The glorious 1922 Orpheum Theatre which celebrates 100 years this March 14th was not the first Orpheum in Kenosha. The original Orpheum was located on 56th Street next to the Fischer Hotel, east of Sixth Avenue. It opened on Saturday, September 24, 1910, and in addition to singers and other acts, the theatre touted clear, bright, and beautiful pictures for just five cents (2022 = $1.40).
Kenosha Evening News, October 1910: “The Orpheum Theatre is now equipped to give the public the finest service as a moving picture house,” The Kenosha Evening News read on November 15, 1911. “The very best pictures are the only ones used in this theatre.”
(continuing -) To better understand the cinema of the past, a turn to some notion of ‘the popular’ seems a logical step. But determining what ‘the popular’ means is not straightforward. At the very least, popularity has both quantitative and qualitative dimensions, as Janet Thumim observes. Some of the more recent movie histories that have attempted to engage with notions of ‘the popular’ employ a ‘top-down’ approach which considers only the quantitative aspect of the popularity of movies, typically using the trade press as a source of movie rental revenues which are employed as a rough-and-ready index of movie popularity. This approach certainly comes closer to objectivity than simply choosing which films to look at, but it introduces other problems, which mainly arise because of the stratified nature of movie production and distribution under the studio system, and the implications that the structure of these industries had for the revenue-earning potential of movies of different classes.
Simplifying the intricacies of the movie business for the purpose of illustration, the American movie industry produced three broad classes of feature film: prestige ‘A’ movies destined initially for the larger first-run cinemas; lesser ‘B’ movies which either played as supporting features for ‘A’ movies or headlined in smaller cinemas and, finally, what might be thought of as sub-‘B’ feature films — generally from poverty row and independent producers — which played as supporting features in larger cinemas, and/or provided the main feature film or one half of a double feature in smaller independently owned theatres. The contracts under which films were distributed had different rental terms for different classes of movie. So while ‘A’ and some of the better ‘B’ movies were generally rented on a percentage basis that gave the distributor a cut of the actual admissions receipts taken at the box office, the lower classes of movies usually earned a flat fee for each booking (often a very small amount. This flat rental rate effectively functioned as a ‘cap’ on the potential earnings of those movies; it determined the maximum a film could earn from any booking regardless how popular it proved to be with the audience. Furthermore, ‘A’ movies played larger, more prestigious cinemas and thus had the potential to attract larger audiences to each show; audiences that were paying higher prices. The net effect of these typical rental practices was the creation of a commercial environment which was structurally biased in favour of the prestige movies. This bias militates against the use of published revenue figures as a simple index of popularity. A high rental revenue figure for a film only tells us that the film earned a large amount of money. It is true that, generally, it will follow that a film which earned high revenues was widely distributed and popular with moviegoers, but what is missing from this picture is any sense of the qualitative popularity of the lower classes of films, whose earnings were inevitably smaller than those of prestige movies and which are thus effectively excluded from any quantitative measure of popularity based on revenues, but which nevertheless may have possessed a resonance for contemporary audiences. To gain a better sense of what cinemagoers saw and liked, a more nuanced approach to the appraisal of popularity is required.
The case study presented in this article does not purport to resolve all of these difficult issues, but it provides a suggestion of what a more fine-grained method of assessing audience engagement with movies might look like and gives a glimpse at the results that it can achieve.
The study looks at movie exhibition in a single small cinema, The Chief in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1941. It is, therefore, a study on an extremely small scale, and no claim is made that the results of this research can be simply extrapolated to larger scales. On the contrary, the argument made here is that larger-scale patterns of cinemagoing would need to be examined with the same attention to detail as this study. This case study outlines a method and an example; it does not providea simple scalable model. The primary source of data used in the case study is a set of microfilmed copies of the Kenosha Evening News held in the Kenosha Public Library. Cinema advertisements contained in the newspaper list all the films that played each of the city’s cinemas, including all of the supporting features. This permits the development of a detailed picture of what films were playing, where and when. The advertisements do not, however, provide any sense of the size of the audience at the Chief on any given day. For this reason these data are supplemented with box office data obtained from the collection of film billing sheets contained in the Stanley Warner Collection at the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California. This collection of film billing sheets is not complete, resulting in some gaps in the financial data. However, where available, these documents provide detailed information about the admissions receipts (box office takings) for individual shows and reveal the rentals due from the exhibitor in respect each movie. Finally, in order to provide a way of classifying the films contained in these datasets in terms that are meaningful within film studies, the American Film Institute film catalogue is used to identify the genre of each movie.
Moviegoing at the Chief Theatre, Kenosha,Wisconsin, 1941.
The Chief was a small cinema in downtown Kenosha, an industrial city situated on the Western shore of Lake Michigan between Chicago and Milwaukee. Kenosha had slightly fewer than 49,000 inhabitants by the early forties and was the home of Nash Motors and Jockey, the underwear manufacturer, both of which had large factories in the city, which provided the main sources of employment. Established in 1835, Kenosha had grown considerably in population between the turn of the Twentieth Century and the 1930s as large numbers of immigrants to the USA moved to the city to take up residence and employment. Like the nation as a whole, Kenosha suffered economic and social hardship during the Great Depression but, by the city’s centenary celebrations in 1935, there were signs of recovery and returning confidence, with the local newspaper asserting that ‘Kenosha can look forward to a future of promise’.
Republic 1940: Come on Leathernecks - Republic 1938: Covered Wagon Days - Republic 1940: Damaged Goods - 1937 Dezel: Dance Girl Dance - RKO 1940: Danger Ahead - Monogram 1940: Danger Flight - Monogram 1939: Dangerous Lady - PRC 1941: Death Rides the Range - Superior 1939: Desert Bandit - Republic 1941: Doomed to Die - Monogram 1940: Dreaming Out Loud - RKO 1940: Drums Along the Mohawk - Fox 1939: Drums of the Desert - Monogram 1940: Emergency Landing - PRC 1941: Federal Fugitives - PRC 1941: Flying Deuces - RKO 1939: Footsteps in the Dark - WBFN 1941: Forty Thousand Horsemen and a “Girl” - Teitel 1941: Frontier Crusader - PRC 1940: Fugitive From Justice - WBFN 1940: Gambling Daughters - PRC 1941: Gambling on the High Seas - WBFN 1940: Gambling With Souls - Superior 1936: Gangs of Chicago - Republic 1940: Girl From Havana - Republic 1940: Girls of the Road - Columbia 1940: Girls Under 21 - Columbia 1940: Great Train Robbery : Republic 1941: Haunted Honeymoon - Metro 1940: Hell’s Angels - Astor 1930: Heritage of the Desert - Paramount 1939: Hidden Gold - Paramount 1940: High School Girl - Astor 1934 High Sierra - WBFN 1941: Hit Parade of 1941 - Republic 1940: I Want a Divorce - Paramount 1940: I’m Still Alive - RKO 1940: In Name Only - RKO 1939: Jesse James - Fox 1939: King of the Lumberjacks - WBFN 1940: King of the Newsboys - Republic 1938: Kit Carson - UA 1940: Kitty Foyle - RKO 1940: Knights of the Range - Paramount 1940: Law and Order - Universal 1940: Law of the Pampas - Paramount 1939: Law of the Wolf - Superior 1939: Legion of the Lawless - RKO 1940: Light of Western Stars - Paramount 1940: Lone Wolf Meets a Lady - Columbia 1940:,Marked Men - PRC 1940: Melody and Moonlight - Republic 1940: Men Against the Sky - RKO 1940: Midnight Limited - Monogram 1940: Military Academy - Columbia 1940: Murder in the Air - WBFN 1940: Murder on the Yukon - Monogram 1940: Mutiny on the Elsinore - 1937: Mystery Plane, Monogram - 1939: Notorious But Nice, Astor - 1933: Oklahoma Renegades, Republic - 1940: Only Angels Have Wings, Columbia - 1939: Outside the 3 Mile Limit, Columbia - 1940: Panama Patrol, Superior - 1939: Paper Bullets, PRC - 1941: Penny Serenade, Columbia - 1941: Phantom of Chinatown, Monogram - 1940: Pony Post, Universal - 1940, Pride of the Bowery, Monogram - 1940: Private Detective, WBFN - 1939: Ragtime Cowboy Joe, Universal - 1940: Rain, Astor - 1932: Rancho Grande, Republic - 1940: Robin Hood of the Pecos, Republic - 1941: Rookies on Parade, Republic - 1941: Rustler’s Valley, Paramount - 1937: Saga of Death Valley, Republic - 1939: Santa Fe Marshall, Paramount - 1940: Santa Fe Trail, WBFN - 1940: Savage Gold, Superior - 1933: Scarface, Astor - 1932: Scatterbrain, Republic - 1940: School for Husbands - 1937: Secret Evidence, PRC - 1941: Secret Valley, Superior - 1937: Secrets of a Model, Dezel - 1940: Shadows Over Shanghai, Superior - 1938: Shenandoah Valley Showdown, Paramount - Sinful Souls Sis Hopkins, Republic - 1941: Sky Bandits, Monogram - 1940: Sky Devils, Astor - 1932: Smashing the Money Ring, WBFN - 1939: Smashing the Vice Trust - 1937: Soldier and the Lady, RKO - 1937:Something to Sing About, Superior - 1937: Son of the Navy, Monogram - 1940: South of Panama, PRC - 1941: South of the Border, Republic - 1939: Stagecoach War, Paramount - 1940: Stagecoach War, Paramount - 1940: Strawberry Blonde, WBFN - 1941: Streamline Express, Astor - 1935: Submarine Patrol, Fox - 1938: Swanee River, Fox - 1939: Tear Gas Squad, WBFN - 1940: That Gang of Mine, Monogram - 1940: The Bat Whispers, Astor:- The Crime of Dr. Crespie, Republic 1935 - The Crouching Beast, Superior 1935: The Devil Bat - PRC 1940: The Human Monster - Monogram 1940: The Letter - WBFN 1940: The Lion Has Wings - UA 1939: The Monster Walks - Astor 1932: The Phantom Strikes - Monogram 1938:- The Sea Hawk WBFN, 1940 - The Sea Wolf, WBFN 1941 - The Virgin Bride/The Wrong Road, Republic 1937 - Three Faces West, Republic, 1940 - Tomboy, Monogram, 1940 - Torpedo Raider, Monogram, 1935 Tough Kid, Monogram, 1938 - Trail of the Silver Spurs, Monogram, 1941 -Two Fisted Rangers, Columbia, 1939 - Una Donna Fra Due Mondi,1936 - Under Texas Skies Republic, 1940 - Undercover Agent, Monogram, 1939 - Vampire Bat, Astor, 1933 - Wallaby Jim of the Islands, Superior, 1937 - Winners of the West, Universal, 1940 - Wyoming Outlaw Republic ,1939 - Young Bill Hickock, Republic,1940 - Young Buffalo Bill, Republic, 1940 - Yukon Flight, Monogram, 1940.
