7

EVERY TOWN HAS ITS MAIN STREET

The Banal Localism of the Civic Film

IN THE 1920S, THERE WAS a moment when the small town was seen as the last holdout against commercial culture. In his analysis of this brief period, the literary scholar John Beck notes that the famed educator John Dewey, critiquing those who thought the United States should have a singular cultural form, believed that the “richness of local life in all its idiosyncrasies [was] the bedrock of what it means to be American.”¹ Writing in a time when a robust and increasingly restrictive Americanism was promoted by business forces and nativists alike, Dewey, along with other small-town defenders, including the poet William Carlos Williams, promoted the provincial as the bulwark against mass conformity. In their view, the small town, with its distinctive culture, social groups, and even local dialect, was both a suitable site for resistance to nationalism and for establishing connections across cultures. As Dewey wrote in 1920, “the locality is the only universal,” an inversion that survives today in discussions of the local and the global.²

In this chapter, I consider the local film as a site where questions of national identity, particularly in its political and economic valences, rose to the forefront. My focus here is on a mode of local film practice that I identify as the civic film. I use the word “civic” here to signal a particular form of publicity that was invested in a citizenship informed by national practice but carried out in local space. Although the civic was experienced and reproduced in everyday life, in this period it was often tied to national service and business organizations, such as the Rotary Club or the chamber of commerce, whose local chapters played a significant part in the standardization of social and political life. Civic films, whether they were commissioned at the behest of one of these organizations or made by an itinerant filmmaker who persuaded these organizations to sponsor the film, reproduced their political and social imaginary. Unlike the films of mutual recognition described in the previous chapter, these movies spotlighted individual community leaders and organizations, often putting them at the center of a narrative that focused on progress in the community. In many cases, these films were produced as moving image time capsules of town life as it was imagined to exist, with the reels often given to a local institution for safekeeping.

In civic films there was little mention of a world outside the locale in which it was filmed, although the movies themselves suggested, in vague and abstract language, that the community was part of a larger civic and social economy that included other towns like it. In this way, the relationship emphasized was not between local and national culture, as was the case for Hollywood local films, but instead a regional sphere where towns competed for markets and industry. The civic culture produced by service and business organizations, coupled with references to mass culture, enabled the use of local film practices to reproduce and historicize small-town life as imagined by the theater manager in cooperation with the sponsoring organization and filmmaker. By putting forward a civic imaginary, filmmakers were able to ignore both the particularity of local people and places as well as Hollywood.

THE BANALITY OF THE LOCAL

Even though “local” is, in its most common uses, a scalar term, it is usually set in a binary relationship with something that defines it in the negative. The local is that which is not national nor global nor general nor, countering Dewey, universal. Conversely, the local is assumed to have a positivist bent, associated with the particular, individual, specific, topical. As a result, the definition of the local is assumed to be obvious to distant and nearby observers alike even though the term is defined precisely by listing the things that it is not. In fact, the “local” in local film is often made to take on various generic, aesthetic, and sociological burdens that are often in direct conflict with its capacity to represent particular people and places. As a result, the local envelops both what makes it particular to a specific time and space and the ideas that make it legible to a broader population. To use a contemporary example, local food is both recognizable in a generic sense, as food, and in a specific sense, as food that comes from a particular place and may have culinary and ethnic associations with the people who live in that place. In this way, the “local” connotes specificity without directly betraying any hint of what the term implies.

What I described earlier as the nationalization of everyday life, or the transformation of ordinary social activities into ones that were coordinated, to some degree, at a national scale, was extended and amplified after the Second World War. As Robert Wiebe has argued, as early as the 1920s, regional- and class-based politics was giving way to a division between a “national class,” which loosened its hold on local politics in order to secure “central, strategic positions in American society,” and a “local middle class” that retained its interests in local and regional economies. As Wiebe observes, these classes also sorted themselves out socially and culturally, with those in the national class joining professional interest groups, such as the American Bar Association, and the local middle classes instead fueling the growth of service clubs, like Rotary and Kiwanis.³ While these latter organizations positioned themselves in opposition to the urban metropolises of the early twentieth century, by midcentury they instead found that the processes of standardization and homogenization that they had once embraced were now being used by boosters in these metropolises to smooth over, or even erase, the difference between the storied small town and the newly constructed suburban community.

