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Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T17:39:04Z

Jkey1021:

{{Infobox book
| name = Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929
| author = Michael Aronson
| publisher = Pittsburgh University Press
| pub_date = 2008
| pages = xx+300
| isbn = 9780822961093
| image = [[File:Aronson.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
}}“Of all history’s difficulties,” writes Michael Aronson, “origins are among the most problematic.”<ref> Aronson, 16. </ref> Aronson’s recounting of the heyday of five-cent cinema in Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1908-1929 is full of origin stories, but Aronson, ever mindful of the ethical difficulties of reconstructing “multiple layers of heresay, legends, and outright falsehoods,” handles those origins with considerable grace.<ref> Aronson, 20. </ref>

Aronson first deals with the origins of storefront cinema itself, disputing earlier claims by scholars like Douglas Gomery and Kenneth Macgowan that nickelodeons had existed before John Harris and Harry Davis opened the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905. While there is no doubt that films were being exhibited before the twentieth century, it was a set of specific determinants, first defined in Pittsburgh, that allowed nickel cinema to enjoy widespread acceptance elsewhere. Such determinants included Davis and Harris’ experience in show business and in cheap amusements, as well as the rapidly expanding market for commercial leisure in downtown Pittsburgh. But most importantly, argues Aronson, those theaters showing films prior to 1905 could not be called nickelodeons for the simple fact that none seemed to have charged a nickel for entry.

Aronson argues that the nickel’s cultural capital was markedly greater than its monetary value—a concept with which early twentieth-century entrepreneurs were intimately familiar. A nickel was worth so little that a consumer was likely to believe anything purchased with one was a bargain indeed. Nickel cinemas sold working class consumers the feeling that they were getting more for less. Davis and Harris’ entertainment empire, totaling dozens of businesses between them, had long focused on such cheap amusements—penny arcades, curio exhibits, peep shows. The nickelodeon business model they pioneered, made possible by their own shrewdness and the opportunities presented by multiethnic and multiclass traffic in downtown Pittsburgh, quickly spread across that city and to others across the central U.S. and New England. Even if Davis and Harris did not invent the moving picture theater, they were certainly the driving force behind its proliferation.

Debates among exhibitors about how much admission to charge were microcosms of a larger debate about what movies were and for whom they were intended. The success of the movies as a popular amusement was predicated to some degree on cheap admission. Now that nickel cinema had helped guarantee cinema’s permanence, the medium was beginning to grow beyond the boundaries of what the humble nickelodeon could offer. A nascent system of popular actors and actresses and studios’ greater emphasis on feature films over single-reel shorts was beginning to lead in the industry to a place exhibitors clinging to the old nickelodeon format could not follow.

Aronson dates these changes as occurring in the mid-1910s, about six years after the national trade circulars announced the death of the nickelodeon.<ref> Aronson, 91. </ref> He contends that film historians’ reliance on the national papers—Variety, Motion Picture News, et al—has created a “seductively rational” tautology that emphasizes Hollywood’s role in establishing a middle-class audience. Industry periodicals described a causal relationship between “size of theater, quality of show, price of admission, and type of patron.”<ref> Aronson, 90. </ref> Aronson argues that prevailing idea in the literature, that middle-class audiences were willing to pay more money for admission to ostentatious picture palaces as a form of class signifier, fail to take into account local negotiations between exhibitors and the public. In fact, exhibitors and audience alike had to be taught the value of feature films, which were beginning to show signs of permanence and legitimate artistic merit that set them apart from the shorts and newsreels that preceded them. This process of education did not happen on Hollywood lots, but rather at local and regional level; Pittsburgh, home of the original nickelodeon and hundreds of others, is of particular significance.

Pittsburgh was home to an active film distribution industry built to cater to the city’s overwhelming cadre of theaters, all of whom were in direct competition with one another. Large firms like “The Big Three,” Mutual, General, and Universal, offered exhibitor new films of standard quality every week in exchange for licensing fees and a signed exclusivity deal. Smaller firms, called bargain exchanges, rented out copies of older films (or illegal copies of new ones) that budget-conscious exhibitors could use to balance out a program. Bargain exchanges like the Western Film Company, the largest in Pittsburgh, are significant because they demonstrate the exhibitors’ reliance on the old rather than the new. It appears that, least in this period, stasis was the industry norm, which problematizes prevailing historiographical ideas that emphasize the rationalization of the industry and the inevitable march towards the Hollywood studio system.

And yet, despite the national journals’ claims to the contrary, the growing film industry remained “too completive and too fractured” to really exhibit substance coalescence of either audiences or industry practices.<ref> Aronson, 110. </ref> Manufacturers and the nascent studio system desired the unification of regional audiences into a single national public, to which big-budget feature films could be marketed without much worry for regional idiosyncrasies. To that end, trade papers like Variety advocated vertical integration and a greater degree of control over distribution, and also prematurely announced the success of such efforts. Aronson contends that, once again, scholarly reliance on the industry’s national publications has obscured the fact that the reality on the ground did not match up with the journals’ predictions.
Exhibitors throughout the 1910s still saw themselves as showmen and ran their business accordingly. Far from being mere middleman between the studio and the consumer, exhibitors were active figures in local cinema, engineering all sorts of stunts and schemes all geared towards filling their theaters. Despite the hopeful wishes of the big Hollywood studios, such stunts hardly ever focused on particular stars, films, or genres; it is clear, Aronson writes, that resistance to the mass market practices advocated by the largest trade papers persisted well into the 1910s, long after the nickelodeons were supposedly rendered irrelevant. Hollywood’s influence at the regional level, at least in this period, was actively sought, but rarely achieved. The films being shown were rarely as important as the overall theatrical experience cultivated by the exhibitor.

Theaters’ prominence in the community had clear advantages. Promotions like Swat-The-Fly, veterans’ parades, and free local produce presented theaters as business wholly devoted to the well-being of the community. However, placing themselves at the center of the community exposed exhibitors to renewed debates regarding the social maladies some critics linked to the movies. Aronson falls in with scholars like Richard Randall, Ira Carmen, and Lee Grieveson in arguing that early efforts to censor film were part of larger struggle to define and regulate film’s artistic and commercial destiny. Exhibitors chafed at the idea of censorship not necessarily over ideas of artistic freedom, but rather because censorship inhibited their ability to act outside of the control of the big studios; for their part, studios swallowed their discomfort with censorship in favor of its potential in affecting the regulation and rationalization they had long desired. Even though films had been a mainstay in American entertainment since the late nineteenth century, disputes concerning content and censorship did not become widespread until the unprecedented success of the Nickelodeon and its peers. Aronson argues that film censorship is really about power. Groups and individuals of all kinds battled over the shape of an industry and who would be able to access its products and profits, and censorship would become the battleground for these issues.

Censorship, like so many other issues film scholars gave taken for granted, was negotiated the regional and local level. Working against a prevailing teleological narrative that takes for granted things like the successes of the studio system, star power, and mass market film promotion, Aronson demonstrates the many of the debates that shaped the history of film as medium occurred thousands of miles from Hollywood at the regional and local levels. Local exhibitors like Harry Davis, Harry Mintz, and Charlie Silveus helped make film successful through their nickelodeon theaters; they stalled industry hegemony by working with local Pittsburgh distributers; they used their knowledge about their neighbors and their community to run successful promotions outside of studio input; they worked against censorship as a way to maintain their regional autonomy. Aronson’s study is effective in returning the human element to a narrative often dominated by films, studios, and dollar signs. His work with the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, from which a great deal of this book is drawn, can serve as an effective guide for other regional studies going forward.

