Bombed Pasts, Burning Futures: Notes on Demolition and Exhibition

What dangers lurk in the heart of the movie theater? In the last grim days of 2020, the breath of those around you, expelling pathogens onto your popcorn with every laugh, gasp, and cry. A decade ago (and still), the gunshots of sexually frustrated men with access to high-capacity weapons. Further back a couple of decades, hyped-up artificial threats of roving Black gangs terrorizing white audiences.¹ Between the birth of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century and the height of the studio era, accidental fires were sparked by deadly combinations of nitrate prints, theater interiors decked out in flammable fabrics, and even sleepy projectionists.² And in the early 1930s, for a brief couple of years between the lumbering lag of Prohibition's wane and its whimper of an elimination, an audacious display of firepower in several major American cities by desperate gang members seeking control over exhibition unions in the midst of the Depression.

When crises erupt in the congressional halls and public squares of the United States, we go to the movies to forget them for a while. But then their foot soldiers sneak in through the side doors to meet us there, smirking at our naïveté. Let's blow things up: the call of the conflicts sparked in the movie theater and outside. That urge to set off an explosion. That drive to light the match. It glows next to you in the dark.

The illusions offered in movie theaters are not just the familiar ones of narrative, light, and sound. The idea of a space that exists independently of whatever is currently shaking the social tree is an illusion of immersive escape. Because over and over again, the theater has been a flashpoint of calamities that befall the nation. The COVID-19 pandemic is no different in the ways it uncovers fundamental relationships between reality and fantasy. Catastrophes, after all, are moments that reveal the ruptures between what we tell ourselves is a structured reality and what we know is, ultimately, a fiction. And the movie theater toes the line between delivery of an orderly sensorium and the mess of lived historical experience. It is precisely that gap that makes the theater into a crucible for the multiple explosive discords that lead to and sustain national crises, such as labor struggles, illnesses, and clashing ideologies.

For several years before the Twenty-first Amendment, and therefore repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, was finally passed in 1933, Prohibition was on a clear downswing. The implications were broad, but for an exhibition industry on the cusp of expanded labor organization, they were both specific and very, very urgent. While much of the country looked forward to rejoicing in a tipple, mobsters found themselves in the precarious position of the potential loss of their rumrunning revenue. Desperately seeking new profit avenues for the upcoming post-prohibition reality, crime syndicates throughout the country, especially in the Midwest, settled on theater labor politics as a new source of income and began infiltrating International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) chapters.

Organized crime had already found a foothold in movie unions with the help of Al Capone associates in Chicago, like Willie Bioff. A string of typically thuggish career moves had Bioff consolidating his power in the late 1920s and early 1930s by moving from selling protection to kosher chicken dealers in Fulton Market to low-level pimping for control over the IATSE local.³ In 1933, Bioff met George Browne, eventual president of the national IATSE, and the two quickly recognized their usefulness to one another.⁴ During contract negotiations with Balaban and Katz in 1934, Bioff and Browne succeeded in extorting $20,000 from the theater chain in exchange for agreeing to a paycut for union workers in the theaters.⁵ And several other projectionist and janitorial organizers, attempting to form unions outside of mob influence, were beaten or murdered by Bioff.⁶

Fully in control of the IATSE, Bioff and his gang menaced theater owners by, among other tactics, removing union projectionists from work—a major nuisance, considering...