Published in Colin MacCabe. The Eloquence of the Vulgar: Language, Cinema and the Politics of Culture. (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 147-162. [2] Ibid. [3] See, for example, Balio, T. The American Film Industry. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Balio, T. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995); Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. and Thompson, K. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Thompson, K. and Bordwell, D. Film History: An Introduction, 3rd Edn. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2009); Staiger, J. Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. (Princeton: Princeton issue 2, November 2010, Page 310, University Press, 1992); Staiger, J. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Waller, G. Ed. Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition. (Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Waller G. and Musser, C. Eds Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930.(Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Gomery, D. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Gomery, D. The Hollywood Studio System: A History. (London: BFI Publishing, 2005); Allen, R. and Gomery , D. Film History: Theory and Practice. (New York and London: McGraw Hill, 1985), Klinger, B. Melodrama and Meaning : History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Klinger, B. Beyond the Multiplex : Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Maltby, R. and Craven, I. Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Stokes, M. and Maltby, R. American Movie Audiences : From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era. (London, BFI Publishing, 1999); Maltby, R., Stokes, M. and Allen, R. Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007); Fuller K. H. At The Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture.(Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Fuller-Seeley, K. H. Ed. Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008); Jancovich, M., Faire, L. and Stubbings, S. The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. (London: BFI Publishing, 2003) and Chapman, J., Glancy, M. and Harper, S. The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). [4] Jameson, F. The Political Unconscious. (New York, London: Routledge,2009), 6. [5] Anon., ‘What the Picture Did For Me’, Motion Picture Herald, Vol. 146 No. 1, (3 January 1942), 46. [6] Anon., ‘What the Picture Did For Me’, Motion Picture Herald, Vol. 145 No. 12, (20 December 1941), 66.
(At this point it is only fair to note also Kathryn Fuller-Seeley’s observation that reports in ‘What the Picture Did For Me’ were not necessarily particularly representative of those of the general public either.) Fuller-Seeley, K. “What the Picture Did For Me”: Small Town Exhibitors’ Strategies for Surviving the Great Depression’ in Fuller-Seeley, K. (2008); Thumim, J. Celluloid Sisters: Women and Popular Cinema. (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992). Figures published in Variety and the Motion Picture Herald are typical sources of data for this approach to the measurement of popularity. See, for example, Chopra-Gant, M. Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir. (London: I B Tauris, 2005).
This is an over-simplification and, particularly, omits a variety of ‘short subjects’, newsreels, cartoons and other material that supported feature films. It is, however, a sufficient account for the purposes of this article and, if anything, the existence of such an array of other material strengthens my argument for the need to examine closely the composition of cinema programs instead of focusing on the major feature films alone. The percentage rate for movies in the former category was variable, depending on the particular terms of each rental contract. Audiences which, incidentally, likely also saw lesser movies as supporting features in these shows. What cinemagoers liked might not always have been films. Live performances, bingo and promotions for consumer goods like dinnerware and books were often part of the cinemagoing experience. The possibility that cinemagoing in itself was a greater attraction for audiences than any particular film represents one of text-based film studies’ great blind spots. For a fuller account of these other pleasures of cinemagoing see Glancy, M. and Sedgwick, J. “Cinemagoing in the United States in the Mid-1930s: A Study Based on the Variety Dataset” in Maltby, R., Stokes, M. and Allen, R. C. Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007). Not all the films in the dataset are listed in the AFI Catalog and in some cases the Internet Movie Database is used as an alternative. In the few cases where neither database has a listing for a film, genre is implied from the advertisement in the Kenosha Evening News. Wright’s Kenosha City Directory. (Milwaukee: Wright Directory Company, 1941), 13. ‘Kenosha’s First Century’ Kenosha Evening News 15 June 1935.
On the other hand it is worth noting that the entry for the cinema on the cinematreasures.org website describes it as having a ‘checkered on-again-off-again history’, so perhaps the difficulties were particular to this cinema. (See, for example, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 27 March 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 10 October 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 8 November 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 9 November 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 24 January 1942, Gomery, D. The Hollywood Studio System. (London: BFI Publishing, 1986), As Kevin Heffernan notes, ‘the lucrative first-run theaters … comprised only 15 percent of the total theaters in operation but garnered 70 percent of the nation’s box office receipts’. (Heffernan, K. Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business 1953-1968 (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). It is perhaps worth emphasising here that small cinemas such as the Chief did play ‘A’ movies, but only late in their runs, often several years after release. This is certainly consistent with one of the findings of Handel; that almost half of the audience in his study was ‘nonselective’, going to the movies to see ‘any picture’ rather than a particular film. (Handel, L. A. Hollywood Looks at its Audience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 152-153). This is an area where this study could undoubtedly be improved by more sophisticated methods. Genre classifications in this article have been taken mostly from the American Film Institute listings for the films. The AFC catalogue lists genres individually so that if a movie is a ‘musical comedy’ it is listed as both a musical and a comedy but not as a ‘musical comedy’, which is not, therefore, recognised as a distinct genre in itself. For the purpose of this study it has been difficult to determine how to deal with such cases since it is not always readily apparent what weighting to give to the different components of the generic hybrid: should be given equal weighting where both appear in the catalogue listing, or is the film in question really a musical with a few gags or a comedy with a couple of songs? The compromise adopted has been to simply treat the film as whichever genre the AFC catalogue lists first. This accounts for the surprisingly low number of musicals in this table (most of the films are listed as comedies first). A more sophisticated method of analysis employing a system of weighting generic components for hybrid films would probably change the picture slightly from the one presented in this table. Reviewing the film under its alternate title, ‘Vice Racket’, Variety (19 May 1937), 23 classed the film as a ‘sex piece’. Film Daily (29 April 1937) called it a ‘sex film’ in an article on the banning of such movies in Council Bluffs, Iowa and neighbouring city, Omaha, Nebraska. Films of this type were also often referred to as ‘vice movies’. Unlike many of the films discussed in this article, Gambling With Souls has been released on DVD. Variety (19 May 1937) 23 judged the lead actress’s performance thus: ‘Her drama is atrocious, and her emotional display amusingly hammy. The Chief typically had three runs each week, a midweek, three-day run on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and two ‘weekend’ runs of two days each: Friday/Saturday and Sunday/Monday. It has so far proven impossible to identify this movie. Neither the AFI Film Catalogue nor the IMDB has a reference to it under any title. The only reference to the movie found thus far is in Boxoffice (26 January 1946), which reports that the movie had been rejected by the Chicago censors in 1945, and links the movie to the distributor, Dezel. 1941 Film Billing Sheets for this distributor — in the Warner Brothers Archive — make no reference to this film, however. Possibly it was being distributed by a different company in 1941. (Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News 25 April 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News 28 April 1941) No revenue figures are available for this engagement. Also released under the title Marriage Forbidden. If, as seems likely, word-of-mouth publicity played any part in the success of the two earlier adults only shows then it is quite possible that the midnight preview of Damaged Goods would have been counter-productive. Unlike Gambling With Souls, Damaged Goods contains no explicit scenes, and the fact that it is essentially a morality tale about the risks of contracting venereal disease from casual sexual encounters likely meant that it would have a limited appeal to audiences seeking sex and scandal. Mademoiselle Ma Mere (1936 Decoin France): No box office revenue figures are available. The existence of such a culture would explain the relative lack of popularity of Damaged Goods; a film which — on the face of its publicity — promised similar pleasures to sex films that succeeded in attracting a larger audience. Benoit Mandelbrot. The Fractal Geometry of Nature, San Francisco: Freeman, 1983), Dixon, W. W. ed. American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. (Oxford: Berg, 2006) 180-181.
Acknowledgements: The research presented in this essay was made possible by a grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (project grant number: 119137).
Mike Chopra-Gant is Reader in Media, Culture and Communications at London Metropolitan University. Contact Mike: .uk
Dirty Movies, or: why film scholars should stop worrying about Citizen Kane and learn to love bad films
(Mike Chopra-Gant, London Metropolitan University, UK, Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010) Abstract)
This article presents an empirical case study of cinema exhibition at a small downtown cinema in an industrial city in the American midwest in the early 1940s. The case study is used to advance an argument that film scholars have too often based their selection of films for study on personal taste, and that film studies has thus evolved around a set of films that does not represent the films which ordinary moviegoers saw and enjoyed. The article argues for the need for film historians to pay greater attention to those films that demonstrably meant something to ordinary cinemagoers in order to produce a more reliable account of the cinema of the past.
In a lecture given in 1992, Colin MacCabe — borrowing an evocative phrase from Dante—spoke of the “eloquence of the vulgar”. ‘Text and society are not separate categories’ argued MacCabe, ‘but ones which mutually illuminate each other’, implicitly calling for an approach to the analysis of cultural ‘texts’ that pays attention to the most commonplace cultural texts andto the social contexts within which such ‘texts’ exist. While there are probably few scholars today working in film and cultural studies who would disagree strongly with this approach, it has more often than not been the case in practice that scholars have been drawn to the exemplary or exceptional in popular culture—auteur cinema,‘quality’ television, cult movies etc. — leaving the most ‘vulgar’, mundane, everyday cultural forms and contexts relatively unexamined.
By way of a case study of cinemagoing and movie exhibition practices in a small Mid-Western city in the early 1940s, this article aims to demonstrate the divergence between the tastes of film scholars and ordinary historical audiences, and show what the analysis of hitherto neglected types of films, and the contexts in which they were consumed, can tell us about cinema andhistorical movie cultures. McCabe’s call for attention to be given to both vulgar ‘text’ and context appears unremarkable at first sight but, on closer examination, it is possible to see that it raises some problems when applied to the artefacts of popular culture and their relationships with the social contexts in which they are produced and consumed; the major problem being that of deciding which texts to look at when trying to obtain a reliable historical sense of the society, the culture, the period weare interested in. There have long been film scholars interested in grounded, historical understandings of films and their contexts. More recently, interest in contextualised understandings of films has grown considerably in importance within academic film studies as the seminal work undertaken by Tino Balio, David Bordwell, Kirsten Thompson, Janet Staiger, Gregory Waller, Douglas Gomery and Robert Allen, to name only a few of the pioneers of film history, has been taken up and advanced by Barbara Klinger, Richard Maltby, Melvin Stokes, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Mark Jancovich and Mark Glancy among others. .However, on the whole, historical and contextual interest in movies has been subordinated to the more dominant approach to academic film study, which is predominantly interested in the film as ‘text’, and has approached the study of movies through various theories of textual meaning and methods of textual analysis, often paying little attention to the larger social and cultural contexts in which those movies existed. Thus constituted, this dominant tendency in academic film studies has been built upon the repression of what Fredric Jameson has called the ‘political unconscious’ of the text, and around a framework that he described as a ‘rewriting’ of the meaning of film texts ‘according to the paradigm of another narrative, which is taken as the former’s master code or Ur-narrative and proposed as the ultimate hidden or unconscious meaning’ of the film in question.The dominance of this approach — itself a legacy of the way that film studies evolved historically from within literary study — has had a profound impact on the study of films. Insofar as this article is concerned, it is the way that emphasis on the film ‘text’ has tended to direct scholars’ attention toward a canon (or, more accurately, canons) of exemplary films that is problematic. In this respect one of the more recent developments in film study — and one that, to its credit, does direct attention toward movies ignored by more mainstream film studies —ultimately proves little better that the mainstream approach to which it sets itself in opposition. The growth of academic interest in what is frequently gathered together under the loosely defined and often misleading term ‘cult’ cinema has been one of the most dynamic developments in film study in recent years. However, ‘cult’ is a category that encompasses a broad range of lower grade movies variously alternatively described by scholars as ‘paracinema’ (Sconce),‘trash’ or ‘exploitation’ cinema (Schaeffer), ‘sleaze’ (Hawkins) and ‘body genres’ (Williams). This attention to hitherto neglected movies is to be welcomed, but this way of grouping together a disparate collection of often quite unrelated movies under the banner ‘cult’ (or, indeed, any other banner that might be used) appears to be driven more by a drive to legitimize these movies within a canon of their own; one set in opposition to the mainstream film studies canon, perhaps, but ultimately just another canon derived by particular intellectual processes and priorities rather than the historical realities of ordinary moviegoing. This is, then, a very different project from the one embarked upon in this article, which sets out to achieve the very opposite of canonization; to break down the distinction between one canon and another and reinsert the movies thus liberated from canonical captivity into the ordinary, everyday moviegoing culture of American in the 1940s. It is a central contention of this article that the focus on canons (whether mainstream or oppositional) and their component texts produces — or at least amplifies — a disjuncture between text and society by imposing an inorganic separation between equally artificial classes of films, thus circumnavigating the relationship between ‘text’ and its contexts of consumption, which McCabe rightly suggests is fundamental to the understanding of the ‘text’. Put simply, film studies’ focus on canonical movies raises an important question: can the ‘texts’ carefully selected for attention by a sub-group of ‘society’ that is as unrepresentative of society in general as film scholars undoubtedly are, really ‘illuminate’ much about society and its culture? Citizen Kane (Welles 1941 USA) may well be a preeminent example of the filmmaker’s art and it has certainly received its fair share of praise and critical attention from film scholars, all of which might seem to imply that it should be considered a ‘significant’ film in its time. But contemporary reports from cinema managers suggest a rather different conclusion, commenting that ‘it may be a classic, but it’s plumb “nuts” to your show-going public’ and that ‘we had a good many walkouts and the general consensus of opinion was that it was terrible’. Such reports imply a failure by Citizen Kane to capture the imagination of ordinary audiences at the time of its release and thus problematise any suggestion that it should be thought of as particularly emblematic of the cinema of its time. By extension, the same point could be made more generally of film studies’ canons of exemplary movies: they are the product of the tastes of an exceptional group (or groups) and, as such, reveal little about the ordinary, everyday dimensions of cinema in the past. If film scholars’ tastes can provide little insight into the preferences and practices of ordinary cinemagoers, then, the question arises again: how do we determine which ‘texts’ will illuminate the society that those cinemagoers inhabited?
