Picture Palaces Lecture
This week, we’re going to think about the nature of movie-going in the age of the picture palace.
In doing so, we are going to consider questions and source materials of particular interest to
historians of film exhibition. Before we start, let’s think what we mean by exhibition history.
What kinds of questions does it ask and what might a focus on exhibition tell us about film
history?
Here are some questions to get us started.

What is the nature of movie going, and the movie going experience?

Under what conditions do people encounter motion pictures, and what is significant about
these conditions?

Do people go to a movie or do they go to the movies?
In groups (5 minutes)
How would you describe the nature and conditions of movie-going today and how might
this be seen to compare with earlier periods of film history?
Ina Rae Hark, in her edited collection, Exhibition: The Film Reader, states that: “When we speak
of film exhibition, we are describing all the practices that come together at a given time and place
to enable viewers to watch a film.” Exhibition is important because, as Hark reminds us, it is
traditionally the site where the money comes in and is therefore pivotal to the economics of
Hollywood. As an area of historical film studies, however, the study of exhibition can take on
many forms; it can include the study of “business practices, architecture, local history and urban
geography, the marketing of films and the meaning of the movie-going experience.”
Today’s lecture will look at the example of the Picture Palace, a kind of exhibition practice which
flourished from the teens to the 1930s. Critically, I want us to think about the picture palace as a
historical phenomenon and begin to consider its social, economic and cultural significance.
Brief reminder of film exhibition
Before we look at Movie Palaces, we should remind ourselves very quickly of the contours of
film exhibition since the development of a workable cinematic apparatus in the 1890s. We have
covered some of this ground before, of course, but let’s recap to situate the picture palace in its
historical place.

Remember that extreme novelty and technological and scientific associations of the
earliest projected films meant they had an audience which was mostly bourgeois and
middle class – for example when the Lumiere’s first demonstrated their cinematograph to
a paying audience in the Grand Café in Paris in December of 1895.

Very, very quickly, though, movies were found in a variety of venues and screened under
disparate conditions – but the factor which linked these encounters with movies was that
the movie itself was not `the sole or even the primary element of the entertainment
spectacle being consumed.’ So, for example, you mind find a movie show at a travelling
fair such as Nottingham’s Goose Fair, where movies, along with Ferris wheels, games of
chance, hot mushy peas, and all the other delights of such an event would be jumbled
together in an experience of entertainment spectacle. Or, you mind find yourself at a
permanent amusement park like Coney Island in NY, where the place of the movie show
was similar to that at a travelling fair. Or, you might find motion pictures on a vaudeville
bill at the turn of the last century, as just one of the numbers on the bill, between the
dancing bear and comedian or the singer.

It is not until 1905 or so with the emergence of the nickelodeon that “going to the
movies” as a social phenomenon becomes something to do - becomes an actual leisure
time option. We have seen that the massive expansion of nickelodeons across North
America was associated with a variety of moral panics, ostensibly concerned with the
well-being of children, juvenile delinquency, and with public heath and safety. It is in this
context that Nickelodeons attracted the attention of social reformers from police and
clergy to social workers, etc. And remember as well, that at least one part of this response
to the nickel theatres was that were attracting the immigrant working class in huge
numbers, and regulation of this unruly group of the newly emergent “masses” was seen as
crucial to public order.
Movie palaces
With this context in mind, we can turn to the development, rise and social significance of what
was known as the picture palace during the period from mid teens to the 1930s, peaking in the
1920s when the ornate, opulent, grand picture palace dominated motion picture exhibition and
arguably transformed the movie going experience as fundamentally as had the emergence the
nickelodeon before.
As you will know from this week’s reading, these spaces were characterized by:
1.
Grand design often with an exotic name and decorative motifs including Egyptian,
Chinese, baroque, renaissance, and classical elements built into every facet structure
and creating an impression of awesome grandeur and exoticism.
2.
Features included enormous lobbys, huge and opulent bathrooms, on-site nurses and
nurserys for kids, with sandboxes and toys and free child minding, armies of
uniformed staff, and very significantly, air conditioning.
3.
Very grand auditoria seating thousands of patrons, with painted ceilings, plasterwork
details, heavy drapery and opulent textures and colours in upholstery fittings, furniture
etc.
4.
The program included, depending on whether you were in one of the flagship Picture
Palaces or in an outlying one, a stage show, a newsreel, trailers on coming attractions,
a comedy short subject, and the feature, with features being changed much more
frequently than they are today. With movie going becoming a social phenomenon so
much greater a part of people’s lives than today, there was a huge demand for product,
and the Hollywood production line was cranked up to produce far more films than are
produced these days.
Consider Roxy Rothfal’s description of just one element of his NYC picture palace
“People want primarily to feel that it is their theatre…One cannot overemphasize the
importance of “atmosphere”…Fresh flowers are placed daily in the lobbies and promenades
of the theatre, on which one item alone are spent several thousands dollars a year…By
creating this atmosphere, and making the patron feel he is our special guest and that nothing
for his comfort and convenience has been overlooked, we have won the first battle; after this,
everything is much easier.”
Samuel L. “Roxy” Rothafel, proprietor of the 6214-seat Roxy Theatre, New York, in
Architectural Forum, June 1925.

