Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun (review)

The research effort that has gone into this book is commendable. For the period from 1906 to 1918, Paul Moore has scoured government documents, trade publications, religious periodicals, and especially the daily press, looking for any scrap of information about the introduction of motion pictures to Toronto. This intense local focus has broader significance, he argues, because movie-going could not have become a continental and even global mass pastime until it had first been integrated into the culture of specific cities, through regulation and normalization, as an everyday phenomenon. Toronto is ideal for exploring these processes because it was treated as part of the US domestic film market, and thus can shed light on the regional development of movies beyond New York and Chicago, and because its Canadian sensibilities demonstrate how foreign nations adapted to Hollywood products.

In the first chapter, Moore claims that Toronto’s early regulation of film was largely uncontentious, the result of the consistency and honesty of police enforcement, reasonable licence fees, and a relatively homogeneous population that endorsed the city’s effort to uphold high moral standards. Chapter 2 looks at the fire-safety law of 1908, the first specific legislation related to movie-going. Moore maintains that this measure was not an indirect attempt to police the poorer classes, as has been argued about similar laws in other places, but was inspired by genuine concerns about the flammability of celluloid and the “combustibility” of panicking audiences. While the state worked to reduce anxieties, so did theatre operators. Chapter 3 describes how the movie business passed from local entrepreneurs, who integrated films into existing entertainment forms such as vaudeville, to large outside chains that emphasized the respectability of their establishments and put their primary focus on cinema. Chapter 4 documents the evolution of official oversight of theatres from traditional police patrolling to more bureaucratic methods of licensing, censorship, and inspection. The great concern in this period was not improper screen content but the unsupervised attendance of children. Chapter 5 charts the shift in press coverage from occasional investigative reports on theatre audiences to the routine advertising of specific films. While journalists had accepted the quotidian character of movie-going by 1911, the 1914 introduction of movie serials as deliberate tie-ins to the serial fiction in women’s magazines broke the resistance of middle-class women, the strongest critics of the industry, and cemented audiences’ awareness that they were all watching the same productions, albeit at different times, in different locations, and in different degrees of comfort. The volume’s concluding chapter argues that wartime film became aligned with citizenship and mass participation through the efforts both of showmen, who appended movie-going to patriotic efforts such as fundraising and recruiting, and of the state, which implicitly endorsed film as a mass practice through the wartime amusement tax.

While Moore’s book contains a lot of useful information, it also has weaknesses. The writing is sometimes awkward. Some facts are wrong, such as the assertion that “British Canadian Loyalist soldiers” burned down the White House during the War of 1812 (p. 151). Several chapters have theoretical scaffolding that is not particularly useful. On the other hand, there is no consideration of the scholarly literature on the social construction of technology, the methodological approach that really underlies the study. Most importantly, the core argument that the standardization of movie-going happened first at the municipal level seems simplistic. To point to just one example, the fire-safety legislation of 1908, which according to Moore was an essential step in the integration of movie-going into regular Toronto urban life, was inspired by accidents in distant jurisdictions and was a provincial law, applicable to all of Ontario. The immediate local context of early movie-going is undoubtedly interesting and important, but it alone does not explain how and why the movies became a mass pastime.