In this chapter, I argue that many of the local films made after the Second World War evacuated any claims for local distinctiveness in favor of what I call “banal localism.” I adapt this term from Michael Billig, whose 1995 book Banal Nationalism reconsiders the meaning and practices of nationalism for a postmodern, and global, era. Countering key theorists of nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson, Billig suggests that the “imagination” required for being a member of a nation is more ordinary than romantic, and relies on a persistent, if often unacknowledged, “flagging” of national identity in everyday routines. Like a language, Billig argues that a nation must be “put to daily use” through “banal practices, rather than conscious choice or collective acts of imagination.” In essence, Billig suggests, the nation is a way of life in which “‘we’ are constantly invited to relax, at home, within the homeland’s borders.” But instead of nationality serving as a prime mover in society, one that provides the motivation for wars and other acts of fealty to the state, Billig emphasizes its “low key, understated tone,” something that appears so ordinary that it is almost imperceptible to the average observer.⁴

While a number of scholars have used the term “banal localism” as a parallel to Billig’s term, such uses tend to describe phenomena that are more consistent with what Roland Robertson has called “glocalization,” the idea that in a globalized society the local becomes imbricated in the global and vice versa.⁵ Billig himself is critical of such theories, as he suggests that even local cultures are embedded within the nation. In fact, he argues globalization itself is a kind of fiction that denies the power nation-states, particularly the United States, play in securing economic and cultural exchange between nations.⁶ However, I argue that banal localism is a form of “flagging” communities, which often identify themselves as small towns, in order to reinforce the social, political, economic, and cultural processes that are necessary for their survival as distinct places. While these identities are linked to the nation, they are not enveloped by it, and the flaggings that occur for specific communities—road signs, references to an assumed “we” in local newspapers, even actual town flags and other symbols—reinforce town identities much in the same way that national symbols and utterances do. At the same time, the town, unlike the nation, is under greater threat of being forgotten, passed by, or simply ignored, as there are other forms of official and semi-official governmental structures—counties, cities, neighborhoods—that could erode and replace its political and economic power. Banal localism, then, allows the town to assert itself without calling attention to the fact that it needs sustained citizen support in order to survive. Because “hot” localism is not an option—few towns are ready for sustained warfare with neighboring communities or with the nation-state—localism in the modern era must be banal.⁷

In the postwar period, film culture became more accessible to ordinary people, which muted the original appeal of the local film. With newly inexpensive amateur film equipment, people could make their own home movies for an audience that was often no larger than the residents of a single household. The decline of single-screen movie theater exhibition was accompanied by the rise in two forms of mobile exhibition—the drive-in theater and the classroom. In the former, one’s own automobile was made an extension of the theatrical experience, thus privatizing it, while in the latter, the projector itself moved, turning a multitude of spaces into places where films might be seen.⁸ Although earlier modes of local film production did not cease completely, the declining importance of movie theaters made the “local film” itself a less compelling proposition for sponsors, theater owners, and audiences. The growth of local broadcast media—radio and particularly television—also made mass mediated experiences of one’s own community somewhat more common than they had been before, which only further dampened the enthusiasm for local movies.⁹

And yet, the civic film thrived in the postwar period, in part because such movies embraced the banal localism that in the early twentieth century would have been anathema to movie sponsors. Instead of promising audiences that they were uniquely suited for motion pictures, itinerants implied that the towns they filmed were just like any other, and that quality was what made them worthwhile. In order to emphasize this point, these films used narration, which was prerecorded and used again and again, to stress the ordinariness of the community in a voice that audience members might recognize from national radio programs and Hollywood newsreels. If local films were once prized for their ability to capture the quotidian, civic films instead embraced the commonplace.