==Notes==

Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T17:35:31Z

Jkey1021:

{{Infobox book
| name = Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929
| author = Michael Aronson
| publisher = Pittsburgh University Press
| pub_date = 2008
| pages = xx+300
| isbn = 9780822961093
| image = [[File:Aronson.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
}}
“Of all history’s difficulties,” writes Michael Aronson, “origins are among the most problematic.”<ref> Aronson, 16. </ref> Aronson’s recounting of the heyday of five-cent cinema in Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1908-1929 is full of origin stories, but Aronson, ever mindful of the ethical difficulties of reconstructing “multiple layers of heresay, legends, and outright falsehoods,” handles those origins with considerable grace.<ref> Aronson, 20. </ref>

Aronson first deals with the origins of storefront cinema itself, disputing earlier claims by scholars like Douglas Gomery and Kenneth Macgowan that nickelodeons had existed before John Harris and Harry Davis opened the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905. While there is no doubt that films were being exhibited before the twentieth century, it was a set of specific determinants, first defined in Pittsburgh, that allowed nickel cinema to enjoy widespread acceptance elsewhere. Such determinants included Davis and Harris’ experience in show business and in cheap amusements, as well as the rapidly expanding market for commercial leisure in downtown Pittsburgh. But most importantly, argues Aronson, those theaters showing films prior to 1905 could not be called nickelodeons for the simple fact that none seemed to have charged a nickel for entry.

Aronson argues that the nickel’s cultural capital was markedly greater than its monetary value—a concept with which early twentieth-century entrepreneurs were intimately familiar. A nickel was worth so little that a consumer was likely to believe anything purchased with one was a bargain indeed. Nickel cinemas sold working class consumers the feeling that they were getting more for less. Davis and Harris’ entertainment empire, totaling dozens of businesses between them, had long focused on such cheap amusements—penny arcades, curio exhibits, peep shows. The nickelodeon business model they pioneered, made possible by their own shrewdness and the opportunities presented by multiethnic and multiclass traffic in downtown Pittsburgh, quickly spread across that city and to others across the central U.S. and New England. Even if Davis and Harris did not invent the moving picture theater, they were certainly the driving force behind its proliferation.

Debates among exhibitors about how much admission to charge were microcosms of a larger debate about what movies were and for whom they were intended. The success of the movies as a popular amusement was predicated to some degree on cheap admission. Now that nickel cinema had helped guarantee cinema’s permanence, the medium was beginning to grow beyond the boundaries of what the humble nickelodeon could offer. A nascent system of popular actors and actresses and studios’ greater emphasis on feature films over single-reel shorts was beginning to lead in the industry to a place exhibitors clinging to the old nickelodeon format could not follow.

Aronson dates these changes as occurring in the mid-1910s, about six years after the national trade circulars announced the death of the nickelodeon.<ref> Aronson, 91. </ref> He contends that film historians’ reliance on the national papers—Variety, Motion Picture News, et al—has created a “seductively rational” tautology that emphasizes Hollywood’s role in establishing a middle-class audience. Industry periodicals described a causal relationship between “size of theater, quality of show, price of admission, and type of patron.”<ref> Aronson, 90. </ref> Aronson argues that prevailing idea in the literature, that middle-class audiences were willing to pay more money for admission to ostentatious picture palaces as a form of class signifier, fail to take into account local negotiations between exhibitors and the public. In fact, exhibitors and audience alike had to be taught the value of feature films, which were beginning to show signs of permanence and legitimate artistic merit that set them apart from the shorts and newsreels that preceded them. This process of education did not happen on Hollywood lots, but rather at local and regional level; Pittsburgh, home of the original nickelodeon and hundreds of others, is of particular significance.

Pittsburgh was home to an active film distribution industry built to cater to the city’s overwhelming cadre of theaters, all of whom were in direct competition with one another. Large firms like “The Big Three,” Mutual, General, and Universal, offered exhibitor new films of standard quality every week in exchange for licensing fees and a signed exclusivity deal. Smaller firms, called bargain exchanges, rented out copies of older films (or illegal copies of new ones) that budget-conscious exhibitors could use to balance out a program. Bargain exchanges like the Western Film Company, the largest in Pittsburgh, are significant because they demonstrate the exhibitors’ reliance on the old rather than the new. It appears that, least in this period, stasis was the industry norm, which problematizes prevailing historiographical ideas that emphasize the rationalization of the industry and the inevitable march towards the Hollywood studio system.

And yet, despite the national journals’ claims to the contrary, the growing film industry remained “too completive and too fractured” to really exhibit substance coalescence of either audiences or industry practices.<ref> Aronson, 110. </ref> Manufacturers and the nascent studio system desired the unification of regional audiences into a single national public, to which big-budget feature films could be marketed without much worry for regional idiosyncrasies. To that end, trade papers like Variety advocated vertical integration and a greater degree of control over distribution, and also prematurely announced the success of such efforts. Aronson contends that, once again, scholarly reliance on the industry’s national publications has obscured the fact that the reality on the ground did not match up with the journals’ predictions.
Exhibitors throughout the 1910s still saw themselves as showmen and ran their business accordingly. Far from being mere middleman between the studio and the consumer, exhibitors were active figures in local cinema, engineering all sorts of stunts and schemes all geared towards filling their theaters. Despite the hopeful wishes of the big Hollywood studios, such stunts hardly ever focused on particular stars, films, or genres; it is clear, Aronson writes, that resistance to the mass market practices advocated by the largest trade papers persisted well into the 1910s, long after the nickelodeons were supposedly rendered irrelevant. Hollywood’s influence at the regional level, at least in this period, was actively sought, but rarely achieved. The films being shown were rarely as important as the overall theatrical experience cultivated by the exhibitor.

Theaters’ prominence in the community had clear advantages. Promotions like Swat-The-Fly, veterans’ parades, and free local produce presented theaters as business wholly devoted to the well-being of the community. However, placing themselves at the center of the community exposed exhibitors to renewed debates regarding the social maladies some critics linked to the movies. Aronson falls in with scholars like Richard Randall, Ira Carmen, and Lee Grieveson in arguing that early efforts to censor film were part of larger struggle to define and regulate film’s artistic and commercial destiny. Exhibitors chafed at the idea of censorship not necessarily over ideas of artistic freedom, but rather because censorship inhibited their ability to act outside of the control of the big studios; for their part, studios swallowed their discomfort with censorship in favor of its potential in affecting the regulation and rationalization they had long desired. Even though films had been a mainstay in American entertainment since the late nineteenth century, disputes concerning content and censorship did not become widespread until the unprecedented success of the Nickelodeon and its peers. Aronson argues that film censorship is really about power. Groups and individuals of all kinds battled over the shape of an industry and who would be able to access its products and profits, and censorship would become the battleground for these issues.

