Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (review)

From the earliest American film histories, the presumption was the importance of urban working class audiences in the development of the new retail business of film exhibition. Large cities were considered the essence of modernism and the engine of film business profits. In the 1970s these presumptions were first questioned, and since then film historians have debated the issue, sometimes quite heatedly. That is the historiographic setting for this book. Its editor Kathryn Fuller-Seeley has pioneered the history of small-town film markets and here she draws together a fine collection of case studies and commentary that reveal both the diversity of small-town retail environments as well as their differences from major metropolitan areas. Robert C. Allen, who has been at the center of these debates, has argued, and continues to argue in this book, for small-town studies as comparison and counterbalance to the metropolitan focus. That proposal could be useful to explore the history of many American businesses of the early twentieth century.

Enterprise & Society readers will be interested in this volume's contribution to understanding small-town business and markets in that era when such towns in their thousands shaped American business. The U.S. Census of 1910 found 69 percent of the population in towns or rural areas of under twenty-five thousand persons; but only 12 percent in the eight cities of over five hundred thousand. The small-town market was not inconsequential. Every weekly issue of Moving Picture World, even in 1907 when nickelodeons first mushroomed, reported many small towns and cities with movie houses such as Chester in Pennsylvania, Glen Falls in New York, Marquette in Michigan and Cairo in Illinois. Even in the 1930s according to Fuller-Seeley, half of movie theaters were in towns of five thousand or fewer people.

Much retail was still local and the only venues were on the main street of the town, therefore drawing upon the whole spectrum of the population was consistently profitable, as Richard Abel explains in his study. Thus theaters often were located near street car lines in both Chicago as well as much smaller Des Moines. George Potiamos noted that the neighborhood nickelodeons, which were considered the incubators of early film exhibition, never came to be in the small rural town of Placerville, California. Terry Lindvall demonstrates the significance of local entertainment impresarios of the time, like the Wells Brothers of Norfolk, smaller-scale versions of B. F. Keith, the Shuberts, Loews, and Fox.

While religion may have been a more united force in these small towns, still the same moral panics about movies occurred in cities and small towns at about the same time, as indicated in several of the case studies. Similarly, factory towns like Anne Morey's Wilmington, North Carolina reacted much like big-city reformers, and even like churches, in promoting film as a healthier family alternative to the saloon.

Kathryn Fuller's study presents the viewpoint of small-town exhibitors expressed in their own words in Motion Picture Herald, as they described the tastes of their patrons and the frustrations with movie producers and distributors of films that did not satisfy their customers. Kevin Corbett uses interviews of former theater owners and managers to reveal the roots of local retail as family businesses with strong community identities, the kinds of precapitalist business practices based not on account books and maximizing profits, but simply whether they could pay their bills at the end of the month and still feed their families.

Other studies by Tepperman, DeBauche, Waller, and Reynolds reveal yet more noteworthy facets of movie exhibition and the retail climate more generally in the small towns and cities that constituted such a substantial share of the nation's economy through the first one-third of the twentieth century. In sum, the book offers a wealth of information and insights that will benefit any scholar interested in the...