REVITALIZING THE “SMALL TOWN” IN THE 1930S

The archetypal American small town, with its Main Street shops, friendly neighbors, and tightly knit community, is a modern invention.¹⁰ Many historians have traced its origins to the 1930s, with the creation of popular, and enduring, fictional communities such as Grover’s Corners, from Our Town (1940); Carvel, from the Andy Hardy series (1937–1958); and, slightly later, Bedford Falls, from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).¹¹ Even though all three of these fictional communities had literary origins, their cinematic portrayals endured, both as an ideal for local communities and as American political and social life writ small. A generation removed from the close-minded and backward-looking small towns depicted by writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis, these new small towns were instead treated as modern-day temples, inhabited by oracles such as Our Town’s “Stage Manager,” Judge Hardy, and the guardian angel Clarence Odbody in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Like ancient temples, these towns were often revisited by spiritual seekers for decades to come, finding solace both in their seeming timelessness—even Carvel, the least remembered of the three, was a going concern until the late 1950s—and their ability to reduce the complexities of modern life into pabulum. The wistfulness for a simpler age that runs through the small-town films of the 1930s and 1940s became a stronger current of nostalgia in the postwar period, making the small-town film not as much a relic of the past as it was an alternate vision of the present.¹² As Daniel Immerwahr argues in his study of the community development movement in this period, the experience of the horrors of an alienated modernity—world war, economic calamity, and social unrest—led to a “newfound appreciation for small-scale social solidarities, from the small group to the faraway village.”¹³ Many of the social movements that emerged in this period, from the organizing strategies of civil rights activists to the neighborhood associations that formed to fight urban renewal projects in cities, can be seen as part of an effort to address major challenges in society by turning them into a series of small, and winnable, fights against the powerful. The small town, in this instance, became both a model of an ideal society and a representative of the favored side in the battle against forces allied with the metropolis.

The utopian tendencies of the small-town films had its apotheosis in The Truman Show (1998), a movie about an ersatz small town created for a reality television show in which only one person, Truman Burbank, was “real.” The picture was filmed on location in the New Urbanist community of Seaside, Florida, which was itself built in the 1980s and modeled after an idealized image of midcentury America. In the second half of the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first, the small town, as image and as built environment, is continually coopted and appropriated, capable of absorbing capitalist and communitarian dreams alike. As Ryan Poll observes, “the dominant small town has become an aesthetic form that erases the violences that constitute global capitalism,” which makes it an appealing face for corporations who wish to mask the environmental and economic damages caused by their activities.¹⁴ The civic films I discuss in this chapter can be thought of as early iterations of imagining the small town as a particular, yet reproducible, space, one where the comfort found in sameness and individuality is indistinguishable. As Robert Wuthnow argues in a recent sociology of small towns in the United States, while the places themselves are diverse in terms of local landscapes, ethnicity, and racial makeup, residents “tacitly share an outlook that involves a similar lifestyle.”¹⁵

THE BANALITY OF CIVIC FILMS

While there is no direct evidence that the turn to banalism in local films came in response to the newfound popularity of small towns in the American cinema, such films did seem to whet the appetite for celebrations of ordinary life. By the 1930s, many itinerant filmmakers no longer saw the fact that the communities they visited identified as “small towns” as a liability that needed to be overcome by booster campaigns or blithe comparisons to Hollywood. Instead, these new civic films celebrated the small town as something that was intrinsic to its identity. Scenes of work and home life, schools, civic and fraternal organizations, and government were valuable precisely because they represented the institutions every prosperous and well-functioning town should have and value. Producers of civic films also assumed that the cinema itself was a stable institution, capable of making representations of the local that would be seen from the outset as both broadly accessible and historical.

Rather than focusing on a single filmmaker whose work epitomizes the civic mode, in this chapter I consider several filmmakers—Franklin Tisdale, H. C. Kunkleman, Shad Graham, Sol Landsman, Arthur Loevin, and Don Parisher—whose practices share stylistic and thematic elements. In some cases, these filmmakers were also linked to one another, either using the same production crew or, in the case of Shad Graham and Arthur Loevin, teaming up together after a period of working independently. Civic film producers used a mixture of old and new tactics to persuade sponsors to invest in their own local movies. Some appealed to the medium’s capacity to historicize the present, claiming that the film would be a “permanent historical record” of the community. Others instead suggested that the film would serve a promotional role, enticing visitors to come to the community to see its landmarks and join its many thriving institutions. Television, in particular, was set out as a potential outlet for these films, which may have encouraged sponsors to invest in a new medium the hopes they had once placed in the cinema itself.