Censorship, like so many other issues film scholars gave taken for granted, was negotiated the regional and local level. Working against a prevailing teleological narrative that takes for granted things like the successes of the studio system, star power, and mass market film promotion, Aronson demonstrates the many of the debates that shaped the history of film as medium occurred thousands of miles from Hollywood at the regional and local levels. Local exhibitors like Harry Davis, Harry Mintz, and Charlie Silveus helped make film successful through their nickelodeon theaters; they stalled industry hegemony by working with local Pittsburgh distributers; they used their knowledge about their neighbors and their community to run successful promotions outside of studio input; they worked against censorship as a way to maintain their regional autonomy. Aronson’s study is effective in returning the human element to a narrative often dominated by films, studios, and dollar signs. His work with the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, from which a great deal of this book is drawn, can serve as an effective guide for other regional studies going forward.

==Notes==
{{reflist}}

Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T17:34:06Z

Jkey1021:

{{Infobox book
| name = Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929
| author = Michael Aronson
| publisher = Pittsburgh University Press
| pub_date = 2008
| pages = xx+300
| isbn = 9780822961093
| image = [[File:Aronson.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
}}
“Of all history’s difficulties,” writes Michael Aronson, “origins are among the most problematic.”<ref> Aronson, 16. </ref> Aronson’s recounting of the heyday of five-cent cinema in Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1908-1929 is full of origin stories, but Aronson, ever mindful of the ethical difficulties of reconstructing “multiple layers of heresay, legends, and outright falsehoods,” handles those origins with considerable grace.<ref> Aronson, 20. </ref>

Aronson first deals with the origins of storefront cinema itself, disputing earlier claims by scholars like Douglas Gomery and Kenneth Macgowan that nickelodeons had existed before John Harris and Harry Davis opened the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905. While there is no doubt that films were being exhibited before the twentieth century, it was a set of specific determinants, first defined in Pittsburgh, that allowed nickel cinema to enjoy widespread acceptance elsewhere. Such determinants included Davis and Harris’ experience in show business and in cheap amusements, as well as the rapidly expanding market for commercial leisure in downtown Pittsburgh. But most importantly, argues Aronson, those theaters showing films prior to 1905 could not be called nickelodeons for the simple fact that none seemed to have charged a nickel for entry.

Aronson argues that the nickel’s cultural capital was markedly greater than its monetary value—a concept with which early twentieth-century entrepreneurs were intimately familiar. A nickel was worth so little that a consumer was likely to believe anything purchased with one was a bargain indeed. Nickel cinemas sold working class consumers the feeling that they were getting more for less. Davis and Harris’ entertainment empire, totaling dozens of businesses between them, had long focused on such cheap amusements—penny arcades, curio exhibits, peep shows. The nickelodeon business model they pioneered, made possible by their own shrewdness and the opportunities presented by multiethnic and multiclass traffic in downtown Pittsburgh, quickly spread across that city and to others across the central U.S. and New England. Even if Davis and Harris did not invent the moving picture theater, they were certainly the driving force behind its proliferation.

Debates among exhibitors about how much admission to charge were microcosms of a larger debate about what movies were and for whom they were intended. The success of the movies as a popular amusement was predicated to some degree on cheap admission. Now that nickel cinema had helped guarantee cinema’s permanence, the medium was beginning to grow beyond the boundaries of what the humble nickelodeon could offer. A nascent system of popular actors and actresses and studios’ greater emphasis on feature films over single-reel shorts was beginning to lead in the industry to a place exhibitors clinging to the old nickelodeon format could not follow.

Aronson dates these changes as occurring in the mid-1910s, about six years after the national trade circulars announced the death of the nickelodeon.<ref> Aronson, 91. </ref> He contends that film historians’ reliance on the national papers—Variety, Motion Picture News, et al—has created a “seductively rational” tautology that emphasizes Hollywood’s role in establishing a middle-class audience. Industry periodicals described a causal relationship between “size of theater, quality of show, price of admission, and type of patron.”<ref> Aronson, 90. </ref> Aronson argues that prevailing idea in the literature, that middle-class audiences were willing to pay more money for admission to ostentatious picture palaces as a form of class signifier, fail to take into account local negotiations between exhibitors and the public. In fact, exhibitors and audience alike had to be taught the value of feature films, which were beginning to show signs of permanence and legitimate artistic merit that set them apart from the shorts and newsreels that preceded them. This process of education did not happen on Hollywood lots, but rather at local and regional level; Pittsburgh, home of the original nickelodeon and hundreds of others, is of particular significance.

Pittsburgh was home to an active film distribution industry built to cater to the city’s overwhelming cadre of theaters, all of whom were in direct competition with one another. Large firms like “The Big Three,” Mutual, General, and Universal, offered exhibitor new films of standard quality every week in exchange for licensing fees and a signed exclusivity deal. Smaller firms, called bargain exchanges, rented out copies of older films (or illegal copies of new ones) that budget-conscious exhibitors could use to balance out a program. Bargain exchanges like the Western Film Company, the largest in Pittsburgh, are significant because they demonstrate the exhibitors’ reliance on the old rather than the new. It appears that, least in this period, stasis was the industry norm, which problematizes prevailing historiographical ideas that emphasize the rationalization of the industry and the inevitable march towards the Hollywood studio system.

And yet, despite the national journals’ claims to the contrary, the growing film industry remained “too completive and too fractured” to really exhibit substance coalescence of either audiences or industry practices.<ref> Aronson, 110. </ref> Manufacturers and the nascent studio system desired the unification of regional audiences into a single national public, to which big-budget feature films could be marketed without much worry for regional idiosyncrasies. To that end, trade papers like Variety advocated vertical integration and a greater degree of control over distribution, and also prematurely announced the success of such efforts. Aronson contends that, once again, scholarly reliance on the industry’s national publications has obscured the fact that the reality on the ground did not match up with the journals’ predictions.
Exhibitors throughout the 1910s still saw themselves as showmen and ran their business accordingly. Far from being mere middleman between the studio and the consumer, exhibitors were active figures in local cinema, engineering all sorts of stunts and schemes all geared towards filling their theaters. Despite the hopeful wishes of the big Hollywood studios, such stunts hardly ever focused on particular stars, films, or genres; it is clear, Aronson writes, that resistance to the mass market practices advocated by the largest trade papers persisted well into the 1910s, long after the nickelodeons were supposedly rendered irrelevant. Hollywood’s influence at the regional level, at least in this period, was actively sought, but rarely achieved. The films being shown were rarely as important as the overall theatrical experience cultivated by the exhibitor.

Theaters’ prominence in the community had clear advantages. Promotions like Swat-The-Fly, veterans’ parades, and free local produce presented theaters as business wholly devoted to the well-being of the community. However, placing themselves at the center of the community exposed exhibitors to renewed debates regarding the social maladies some critics linked to the movies. Aronson falls in with scholars like Richard Randall, Ira Carmen, and Lee Grieveson in arguing that early efforts to censor film were part of larger struggle to define and regulate film’s artistic and commercial destiny. Exhibitors chafed at the idea of censorship not necessarily over ideas of artistic freedom, but rather because censorship inhibited their ability to act outside of the control of the big studios; for their part, studios swallowed their discomfort with censorship in favor of its potential in affecting the regulation and rationalization they had long desired. Even though films had been a mainstay in American entertainment since the late nineteenth century, disputes concerning content and censorship did not become widespread until the unprecedented success of the Nickelodeon and its peers. Aronson argues that film censorship is really about power. Groups and individuals of all kinds battled over the shape of an industry and who would be able to access its products and profits, and censorship would become the battleground for these issues.

