Abstract

Motion-picture house organs, or theater programs, were notoriously ephemeral in the silent period. Among the rare few that survive are the Weekly Film News, published by J. H. Kunsky Theatrical Enterprises in Detroit and given out to patrons of Kunsky’s circuit of downtown and neighborhood theaters. The fifty or more issues extant, from May 1916 to April 1919, offer a unique opportunity to deepen our knowledge of early cinema history. This unique ephemera illuminates the weekly programming of a major theater circuit in an unexamined metropolis, what that circuit assumed its patrons wanted to read and why, and perhaps even who those patrons were.

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