Harry Silverstein, about 25, was shot and killed at the rear of the Central Park Theatre on January 4, 1931. An ex-employee named Rappaport, 20, was on the back of the stage that night with electrician Herbert Imlach, Irving Riffkind and Robert Ross. About 8:30 P. M. a Bob Lewis approached Rappaport to say that Silverstein was outside and that Rappaport went to the stage door and that two shots were heard. Witnesses rushed down to see Silverstein grappling with Rappaport, who ran away to be apprehended at Mansfield, Ohio in February, 1935. He claimed self-defense, great fear of Silverstein, and a history of attacks by Silverstein from high school on combined with death threats without justification. Silverstein was 5'10" tall and weighed 180 pounds, while Rappaport was 5'5" and weighed but 115 pounds.
On the night of the homicide, Rappaport testified that he and some others played cards in the theatre for awhile and he later played solitaire. When made aware that Silverstein was present, he ran to the stage door, opened it and stepped into the alley where he was felled with a powerful blow and that they grappled; that the gun was in the pocket of his coat; that Troubles tore the pocket and the gun fell on the ground; that they both reached for it and in the struggle the gun was discharged; that he believed he was in danger of great bodily harm from Silverstein; that he did not see Ross, Riffkind or Imlach there at that time; that he left the gun on the ramp where it dropped after the shooting; that he immediately ran away, went to New York, assumed the name of Milton Stein, and traveled with a New York salesman through five or six states until he was arrested at Mansfield, Ohio. Riffkind testified that the noise of shots was a part of the picture then playing in the theatre.
(Saturday, May 10, 1941) - New Theater Will Open Tonight
With the gala opening of the new Hollywood theater tonight, Kenosha will welcome her eighth motion picture house. Michael Lencioni, who has been the manager of the Lincoln theater for the past three years, is owner and manager of the new Hollywood.
The Hollywood is located at 4902 Seventh avenue where the Butterfly theater once operated. However, for the opening tonight the building has been completely renovated and redecorated. The interior is done in maroon, cream and orchid and the sidelights are rainbow colored fixtures which may be changed to any color desired. Self-rising seats will be another innovation chosen by Mr. Lencioni for the comfort and convenience of patrons and a new mirraphonic sound system is a feature of the new theater. Motion pictures will be unreeled upon a new processed screen with a highly reflective surface which has the added virtue of being exceptionally easy on the eyes. A modernistic canopy will greet movie patrons as they approach the Hollywood, and new draperies and carpets will add to the attractiveness of the interior.
The new theater will be open every evening, and for Sunday and holiday matinees Mr Lencioni, who was born in Kenosha, made his home here until he moved to Sheboygan Falls to manage a theater. Three years ago he returned here to manage the Lincoln. During the past week his many friends in the city have extended their best wishes for success in his new venture.
(November 2, 1932) - Reopen Lincoln Theater Friday -
Management of Butterfly Takes Over Second Theater
The Lincoln theater on Fourteenth Avenue, redecorated and remodeled, will be opened Friday, Nov, 7 by Samuel Levinsohn and Harry Vogel who recently took over the Butterfly theater. Sound equipment has been installed in the Lincoln which was previously used for silent pictures and has been closed for some time.
Acoustical Treatment
The walls of the theater interior have been treated with acoustical padding such as is used in a large number of modern theaters and numerous other improvements have been made. The Lincoln will be run on the same policy as the Butterfly. There will be double feature programs changing four times a week. E. D. Harris is the manager.
(Chicago Tribune, January 8, 1989, by Rudolph Unger) The lights on movie theater marquees in Chicagos Loop have been flickering out one by one over the years, and the Loops last marquee was to go dark Sunday as the Woods Theater closed its doors. The demise of the theater where “Gone with the Wind“ premiered on a reserved-seat basis in 1940, beginning an engagement that lasted an entire year, will make Monday the first day in more than three-quarters of a century that the citys Loop will be without a movie theater. The Woods, on the northwest corner of Randolph and Dearborn Streets, will close to make way for a 30-story office building, becoming the latest victim of the Loops decline as an entertainment center and its growth as a commercial center. The 1,100-seat Woods is the last movie house to join the scrap heap of the once glittering film palaces that radiated like brillant necklaces near the intersection of State and Randolph Streets. “There was always a festival air surrounding the intersection of State and Randolph, the center of the Loops night life,” said Edward Barry, a veteran newspaper cultural critic. “I still recall the first of the great silent Harold Lloyd comedy films,Safety First,at the Chicago in 1923, in which he hung from the Wrigley Building clock.” The late Danny Kaye, the funny man whose uproarious first movie, “Up in Arms,” graced the Woods marquee for a year in 1944, would weep if he could see the Loop today, devoid of even a single silver screen. Bob Hope, that other funny man who once stood penniless outside Loop theaters in the 1920s before his star ascended, would certainly look in amazement at the shuttered show houses and sites of razed cinema palaces whose marquees once were emblazoned with the names of the brightest stars in Hollywoods firmament: actors such as Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, Jack Benny, Fred Astaire, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Spencer Tracy. Actresses such as Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Fontaine, Judy Garland, Ingrid Bergman and Barbara Stanwyck. The Chicago Theatre, long the flagship of the sumptuous Loop show places, was saved from destruction through a massive civic effort to refurbish it as a center of live entertainment. But shadows overhang its future since its operator, Chicago Theatre Productions, went into bankruptcy last summer, and the theater has been reopened only for an occasional event since. The Woods Theater, the Loop’s last movie house, on the northwest corner of Randolph and Dearborn Streets, was to close Sunday to make way for a 30-story building. Gone forever are such popular show houses as the State-Lake Theater, across the street from the Chicago. The Loop, just south of the Chicago, which for a time featured newsreels, is long gone. The Roosevelt, a block south on State, and the opulent Oriental, on Randolph just west of State, gave way to stores. The United Artists, down the street from the Oriental and kitty corner from the Woods, closed last year. The Garrick, onetime neighbor of the Woods, was replaced with a parking garage. The Apollo, just west of the Garrick, made way for the Greyhound bus terminal, which itself is now to be razed so that twin office towers can be built on Randolph Street. The McVickers Theater, on Madison Street just west of State, was taken over by film producer Mike Todd to feature his Todd-A-O process films, beginning with the screen version of the musical “Oklahoma.“ North of the Woods on Dearborn Street, the two Dearborn Cinemas had a short-lived existence after opening in the old Michael Todd and Cinestage Theaters. The properties, owned by Todds estate, are to be sold to the developer of the Greyhound property and restored to their original names, Harris and Selywn, and their original use as playhouses. Also long gone from the scene is the Palace Theater, in the Bismarck Hotel complex, once known as the home of the wide-screen Cinerama films. At one time, the Palace, like the Chicago, the State-Lake and the Oriental, featured not only first-run films from Hollywood but they also hosted live stage entertainment. “From childhood on, going to movies was a big thrill,” recalled Herman Kogan, Chicago historian and newspaperman. “On Saturdays, that meant going to one of the big Loop show palaces, where you could see stage shows as well as first-run films.” There were other, smaller theaters scattered about the Loop where B films or reruns of first-run movies could be seen, usually for a cut-rate price. These included the Monroe, the Clark and the LaSalle, which stood on the site of the present-day St. Peter Catholic Church at 110 W. Madison St. The Today theater, located on Madison Street just west of Dearborn and which specialized in newsreels, also disappeared. The movies came to Chicagos Loop-traditionally defined as the city blocks lying within the “loop“ of the downtown elevated tracks-early in this century.
(Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1918) Since theater building is a habit to which Chicago is little addicted, a brief, provincial enthusiasm may be condoned for A. H. Woods and his new house, the Woods, at Randolph and Dearborn. Mr. Woods is known as a showman of many successful enterprises, operating extensively in racy farce, modern melodrama, and character comedy of the Potash and Perimutter type. He is an intrepid investor in the stages, but his daring is mitigated usually by an intuition which preserves him. That is, he avoids the five per cent that is hopelessly good in the theater and the five per cent that is hopelessly bad, and he banks, reluctantly, no doubt, on the ninety per cent that is prudently mediocre.
He is, one suspects, a man with few illusions, and none of the florid managerial vanities that inspire such stupid and ignorant posings as “The Judge of Zalamea.” The commonplace or successful show is the better for Mr. Woods having done it, because he does it as well as it can be done without interfering with the attendances. His name on an entertainment is assurance that, while it may not mean much as drama, it signifies a great deal as theater. So the ingenuous wanderer within the Union Loop, seeking amusement rather than edification, will usually find the new Woods a satisfactory haven.
It is a good-looking theater. From Michael & Fox, who are literary as well as architectural, it is learned that upon the outside it is an artistic liaison between office building and playhouse. Inside it is as quiet as a midwestern library, with solid walnut walls, purple carpets and chairs, and a conservative lighting scheme of gray and lavender. The first floor auditorium is one of the most spacious in America, with something like 700 seats on it, and all of them permitting an unobstructed view of the stage. There is no gallery, but the balcony is commodious and comfortable. Two foyers are quiet and dignified in brown and purple, “adding,” say the architects, “to the feeling of elegance that is characteristic of the whole.”
“FRIENDLY ENEMIES,” the first play for the Woods theater, comes from the titular Capital, with the plaudits of the President. …
When and if Mr. Woods gets the electric lights on his theater in operation, the Dearborn street facade will announce “Sam Bernard and Louis Mann,” while emblazoned on the Randolph street front will be “Louis Mann and Sam Bernard.” In case it is learned that the sign on one thoroughfare is more conspicuous than that on the other, a scheme of equable alternation will be arranged by the arbitrators. Thus Mr. Woods is comfortable, Mr. Bernard and Mr. Mann are 50 per cent happy, and Mr. Mann and Mr. Bernard the remaining fifty. All are content except perhaps the bilious observer, who thinks he sees in the minor details of the alliance one of the several reasons that acting is to art what kopeck is to finance.
(Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1918) - An explosion of dynamite shattered the east doors of the new Al H. Woods theater at Randolph and Dearborn streets last night and started a campaign by the police and the state’s attorney’s office to head off a reign of terror alleged to have been planned by union labor sympathizers. Threats to prevent the big playhouse from opening its doors to the public on Monday are said to have been made by labor representatives and soon after the blast had stirred great excitement at the busy downtown corner. Acting Chief Alcock and Assistant Fleming were on the scene looking for evidence upon which to base prosecution. State’s Attorney Hoyne, who is in Hot Springs, Ark., was in communication with his office by long distance telephone and gave directions for the inquiry.
Actual Damage Slight.
The explosion caused property damage of less than $75 despite the fact that it was of sufficient force to smash windows in a passing street car. Nobody was injured, although scores of persons were in the immediate vicinity. Following the explosion, which took place at 7:15 o’clock, George H. Thomas, the contractor who erected the building, and Lou M. Houseman, western representative of Al H. Woods, owner of the theater, admitted their suspicion that sheet metal workers might be implicated. Half a stick of dynamite blew up, either from a slow fuse or a match, just outside the Dearborn street entrance. The actual damage will not exceed $75.
What the Trouble Was About.
Mr. Thomas declared there had been labor trouble ever since construction started. Last Monday, he said, the electrical workers walked out in sympathy with the sheet metal trade, which quit the job three months ago because he refused to substitute iron doors for ones of steel already in position. Had the demands of the unions been acceded to, Mr. Housdeman said, the theater opening would have been delayed three months. Thomas Walsh, business agent of the sheet metal workers, was reached by telephone last night, but refused to talk. He was recalled to the telephone three times. Finally he said:
PROCLAMATION - Whereas one of the technical advances for which our country is noted has been taking place in the entertainment field with the development of three-dimensional motion pictures and
Whereas on May 6 the city of Kenosha will become the first city in Wisconsin where theater patrons can enjoy the advantages of the latest and most modern development in this field known as stereophonic sound,
Therefore I as city manager declare Wednesday, May 6 as “Stereophonic Three Dimension Day” in Kenosha and express best wishes to the local theater which has brought this unique entertainment experience to our citizens.
CUSTER, City Manager (Kenosha News, May 6, 1953 for the simultaneous premiere of HOUSE OF WAX at the Kenosha Theatre.)
(Sat., Jan.29, 1921) - THEATRE DEAL IS NOW CLOSED -
Virginian Theatre Leased by Collins Theatrical Enterprises -
EXPLAINS NEW PLANS -
Virginian to Continue to Be the Home of Vaudeville and Also Super Film Attractions —–
The merger of the management of the Virginian and Burke Theatres was completed on Friday evening when a lease for the Virginian Theatre was secured by the Collins Theatrical Enterprise as anticipated in the unofficial announcement made on Friday. The lease was sealed, signed and delivered on Friday afternoon just after four-thirty and the new management is to take control of the theatre on the first of February. The lease provides an option for the purchase of the property, should this be desired at a later date. For the present, Manager Fred Dayton will remain in charge of the theatre until the new management becomes acquainted with the operation of the theatre.
Reflects Success of Past
The expansion of the theatre holdings of the Collins Theatrical Enterprise reflects the success which they have achieved in the management of the Burke Theatre on Market Square. The members of the company are Mrs. Lillian K. Collins, who in the near future will take personal charge of the Virginian; Charles Collins and Marvin B. Kincaid, all three of whom will be associated in the management of the two theatres. It is planned to continue the Virginian theatre as the home of high class vaudeville in Kenosha. As in the past, vaudeville will be staged there on the last three days of the week and on Sunday with an entire new bill for each Sunday program. The merger of the theatre with the Burke will also make it possible to supplement these shows with high class film attractions whenever this is advisable.
Daytons Explain Future Plans
Edward and Fred Dayton, who for the past eleven months have been successful in the management of the Virginian Theatre, have sold out their interest to the Virginian Theatre Company, which organization leased the property to the new holder. The Dayton brothers plan to devote their time to their growing insurance business, the extent of which made it necessary for them to withdraw from the theatrical management for the present. They have recently expanded their insurance business to such an extent that it requires the greater part of their time. The Virginian is also to be open each and every day as the new management plans to bring feature super-films here for the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday performances. The film contracts held by the Collins Theatrical Enterprise will enable them to present some of the latest and most attractive releases at this theatre. E. Z. Jones, Jr., who for the past six months has been in charge of the publicity for the Burke Theatre, will be placed in charge of the publicity work for the two show houses.
Has Interesting History
The merger of the two theatres is an interesting chapter in the history of the Collins Theatrical Enterprise. The company started several years ago when Mrs. Lillian K. Collins took over the ownership and control of the Burke Theatre. At that time Mr. Collins was a salesman for the J. P. Smith and Company, large importers pf New York and Chicago, but in a few months the business of the Burke Theatre grew to such large dimensions that he resigned his position to aid in the management of it. The many friends of the Burke grew to such large numbers that they could not be accommodated at the one theatre and the Orpheum Theatre on Market Street was leased, remodeled, and under the name of the Blue Mill operated very successfully by Marvin B.. Kincaid with the assistance of Mr. and Mrs. Collins.
Expected New Theatre
Then for the first time in the history of the Blue Mill property, it became a successful movie shrine. Then the owners of the property came to Manager Kincaid and secured a release on the lease with the intimation that the property would be sold and a larger and finer theatre built on Main Street to be leased to the Collins Theatrical Enterprise. It was a great disappointment when this deal failed to materialize but the acquisition of the Virginian Theatre now marks the fulfilling of it in another way.
Yesterday the owners of the Fox Theatre, now officially the Stevens Point Opera House, removed the iconic Fox Theater marquee from its façade in what Mayor Mike Wiza said is an effort to “restore it to its original look, not the look we remember from the ’60s and ’70s, but the original look. And honestly, it’s probably much more practical, since it’s not going to be a movie theater anymore. We decided to take the building over. We didn’t have the ability to save it, nor did we have the money to fix it, so what we did was have an engineer go in and determine if all of it needed to come down and it didn’t,” Wiza said. He said the back two-thirds were structurally unsound and demolition on that had to be done. Fortunately, a large section visible from Main Street was able to be salvaged … the front third, basically the lobby, and the second floor ballroom. Wild Card Corporation owned an adjacent building and stepped in, said Wild Card Customer Success Manager Joe Schoenberg, who added that they will display the important parts of the sign inside the renovated space. "The actual opera house was here long before Fox was, and we want to keep it that way.” The building will house a catering kitchen and events space, and will feature a German-style beer garden in the back.
The 158-car Milky Way Drive-In cinema is back for another summer after debuting last year as a popular COVID-safe attraction. Its second season will begin May 22 with a Bon Jovi drive-in concert experience broadcast to about 300 outdoor theaters and select indoor cinemas across the United States, Canada and Ireland, according to producer Encore Drive-In Nights. Milky Way is one of six drive-ins across Wisconsin broadcasting the show. Admission is $89 per vehicle with a maximum of six patrons. Milky Way’s lineup through June 6 includes “Frozen II,” “Black Panther,” “Marvel’s The Avengers,” and “Minions.” “Jurassic Park” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” were scheduled as a double feature on June 3. On days when the adjoining Milwaukee Milkmen sports team doesn’t play a home game, programs are shown on a 40-foot LED screen, with sound transmitted via a stereo radio frequency.
Tickets are $35 per vehicle. The cinema serves an array of concessions, available to order online for delivery by carhop. It also hosts a rotating selection of local food trucks and vendors. “After a great inaugural year at Milky Way, we’re very, very excited to bring back the drive-in experience for 2021,” said Mike Zimmerman, CEO of ROC Ventures, developer of the Ballpark Commons mixed-use development and owner of the Milwaukee Milkmen. “The Milky Way Drive-In offers a terrific food-and-entertainment ‘night out’ experience in a safe environment.”
January 2, 1926: McVickers Robbery Seen As Inside Job (AP) — Executives of McVickers theatre were scrutinizing rogues gallery files today while police were seeking former employees of the theatre after the treasurer was held up last night and robbed of $1,000. A robber familiar with the theatre’s floor plan and routine sequestered the treasurer, his wife and another employe and forced them to deliver up the contents of the safe. The police are convinced that intimate knowledge of the layout of the building was necessary to smooth execution of the robbery.
(March 13, 1922 - Kenosha Evening News) -
The Story of Saxe Brothers Who Caught Gleam of Big Idea — Pioneers of the Movies ______
The Saxe brothers John and Tom have been something like patron saints to the moving picture industry in Wisconsin and their management has branched out into other states. They were among the first men of the nation to realize the value of the moving picture as an educational institution. They saw the great possibilities of it to the lover of the cleanest and best in amusements at the minimum price. They saw early the important place that the motion picture was destined to play in modern life and they decided to have a part in the important development.
It was Tom Saxe who first predicted that motion pictures would become entertainment de luxe with productions so elaborate that managers would be justified in asking admission prices on a par with those of the legitimate houses.
Started Fifteen Years Ago
It Was five years before the “Divine Sarah” Bernhardt gave motion pictures real standing by joining the movies that John Saxe, now president of the Saxe Amusement company, and Tom Saxe, secretary of the company, began to dabble in pictures. They set up an old “Hale’s Touring Car” on Grand avenue in Milwaukee as the start of their business. Thousands of people recall this old car when people looked through the windows at pictures which flashed past. It’s a long step from the old touring car to the pictures of today but the Saxe boys were right at the head of the procession in every advancement.
The old car got too small. The world was moving faster, and Saxe Brothers moved with the world. They bought the old Orpheum Theatre in Milwaukee and converted it over to pictures. It was a real success, and then the Saxe boys began to branch out. They secured the Lyric theatre, the Princess, the Crystal and the Alhambra, which they made one of the biggest houses in the nation given over to the new and favorite form of entertainment.
Took a Gamble at “Pictures”
The Saxe Brothers took a gamble on pictures. They made old houses larger and built new ones with a view of giving the motion picture everything possible in the way of attractive investure. They called in the magic art of music to make pictures more attractive and added many things which brought a new and different attraction for the picture shows. Many times the expenditures made to try out new experiments were much greater than the returns, but the forward-looking Saxe Brothers were willing to take a chance because they believed that the ultimate success of the picture as an entertainment was far in the future. It was natural that the Saxe Brothers should become a commanding part in the management of the picture business in Wisconsin With their center in Milwaukee; they have been branching out year after year, until now the company has a part in the management and control of twenty-five theatres in Milwaukee and other parts of Wisconsin.
Theatres in Many Cities
The directory of the Saxe enterprises now includes the Strand, Rialto, Princess, Theatorium, the Miller (a vaudeville house), Modjeska, Savoy and Tivoli in Milwaukee, three houses in Waukesha, three in Oshkosh, four in Marinette, two in Kenosha, and one each in Green Bay and Wausau. The close connection of all of these theatres makes it possible for the controlling company to furnish to all the houses the best in motion picture entertainment with the minimum of cost.
Not the least of the interesting features connected with the new Orpheum Theatre is the fact that it signalizes an active interest of two pioneers of a great idea in Kenosha. John E. Saxe and Tom Saxe have done a lot to make life more liveable for the people of Wisconsin. Their connection with the new Orpheum Theatre is a guarantee of a broad policy looking forward all the time. The interest that they have shown in the development of the theatre in Kenosha is one of the happy incidents. When the Dayton boys were looking about for someone of real theatre experience, they found Tom Saxe, and they found that he had an idea that their idea of Kenosha being the real place for a real theatre was a decidedly valuable asset.