Censorship, like so many other issues film scholars gave taken for granted, was negotiated the regional and local level. Working against a prevailing teleological narrative that takes for granted things like the successes of the studio system, star power, and mass market film promotion, Aronson demonstrates the many of the debates that shaped the history of film as medium occurred thousands of miles from Hollywood at the regional and local levels. Local exhibitors like Harry Davis, Harry Mintz, and Charlie Silveus helped make film successful through their nickelodeon theaters; they stalled industry hegemony by working with local Pittsburgh distributers; they used their knowledge about their neighbors and their community to run successful promotions outside of studio input; they worked against censorship as a way to maintain their regional autonomy. Aronson’s study is effective in returning the human element to a narrative often dominated by films, studios, and dollar signs. His work with the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, from which a great deal of this book is drawn, can serve as an effective guide for other regional studies going forward.

Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T17:33:01Z

Jkey1021:

{{Infobox book
| name = Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929
| author = Michael Aronson
| publisher = Pittsburgh University Press
| pub_date = 2008
| pages = xx+300
| isbn = 9780822961093
| image = [[File:Aronson.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
}}
“Of all history’s difficulties,” writes Michael Aronson, “origins are among the most problematic.”<ref> Aronson, 16. </ref> Aronson’s recounting of the heyday of five-cent cinema in Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1908-1929 is full of origin stories, but Aronson, ever mindful of the ethical difficulties of reconstructing “multiple layers of heresay, legends, and outright falsehoods,” handles those origins with considerable grace.<ref> Aronson, 20. </ref>

Aronson first deals with the origins of storefront cinema itself, disputing earlier claims by scholars like Douglas Gomery and Kenneth Macgowan that nickelodeons had existed before John Harris and Harry Davis opened the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905. While there is no doubt that films were being exhibited before the twentieth century, it was a set of specific determinants, first defined in Pittsburgh, that allowed nickel cinema to enjoy widespread acceptance elsewhere. Such determinants included Davis and Harris’ experience in show business and in cheap amusements, as well as the rapidly expanding market for commercial leisure in downtown Pittsburgh. But most importantly, argues Aronson, those theaters showing films prior to 1905 could not be called nickelodeons for the simple fact that none seemed to have charged a nickel for entry.

Aronson argues that the nickel’s cultural capital was markedly greater than its monetary value—a concept with which early twentieth-century entrepreneurs were intimately familiar. A nickel was worth so little that a consumer was likely to believe anything purchased with one was a bargain indeed. Nickel cinemas sold working class consumers the feeling that they were getting more for less. Davis and Harris’ entertainment empire, totaling dozens of businesses between them, had long focused on such cheap amusements—penny arcades, curio exhibits, peep shows. The nickelodeon business model they pioneered, made possible by their own shrewdness and the opportunities presented by multiethnic and multiclass traffic in downtown Pittsburgh, quickly spread across that city and to others across the central U.S. and New England. Even if Davis and Harris did not invent the moving picture theater, they were certainly the driving force behind its proliferation.

Debates among exhibitors about how much admission to charge were microcosms of a larger debate about what movies were and for whom they were intended. The success of the movies as a popular amusement was predicated to some degree on cheap admission. Now that nickel cinema had helped guarantee cinema’s permanence, the medium was beginning to grow beyond the boundaries of what the humble nickelodeon could offer. A nascent system of popular actors and actresses and studios’ greater emphasis on feature films over single-reel shorts was beginning to lead in the industry to a place exhibitors clinging to the old nickelodeon format could not follow.

Aronson dates these changes as occurring in the mid-1910s, about six years after the national trade circulars announced the death of the nickelodeon.<ref> Aronson, 91. </ref> He contends that film historians’ reliance on the national papers—Variety, Motion Picture News, et al—has created a “seductively rational” tautology that emphasizes Hollywood’s role in establishing a middle-class audience. Industry periodicals described a causal relationship between “size of theater, quality of show, price of admission, and type of patron.”<ref> Aronson, 90. </ref> Aronson argues that prevailing idea in the literature, that middle-class audiences were willing to pay more money for admission to ostentatious picture palaces as a form of class signifier, fail to take into account local negotiations between exhibitors and the public. In fact, exhibitors and audience alike had to be taught the value of feature films, which were beginning to show signs of permanence and legitimate artistic merit that set them apart from the shorts and newsreels that preceded them. This process of education did not happen on Hollywood lots, but rather at local and regional level; Pittsburgh, home of the original nickelodeon and hundreds of others, is of particular significance.

Pittsburgh was home to an active film distribution industry built to cater to the city’s overwhelming cadre of theaters, all of whom were in direct competition with one another. Large firms like “The Big Three,” Mutual, General, and Universal, offered exhibitor new films of standard quality every week in exchange for licensing fees and a signed exclusivity deal. Smaller firms, called bargain exchanges, rented out copies of older films (or illegal copies of new ones) that budget-conscious exhibitors could use to balance out a program. Bargain exchanges like the Western Film Company, the largest in Pittsburgh, are significant because they demonstrate the exhibitors’ reliance on the old rather than the new. It appears that, least in this period, stasis was the industry norm, which problematizes prevailing historiographical ideas that emphasize the rationalization of the industry and the inevitable march towards the Hollywood studio system.

And yet, despite the national journals’ claims to the contrary, the growing film industry remained “too completive and too fractured” to really exhibit substance coalescence of either audiences or industry practices.<ref> Aronson, 110. </ref> Manufacturers and the nascent studio system desired the unification of regional audiences into a single national public, to which big-budget feature films could be marketed without much worry for regional idiosyncrasies. To that end, trade papers like Variety advocated vertical integration and a greater degree of control over distribution, and also prematurely announced the success of such efforts. Aronson contends that, once again, scholarly reliance on the industry’s national publications has obscured the fact that the reality on the ground did not match up with the journals’ predictions.
Exhibitors throughout the 1910s still saw themselves as showmen and ran their business accordingly. Far from being mere middleman between the studio and the consumer, exhibitors were active figures in local cinema, engineering all sorts of stunts and schemes all geared towards filling their theaters. Despite the hopeful wishes of the big Hollywood studios, such stunts hardly ever focused on particular stars, films, or genres; it is clear, Aronson writes, that resistance to the mass market practices advocated by the largest trade papers persisted well into the 1910s, long after the nickelodeons were supposedly rendered irrelevant. Hollywood’s influence at the regional level, at least in this period, was actively sought, but rarely achieved. The films being shown were rarely as important as the overall theatrical experience cultivated by the exhibitor.

Theaters’ prominence in the community had clear advantages. Promotions like Swat-The-Fly, veterans’ parades, and free local produce presented theaters as business wholly devoted to the well-being of the community. However, placing themselves at the center of the community exposed exhibitors to renewed debates regarding the social maladies some critics linked to the movies. Aronson falls in with scholars like Richard Randall, Ira Carmen, and Lee Grieveson in arguing that early efforts to censor film were part of larger struggle to define and regulate film’s artistic and commercial destiny. Exhibitors chafed at the idea of censorship not necessarily over ideas of artistic freedom, but rather because censorship inhibited their ability to act outside of the control of the big studios; for their part, studios swallowed their discomfort with censorship in favor of its potential in affecting the regulation and rationalization they had long desired. Even though films had been a mainstay in American entertainment since the late nineteenth century, disputes concerning content and censorship did not become widespread until the unprecedented success of the Nickelodeon and its peers. Aronson argues that film censorship is really about power. Groups and individuals of all kinds battled over the shape of an industry and who would be able to access its products and profits, and censorship would become the battleground for these issues.

