Volume I: Narrative History Volume I: Narrative History
When motion pictures made their advent, nearly every town in America had an opera house for the presentation of plays and other stage events. Many of these installed projectors and showed films as part of programs. Similarly, rooms in town halls and churches were often converted for motion picture exhibition. During the 1896-1898 years, numerous Vitascope parlors and other motion picture establishments were set up in leading cities, with William T. Rock's Vitascope Hall in New Orleans, opened in 1896, and William Tally's Phonograph and Vitascope Parlor, opened in Los Angeles the same year, being among the pioneers. From then through the next few years, additional motion picture theatres were installed, often in hastily altered storefronts or as parts of concessions in carnivals and traveling shows. Around 1905 Hale's Tours became a popular attraction at amusement parks and in city locations, and several hundred were set up in America, plus hundreds more overseas. Basically, this type of theatre consisted of seats arranged as in a railway coach with a screen at the front of the car. Patrons faced forward and watched the projected action, sometimes to the accompaniment of hissing steam, whistles, and bells provided by sound effect devices.
In the years after 1905, motion picture theatres were opened by the thousands all across America. Usually charging five cents admission, these theatres became known as nickelodeons - a combination nickel and odeon, a Greek word for theatre. Prices varied, and theatres in larger cities sometimes charged a dime or 15 cents for adults at evening performances. Gradually admission fees were raised, and by 1915 the nickel theatre was in the minority. At the same time multiple-reel dramatic productions became popular, and the future of the one-reel subject was doubtful.
Nickelodeon circa 1905
Carl Laemmle, who spent the first part of his business career in a clothing store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin before entering the film industry as a nickelodeon operator, gave a view of his contemporaries in the field. Note The year is 1907:
The low estate of the movie business was indescribable. It was a business which sheltered a variegated collection of former carnival men, gamblers, ex-saloonkeepers, medicine men, concessionaires of circus side shows, photographers, Note and peddlers who were attracted by reports of lurid profits made in the operation of nickelodeons. Devoid of all the fundamentals of business training and slipshod in their practices, they were naturally stigmatized when joining forces in the new field. Thus it came about that members of other competitive industries looked askance at these newcomers, which resulted in considerable harm to all movie pioneers.
A typical early nickelodeon consisted of a street-level facility, often converted from a store, fronted by an electrically illuminated and quite ornate facade behind which was a ticket booth, a room seating a hundred or more patrons, a projection booth, and a screen. Often a phonograph horn, operated from the projection booth on the inside, blared music to entice passersby into performances. Nickelodeons with larger budgets often employed a coin-operated piano out front near the ticket booth, or even an orchestrion - a glorified automatic instrument built on the principles of the player piano, but with ranks of pipes and percussion instruments in addition to a self-playing piano.
Small theatres were often family operations, and while one person sold tickets, another took them at the door and supervised seating and order within. At the appropriate time, the ticket seller would hurry to the projection booth and assume a new role. In the early days the seating often consisted of kitchen-type wooden chairs arranged in rows. Later, the American Seating Company and others sold permanently installed folding seats to theatre owners who could afford them.
Many houses provided musical accompaniment by a pianist who sat below the screen and pounded out a succession of melodies, often irrelevant to the action being depicted in the film. To provide accompaniment, The Moving Picture World and other trade publications printed suggestions received from exhibitors, comprising a string of popular and classical melodies arranged in sequence, to be changed as subtitles appeared on the screen. Beginning about 1913, film producers provided sheet music with accompaniment scores, but this was for larger multiple-reel features and not for one-reelers.