A September, 1983 Racine Journal Times article reported that in about 1912 Jack Benny [Benjamin Kubelsky] was brought to Racine to form and play in the pit orchestra of the Rex (then Racine Theatre) by Philip Dahlberg along with Cora Salisbury up from Waukegan to play with him. Together the trio supplied the musical accompaniment to the shows of the ring season. Benny played the violin. He was just 18 years of age.
The glorious 1922 Orpheum Theatre which celebrates 100 years this March 14th was not the first Orpheum in Kenosha. The original Orpheum was located on 56th Street next to the Fischer Hotel, east of Sixth Avenue. It opened on Saturday, September 24, 1910, and in addition to singers and other acts, the theatre touted clear, bright, and beautiful pictures for just five cents (2022 = $1.40).
Kenosha Evening News, October 1910: “The Orpheum Theatre is now equipped to give the public the finest service as a moving picture house,” The Kenosha Evening News read on November 15, 1911. “The very best pictures are the only ones used in this theatre.”
(continuing -) To better understand the cinema of the past, a turn to some notion of ‘the popular’ seems a logical step. But determining what ‘the popular’ means is not straightforward. At the very least, popularity has both quantitative and qualitative dimensions, as Janet Thumim observes. Some of the more recent movie histories that have attempted to engage with notions of ‘the popular’ employ a ‘top-down’ approach which considers only the quantitative aspect of the popularity of movies, typically using the trade press as a source of movie rental revenues which are employed as a rough-and-ready index of movie popularity. This approach certainly comes closer to objectivity than simply choosing which films to look at, but it introduces other problems, which mainly arise because of the stratified nature of movie production and distribution under the studio system, and the implications that the structure of these industries had for the revenue-earning potential of movies of different classes.
Simplifying the intricacies of the movie business for the purpose of illustration, the American movie industry produced three broad classes of feature film: prestige ‘A’ movies destined initially for the larger first-run cinemas; lesser ‘B’ movies which either played as supporting features for ‘A’ movies or headlined in smaller cinemas and, finally, what might be thought of as sub-‘B’ feature films — generally from poverty row and independent producers — which played as supporting features in larger cinemas, and/or provided the main feature film or one half of a double feature in smaller independently owned theatres. The contracts under which films were distributed had different rental terms for different classes of movie. So while ‘A’ and some of the better ‘B’ movies were generally rented on a percentage basis that gave the distributor a cut of the actual admissions receipts taken at the box office, the lower classes of movies usually earned a flat fee for each booking (often a very small amount. This flat rental rate effectively functioned as a ‘cap’ on the potential earnings of those movies; it determined the maximum a film could earn from any booking regardless how popular it proved to be with the audience. Furthermore, ‘A’ movies played larger, more prestigious cinemas and thus had the potential to attract larger audiences to each show; audiences that were paying higher prices. The net effect of these typical rental practices was the creation of a commercial environment which was structurally biased in favour of the prestige movies. This bias militates against the use of published revenue figures as a simple index of popularity. A high rental revenue figure for a film only tells us that the film earned a large amount of money. It is true that, generally, it will follow that a film which earned high revenues was widely distributed and popular with moviegoers, but what is missing from this picture is any sense of the qualitative popularity of the lower classes of films, whose earnings were inevitably smaller than those of prestige movies and which are thus effectively excluded from any quantitative measure of popularity based on revenues, but which nevertheless may have possessed a resonance for contemporary audiences. To gain a better sense of what cinemagoers saw and liked, a more nuanced approach to the appraisal of popularity is required.
The case study presented in this article does not purport to resolve all of these difficult issues, but it provides a suggestion of what a more fine-grained method of assessing audience engagement with movies might look like and gives a glimpse at the results that it can achieve.
The study looks at movie exhibition in a single small cinema, The Chief in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1941. It is, therefore, a study on an extremely small scale, and no claim is made that the results of this research can be simply extrapolated to larger scales. On the contrary, the argument made here is that larger-scale patterns of cinemagoing would need to be examined with the same attention to detail as this study. This case study outlines a method and an example; it does not providea simple scalable model. The primary source of data used in the case study is a set of microfilmed copies of the Kenosha Evening News held in the Kenosha Public Library. Cinema advertisements contained in the newspaper list all the films that played each of the city’s cinemas, including all of the supporting features. This permits the development of a detailed picture of what films were playing, where and when. The advertisements do not, however, provide any sense of the size of the audience at the Chief on any given day. For this reason these data are supplemented with box office data obtained from the collection of film billing sheets contained in the Stanley Warner Collection at the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California. This collection of film billing sheets is not complete, resulting in some gaps in the financial data. However, where available, these documents provide detailed information about the admissions receipts (box office takings) for individual shows and reveal the rentals due from the exhibitor in respect each movie. Finally, in order to provide a way of classifying the films contained in these datasets in terms that are meaningful within film studies, the American Film Institute film catalogue is used to identify the genre of each movie.
The Chief was a small cinema in downtown Kenosha, an industrial city situated on the Western shore of Lake Michigan between Chicago and Milwaukee. Kenosha had slightly fewer than 49,000 inhabitants by the early forties and was the home of Nash Motors and Jockey, the underwear manufacturer, both of which had large factories in the city, which provided the main sources of employment. Established in 1835, Kenosha had grown considerably in population between the turn of the Twentieth Century and the 1930s as large numbers of immigrants to the USA moved to the city to take up residence and employment. Like the nation as a whole, Kenosha suffered economic and social hardship during the Great Depression but, by the city’s centenary celebrations in 1935, there were signs of recovery and returning confidence, with the local newspaper asserting that ‘Kenosha can look forward to a future of promise’.
Republic 1940: Come on Leathernecks - Republic 1938: Covered Wagon Days - Republic 1940: Damaged Goods - 1937 Dezel: Dance Girl Dance - RKO 1940: Danger Ahead - Monogram 1940: Danger Flight - Monogram 1939: Dangerous Lady - PRC 1941: Death Rides the Range - Superior 1939: Desert Bandit - Republic 1941: Doomed to Die - Monogram 1940: Dreaming Out Loud - RKO 1940: Drums Along the Mohawk - Fox 1939: Drums of the Desert - Monogram 1940: Emergency Landing - PRC 1941: Federal Fugitives - PRC 1941: Flying Deuces - RKO 1939: Footsteps in the Dark - WBFN 1941: Forty Thousand Horsemen and a “Girl” - Teitel 1941: Frontier Crusader - PRC 1940: Fugitive From Justice - WBFN 1940: Gambling Daughters - PRC 1941: Gambling on the High Seas - WBFN 1940: Gambling With Souls - Superior 1936: Gangs of Chicago - Republic 1940: Girl From Havana - Republic 1940: Girls of the Road - Columbia 1940: Girls Under 21 - Columbia 1940: Great Train Robbery : Republic 1941: Haunted Honeymoon - Metro 1940: Hell’s Angels - Astor 1930: Heritage of the Desert - Paramount 1939: Hidden Gold - Paramount 1940: High School Girl - Astor 1934 High Sierra - WBFN 1941: Hit Parade of 1941 - Republic 1940: I Want a Divorce - Paramount 1940: I’m Still Alive - RKO 1940: In Name Only - RKO 1939: Jesse James - Fox 1939: King of the Lumberjacks - WBFN 1940: King of the Newsboys - Republic 1938: Kit Carson - UA 1940: Kitty Foyle - RKO 1940: Knights of the Range - Paramount 1940: Law and Order - Universal 1940: Law of the Pampas - Paramount 1939: Law of the Wolf - Superior 1939: Legion of the Lawless - RKO 1940: Light of Western Stars - Paramount 1940: Lone Wolf Meets a Lady - Columbia 1940:,Marked Men - PRC 1940: Melody and Moonlight - Republic 1940: Men Against the Sky - RKO 1940: Midnight Limited - Monogram 1940: Military Academy - Columbia 1940: Murder in the Air - WBFN 1940: Murder on the Yukon - Monogram 1940: Mutiny on the Elsinore - 1937: Mystery Plane, Monogram - 1939: Notorious But Nice, Astor - 1933: Oklahoma Renegades, Republic - 1940: Only Angels Have Wings, Columbia - 1939: Outside the 3 Mile Limit, Columbia - 1940: Panama Patrol, Superior - 1939: Paper Bullets, PRC - 1941: Penny Serenade, Columbia - 1941: Phantom of Chinatown, Monogram - 1940: Pony Post, Universal - 1940, Pride of the Bowery, Monogram - 1940: Private Detective, WBFN - 1939: Ragtime Cowboy Joe, Universal - 1940: Rain, Astor - 1932: Rancho Grande, Republic - 1940: Robin Hood of the Pecos, Republic - 1941: Rookies on Parade, Republic - 1941: Rustler’s Valley, Paramount - 1937: Saga of Death Valley, Republic - 1939: Santa Fe Marshall, Paramount - 1940: Santa Fe Trail, WBFN - 1940: Savage Gold, Superior - 1933: Scarface, Astor - 1932: Scatterbrain, Republic - 1940: School for Husbands - 1937: Secret Evidence, PRC - 1941: Secret Valley, Superior - 1937: Secrets of a Model, Dezel - 1940: Shadows Over Shanghai, Superior - 1938: Shenandoah Valley Showdown, Paramount - Sinful Souls Sis Hopkins, Republic - 1941: Sky Bandits, Monogram - 1940: Sky Devils, Astor - 1932: Smashing the Money Ring, WBFN - 1939: Smashing the Vice Trust - 1937: Soldier and the Lady, RKO - 1937:Something to Sing About, Superior - 1937: Son of the Navy, Monogram - 1940: South of Panama, PRC - 1941: South of the Border, Republic - 1939: Stagecoach War, Paramount - 1940: Stagecoach War, Paramount - 1940: Strawberry Blonde, WBFN - 1941: Streamline Express, Astor - 1935: Submarine Patrol, Fox - 1938: Swanee River, Fox - 1939: Tear Gas Squad, WBFN - 1940: That Gang of Mine, Monogram - 1940: The Bat Whispers, Astor:- The Crime of Dr. Crespie, Republic 1935 - The Crouching Beast, Superior 1935: The Devil Bat - PRC 1940: The Human Monster - Monogram 1940: The Letter - WBFN 1940: The Lion Has Wings - UA 1939: The Monster Walks - Astor 1932: The Phantom Strikes - Monogram 1938:- The Sea Hawk WBFN, 1940 - The Sea Wolf, WBFN 1941 - The Virgin Bride/The Wrong Road, Republic 1937 - Three Faces West, Republic, 1940 - Tomboy, Monogram, 1940 - Torpedo Raider, Monogram, 1935 Tough Kid, Monogram, 1938 - Trail of the Silver Spurs, Monogram, 1941 -Two Fisted Rangers, Columbia, 1939 - Una Donna Fra Due Mondi,1936 - Under Texas Skies Republic, 1940 - Undercover Agent, Monogram, 1939 - Vampire Bat, Astor, 1933 - Wallaby Jim of the Islands, Superior, 1937 - Winners of the West, Universal, 1940 - Wyoming Outlaw Republic ,1939 - Young Bill Hickock, Republic,1940 - Young Buffalo Bill, Republic, 1940 - Yukon Flight, Monogram, 1940.