Censorship, like so many other issues film scholars gave taken for granted, was negotiated the regional and local level. Working against a prevailing teleological narrative that takes for granted things like the successes of the studio system, star power, and mass market film promotion, Aronson demonstrates the many of the debates that shaped the history of film as medium occurred thousands of miles from Hollywood at the regional and local levels. Local exhibitors like Harry Davis, Harry Mintz, and Charlie Silveus helped make film successful through their nickelodeon theaters; they stalled industry hegemony by working with local Pittsburgh distributers; they used their knowledge about their neighbors and their community to run successful promotions outside of studio input; they worked against censorship as a way to maintain their regional autonomy. Aronson’s study is effective in returning the human element to a narrative often dominated by films, studios, and dollar signs. His work with the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, from which a great deal of this book is drawn, can serve as an effective guide for other regional studies going forward.

{{reflist}}

Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T17:27:53Z

Jkey1021:

{{Infobox book
| name = Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929
| author = Michael Aronson
| publisher = Pittsburgh University Press
| pub_date = 2008
| pages = xx+300
| isbn = 9780822961093
| image = [[File:Aronson.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
}}
“Of all history’s difficulties,” writes Michael Aronson, “origins are among the most problematic.”<ref> Aronson, 16. </ref> Aronson’s recounting of the heyday of five-cent cinema in Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1908-1929 is full of origin stories, but Aronson, ever mindful of the ethical difficulties of reconstructing “multiple layers of heresay, legends, and outright falsehoods,” handles those origins with considerable grace.

Aronson first deals with the origins of storefront cinema itself, disputing earlier claims by scholars like Douglas Gomery and Kenneth Macgowan that nickelodeons had existed before John Harris and Harry Davis opened the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905. While there is no doubt that films were being exhibited before the twentieth century, it was a set of specific determinants, first defined in Pittsburgh, that allowed nickel cinema to enjoy widespread acceptance elsewhere. Such determinants included Davis and Harris’ experience in show business and in cheap amusements, as well as the rapidly expanding market for commercial leisure in downtown Pittsburgh. But most importantly, argues Aronson, those theaters showing films prior to 1905 could not be called nickelodeons for the simple fact that none seemed to have charged a nickel for entry.

Aronson argues that the nickel’s cultural capital was markedly greater than its monetary value—a concept with which early twentieth-century entrepreneurs were intimately familiar. A nickel was worth so little that a consumer was likely to believe anything purchased with one was a bargain indeed. Nickel cinemas sold working class consumers the feeling that they were getting more for less. Davis and Harris’ entertainment empire, totaling dozens of businesses between them, had long focused on such cheap amusements—penny arcades, curio exhibits, peep shows. The nickelodeon business model they pioneered, made possible by their own shrewdness and the opportunities presented by multiethnic and multiclass traffic in downtown Pittsburgh, quickly spread across that city and to others across the central U.S. and New England. Even if Davis and Harris did not invent the moving picture theater, they were certainly the driving force behind its proliferation.

Debates among exhibitors about how much admission to charge were microcosms of a larger debate about what movies were and for whom they were intended. The success of the movies as a popular amusement was predicated to some degree on cheap admission. Now that nickel cinema had helped guarantee cinema’s permanence, the medium was beginning to grow beyond the boundaries of what the humble nickelodeon could offer. A nascent system of popular actors and actresses and studios’ greater emphasis on feature films over single-reel shorts was beginning to lead in the industry to a place exhibitors clinging to the old nickelodeon format could not follow.
Aronson dates these changes as occurring in the mid-1910s, about six years after the national trade circulars announced the death of the nickelodeon. He contends that film historians’ reliance on the national papers—Variety, Motion Picture News, et al—has created a “seductively rational” tautology that emphasizes Hollywood’s role in establishing a middle-class audience. Industry periodicals described a causal relationship between “size of theater, quality of show, price of admission, and type of patron.” Aronson argues that prevailing idea in the literature, that middle-class audiences were willing to pay more money for admission to ostentatious picture palaces as a form of class signifier, fail to take into account local negotiations between exhibitors and the public. In fact, exhibitors and audience alike had to be taught the value of feature films, which were beginning to show signs of permanence and legitimate artistic merit that set them apart from the shorts and newsreels that preceded them. This process of education did not happen on Hollywood lots, but rather at local and regional level; Pittsburgh, home of the original nickelodeon and hundreds of others, is of particular significance.

Pittsburgh was home to an active film distribution industry built to cater to the city’s overwhelming cadre of theaters, all of whom were in direct competition with one another. Large firms like “The Big Three,” Mutual, General, and Universal, offered exhibitor new films of standard quality every week in exchange for licensing fees and a signed exclusivity deal. Smaller firms, called bargain exchanges, rented out copies of older films (or illegal copies of new ones) that budget-conscious exhibitors could use to balance out a program. Bargain exchanges like the Western Film Company, the largest in Pittsburgh, are significant because they demonstrate the exhibitors’ reliance on the old rather than the new. It appears that, least in this period, stasis was the industry norm, which problematizes prevailing historiographical ideas that emphasize the rationalization of the industry and the inevitable march towards the Hollywood studio system.

And yet, despite the national journals’ claims to the contrary, the growing film industry remained “too completive and too fractured” to really exhibit substance coalescence of either audiences or industry practices. Manufacturers and the nascent studio system desired the unification of regional audiences into a single national public, to which big-budget feature films could be marketed without much worry for regional idiosyncrasies. To that end, trade papers like Variety advocated vertical integration and a greater degree of control over distribution, and also prematurely announced the success of such efforts. Aronson contends that, once again, scholarly reliance on the industry’s national publications has obscured the fact that the reality on the ground did not match up with the journals’ predictions.
Exhibitors throughout the 1910s still saw themselves as showmen and ran their business accordingly. Far from being mere middleman between the studio and the consumer, exhibitors were active figures in local cinema, engineering all sorts of stunts and schemes all geared towards filling their theaters. Despite the hopeful wishes of the big Hollywood studios, such stunts hardly ever focused on particular stars, films, or genres; it is clear, Aronson writes, that resistance to the mass market practices advocated by the largest trade papers persisted well into the 1910s, long after the nickelodeons were supposedly rendered irrelevant. Hollywood’s influence at the regional level, at least in this period, was actively sought, but rarely achieved. The films being shown were rarely as important as the overall theatrical experience cultivated by the exhibitor.

Theaters’ prominence in the community had clear advantages. Promotions like Swat-The-Fly, veterans’ parades, and free local produce presented theaters as business wholly devoted to the well-being of the community. However, placing themselves at the center of the community exposed exhibitors to renewed debates regarding the social maladies some critics linked to the movies. Aronson falls in with scholars like Richard Randall, Ira Carmen, and Lee Grieveson in arguing that early efforts to censor film were part of larger struggle to define and regulate film’s artistic and commercial destiny. Exhibitors chafed at the idea of censorship not necessarily over ideas of artistic freedom, but rather because censorship inhibited their ability to act outside of the control of the big studios; for their part, studios swallowed their discomfort with censorship in favor of its potential in affecting the regulation and rationalization they had long desired. Even though films had been a mainstay in American entertainment since the late nineteenth century, disputes concerning content and censorship did not become widespread until the unprecedented success of the Nickelodeon and its peers. Aronson argues that film censorship is really about power. Groups and individuals of all kinds battled over the shape of an industry and who would be able to access its products and profits, and censorship would become the battleground for these issues.