Whether they were interested in making movies for memorial or advertising purposes, sponsors appear to have been persuaded of the value of an anodyne aesthetic. In contrast to the local film modes discussed so far in this book, civic films were not intended for the amusement of contemporary audiences. Their productions received comparatively little fanfare in local newspapers, and even directors who claimed experience in Hollywood, such as Graham, did not suggest that they would be giving the town an opportunity to see how things were done on the coast. Initially civic producers wanted to give their work the imprimatur of official movie making and were thus shot in 35mm, but by the 1950s they regularly provided 16mm copies to their sponsors for local use.¹⁶ Some producers, including Robert M. Carson, began shooting in 16mm, making longer and even duller films. While considerable time and expense went into the production of these motion pictures, the results were uneven, showing a marked indifference to film form and narrative structure. The soundtracks used in these films combine prerecorded and often canned narration with musical standards that had little to do with the scenes they accompanied. If local films often crossed the line between footage of local people and places and mere advertisements, movies made in the civic mode eschewed that distinction altogether. In fact, many civic films are better understood as a long series of advertisements for sponsoring businesses, coupled with perfunctory footage of local institutions and landscapes to create the illusion that the motion picture can serve other functions.

In previous chapters, I suggested that the other modes of local film production are best understood as being embedded within cinema history. In this chapter, I expand this view and instead argue for the civic mode’s emergence in the context of the transformed identity of the American small town. First, I look at early civic films made by Franklin Tisdale, a Chicago-based filmmaker who began producing motion pictures in the 1910s, and H. C. Kunkleman, an Ohio-based filmmaker who was associated with the Pacific Film Production Company in the 1930s. While several of the filmmakers discussed in this chapter also began producing civic films in the early 1930s, of those with narration only Kunkleman’s films are known to survive, and they thus make a useful case study for how the mode emerged. Next, I turn to the Home Town series, which reflected a confidence that the banal localism of midcentury America could sustain a filmmaking practice for several decades. By midcentury the fate of the local film was tied to that of small towns, so much so that towns’ decline as economic, social, and cultural centers also meant that itinerants no longer had access to the capital, or audiences, required for their work to continue. Although the movies I discuss in this chapter kept up appearances, presenting each town as enduring scenes of human endeavors, at times they betrayed an obvious truth—the banality of the local in midcentury meant that there were few reasons to record its appearance on celluloid.

THE LOCAL FILM AS COMMERCIAL REEL

In 1940, the seasoned camera operator Charles W. Herbert published an article in American Cinematographer recounting the history of what he called “commercial reels.” But rather than providing a sketch of the many efforts by companies to push their products in the movies, Herbert focused on a period in the early 1920s when what he called “goldbricking promoters” dispersed across the country, pushing their “promotional commercials” on naive small-town residents: “High pressure men with convincing letterheads and calling cards would find the town. They quietly hobnobbed with bankers, mayors, leading citizens, expressing wonderment at the fact that the motion picture industry had not discovered this great storehouse of talent and ideal locations.”¹⁷ Herbert went on to recount the major modes of local filmmaking, from home talent productions to Hollywood screen tests, though he cast such pictures as scams, what the Riverside, California, Chamber of Commerce called in 1933 “money-getting schemes” that needed to be fully investigated before local businesses handed over their hard-earned dollars to out-of-towners.¹⁸ By describing the local film as a commercial venture, Herbert placed it within a history of industrial and advertising films, emphasizing its profitability for filmmakers, especially fake ones, and diminishing its other values. While Herbert was a bit too quick to cast aspersions on the entire field of itinerant filmmaking, his description of these practices is a window into how those in the industry thought of local films—a huckster’s game, conducted by those who were unable to secure steady work in New York or Los Angeles.

Local films were always commercial ventures, despite the occasional protestations to the contrary by their producers, but civic pictures were almost exclusively commercials, produced by professionals who had experience in, or at least ties to, the movie industry. Here, I wish to outline how the very processes of making local films—securing sponsors to pay for production, persuading local theater owners to agree to add them to their programs, requesting community participation—privilege certain social configurations, which over time calcify into pictures that take on generic aspects. Put another way, I seek to answer why the civic film emerged as the dominant mode of local motion picture production after the Second World War.

