Strategies For Survival: The Little Exhibitor in the 1920s

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Notes

1. Baker offered a free ferry across the river for his customers, which inspired the name “Freeport.”

2. The historical information about Freeport was compiled from: McCoy's City Directory (Freeport: Freeport Chamber of Commerce, 1926) 5; Freeport Journal, Illustrated Freeport (Mt. Vernon, IN: Windmill Publications Inc., 2000); Freeport Chamber of Commerce, “In the Beginning,” Freeport, Illinois, (Pinckneyville, Ill.: Craig Williams Creative, Inc., 2004) 5.

3. The existence of six nickelodeons was probably not unusual for a city of 20,000. As a point of comparison, Urbana, Ill., with a population of 6,000 people, had 4 nickelodeons during the same time period (Fuller 40).

4. In addition to vaudeville houses, other spaces in Freeport would occasionally exhibit movies. Local churches and social clubs would occasionally show movies and often offered free admission to the public. In 1907, Freeport also had an outdoor theater that offered motion pictures as did Highland Park, a popular recreation spot from 1903 until the late teens, which had a vaudeville theater and movies.

5. The Superba would later increase its seating capacity to three hundred.

6. This figure has been calculated using information from a January 3, 1923 article of Film Daily, cited in William Marston Seabury, The Public and the Motion Picture Industry (NYC: Macmillan Company, 1926) 278.

7. I am assuming that theaters outside of Freeport did not pose a significant threat to the Superba as only Freeport theaters advertised in the local newspaper.

8. I have concluded that the Superba was a first-run theater based on Watson's own description of the theater as such as well as the close proximity of the review of films in Variety and their exhibition at the Superba.

9. Although Schiller isn't clear about the time period in which her description applies, based on Watson's correspondence, bidding seems to be a regular practice for exhibitors in the 1920s.

10. Watson decided not to purchase the system, however, because his neighbor's system was not working well and was not bringing in any more business than Watson.

11. The response of the chain theaters to the Depression is discussed by: Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1992).

12. The significant rise in total receipts in 1924 does not match the box office reports for the Superba Theater. The reason for this discrepancy is unclear.

13. Watson may have had other reasons for wanting to cancel films he originally contracted. Dubbed “over-buying,” distributors often complained that exhibitors would contract desirable films to block local competition from acquiring the film, only to later back out of the contract.

14. Watson's abusive, racist language is peppered throughout his correspondence. His objections to the film boards are deeply rooted in his dissatisfaction with the way they conducted business, however, and not merely based on his bigoted view of the boards themselves.

15. Jeanne Thomas Allen notes, however, that the MPPC's “controls on bootlegging, duping, and bicycling appear to be very weak,” which allowed exhibitors to continue the practice of bicycling films during the 1910s (Jeanne Thomas Allen, “Afterward,” The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures, ed. Gorham Kindem (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982) 72-73.).

16. Michael Aronson, Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies 1905-1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) 140-141.

17. For instance, Carl Laemmle notes the frequency of bicycling prints throughout the country throughout the first decade of the twentieth century (Richard Koszarski and Carl Laemmle, “This Business of Motion Pictures,” Film History 3.1 (1989): 47-71.). Although Laemmle is referring to an earlier period than Watson's practice of bicycling, we can note the continuities of this practice in different times and areas of the country.