Censorship, like so many other issues film scholars gave taken for granted, was negotiated the regional and local level. Working against a prevailing teleological narrative that takes for granted things like the successes of the studio system, star power, and mass market film promotion, Aronson demonstrates the many of the debates that shaped the history of film as medium occurred thousands of miles from Hollywood at the regional and local levels. Local exhibitors like Harry Davis, Harry Mintz, and Charlie Silveus helped make film successful through their nickelodeon theaters; they stalled industry hegemony by working with local Pittsburgh distributers; they used their knowledge about their neighbors and their community to run successful promotions outside of studio input; they worked against censorship as a way to maintain their regional autonomy. Aronson’s study is effective in returning the human element to a narrative often dominated by films, studios, and dollar signs. His work with the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, from which a great deal of this book is drawn, can serve as an effective guide for other regional studies going forward.

Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T17:27:03Z

Jkey1021:

{{Infobox book
| name = Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929
| author = Michael Aronson
| publisher = Pittsburgh University Press
| pub_date = 2008
| pages = xx+300
| isbn = 9780822961093
| image = [[File:Aronson.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
}}
“Of all history’s difficulties,” writes Michael Aronson, “origins are among the most problematic.”<ref> Aronson, 16. <ref/> Aronson’s recounting of the heyday of five-cent cinema in Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1908-1929 is full of origin stories, but Aronson, ever mindful of the ethical difficulties of reconstructing “multiple layers of heresay, legends, and outright falsehoods,” handles those origins with considerable grace.

Aronson first deals with the origins of storefront cinema itself, disputing earlier claims by scholars like Douglas Gomery and Kenneth Macgowan that nickelodeons had existed before John Harris and Harry Davis opened the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905. While there is no doubt that films were being exhibited before the twentieth century, it was a set of specific determinants, first defined in Pittsburgh, that allowed nickel cinema to enjoy widespread acceptance elsewhere. Such determinants included Davis and Harris’ experience in show business and in cheap amusements, as well as the rapidly expanding market for commercial leisure in downtown Pittsburgh. But most importantly, argues Aronson, those theaters showing films prior to 1905 could not be called nickelodeons for the simple fact that none seemed to have charged a nickel for entry.

Aronson argues that the nickel’s cultural capital was markedly greater than its monetary value—a concept with which early twentieth-century entrepreneurs were intimately familiar. A nickel was worth so little that a consumer was likely to believe anything purchased with one was a bargain indeed. Nickel cinemas sold working class consumers the feeling that they were getting more for less. Davis and Harris’ entertainment empire, totaling dozens of businesses between them, had long focused on such cheap amusements—penny arcades, curio exhibits, peep shows. The nickelodeon business model they pioneered, made possible by their own shrewdness and the opportunities presented by multiethnic and multiclass traffic in downtown Pittsburgh, quickly spread across that city and to others across the central U.S. and New England. Even if Davis and Harris did not invent the moving picture theater, they were certainly the driving force behind its proliferation.

Debates among exhibitors about how much admission to charge were microcosms of a larger debate about what movies were and for whom they were intended. The success of the movies as a popular amusement was predicated to some degree on cheap admission. Now that nickel cinema had helped guarantee cinema’s permanence, the medium was beginning to grow beyond the boundaries of what the humble nickelodeon could offer. A nascent system of popular actors and actresses and studios’ greater emphasis on feature films over single-reel shorts was beginning to lead in the industry to a place exhibitors clinging to the old nickelodeon format could not follow.
Aronson dates these changes as occurring in the mid-1910s, about six years after the national trade circulars announced the death of the nickelodeon. He contends that film historians’ reliance on the national papers—Variety, Motion Picture News, et al—has created a “seductively rational” tautology that emphasizes Hollywood’s role in establishing a middle-class audience. Industry periodicals described a causal relationship between “size of theater, quality of show, price of admission, and type of patron.” Aronson argues that prevailing idea in the literature, that middle-class audiences were willing to pay more money for admission to ostentatious picture palaces as a form of class signifier, fail to take into account local negotiations between exhibitors and the public. In fact, exhibitors and audience alike had to be taught the value of feature films, which were beginning to show signs of permanence and legitimate artistic merit that set them apart from the shorts and newsreels that preceded them. This process of education did not happen on Hollywood lots, but rather at local and regional level; Pittsburgh, home of the original nickelodeon and hundreds of others, is of particular significance.

Pittsburgh was home to an active film distribution industry built to cater to the city’s overwhelming cadre of theaters, all of whom were in direct competition with one another. Large firms like “The Big Three,” Mutual, General, and Universal, offered exhibitor new films of standard quality every week in exchange for licensing fees and a signed exclusivity deal. Smaller firms, called bargain exchanges, rented out copies of older films (or illegal copies of new ones) that budget-conscious exhibitors could use to balance out a program. Bargain exchanges like the Western Film Company, the largest in Pittsburgh, are significant because they demonstrate the exhibitors’ reliance on the old rather than the new. It appears that, least in this period, stasis was the industry norm, which problematizes prevailing historiographical ideas that emphasize the rationalization of the industry and the inevitable march towards the Hollywood studio system.

And yet, despite the national journals’ claims to the contrary, the growing film industry remained “too completive and too fractured” to really exhibit substance coalescence of either audiences or industry practices. Manufacturers and the nascent studio system desired the unification of regional audiences into a single national public, to which big-budget feature films could be marketed without much worry for regional idiosyncrasies. To that end, trade papers like Variety advocated vertical integration and a greater degree of control over distribution, and also prematurely announced the success of such efforts. Aronson contends that, once again, scholarly reliance on the industry’s national publications has obscured the fact that the reality on the ground did not match up with the journals’ predictions.
Exhibitors throughout the 1910s still saw themselves as showmen and ran their business accordingly. Far from being mere middleman between the studio and the consumer, exhibitors were active figures in local cinema, engineering all sorts of stunts and schemes all geared towards filling their theaters. Despite the hopeful wishes of the big Hollywood studios, such stunts hardly ever focused on particular stars, films, or genres; it is clear, Aronson writes, that resistance to the mass market practices advocated by the largest trade papers persisted well into the 1910s, long after the nickelodeons were supposedly rendered irrelevant. Hollywood’s influence at the regional level, at least in this period, was actively sought, but rarely achieved. The films being shown were rarely as important as the overall theatrical experience cultivated by the exhibitor.