How does this quote help us think about the relationship of the picture palace to the
movie-going audience?
King for a Day (democratisation of goods)
In one sense, the rise of the picture palace was linked to the growth of the middle-class, and the
selling of movies to this class. But more than this, we can link the development of the movie
palace to broader transformation of early 20th century America.
To think about this, we might ask what connection the movie palace has to the development of
the department store?
Are there any connections we can make between these two seemingly different kinds of
phenomena or space?
Well, these two apparently entirely different phenomena can be seen as manifestations of similar
and related transformations in American culture. Douglas Gomery notes how the business
practices of the film exhibitor began to copy the scientific management of the retail chain store,
chiefly through taking advantage of economies of scale, but also through the manufacture of
exciting and pleasurable environments related to the act of consumption itself.
“Exhibition practices prior to the 1950s trained audiences to seek pleasure in the experience of
film consumption rather than to rank the desirability of consuming any single narrative on a film
by film basis.” (Hark) Why? How was this achieved?
In both the movie palace and the department store we find that:

Both are public spaces in which grandeur and leisure are available to a large section of the
population.

Both spaces exhibit a sense of exoticism and classiness, transporting people from their
quotidian lives to more interesting, more comfortable places.

There is recognition of something called the mass audience, which in many important
ways crossed class boundaries.
In short, both “shopping” and “movie-going” emerged as leisure pursuit in their own right at
more or less the same time. It is worth pointing out that prior to the emergence of the department
store, people went to shops to buy things and not to just look around. Echoing the movie palace,
department stores were defined by their own grand spaces, opulent furnishings, chandeliers and
so on – they were spectacles of consumption and encouraged particular kinds of social interaction
that bore similarity and comparison with the movie palace.
1) Both encouraged particular styles and conventions of behaviour. Shoppers didn’t have to
confront shop-owners in the department store and there was a respectful distance created between
the experience of being a patron, much like how the movie palaces’s enforced retrained manners
quietened down and civilized the perhaps more unruly and certainly louder nickelodeon audience.
In this sense, both spaces provide modes of social interaction which were both communal and
private (or more so than they had been)
2) They both democratised public space – created spaces where people of various classes and
backgrounds, were placed in a proximity which was hitherto highly unlikely or impossible.
Both provided a large-scale and fairly posh domestic environment which were a safe haven for
women (for example) to meet in public in relative style and security.
It is worth noting that the period which coincided with the expansion of department stores and
movies palaces was one in which a measurable increase in national wealth appeared in the US.
Between 1880 and 1930 the number of salaried employees increased 8 fold, coming to compose
over 60 percent of the middle class. Soon, white collar ranks became the largest single group in
the labour force. Between 1897-1930, per capita annual income increased from 231-719 dollars.
Household expenditures tripled between 1909 and 1929.
What is being charted here is the simultaneous expansion of the economy and of available
wealth, leisure time, and the development of what has come to be known as the ‘Consumer
Society.’ Hollywood and the department store are both good historical examples of these societal
transformations.
In both places, exoticism, opulence and the masses converged into spaces where leisure and
consumer desire provided both, on the one hand, a relative democratisation of public space, as I
said, and on the other, powerful examples of the emergence of mass culture and consumer culture
in 20th century America.
In watching Safety Last, we might think of its particular representation of the department store
and consumer culture as this was also the culture to which motion picture theatre belonged in the
1920s.