The photoplayer, Note a device consisting in its usual form of a central piano console flanked by two side chests containing organ pipes and sound effects, became popular around 1912, and by 1920 an estimated 6,000 or more had been sold for prices ranging from about $2,000 to $10,000. Set up beneath the screen or in the orchestra pit, the photoplayer used one or two paper music rolls scored with notes for the melody. Some instruments used regular 88-note home player piano rolls, while others used orchestrion rolls scored with holes to operate organ pipes, a xylophone, set of orchestra bells, drums, and other effects. All photoplayers were equipped with knobs, pedals, or push buttons to actuate sound effects such as doorbell, train whistle, thunder, steam engine, auto horn, horses' hooves, telegraph key, bird whistle, pistol shot, and other noises. With his eyes on the screen, the photoplayer operator would change musical selections to fit the action - a march for a military encounter, a romantic ballad for a love scene, etc. - while at the same time operating the sound effects gadgets as the horses charged through the mountain pass, or the bandits held up the Lightning Express. Note
Although pipe organs were occasionally used to accompany films before 1910, it wasn't until about 1912-1913 that they began to be popular. Unlike a photoplayer, which was self-contained, the pipe organ had to have separate chambers for the blower, relays, and ranks of pipes, and necessitated special construction or remodeling. In its most basic form, a theatre pipe organ consisted of a console or keyboard unit with two manuals which controlled several ranks of pipes located in a distant chamber. Even small organs often were equipped with a xylophone, set of orchestra bells, and several percussion and sound effects devices. Larger organs had three or more manuals and up to two or three dozen ranks of pipes. Not including architectural revisions to the theatre, the price of a pipe organ ranged from about $5,000 to $25,000 or more. Note
Down front in a nickelodeon was a screen, made from a stretched sheet or a white-painted backdrop or canvas. Later, special screens were available through trade sources. An early account Note notes that often theatre interiors were painted red, for reasons that remain obscure today. Such establishments were given distinctive names like Bijou Dream, Nickelette, Amus-U, Blue Mouse, Dreamland, Peerless, Pastime, Royal, Nickelodeon, Idle Hour, Vaudette, Electric, or Princess.
Hours of operation varied. In a large city a nickelodeon might open at 10 in the morning and run nonstop until late in the evening. In a rural district a less pretentious establishment might be open on a limited schedule, such as Thursday and Saturday evenings and Saturday afternoons. In 1910 it was estimated that there were 12,000 theatres in the United States, 5,000 in Great Britain and 40,000 to 50,000 elsewhere in the world. Note In New York City there were over 750 in 1910. By 1915, the number in the United States was over 15,000. While most theatres were of a permanent nature, some were housed in tents as part of traveling shows. Note Other theatres known as airdomes exhibited films under the open sky during summer months.
In the early days most nickelodeons and their larger cousins showed a succession of one-reel films. The typical reel was several hundred to 1,000 feet long. Longer reels took about 15 or 16 minutes to project. Although Edison, Biograph, and others experimented with different film sizes and running speeds, it was the Lumière system that was eventually adopted by the world. By the early 20th century the standard format was 16 frames or exposures per foot of film, a length which took one second to project, equivalent to about 16 minutes for a 1,000 foot reel. However, studies showed that audiences liked their action to be slightly faster than life, perhaps to make up for the lack of accompanying speech or sound, and it was usual to run films slightly faster than the 16-minute speed, with about 30% faster, or 12 to 13 minutes being typical. In practice projecting speeds varied, and trade magazine articles told of hurried theatre owners rushing a film through in 11 minutes or less. The Thanhouser Company advertised that its one-reel films ran 15 minutes on the screen, but in practice most were run faster than that.
Projectors were available in two formats: hand-cranked and electric, the latter equipped with a speed control device. Before 1910 most were hand-cranked. By early 1910 the Power's Company, owned by Nicholas Power, was the dominant manufacturer of projectors, with its new Cameragraph No. 6 well on its way to becoming a commercial success. Note However, numerous theatres used other brands, including Edison Projecting Kinetoscope, Standard, Motiograph, Edengraph, and Lubin. By 1920 Power's projectors had lost their dominance in the market, and Simplex was the leading brand.
Films were viewed as agents of immorality, indeed as the devil himself, by many ministers, public officials, and other do-gooders. Numerous communities passed laws prohibiting Sunday exhibitions. Even New Rochelle, several years after Thanhouser was established there and considered a mainstay of the community, considered Sunday theatre closing until an outside judicial ruling intervened. Before they realized that news coverage of motion pictures helped increase circulation, many newspapers crusaded against the evil of films projected on a screen. Actually, the most sensational films of the time paled in lurid content to the crimes vividly described in print by the so-called yellow journalists of the era.
Motion pictures and nickelodeon theatres grew up together in a parallel, symbiotic arrangement, reinforcing each other. The availability of larger, more varied film programs with increasingly better subjects caused theatre attendance and the number of theatres to multiply as an ever-increasing segment of the population looked to the screen for entertainment.
Copyright © 1995 Q. David Bowers. All Rights Reserved.