Perhaps the most important shift that occurred is that film itself came to be thought of in pragmatic terms. Thomas Elsaesser emphasizes the usefulness, or utility, of moving image production as a quality that separated the wheat of the industrial film from the chaff of moving images more generally.¹⁹ Considered in this framework, many of the local films produced in the first several decades of the twentieth century should not be thought of as industrial films at all, as their utility was limited to making money and fulfilling the fantasies of its sponsors and audiences. The primary informative value of local films was their ability to show people and places how they looked on camera. And even this quality was often overcome by other desires, such as an interest in reproducing the form and content of Hollywood films or emphasizing the mutuality inherent in the looks at the camera.

But, starting in the early 1920s, another purpose for local films emerged—to document local institutions as products of civil society. Franklin M. Tisdale’s eponymous film company, which began as early as 1911, typifies the migration of local films from amusements to civic fare. When Tisdale came to Pittston, Pennsylvania, in 1916, he brought along one of his “Tisdale Players,” an aspiring actress from California, and invited locals to audition before his camera for a movie popularity contest, giving participants both the opportunity to see themselves on screen and to learn whether their neighbors judged them suitable for the movies.²⁰ But by 1921, when Tisdale visited Decatur, Illinois, the local newspaper plainly stated that “there will be no plot or characters in the picture, the intent being to produce a purely civic and industrial feature.”²¹ Even though the company had the resources to produce local Hollywood movies, their turn to making civic pictures suggests that such films were treated more seriously by business sponsors. That same year, the Waterloo, Iowa, newspaper emphasized that the company’s film in that city would depict “the daily routine of business, also the various steps in the manufacture of Waterloo products,” and show them to locals and nonlocals alike who were interested in what went on in the city.²² A few years later, Tisdale started another venture, the Imperial Film Corporation, and inaugurated a new series titled, “Things You Ought to Know About,” in which the town name itself was included at the end of the title. In contrast to the 1910s, when including a town’s name in a title was thought to limit its distribution possibilities, civic filmmakers invariably invoked the town’s name in their productions. Such movies could be thought of as process films in which everyone depicted, from cooks to factory workers to firefighters, were all part of a larger organism, contributing to the town’s everyday functioning and necessary elements for its continued growth.

In the 1920s, other independent cameramen, most notably Harry Kunkleman, entered the civic film game, shooting under the auspices of several companies, including the Metropolitan Industrial Film Company, the Civic Arts Film Production Company, and by the early 1930s, the Pacific Film Production Company. Like Tisdale, representatives of Pacific tried a number of business strategies to make their films pay off. Some continued to shoot “screen tests” at a Movie Ball hosted by the film’s sponsors. William Ramsell in Iowa found success partnering with local dairies to hold a baby contest, with all children under the age of six invited to participate in a film that was screened alongside more pedestrian views of people and businesses. In 1937, one of the company’s enterprising cameramen made a movie at an Ohio roller-skating rink, asking townspeople to “skate yourself into Hollywood” for a Sunday evening shoot.²³

Despite the occasional reference to Klieg lights and Hollywood, civic film producers were not keen to link their work with that of the stars. Instead, their focus was on documenting the town itself, with an eye to the “historical record” their picture would surely become. By the time Kunkleman, a cameraman from Ohio who had started his own company in 1920, was working for Pacific in the 1930s, the company had converted to sound in a way, by adding a soundtrack to each film after shooting had finished. But instead of recording a unique narration for each film, Kunkleman recycled the same commentary, a fact that went unnoted in local newspapers or in the commentary leading up to the film’s production. Instead, the extant films from this period signal how producers and sponsors alike embraced a routinized view of their town’s economic, social, and civic culture. Like other modes of local film production, civic films were a marked success. One prominent producer, Blache Screen Service of San Francisco, reported making 863 “Short Length Ad Films,” most of which were likely part of their Buy at Home series, in 1939 alone.²⁴

