Rethinking Rothafel: Roxy's Forgotten Legacy

Roxy was the first man to have the courage and finesse to elevate the exhibition of moving pictures beyond the store show level. He made the motion picture theatre the community art center and compelled public appreciation of films for their true artistic values.

Carl Laemmle

We can only wonder now what motion picture exhibition would have been in the classical period without the unique contribution of Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel. Manager of movie houses, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, stage producer, filmmaker, and technical innovator, he created "high class" motion picture presentation in the pre- and post-World War I periods, developing the movie palace experience that would frame motion picture exhibition for decades. Yet, just as that era of movie palaces has faded into history, so has the memory of Rothafel. What remains of his legacy are anecdotes, legends, and incomplete histories. This essay will attempt at least partially to reconstruct the story of this important pioneer of American movie theater history.

The story of Roxy's rise from backroom nickelodeon operator to the most successful showman in motion picture history is not unlike the story of many of Hollywood's earliest moguls. Born July 9, 1882, in Stillwater, Minnesota, to Jewish immigrants from Germany, Rothafel (who was born Rothapfel, but dropped the "p" in the early 1920s) was the rebellious and visionary son of a shoemaker. Legend has it that even as a kid he organized a one-cent theater and took his juvenile playmates on a tour of neighboring villages. ¹ But Roxy's father, like many immigrants, wanted more for his son. Moving to New York at the age of thirteen, Roxy soon lost interest in his studies, putting him constantly at odds with his father. Less than two years after his mother's death, Roxy, at the age of sixteen, was forced out of his home and onto the streets of New York to make his own way. ²

Following a series of menial occupations, his last as a traveling bookseller, Roxy joined the U.S. Marine Corps and over the next seven years saw action in Santo Domingo and in China during the Boxer Rebellion. ³ When discharged, he was one of its highest-ranking Jews. He moved to Pennsylvania, where he returned to the road as a traveling book salesman when not playing semipro baseball. It was on the baseball diamond, and not in the movie palaces of Broadway, that the nickname "Roxy" was born.

One day during the off-season while selling books, Roxy wandered into a saloon in the coal-mining town of Forest City, Pennsylvania. After finishing his favorite meal of grilled frankfurters, he eyed the barkeeper's daughter, Rosa. Deciding on the spot to abandon the road, he asked and received a position tending bar. Using the backroom of the saloon, which had often served as a dance hall, he borrowed 250 chairs from the local undertaker and opened the "Family Theater" on Christmas Day, 1908. "It was a one man show," he later recalled.

"The projector was crude, the screen billowy and the lights poor," but it proved to be a "laboratory of my dreams, enabling me to try out, in very primitive ways, some of the ideas I had."⁴

Roxy experimented with a crude lighting setup that allowed ambient colors to be reflected throughout the converted room and on the screen at the commencement and finale of every show. For five cents, patrons were treated to both a film and a musical presentation, as each and every night a different soloist and a different kind of music were offered (Hall 1975, 28). Even the music accompanying the films was timed ever more precisely; a system of colored lights was added to the theater's old piano, enabling Roxy to signal changes to the pianist that better fit the mood. ⁵ Believing that music should be an important part of the moving picture theater experience...