Theaters’ prominence in the community had clear advantages. Promotions like Swat-The-Fly, veterans’ parades, and free local produce presented theaters as business wholly devoted to the well-being of the community. However, placing themselves at the center of the community exposed exhibitors to renewed debates regarding the social maladies some critics linked to the movies. Aronson falls in with scholars like Richard Randall, Ira Carmen, and Lee Grieveson in arguing that early efforts to censor film were part of larger struggle to define and regulate film’s artistic and commercial destiny. Exhibitors chafed at the idea of censorship not necessarily over ideas of artistic freedom, but rather because censorship inhibited their ability to act outside of the control of the big studios; for their part, studios swallowed their discomfort with censorship in favor of its potential in affecting the regulation and rationalization they had long desired. Even though films had been a mainstay in American entertainment since the late nineteenth century, disputes concerning content and censorship did not become widespread until the unprecedented success of the Nickelodeon and its peers. Aronson argues that film censorship is really about power. Groups and individuals of all kinds battled over the shape of an industry and who would be able to access its products and profits, and censorship would become the battleground for these issues.

Censorship, like so many other issues film scholars gave taken for granted, was negotiated the regional and local level. Working against a prevailing teleological narrative that takes for granted things like the successes of the studio system, star power, and mass market film promotion, Aronson demonstrates the many of the debates that shaped the history of film as medium occurred thousands of miles from Hollywood at the regional and local levels. Local exhibitors like Harry Davis, Harry Mintz, and Charlie Silveus helped make film successful through their nickelodeon theaters; they stalled industry hegemony by working with local Pittsburgh distributers; they used their knowledge about their neighbors and their community to run successful promotions outside of studio input; they worked against censorship as a way to maintain their regional autonomy. Aronson’s study is effective in returning the human element to a narrative often dominated by films, studios, and dollar signs. His work with the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, from which a great deal of this book is drawn, can serve as an effective guide for other regional studies going forward.

Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T17:23:29Z

Jkey1021:

{{Infobox book
| name = Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929
| author = Michael Aronson
| publisher = Pittsburgh University Press
| pub_date = 2008
| pages = xx+300
| isbn = 9780822961093
| image = [[File:Aronson.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
}}
“Of all history’s difficulties,” writes Michael Aronson, “origins are among the most problematic.” Aronson’s recounting of the heyday of five-cent cinema in Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1908-1929 is full of origin stories, but Aronson, ever mindful of the ethical difficulties of reconstructing “multiple layers of heresay, legends, and outright falsehoods,” handles those origins with considerable grace.

Aronson first deals with the origins of storefront cinema itself, disputing earlier claims by scholars like Douglas Gomery and Kenneth Macgowan that nickelodeons had existed before John Harris and Harry Davis opened the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905. While there is no doubt that films were being exhibited before the twentieth century, it was a set of specific determinants, first defined in Pittsburgh, that allowed nickel cinema to enjoy widespread acceptance elsewhere. Such determinants included Davis and Harris’ experience in show business and in cheap amusements, as well as the rapidly expanding market for commercial leisure in downtown Pittsburgh. But most importantly, argues Aronson, those theaters showing films prior to 1905 could not be called nickelodeons for the simple fact that none seemed to have charged a nickel for entry.

Aronson argues that the nickel’s cultural capital was markedly greater than its monetary value—a concept with which early twentieth-century entrepreneurs were intimately familiar. A nickel was worth so little that a consumer was likely to believe anything purchased with one was a bargain indeed. Nickel cinemas sold working class consumers the feeling that they were getting more for less. Davis and Harris’ entertainment empire, totaling dozens of businesses between them, had long focused on such cheap amusements—penny arcades, curio exhibits, peep shows. The nickelodeon business model they pioneered, made possible by their own shrewdness and the opportunities presented by multiethnic and multiclass traffic in downtown Pittsburgh, quickly spread across that city and to others across the central U.S. and New England. Even if Davis and Harris did not invent the moving picture theater, they were certainly the driving force behind its proliferation.

Debates among exhibitors about how much admission to charge were microcosms of a larger debate about what movies were and for whom they were intended. The success of the movies as a popular amusement was predicated to some degree on cheap admission. Now that nickel cinema had helped guarantee cinema’s permanence, the medium was beginning to grow beyond the boundaries of what the humble nickelodeon could offer. A nascent system of popular actors and actresses and studios’ greater emphasis on feature films over single-reel shorts was beginning to lead in the industry to a place exhibitors clinging to the old nickelodeon format could not follow.
Aronson dates these changes as occurring in the mid-1910s, about six years after the national trade circulars announced the death of the nickelodeon. He contends that film historians’ reliance on the national papers—Variety, Motion Picture News, et al—has created a “seductively rational” tautology that emphasizes Hollywood’s role in establishing a middle-class audience. Industry periodicals described a causal relationship between “size of theater, quality of show, price of admission, and type of patron.” Aronson argues that prevailing idea in the literature, that middle-class audiences were willing to pay more money for admission to ostentatious picture palaces as a form of class signifier, fail to take into account local negotiations between exhibitors and the public. In fact, exhibitors and audience alike had to be taught the value of feature films, which were beginning to show signs of permanence and legitimate artistic merit that set them apart from the shorts and newsreels that preceded them. This process of education did not happen on Hollywood lots, but rather at local and regional level; Pittsburgh, home of the original nickelodeon and hundreds of others, is of particular significance.

Pittsburgh was home to an active film distribution industry built to cater to the city’s overwhelming cadre of theaters, all of whom were in direct competition with one another. Large firms like “The Big Three,” Mutual, General, and Universal, offered exhibitor new films of standard quality every week in exchange for licensing fees and a signed exclusivity deal. Smaller firms, called bargain exchanges, rented out copies of older films (or illegal copies of new ones) that budget-conscious exhibitors could use to balance out a program. Bargain exchanges like the Western Film Company, the largest in Pittsburgh, are significant because they demonstrate the exhibitors’ reliance on the old rather than the new. It appears that, least in this period, stasis was the industry norm, which problematizes prevailing historiographical ideas that emphasize the rationalization of the industry and the inevitable march towards the Hollywood studio system.

And yet, despite the national journals’ claims to the contrary, the growing film industry remained “too completive and too fractured” to really exhibit substance coalescence of either audiences or industry practices. Manufacturers and the nascent studio system desired the unification of regional audiences into a single national public, to which big-budget feature films could be marketed without much worry for regional idiosyncrasies. To that end, trade papers like Variety advocated vertical integration and a greater degree of control over distribution, and also prematurely announced the success of such efforts. Aronson contends that, once again, scholarly reliance on the industry’s national publications has obscured the fact that the reality on the ground did not match up with the journals’ predictions.
Exhibitors throughout the 1910s still saw themselves as showmen and ran their business accordingly. Far from being mere middleman between the studio and the consumer, exhibitors were active figures in local cinema, engineering all sorts of stunts and schemes all geared towards filling their theaters. Despite the hopeful wishes of the big Hollywood studios, such stunts hardly ever focused on particular stars, films, or genres; it is clear, Aronson writes, that resistance to the mass market practices advocated by the largest trade papers persisted well into the 1910s, long after the nickelodeons were supposedly rendered irrelevant. Hollywood’s influence at the regional level, at least in this period, was actively sought, but rarely achieved. The films being shown were rarely as important as the overall theatrical experience cultivated by the exhibitor.