Figure 7.1. H. C. Kunkleman. Courtesy of David Kuntz

In the mid-1930s, Kunkleman traveled to the South to make a series of films in small towns throughout the region.²⁵ His 1936 picture Your Town on Parade in 1936, made in Cordele, Georgia, typifies how civic films began to redefine the form and function of local movies.²⁶ The picture opens with a series of pans across a group of businessmen, all presumably members of the chamber of commerce, the film’s sponsor. The narrator, who Kunkleman had also used for a film made in Anderson, South Carolina, a year earlier, informs the viewer that “this picture is not designed for advertising purposes only, but also to show you the things you should know about the town in which you live,” which implies that there were many everyday activities, even in a small community, that were unknown to most of its inhabitants.²⁷ And, if that alone were not enough reason to continue watching the picture, the narrator presents another case to the viewer—“Perhaps you would have liked to have seen pictures of your city in the past good old grandfather days, when movies were just in its infancy. This picture of your city as it is today will be worth seeing in the years to come.” In a few lines, the narrator summarizes the purpose of the civic film: to show people their own town and to record it for future generations. Excised from this account of the local film is any reference to Hollywood and, in many cases, any audience apart from those who reside in the town where it was filmed.

Pacific’s films often ran long—six reels, or just about an hour, in Waterloo, Iowa—but the Cordele film is a relatively compact twenty-four minutes.²⁸ Although the film has a soundtrack, with recorded music and narration, intertitles are also used, most of which appear to be handwritten advertising cards that specify the names of local businesses and were likely filmed onsite. A few title cards, particularly those for the Rotary Club and the Lions Club, are standardized and appear to have been inserted into the film in post-production. Kunkleman’s stylistic range was limited. Slow pans from left to right and back again were his trademark, with the occasional medium shot of an individual looking directly at the camera. There is very little left to chance in these pictures, and while the participants seem comfortable participating in their production, there is little joy expressed, as if Kunkleman intended to capture an official, yet ordinary, day in the life of the town, rather than give people an opportunity to express surprise or delight at the camera’s presence.

Although Kunkleman’s films were exhibited in local theaters, they appear to be directed to an audience who was geographically, or temporally, distant from the place of production. And while one can detect this distance in the image itself, it is the soundtrack, particularly the voiceover narration, that sets apart civic films from their silent nonfiction counterparts. As Charles Wolfe has observed of voiceover narration in documentary films in this period, early reviewers of sound travelogues and newsreels often assumed that the narration was not that of a “voice of God” but rather the voice of a lecturer, who was assumed to be just off screen.²⁹ The transition from the nearby lecturer to the distant narrator was an important development in early sound documentaries, as it confirmed the film’s status as an objective and truthful art form. In his analysis of voiceover in government-sponsored films made in the 1930s, Jonathan Kahana suggests that it often served as “political ventriloquism” or, more pointedly, a “volatile agent of hegemony.” As he argues, “The state that speaks in these films was one that gained its authority by an uncanny ability to produce and fill empty spaces: in the land, but also in the American character. This voice projected itself into both places in an uncanny ventriloquizing of the American people, in whose name the state claimed its new powers.”³⁰ Kahana goes on to argue that such use of voiceover, in a period when the documentary form itself was gaining visibility, is allegorical, instrumentalizing particular images in service of a national narrative about state power.

Although civic films operated at a different scale, and their lack of coordination reduced their efficacy, the presence of canned narration allowed for a similar conversion of the local film from something particular to something that was generically particular. After all, it was not just the presence of an off-screen narrator that distinguished these civic films from their predecessors but the presumed place of that narrator, whose very voice—intonation, accent, and elocution—marked him as not being local but rather detached from the place depicted by the camera.³¹ As Wolfe notes, the voiceover narration of early documentaries drew on the aural qualities of the radio announcer’s voice, which by the mid-1930s was firmly established as a distinct mode of address, typified by the March of Time’s Westbrook Van Voorhis, whose “odd inflections, teletype cadence and often ironic tone” made him famous in his own right.³² Although the narrator of Kunkleman’s film is unidentified, the postwar civic filmmakers boasted of the celebrity of the radio announcers who narrated their films.