(At this point it is only fair to note also Kathryn Fuller-Seeley’s observation that reports in ‘What the Picture Did For Me’ were not necessarily particularly representative of those of the general public either.) Fuller-Seeley, K. “What the Picture Did For Me”: Small Town Exhibitors’ Strategies for Surviving the Great Depression’ in Fuller-Seeley, K. (2008); Thumim, J. Celluloid Sisters: Women and Popular Cinema. (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992). Figures published in Variety and the Motion Picture Herald are typical sources of data for this approach to the measurement of popularity. See, for example, Chopra-Gant, M. Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir. (London: I B Tauris, 2005).
This is an over-simplification and, particularly, omits a variety of ‘short subjects’, newsreels, cartoons and other material that supported feature films. It is, however, a sufficient account for the purposes of this article and, if anything, the existence of such an array of other material strengthens my argument for the need to examine closely the composition of cinema programs instead of focusing on the major feature films alone. The percentage rate for movies in the former category was variable, depending on the particular terms of each rental contract. Audiences which, incidentally, likely also saw lesser movies as supporting features in these shows. What cinemagoers liked might not always have been films. Live performances, bingo and promotions for consumer goods like dinnerware and books were often part of the cinemagoing experience. The possibility that cinemagoing in itself was a greater attraction for audiences than any particular film represents one of text-based film studies’ great blind spots. For a fuller account of these other pleasures of cinemagoing see Glancy, M. and Sedgwick, J. “Cinemagoing in the United States in the Mid-1930s: A Study Based on the Variety Dataset” in Maltby, R., Stokes, M. and Allen, R. C. Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007). Not all the films in the dataset are listed in the AFI Catalog and in some cases the Internet Movie Database is used as an alternative. In the few cases where neither database has a listing for a film, genre is implied from the advertisement in the Kenosha Evening News. Wright’s Kenosha City Directory. (Milwaukee: Wright Directory Company, 1941), 13. ‘Kenosha’s First Century’ Kenosha Evening News 15 June 1935.
On the other hand it is worth noting that the entry for the cinema on the cinematreasures.org website describes it as having a ‘checkered on-again-off-again history’, so perhaps the difficulties were particular to this cinema. (See, for example, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 27 March 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 10 October 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 8 November 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 9 November 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News, 24 January 1942, Gomery, D. The Hollywood Studio System. (London: BFI Publishing, 1986), As Kevin Heffernan notes, ‘the lucrative first-run theaters … comprised only 15 percent of the total theaters in operation but garnered 70 percent of the nation’s box office receipts’. (Heffernan, K. Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business 1953-1968 (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004). It is perhaps worth emphasising here that small cinemas such as the Chief did play ‘A’ movies, but only late in their runs, often several years after release. This is certainly consistent with one of the findings of Handel; that almost half of the audience in his study was ‘nonselective’, going to the movies to see ‘any picture’ rather than a particular film. (Handel, L. A. Hollywood Looks at its Audience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 152-153). This is an area where this study could undoubtedly be improved by more sophisticated methods. Genre classifications in this article have been taken mostly from the American Film Institute listings for the films. The AFC catalogue lists genres individually so that if a movie is a ‘musical comedy’ it is listed as both a musical and a comedy but not as a ‘musical comedy’, which is not, therefore, recognised as a distinct genre in itself. For the purpose of this study it has been difficult to determine how to deal with such cases since it is not always readily apparent what weighting to give to the different components of the generic hybrid: should be given equal weighting where both appear in the catalogue listing, or is the film in question really a musical with a few gags or a comedy with a couple of songs? The compromise adopted has been to simply treat the film as whichever genre the AFC catalogue lists first. This accounts for the surprisingly low number of musicals in this table (most of the films are listed as comedies first). A more sophisticated method of analysis employing a system of weighting generic components for hybrid films would probably change the picture slightly from the one presented in this table. Reviewing the film under its alternate title, ‘Vice Racket’, Variety (19 May 1937), 23 classed the film as a ‘sex piece’. Film Daily (29 April 1937) called it a ‘sex film’ in an article on the banning of such movies in Council Bluffs, Iowa and neighbouring city, Omaha, Nebraska. Films of this type were also often referred to as ‘vice movies’. Unlike many of the films discussed in this article, Gambling With Souls has been released on DVD. Variety (19 May 1937) 23 judged the lead actress’s performance thus: ‘Her drama is atrocious, and her emotional display amusingly hammy. The Chief typically had three runs each week, a midweek, three-day run on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and two ‘weekend’ runs of two days each: Friday/Saturday and Sunday/Monday. It has so far proven impossible to identify this movie. Neither the AFI Film Catalogue nor the IMDB has a reference to it under any title. The only reference to the movie found thus far is in Boxoffice (26 January 1946), which reports that the movie had been rejected by the Chicago censors in 1945, and links the movie to the distributor, Dezel. 1941 Film Billing Sheets for this distributor — in the Warner Brothers Archive — make no reference to this film, however. Possibly it was being distributed by a different company in 1941. (Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News 25 April 1941, Advertisement for Chief theatre, Kenosha Evening News 28 April 1941) No revenue figures are available for this engagement. Also released under the title Marriage Forbidden. If, as seems likely, word-of-mouth publicity played any part in the success of the two earlier adults only shows then it is quite possible that the midnight preview of Damaged Goods would have been counter-productive. Unlike Gambling With Souls, Damaged Goods contains no explicit scenes, and the fact that it is essentially a morality tale about the risks of contracting venereal disease from casual sexual encounters likely meant that it would have a limited appeal to audiences seeking sex and scandal. Mademoiselle Ma Mere (1936 Decoin France): No box office revenue figures are available. The existence of such a culture would explain the relative lack of popularity of Damaged Goods; a film which — on the face of its publicity — promised similar pleasures to sex films that succeeded in attracting a larger audience. Benoit Mandelbrot. The Fractal Geometry of Nature, San Francisco: Freeman, 1983), Dixon, W. W. ed. American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations. (Oxford: Berg, 2006) 180-181.
Acknowledgements: The research presented in this essay was made possible by a grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (project grant number: 119137). Mike Chopra-Gant is Reader in Media, Culture and Communications at London Metropolitan University. Contact Mike: .uk
Dirty Movies, or: why film scholars should stop worrying about Citizen Kane and learn to love bad films (Mike Chopra-Gant, London Metropolitan University, UK, Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010) Abstract) This article presents an empirical case study of cinema exhibition at a small downtown cinema in an industrial city in the American midwest in the early 1940s. The case study is used to advance an argument that film scholars have too often based their selection of films for study on personal taste, and that film studies has thus evolved around a set of films that does not represent the films which ordinary moviegoers saw and enjoyed. The article argues for the need for film historians to pay greater attention to those films that demonstrably meant something to ordinary cinemagoers in order to produce a more reliable account of the cinema of the past.
In a lecture given in 1992, Colin MacCabe — borrowing an evocative phrase from Dante—spoke of the “eloquence of the vulgar”. ‘Text and society are not separate categories’ argued MacCabe, ‘but ones which mutually illuminate each other’, implicitly calling for an approach to the analysis of cultural ‘texts’ that pays attention to the most commonplace cultural texts andto the social contexts within which such ‘texts’ exist. While there are probably few scholars today working in film and cultural studies who would disagree strongly with this approach, it has more often than not been the case in practice that scholars have been drawn to the exemplary or exceptional in popular culture—auteur cinema,‘quality’ television, cult movies etc. — leaving the most ‘vulgar’, mundane, everyday cultural forms and contexts relatively unexamined.
By way of a case study of cinemagoing and movie exhibition practices in a small Mid-Western city in the early 1940s, this article aims to demonstrate the divergence between the tastes of film scholars and ordinary historical audiences, and show what the analysis of hitherto neglected types of films, and the contexts in which they were consumed, can tell us about cinema andhistorical movie cultures. McCabe’s call for attention to be given to both vulgar ‘text’ and context appears unremarkable at first sight but, on closer examination, it is possible to see that it raises some problems when applied to the artefacts of popular culture and their relationships with the social contexts in which they are produced and consumed; the major problem being that of deciding which texts to look at when trying to obtain a reliable historical sense of the society, the culture, the period weare interested in. There have long been film scholars interested in grounded, historical understandings of films and their contexts. More recently, interest in contextualised understandings of films has grown considerably in importance within academic film studies as the seminal work undertaken by Tino Balio, David Bordwell, Kirsten Thompson, Janet Staiger, Gregory Waller, Douglas Gomery and Robert Allen, to name only a few of the pioneers of film history, has been taken up and advanced by Barbara Klinger, Richard Maltby, Melvin Stokes, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Mark Jancovich and Mark Glancy among others. .However, on the whole, historical and contextual interest in movies has been subordinated to the more dominant approach to academic film study, which is predominantly interested in the film as ‘text’, and has approached the study of movies through various theories of textual meaning and methods of textual analysis, often paying little attention to the larger social and cultural contexts in which those movies existed. Thus constituted, this dominant tendency in academic film studies has been built upon the repression of what Fredric Jameson has called the ‘political unconscious’ of the text, and around a framework that he described as a ‘rewriting’ of the meaning of film texts ‘according to the paradigm of another narrative, which is taken as the former’s master code or Ur-narrative and proposed as the ultimate hidden or unconscious meaning’ of the film in question.The dominance of this approach — itself a legacy of the way that film studies evolved historically from within literary study — has had a profound impact on the study of films. Insofar as this article is concerned, it is the way that emphasis on the film ‘text’ has tended to direct scholars’ attention toward a canon (or, more accurately, canons) of exemplary films that is problematic. In this respect one of the more recent developments in film study — and one that, to its credit, does direct attention toward movies ignored by more mainstream film studies —ultimately proves little better that the mainstream approach to which it sets itself in opposition. The growth of academic interest in what is frequently gathered together under the loosely defined and often misleading term ‘cult’ cinema has been one of the most dynamic developments in film study in recent years. However, ‘cult’ is a category that encompasses a broad range of lower grade movies variously alternatively described by scholars as ‘paracinema’ (Sconce),‘trash’ or ‘exploitation’ cinema (Schaeffer), ‘sleaze’ (Hawkins) and ‘body genres’ (Williams). This attention to hitherto neglected movies is to be welcomed, but this way of grouping together a disparate collection of often quite unrelated movies under the banner ‘cult’ (or, indeed, any other banner that might be used) appears to be driven more by a drive to legitimize these movies within a canon of their own; one set in opposition to the mainstream film studies canon, perhaps, but ultimately just another canon derived by particular intellectual processes and priorities rather than the historical realities of ordinary moviegoing. This is, then, a very different project from the one embarked upon in this article, which sets out to achieve the very opposite of canonization; to break down the distinction between one canon and another and reinsert the movies thus liberated from canonical captivity into the ordinary, everyday moviegoing culture of American in the 1940s. It is a central contention of this article that the focus on canons (whether mainstream or oppositional) and their component texts produces — or at least amplifies — a disjuncture between text and society by imposing an inorganic separation between equally artificial classes of films, thus circumnavigating the relationship between ‘text’ and its contexts of consumption, which McCabe rightly suggests is fundamental to the understanding of the ‘text’. Put simply, film studies’ focus on canonical movies raises an important question: can the ‘texts’ carefully selected for attention by a sub-group of ‘society’ that is as unrepresentative of society in general as film scholars undoubtedly are, really ‘illuminate’ much about society and its culture? Citizen Kane (Welles 1941 USA) may well be a preeminent example of the filmmaker’s art and it has certainly received its fair share of praise and critical attention from film scholars, all of which might seem to imply that it should be considered a ‘significant’ film in its time. But contemporary reports from cinema managers suggest a rather different conclusion, commenting that ‘it may be a classic, but it’s plumb “nuts” to your show-going public’ and that ‘we had a good many walkouts and the general consensus of opinion was that it was terrible’. Such reports imply a failure by Citizen Kane to capture the imagination of ordinary audiences at the time of its release and thus problematise any suggestion that it should be thought of as particularly emblematic of the cinema of its time. By extension, the same point could be made more generally of film studies’ canons of exemplary movies: they are the product of the tastes of an exceptional group (or groups) and, as such, reveal little about the ordinary, everyday dimensions of cinema in the past. If film scholars’ tastes can provide little insight into the preferences and practices of ordinary cinemagoers, then, the question arises again: how do we determine which ‘texts’ will illuminate the society that those cinemagoers inhabited?