Theaters’ prominence in the community had clear advantages. Promotions like Swat-The-Fly, veterans’ parades, and free local produce presented theaters as business wholly devoted to the well-being of the community. However, placing themselves at the center of the community exposed exhibitors to renewed debates regarding the social maladies some critics linked to the movies. Aronson falls in with scholars like Richard Randall, Ira Carmen, and Lee Grieveson in arguing that early efforts to censor film were part of larger struggle to define and regulate film’s artistic and commercial destiny. Exhibitors chafed at the idea of censorship not necessarily over ideas of artistic freedom, but rather because censorship inhibited their ability to act outside of the control of the big studios; for their part, studios swallowed their discomfort with censorship in favor of its potential in affecting the regulation and rationalization they had long desired. Even though films had been a mainstay in American entertainment since the late nineteenth century, disputes concerning content and censorship did not become widespread until the unprecedented success of the Nickelodeon and its peers. Aronson argues that film censorship is really about power. Groups and individuals of all kinds battled over the shape of an industry and who would be able to access its products and profits, and censorship would become the battleground for these issues.

Censorship, like so many other issues film scholars gave taken for granted, was negotiated the regional and local level. Working against a prevailing teleological narrative that takes for granted things like the successes of the studio system, star power, and mass market film promotion, Aronson demonstrates the many of the debates that shaped the history of film as medium occurred thousands of miles from Hollywood at the regional and local levels. Local exhibitors like Harry Davis, Harry Mintz, and Charlie Silveus helped make film successful through their nickelodeon theaters; they stalled industry hegemony by working with local Pittsburgh distributers; they used their knowledge about their neighbors and their community to run successful promotions outside of studio input; they worked against censorship as a way to maintain their regional autonomy. Aronson’s study is effective in returning the human element to a narrative often dominated by films, studios, and dollar signs. His work with the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, from which a great deal of this book is drawn, can serve as an effective guide for other regional studies going forward.

File:Aronson.jpg

2015-09-28T14:55:44Z

Jkey1021: Nickelodeon City cover.

Nickelodeon City cover.

Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T14:54:48Z

Jkey1021:

Nickelodeon City

2015-09-28T14:50:28Z

Jkey1021: Created page with "This page is under construction. Thank you for your patience."

This page is under construction. Thank you for your patience.

Twentieth Century United States

2015-09-28T14:49:43Z

Jkey1021:

==Book Summaries==
* Donna Alvah. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/women-and-children-first-the-importance-of-gender-and-military-families-in-the-cold-war-era/ Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946-1965] (2007).
* Luis Alvarez. [[The Power of the Zoot|The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II]] (2008).
* Karen Anderson. [[Wartime Women|Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II]] (1981).
* Michael Aronson. [[Nickelodeon City|Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929]] (2008).
* Eric Avila. [[Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight|Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles]] (2004).
* Beth Bailey. [[America’s Army|America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force]] (2009).
* Beth Bailey & David Farber. [[The First Strange Place|The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii]] (1992).
* Beth Bailey. [[From Front Porch to Back Seat|From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America]] (1989).
* Mark Brilliant. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/californication-race-ethnicity-and-unity-in-twentieth-century-california/ Californication: Race, Ethnicity, and Unity in Twentieth Century California] (2012).
* Amy Bridges. [[Morning Glories]] (1999).
* Laura Briggs. [[Reproducing Empire|Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico]] (2002).
* Alan Brinkley. [[Voices of Protest|Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression]] (1983).
* Charlotte Brooks. [[Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends|Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California]] (2009).
* Catherine Fisher Collins. [[The Imprisonment of African American Women| The Imprisonment of African American Women: Causes, Conditions, and Future Implications]] (1997).
* Robert Caro. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/dog-days-classics-robert-caros-controversial-portrait-of-robert-moses-and-new-york/ The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York](1974)
* Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/dog-days-classics-political-boss-and-midwestern-pharaoh-richard-j-daleys-chicago-legacy/ American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for the Nation and Chicago] (2001)
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[A Consumers’ Republic|A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America]] (2003).
* Lizabeth Cohen. [[Making a New Deal|Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939]] (2008).

* Nancy F. Cott. [[Public Vows|Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation]] (2002).
* Pete Daniel, [[Lost Revolutions|Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s]] (2000)
* Mike Davis. [[City of Quartz|City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles]] (2006).
* Mike Davis & Michael Sprinker. [[Magical Urbanism|Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City]] (2001).
* Michael J. Dear. [[The Postmodern Urban Condition]] (2001).
* Robert C. Donnelly. [[Dark Rose]] (2011).
* Steven Erie. [[Globalizing L.A.|Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development]] (2004).
* Steven P. Erie. [[Beyond Chinatown|Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California]] (2006).
* Elizabeth Ewen. [[Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars]] (1985).
* Dannelly Farrow. [[Dixie's Daughters]] (2003).
* Barbara Ferman. [[Challenging the Growth Machine|Challenging the Growth Machine: Neighborhood Politics in Chicago and Pittsburgh]] (1996).
* Marcie Ferris and Mark Greenberg. [[Jewish Roots in Southern Soil|Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History]] (2006).
* John M. Findlay. [[Magic Lands|Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940]] (1993).
* Steven Gregory. [[Black Corona|Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community]] (1999).
* Jason Hackworth. [[The Neoliberal City|The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism]] (2006).
* William Ivy Hair. [[Carnival of Fury|Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900]] (2008).
* Tona J. Hangen. [[Redeeming the Dial|Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America]] (2013).
* Andrew Hartman. [[A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars]] (2015)
* Chester W. Hartman. [[Yerba Buena|Yerba Buena: land grab and community resistance in San Francisco,]] (1974).
* Georgina Hickey. [[Hope and Danger in the New South City|Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940]] (2005).
* Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989).
* Daniel Horowitz. [[Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”|Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism]] (2000).
* John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle. [[Lots of Parking|Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture]] (2004).
* Daniel Martinez HoSang. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/erasing-race-whiteness-california-and-the-colorblind-bind/ Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California](2010)
* Jonathan Hughes (Editor)& Simon Sadler (Editor).[[Non-Plan|Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism]] (2000).
* Daniel Hurewitz. [[Bohemian Los Angeles|Bohemian Los Angeles: and the Making of Modern Politics]] (2007).
* Marilynn S. Johnson. [[The Second Gold Rush|The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II]] (1994).
* Tony Judt. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/neoliberalisms-license-to-ill/ Ill Fares the Land] (2011).
* Larry D. Kramer. [[The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review]] (2004).
* Joel Kotkin. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/americas-ace-in-the-hole-is-of-course-its-awesomeness/ The Next Hundred Million:America in 2050] (2010)
* Kevin M. Kruse. [[White Flight|White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism]] (2007).
* Matthew D. Lassiter. [[The Silent Majority|The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South]] (2007).
*Gary L. Lehring. [[Officially Gay|The Political Construction of Sexuality by the U. S. Military]] (2003).
* William R. Leach. [[Land of Desire|Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture]] (1994).
* Michael F. Logan. [[Fighting Sprawl and City Hall|Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest]] (1995).
* Roger W. Lotchin. [[Fortress California, 1910-1961|Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare]] (2002).
* Lisa Lowe. [[Immigrant Acts|Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics]] (1996).
* Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd. [[Middletown|Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture]] (1959).
* Catherine Lutz. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/3187/ Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century] (2001).
* Nancy MacLean. [[Freedom Is Not Enough|Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace]] (2008).
* Isaac Martin. [http://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/stalking-the-tax-man-the-pervasive-influence-of-the-property-tax-revolt/ The Permanent Tax Revolt: How Property Tax Transformed America] (2008).
* Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton. [[American Apartheid|American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass]] (1993).
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