Strand Theatre
Moorhead,
MS
38761
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Thanks for the information, Ken. I know a lot of errors turn up in both the daily and weekly journals, and in the FDY. Theaters changed both owners and names frequently, and the industry journals had rather slapdash communication with theater owners and managers, so it would have been easy for a brief name change to reach one journal and not the others. That might have been the case with the Star, or Strand if it did in fact get that name change and it simply slipped through the cracks at the FDY.
When you add to that the likelihood of editing errors in publications that were compiled quickly, and which covered wide areas without professional journalists on the ground, it’s difficult to unravel a lot of these puzzles. Someone at Motion Picture News might have just gotten the theater name wrong in that item I cited. That’s why I like to rely more on local newspapers when they are available, but I’ve been unable to find any from Moorhead. Being a very small town in a very poor region, its newspaper might have vanished without a trace, so we might never find it.
Joe: Moorhead had no theatres listed in 1914-1915. Film Daily Yearbook’s 1926- 1929 only show a Star Theatre in Moorhead (no seating capacity given) it could be typo. There is no theatre listed in 1931. The 1932, 1933 & 1934 editions show a Regent Theatre (Closed) with 300 seats. No theatre listed in 1935, 1936 & 1937. The Strand Theatre is listed in 1938 (no seating capacity given), and 325 seats in 1939.
There might have been more than one Strand in Moorhead, or the name might have been temporarily changed to Regent. This item is from the April 20, 1929, issue of Motion Picture News:
Assuming the Strand of 1929 was the same house that was the Strand in the 1940s, and that the name change to Regent had indeed taken place, the name Strand had been restored by 1939. The Strand placed courtesy advertisements in the 1939, 1940, and 1941 editions of Retrospect, the yearbook of Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School in Moorhead.