March 14th, 2022 marks the Orpheum Theatre’s Centennial. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2134366280053291&id=100004398180010&sfnsn=mo
The box office and numerous other artifacts have indeed been removed but are in the Pleasant Prairie Historical Society collection.
Harry Silverstein, about 25, was shot and killed at the rear of the Central Park Theatre on January 4, 1931. An ex-employee named Rappaport, 20, was on the back of the stage that night with electrician Herbert Imlach, Irving Riffkind and Robert Ross. About 8:30 P. M. a Bob Lewis approached Rappaport to say that Silverstein was outside and that Rappaport went to the stage door and that two shots were heard. Witnesses rushed down to see Silverstein grappling with Rappaport, who ran away to be apprehended at Mansfield, Ohio in February, 1935. He claimed self-defense, great fear of Silverstein, and a history of attacks by Silverstein from high school on combined with death threats without justification. Silverstein was 5'10" tall and weighed 180 pounds, while Rappaport was 5'5" and weighed but 115 pounds.
On the night of the homicide, Rappaport testified that he and some others played cards in the theatre for awhile and he later played solitaire. When made aware that Silverstein was present, he ran to the stage door, opened it and stepped into the alley where he was felled with a powerful blow and that they grappled; that the gun was in the pocket of his coat; that Troubles tore the pocket and the gun fell on the ground; that they both reached for it and in the struggle the gun was discharged; that he believed he was in danger of great bodily harm from Silverstein; that he did not see Ross, Riffkind or Imlach there at that time; that he left the gun on the ramp where it dropped after the shooting; that he immediately ran away, went to New York, assumed the name of Milton Stein, and traveled with a New York salesman through five or six states until he was arrested at Mansfield, Ohio. Riffkind testified that the noise of shots was a part of the picture then playing in the theatre.
Kenosha Evening News, Friday, May 9, 1941, Page 17.
EXHIBITORS HERALD: October 1, 1927.
About 1948.
Martin S. Tullgren was the architect.
(Saturday, May 10, 1941) - New Theater Will Open Tonight
With the gala opening of the new Hollywood theater tonight, Kenosha will welcome her eighth motion picture house. Michael Lencioni, who has been the manager of the Lincoln theater for the past three years, is owner and manager of the new Hollywood.
The Hollywood is located at 4902 Seventh avenue where the Butterfly theater once operated. However, for the opening tonight the building has been completely renovated and redecorated. The interior is done in maroon, cream and orchid and the sidelights are rainbow colored fixtures which may be changed to any color desired. Self-rising seats will be another innovation chosen by Mr. Lencioni for the comfort and convenience of patrons and a new mirraphonic sound system is a feature of the new theater. Motion pictures will be unreeled upon a new processed screen with a highly reflective surface which has the added virtue of being exceptionally easy on the eyes. A modernistic canopy will greet movie patrons as they approach the Hollywood, and new draperies and carpets will add to the attractiveness of the interior.
The new theater will be open every evening, and for Sunday and holiday matinees Mr Lencioni, who was born in Kenosha, made his home here until he moved to Sheboygan Falls to manage a theater. Three years ago he returned here to manage the Lincoln. During the past week his many friends in the city have extended their best wishes for success in his new venture.
(November 2, 1932) - Reopen Lincoln Theater Friday - Management of Butterfly Takes Over Second Theater
The Lincoln theater on Fourteenth Avenue, redecorated and remodeled, will be opened Friday, Nov, 7 by Samuel Levinsohn and Harry Vogel who recently took over the Butterfly theater. Sound equipment has been installed in the Lincoln which was previously used for silent pictures and has been closed for some time.
Acoustical Treatment
The walls of the theater interior have been treated with acoustical padding such as is used in a large number of modern theaters and numerous other improvements have been made. The Lincoln will be run on the same policy as the Butterfly. There will be double feature programs changing four times a week. E. D. Harris is the manager.
The building dimensions were given as 125' by 25'. Near the end of its operations, the seating capacity was listed as 252 in advertisements.
(Chicago Tribune, January 8, 1989, by Rudolph Unger) The lights on movie theater marquees in Chicago
s Loop have been flickering out one by one over the years, and the Loops last marquee was to go dark Sunday as the Woods Theater closed its doors. The demise of the theater where “Gone with the Wind“ premiered on a reserved-seat basis in 1940, beginning an engagement that lasted an entire year, will make Monday the first day in more than three-quarters of a century that the citys Loop will be without a movie theater. The Woods, on the northwest corner of Randolph and Dearborn Streets, will close to make way for a 30-story office building, becoming the latest victim of the Loops decline as an entertainment center and its growth as a commercial center. The 1,100-seat Woods is the last movie house to join the scrap heap of the once glittering film palaces that radiated like brillant necklaces near the intersection of State and Randolph Streets. “There was always a festival air surrounding the intersection of State and Randolph, the center of the Loops night life,” said Edward Barry, a veteran newspaper cultural critic. “I still recall the first of the great silent Harold Lloyd comedy films,Safety First,at the Chicago in 1923, in which he hung from the Wrigley Building clock.” The late Danny Kaye, the funny man whose uproarious first movie, “Up in Arms,” graced the Woods marquee for a year in 1944, would weep if he could see the Loop today, devoid of even a single silver screen. Bob Hope, that other funny man who once stood penniless outside Loop theaters in the 1920s before his star ascended, would certainly look in amazement at the shuttered show houses and sites of razed cinema palaces whose marquees once were emblazoned with the names of the brightest stars in Hollywoods firmament: actors such as Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, Jack Benny, Fred Astaire, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Spencer Tracy. Actresses such as Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Fontaine, Judy Garland, Ingrid Bergman and Barbara Stanwyck. The Chicago Theatre, long the flagship of the sumptuous Loop show places, was saved from destruction through a massive civic effort to refurbish it as a center of live entertainment. But shadows overhang its future since its operator, Chicago Theatre Productions, went into bankruptcy last summer, and the theater has been reopened only for an occasional event since. The Woods Theater, the Loop’s last movie house, on the northwest corner of Randolph and Dearborn Streets, was to close Sunday to make way for a 30-story building. Gone forever are such popular show houses as the State-Lake Theater, across the street from the Chicago. The Loop, just south of the Chicago, which for a time featured newsreels, is long gone. The Roosevelt, a block south on State, and the opulent Oriental, on Randolph just west of State, gave way to stores. The United Artists, down the street from the Oriental and kitty corner from the Woods, closed last year. The Garrick, onetime neighbor of the Woods, was replaced with a parking garage. The Apollo, just west of the Garrick, made way for the Greyhound bus terminal, which itself is now to be razed so that twin office towers can be built on Randolph Street. The McVickers Theater, on Madison Street just west of State, was taken over by film producer Mike Todd to feature his Todd-A-O process films, beginning with the screen version of the musical “Oklahoma.“ North of the Woods on Dearborn Street, the two Dearborn Cinemas had a short-lived existence after opening in the old Michael Todd and Cinestage Theaters. The properties, owned by Todds estate, are to be sold to the developer of the Greyhound property and restored to their original names, Harris and Selywn, and their original use as playhouses. Also long gone from the scene is the Palace Theater, in the Bismarck Hotel complex, once known as the home of the wide-screen Cinerama films. At one time, the Palace, like the Chicago, the State-Lake and the Oriental, featured not only first-run films from Hollywood but they also hosted live stage entertainment. “From childhood on, going to movies was a big thrill,” recalled Herman Kogan, Chicago historian and newspaperman. “On Saturdays, that meant going to one of the big Loop show palaces, where you could see stage shows as well as first-run films.” There were other, smaller theaters scattered about the Loop where B films or reruns of first-run movies could be seen, usually for a cut-rate price. These included the Monroe, the Clark and the LaSalle, which stood on the site of the present-day St. Peter Catholic Church at 110 W. Madison St. The Today theater, located on Madison Street just west of Dearborn and which specialized in newsreels, also disappeared. The movies came to Chicagos Loop-traditionally defined as the city blocks lying within the “loop“ of the downtown elevated tracks-early in this century.(Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1918) Since theater building is a habit to which Chicago is little addicted, a brief, provincial enthusiasm may be condoned for A. H. Woods and his new house, the Woods, at Randolph and Dearborn. Mr. Woods is known as a showman of many successful enterprises, operating extensively in racy farce, modern melodrama, and character comedy of the Potash and Perimutter type. He is an intrepid investor in the stages, but his daring is mitigated usually by an intuition which preserves him. That is, he avoids the five per cent that is hopelessly good in the theater and the five per cent that is hopelessly bad, and he banks, reluctantly, no doubt, on the ninety per cent that is prudently mediocre. He is, one suspects, a man with few illusions, and none of the florid managerial vanities that inspire such stupid and ignorant posings as “The Judge of Zalamea.” The commonplace or successful show is the better for Mr. Woods having done it, because he does it as well as it can be done without interfering with the attendances. His name on an entertainment is assurance that, while it may not mean much as drama, it signifies a great deal as theater. So the ingenuous wanderer within the Union Loop, seeking amusement rather than edification, will usually find the new Woods a satisfactory haven. It is a good-looking theater. From Michael & Fox, who are literary as well as architectural, it is learned that upon the outside it is an artistic liaison between office building and playhouse. Inside it is as quiet as a midwestern library, with solid walnut walls, purple carpets and chairs, and a conservative lighting scheme of gray and lavender. The first floor auditorium is one of the most spacious in America, with something like 700 seats on it, and all of them permitting an unobstructed view of the stage. There is no gallery, but the balcony is commodious and comfortable. Two foyers are quiet and dignified in brown and purple, “adding,” say the architects, “to the feeling of elegance that is characteristic of the whole.” “FRIENDLY ENEMIES,” the first play for the Woods theater, comes from the titular Capital, with the plaudits of the President. … When and if Mr. Woods gets the electric lights on his theater in operation, the Dearborn street facade will announce “Sam Bernard and Louis Mann,” while emblazoned on the Randolph street front will be “Louis Mann and Sam Bernard.” In case it is learned that the sign on one thoroughfare is more conspicuous than that on the other, a scheme of equable alternation will be arranged by the arbitrators. Thus Mr. Woods is comfortable, Mr. Bernard and Mr. Mann are 50 per cent happy, and Mr. Mann and Mr. Bernard the remaining fifty. All are content except perhaps the bilious observer, who thinks he sees in the minor details of the alliance one of the several reasons that acting is to art what kopeck is to finance.
(Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1918) - An explosion of dynamite shattered the east doors of the new Al H. Woods theater at Randolph and Dearborn streets last night and started a campaign by the police and the state’s attorney’s office to head off a reign of terror alleged to have been planned by union labor sympathizers. Threats to prevent the big playhouse from opening its doors to the public on Monday are said to have been made by labor representatives and soon after the blast had stirred great excitement at the busy downtown corner. Acting Chief Alcock and Assistant Fleming were on the scene looking for evidence upon which to base prosecution. State’s Attorney Hoyne, who is in Hot Springs, Ark., was in communication with his office by long distance telephone and gave directions for the inquiry.
Actual Damage Slight.
The explosion caused property damage of less than $75 despite the fact that it was of sufficient force to smash windows in a passing street car. Nobody was injured, although scores of persons were in the immediate vicinity. Following the explosion, which took place at 7:15 o’clock, George H. Thomas, the contractor who erected the building, and Lou M. Houseman, western representative of Al H. Woods, owner of the theater, admitted their suspicion that sheet metal workers might be implicated. Half a stick of dynamite blew up, either from a slow fuse or a match, just outside the Dearborn street entrance. The actual damage will not exceed $75.
What the Trouble Was About.
Mr. Thomas declared there had been labor trouble ever since construction started. Last Monday, he said, the electrical workers walked out in sympathy with the sheet metal trade, which quit the job three months ago because he refused to substitute iron doors for ones of steel already in position. Had the demands of the unions been acceded to, Mr. Housdeman said, the theater opening would have been delayed three months. Thomas Walsh, business agent of the sheet metal workers, was reached by telephone last night, but refused to talk. He was recalled to the telephone three times. Finally he said:
I know nothing about it.
PROCLAMATION - Whereas one of the technical advances for which our country is noted has been taking place in the entertainment field with the development of three-dimensional motion pictures and
Whereas on May 6 the city of Kenosha will become the first city in Wisconsin where theater patrons can enjoy the advantages of the latest and most modern development in this field known as stereophonic sound,
Therefore I as city manager declare Wednesday, May 6 as “Stereophonic Three Dimension Day” in Kenosha and express best wishes to the local theater which has brought this unique entertainment experience to our citizens.
(Sat., Jan.29, 1921) - THEATRE DEAL IS NOW CLOSED - Virginian Theatre Leased by Collins Theatrical Enterprises - EXPLAINS NEW PLANS - Virginian to Continue to Be the Home of Vaudeville and Also Super Film Attractions —– The merger of the management of the Virginian and Burke Theatres was completed on Friday evening when a lease for the Virginian Theatre was secured by the Collins Theatrical Enterprise as anticipated in the unofficial announcement made on Friday. The lease was sealed, signed and delivered on Friday afternoon just after four-thirty and the new management is to take control of the theatre on the first of February. The lease provides an option for the purchase of the property, should this be desired at a later date. For the present, Manager Fred Dayton will remain in charge of the theatre until the new management becomes acquainted with the operation of the theatre.
Reflects Success of Past
The expansion of the theatre holdings of the Collins Theatrical Enterprise reflects the success which they have achieved in the management of the Burke Theatre on Market Square. The members of the company are Mrs. Lillian K. Collins, who in the near future will take personal charge of the Virginian; Charles Collins and Marvin B. Kincaid, all three of whom will be associated in the management of the two theatres. It is planned to continue the Virginian theatre as the home of high class vaudeville in Kenosha. As in the past, vaudeville will be staged there on the last three days of the week and on Sunday with an entire new bill for each Sunday program. The merger of the theatre with the Burke will also make it possible to supplement these shows with high class film attractions whenever this is advisable.
Daytons Explain Future Plans
Edward and Fred Dayton, who for the past eleven months have been successful in the management of the Virginian Theatre, have sold out their interest to the Virginian Theatre Company, which organization leased the property to the new holder. The Dayton brothers plan to devote their time to their growing insurance business, the extent of which made it necessary for them to withdraw from the theatrical management for the present. They have recently expanded their insurance business to such an extent that it requires the greater part of their time. The Virginian is also to be open each and every day as the new management plans to bring feature super-films here for the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday performances. The film contracts held by the Collins Theatrical Enterprise will enable them to present some of the latest and most attractive releases at this theatre. E. Z. Jones, Jr., who for the past six months has been in charge of the publicity for the Burke Theatre, will be placed in charge of the publicity work for the two show houses.
Has Interesting History
The merger of the two theatres is an interesting chapter in the history of the Collins Theatrical Enterprise. The company started several years ago when Mrs. Lillian K. Collins took over the ownership and control of the Burke Theatre. At that time Mr. Collins was a salesman for the J. P. Smith and Company, large importers pf New York and Chicago, but in a few months the business of the Burke Theatre grew to such large dimensions that he resigned his position to aid in the management of it. The many friends of the Burke grew to such large numbers that they could not be accommodated at the one theatre and the Orpheum Theatre on Market Street was leased, remodeled, and under the name of the Blue Mill operated very successfully by Marvin B.. Kincaid with the assistance of Mr. and Mrs. Collins.
Expected New Theatre Then for the first time in the history of the Blue Mill property, it became a successful movie shrine. Then the owners of the property came to Manager Kincaid and secured a release on the lease with the intimation that the property would be sold and a larger and finer theatre built on Main Street to be leased to the Collins Theatrical Enterprise. It was a great disappointment when this deal failed to materialize but the acquisition of the Virginian Theatre now marks the fulfilling of it in another way.
Not in Rainier, Oregon.
Yesterday the owners of the Fox Theatre, now officially the Stevens Point Opera House, removed the iconic Fox Theater marquee from its façade in what Mayor Mike Wiza said is an effort to “restore it to its original look, not the look we remember from the ’60s and ’70s, but the original look. And honestly, it’s probably much more practical, since it’s not going to be a movie theater anymore. We decided to take the building over. We didn’t have the ability to save it, nor did we have the money to fix it, so what we did was have an engineer go in and determine if all of it needed to come down and it didn’t,” Wiza said. He said the back two-thirds were structurally unsound and demolition on that had to be done. Fortunately, a large section visible from Main Street was able to be salvaged … the front third, basically the lobby, and the second floor ballroom. Wild Card Corporation owned an adjacent building and stepped in, said Wild Card Customer Success Manager Joe Schoenberg, who added that they will display the important parts of the sign inside the renovated space. "The actual opera house was here long before Fox was, and we want to keep it that way.” The building will house a catering kitchen and events space, and will feature a German-style beer garden in the back.
The 158-car Milky Way Drive-In cinema is back for another summer after debuting last year as a popular COVID-safe attraction. Its second season will begin May 22 with a Bon Jovi drive-in concert experience broadcast to about 300 outdoor theaters and select indoor cinemas across the United States, Canada and Ireland, according to producer Encore Drive-In Nights. Milky Way is one of six drive-ins across Wisconsin broadcasting the show. Admission is $89 per vehicle with a maximum of six patrons. Milky Way’s lineup through June 6 includes “Frozen II,” “Black Panther,” “Marvel’s The Avengers,” and “Minions.” “Jurassic Park” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” were scheduled as a double feature on June 3. On days when the adjoining Milwaukee Milkmen sports team doesn’t play a home game, programs are shown on a 40-foot LED screen, with sound transmitted via a stereo radio frequency. Tickets are $35 per vehicle. The cinema serves an array of concessions, available to order online for delivery by carhop. It also hosts a rotating selection of local food trucks and vendors. “After a great inaugural year at Milky Way, we’re very, very excited to bring back the drive-in experience for 2021,” said Mike Zimmerman, CEO of ROC Ventures, developer of the Ballpark Commons mixed-use development and owner of the Milwaukee Milkmen. “The Milky Way Drive-In offers a terrific food-and-entertainment ‘night out’ experience in a safe environment.”
January 2, 1926: McVickers Robbery Seen As Inside Job (AP) — Executives of McVickers theatre were scrutinizing rogues gallery files today while police were seeking former employees of the theatre after the treasurer was held up last night and robbed of $1,000. A robber familiar with the theatre’s floor plan and routine sequestered the treasurer, his wife and another employe and forced them to deliver up the contents of the safe. The police are convinced that intimate knowledge of the layout of the building was necessary to smooth execution of the robbery.
(March 13, 1922 - Kenosha Evening News) - The Story of Saxe Brothers Who Caught Gleam of Big Idea — Pioneers of the Movies ______
The Saxe brothers John and Tom have been something like patron saints to the moving picture industry in Wisconsin and their management has branched out into other states. They were among the first men of the nation to realize the value of the moving picture as an educational institution. They saw the great possibilities of it to the lover of the cleanest and best in amusements at the minimum price. They saw early the important place that the motion picture was destined to play in modern life and they decided to have a part in the important development.
It was Tom Saxe who first predicted that motion pictures would become entertainment de luxe with productions so elaborate that managers would be justified in asking admission prices on a par with those of the legitimate houses.
Started Fifteen Years Ago
It Was five years before the “Divine Sarah” Bernhardt gave motion pictures real standing by joining the movies that John Saxe, now president of the Saxe Amusement company, and Tom Saxe, secretary of the company, began to dabble in pictures. They set up an old “Hale’s Touring Car” on Grand avenue in Milwaukee as the start of their business. Thousands of people recall this old car when people looked through the windows at pictures which flashed past. It’s a long step from the old touring car to the pictures of today but the Saxe boys were right at the head of the procession in every advancement.
The old car got too small. The world was moving faster, and Saxe Brothers moved with the world. They bought the old Orpheum Theatre in Milwaukee and converted it over to pictures. It was a real success, and then the Saxe boys began to branch out. They secured the Lyric theatre, the Princess, the Crystal and the Alhambra, which they made one of the biggest houses in the nation given over to the new and favorite form of entertainment.
Took a Gamble at “Pictures”
The Saxe Brothers took a gamble on pictures. They made old houses larger and built new ones with a view of giving the motion picture everything possible in the way of attractive investure. They called in the magic art of music to make pictures more attractive and added many things which brought a new and different attraction for the picture shows. Many times the expenditures made to try out new experiments were much greater than the returns, but the forward-looking Saxe Brothers were willing to take a chance because they believed that the ultimate success of the picture as an entertainment was far in the future. It was natural that the Saxe Brothers should become a commanding part in the management of the picture business in Wisconsin With their center in Milwaukee; they have been branching out year after year, until now the company has a part in the management and control of twenty-five theatres in Milwaukee and other parts of Wisconsin.
Theatres in Many Cities
The directory of the Saxe enterprises now includes the Strand, Rialto, Princess, Theatorium, the Miller (a vaudeville house), Modjeska, Savoy and Tivoli in Milwaukee, three houses in Waukesha, three in Oshkosh, four in Marinette, two in Kenosha, and one each in Green Bay and Wausau. The close connection of all of these theatres makes it possible for the controlling company to furnish to all the houses the best in motion picture entertainment with the minimum of cost.
Not the least of the interesting features connected with the new Orpheum Theatre is the fact that it signalizes an active interest of two pioneers of a great idea in Kenosha. John E. Saxe and Tom Saxe have done a lot to make life more liveable for the people of Wisconsin. Their connection with the new Orpheum Theatre is a guarantee of a broad policy looking forward all the time. The interest that they have shown in the development of the theatre in Kenosha is one of the happy incidents. When the Dayton boys were looking about for someone of real theatre experience, they found Tom Saxe, and they found that he had an idea that their idea of Kenosha being the real place for a real theatre was a decidedly valuable asset.
A September, 1983 Racine Journal Times article reported that in about 1912 Jack Benny [Benjamin Kubelsky] was brought to Racine to form and play in the pit orchestra of the Rex (then Racine Theatre) by Philip Dahlberg along with Cora Salisbury up from Waukegan to play with him. Together the trio supplied the musical accompaniment to the shows of the ring season. Benny played the violin. He was just 18 years of age.
The battle is lost. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1783568838634123/permalink/2998274050496923/