, one from 1927 and one from 1929. The 1927 item said that he had recently bought the Cozy Theatre, and the 1929 item mentioned him briefly as operator of the Savoy.
Scans of some issues of Exhibitors' Trade Review and other trade publications are online, the largest collection being at The Internet Archive, which is a rather difficult site to search as their cataloging system is, well, a mess, but there are probably other references to Leucht in the trades. I’ll keep an eye out for them, as new items are occasionally added to the various digital archives. I’ll also see if I can discover who operated the Rialto in the late 1950s.
If The Grocery Boy was an entirely local project it would be unusual. Most “local talent” movies were actually made by itinerant production companies. One outfit in operation as early as 1920, Community Photoplay, sent crews from their Los Angeles studio to cities all over the country. Essentially these companies would make the same movies over and over in different places with different players.
They would make arrangements with a local theater owner, then advertise a casting call for the production in the local newspaper, select the most likely players at the call, scout locations for filming, then spend a few days shooting the movie from the pre-written scenario. After the film was developed it would be edited and then presented in the theater which had contracted for the movie. The whole process would be completed in about two months, and the crew would be on to the next town on their list.
Nobody knows how many “local talent” movies were made during the silent era, but there must have been hundreds, if not thousands. Still, even though the production company “owned” the movie, they usually didn’t keep a copy. The negatives would be discarded and the only print (or prints) would stay with the local theater operator, who could show it as often as he liked, in whatever theater he chose. This is one of the reasons so few of these movies survived. Local theater operators didn’t know enough about preserving the unstable nitrate film over a long time.
The “local talent” business declined rapidly when talking pictures came along, due mostly to the far greater cost and complexity of making sound movies. In any case, local actors who could learn lines quickly and deliver them convincingly would have been much harder to find than people who could mug and posture for the silent camera.
I don’t know of anyone who is researching local talent movies. I can’t even find the term mentioned on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s web site. Still, there are so many people researching silent movies that there must be a few who specialize in local talent productions. Again, I’ll keep an eye out for information about the subject.
As William Leucht originally would have had what might have been the only print of The Grocery Boy, the most likely place to search for information about what became of it would be among his descendants. There could still be a few living in St. Joseph, though Google searches on the name fetch mostly obituaries. Still, obituaries might reveal the married names of daughters, and in my experience women usually remember more family history than men do. The most recent Leucht connected with St. Joseph that I’ve seen is a Geralyn (Geri) Leucht, who is listed at Classmates.com as a 1971 graduate of Central High School.
Good luck tracking down the print of The Grocery Boy. If it still exists, and you can find it, it will be of great interest to fans of silent movies.
Dave Price is probably right. Work on E. J. Sparks' new theater on Las Olas Boulevard was “well under way” according to an item in the January 13, 1939, issue of The Film Daily. The Warnor and Colony were the downtown Fort Lauderdale theaters that opened in 1941. The Florida must have opened fairly early in 1939.
Boxoffice is moving its online archive to a new format. For the time being the old archive is still online, but it no longer has direct internal links from one page to the next, so here is a link to the second page of the article Tinseltoes linked to in the previous comment.
Back in 2010 I linked to a Boxoffice article about theater renovations which included a photo of the Denis Theatre in Mount Lebanon. That link is dead. The bad news is that Boxoffice is reconfiguring its digital archive and will be moving everything to a new format. The good news is that, for now at least, the old archive is still online, though somewhat altered, and I don’t know for how long.
In any case, while it lasts, here is the page with the photos of the Denis, from the issue of October 15, 1938. You can’t navigate directly from one page to the next anymore, so here is a direct link to the second page of the article with the text about the Denis.
The March 24, 1939, issue of The Film Daily announced the start of construction on this theater:
A photo of the Alley Theatre appears on page 107 of Santa Fe: A Walk Through Time, by Kingsley Hammett (Google Books preview.) The building, directly across San Francisco Street from the Lensic Theatre, currently houses two retail shops.The April 10, 1935, issue of Film Daily reported that the Rialto Theatre in North St. Paul had installed 400 new seats. The April 30 issue said that the Rialto had been reopened with new seats and improved sound.
I’m glad to help. If a print of the movie was still around in the late 1950s, and in condition to be screened, someone must have been taking care of it. The nitrate film stock that was used in the 1920s was very unstable, and had to be carefully preserved. If somebody was looking after it for more than thirty years, chances are they continued to do so. The Grocery Boy might still exist in someone’s private collection.
An item in the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had information about the Ashland Theatre:
The McDonald’s that occupies one side of the Sugg Theatre’s site is at 2027 S. 4th Street, so the Sugg’s address was probably 2027 or 2029.
The January 2, 1940, issue of The Film Daily ran this brief item about the destruction of the theater: