The American Film Industry

4. Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905-1914: Building an Audience for the Movies

4RUSSELL MERRITT Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905-1914: Building an Audience for the Movies The Nickelodeon In its short heyday, the nickelodeon theater was a pioneer movie house, a get-rich-quick scheme, and a national institution that was quickly turned into a state of mind. Its golden age began in 1905 and lasted scarcely nine years, but during that time it provided the movies their first permanent home, established a durable pattern for nationwide distribution, and-most important-built for the motion picture an audience that would continue to support it for another forty years. Even after its decline, it survived in popular legend as a monument to movies in their age ofinnocence: the theater primeval that showed movies to an unspoiled and uninhibited audience ofchildren and poor people. How the nickelodeon was portrayed in movie histories, how sharply it was believed to contrast with the postwar years ofthe movie palace and expensive studio production, is evident in the terms used to identify it. James Agee, for example, writing from the perspective of his own childhood, turned the nickelodeon into a populist shrine, cataloguing its delights in the style of a Whitman poem. He recalled "the barefaced honky-tonk and the waltzes by Waldteufel, slammed out in a mechanical piano; the searing redolence of peanuts and demirep perfumery, tobacco and feet, and sweat; the laughter of unres83 84 Part 1/ A Novelty Spawns Small Businesses, 1894-1908 pectable people having a hell of a fine time, laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall."l More recently, Edward Wagenknecht in The Movies in the Age of Innocence painted an unblemished portrait of Chicago nickelodeons as they appeared to him in his youth, a portrait more detailed than Agee's but no less affectionate. As other histories have shown, the nickelodeon era has been the epoch of film history easiest to sentimentalize .2 Theatre Unique on 14th St., New York City 1. James Agee, "Comedy's Greatest Era," Life, September 3, 1949, reprinted in Agee, Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments (New York: Mc Dowell, Obolensky, 1958) pp.67 . 2. See the introduction to Edward Wagenknecht, The Movies in the Age 0/Innocence (Norman: University ofOklahoma Press, 1962). Other accounts of the nickelodeon can be found in the standard film histories of the silent era: Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926); Benjamin B. Hampton, A History o/the Movies (New York: Covici, Friede, 1931); Lewis Jacobs, The Rise o/the American 4. Merritt: Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905-1914 85 Few historians would claim that his nostalgic view of the nickelodeon is pure fabrication. Even those who discount the innocence of the prewar years might find it hard to resist the allure of the vintage five-cent theater. The novelty was real, the appeal obvious, the popularity undeniable. But this portrait, two-dimensional and static, is patently incomplete. The purpose ofmy inquiry is to define that theater more sharply and, more important, to satisfy two nagging questions. First, how did theater operators finally attract the middle-class audiences so reluctant to peer inside the early movie houses? Second, when did the industry itself, originally supported and paid for by the working class, determine to abandon that audience for the broader, more affluent white-collar trade? No one, to my mind, has answered these questions satisfactorily, least of all those historians who suppose that the middle-class moviegoer got started with features and World War I. By 1914, the middleclass audiences were, in fact, already in the theaters waiting for the spectacles and movie stars that would follow. The seduction of the affluent occurred, I will contend, in the preceding years, between 1905 and 1912, in precisely that theater supposedly reserved for the bluecollar workers. "Democracy's Theater" The nickelodeon itselfwas a small, uncomfortable makeshift theater, usually a converted dance hall, restaurant, pawnshop, or cigar store, made over to look like a vaudeville emporium. Outside, large lurid posters pasted into the theater windows announced the playbill for the day. For ten cents-nickelodeons were seldom a nickel-the early moviegoer went inside and saw a miscellany of brief adventure, comedy, or fantasy films that lasted about an hour. Movies were always the main attraction, but enterprising managers followed the formula created by William Fox and Marcus Loew in 1906, and enhanced their programs with sing-alongs, inexpensive vaudeville acts, and illustrated lectures...