If the civic films of the 1920s and 1930s pointed toward a shift in how local films depict small-town life, the movies made after the Second World War underscored just how dramatic, and seemingly incontrovertible, this shift was. Instead of local films responding to an inchoate set of desires around the cinema, they were now put in service of a civic agenda in which the local was figured as a distillation of national political, economic, and cultural concerns of a prosperous, if anxious, middle class. For these audiences and sponsors, local films were not associated with the pleasure of seeing themselves but rather the security of knowing that their images had been committed to celluloid for posterity.

A NEW YORK STORY: CASTING OUR HOME TOWN

Like many itinerant filmmakers, Shad E. Graham, as he called himself when he was making his Our Home Town film series, constructed an autobiography that placed him, during varying points in his career, at both the center and periphery of cinema history.³³ Born on April 24, 1896, the day after Edison’s Vitascope debuted in New York, Graham spent his life staking a claim on all corners of the cinema, from unverified early brushes with film pioneers—a bit part in The Great Train Robbery (1903) and work as a “prop boy” for The Birth of a Nation (1915)—to associations with Hollywood studios, including William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Studios, Universal, and MGM.³⁴ During the Second World War, Graham worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and in his postwar career became an independent producer of educational, industrial, and newsreel pictures.³⁵ But despite this range of activity in and around the movie industry, Graham’s most significant work was on the Our Home Town series, which he suggested was “a classic portrayal of small town life” that “made the citizens proud of their town,” as it revealed “hidden truths and beauty they had over-looked.”³⁶ After his death in 1969, Graham’s widow donated several dozen films from the series to the University of Texas at Austin, in what was likely the first attempt to place local films within an academic and archival context.³⁷

For an itinerant filmmaker, Graham was unusually attentive to the historical importance of his own work, but the Home Town series, alternately titled Our Home Town and My Home Town, was not his alone. In fact, a number of other filmmakers, including Sol Landsman, Arthur Loevin, George S. Gullette, Sam Marino, and Don Parisher, all produced versions of the Home Town series in the 1940s, operating under a variety of company names. Most of these individuals were based in New York, or at least saw the city as their putative home and source of talent. Several prominent newsreel and radio announcers provided narration for the films, including Vincent Connolly, whose voice could be heard on the popular Mary Margaret McBride radio show and Paramount’s newsreels; John Reed King, who worked in both radio and television; and CBS’s Norman Brokenshire, one of radio’s best-known announcers. In his memoirs, Brokenshire recalled working in early 1947 with Parisher, who would send him the film and “covering script” so he could record it in New York.³⁸ But it was Connolly’s narration that appeared most frequently in these films, and he occasionally received top billing in their promotion.³⁹

Figure 7.2. Receipt from My Home Town, Luling, Texas (1948). Shad Graham Papers, di_10748, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin

While Graham was not the first civic film producer, his championing of the importance of the series underscored its ties to the banal localism that thrived after World War II. Graham and other producers of the Home Town films added to the familiar mix of local business boosterism and small-town civic pride a healthy dose of postwar patriotism in which the American small town was not only a respite from international troubles but a model of how conflicts might be resolved. While the canned narration is critical to distinguishing the civic film from its predecessors, for the Home Town series it is the text of the narration itself that associates routinized images of service clubs, fire departments, and schoolchildren with a postwar vision of American democracy.

EVEN WHEN IT RAINS ON MONDAYS: CODIFYING THE HOME TOWN GENRE

According to Graham, he began making his Our Home Town film series in the early 1930s, but these early productions were not documented by him and do not appear in the voluminous digitized newspaper archives from this period.⁴⁰ However, a through-line can be found in the career of Graham’s associate George S. Gullette, whose work as an itinerant filmmaker stretched back to 1912 when, as a representative of the Moving Picture Publicity Company, he made a picture in Allentown, Pennsylvania.⁴¹ Over the next two decades, Gullette was behind at least two significant itinerant film series. The first, which he and John E. Campbell registered for copyright in 1921 as Who’s Who, involved filming the “backs of persons with numbers for exhibiting them as a guessing contest concluding with the subtitle ‘See Them Turn Around Next Week,’ at which points audiences could confirm their abilities to recognize local people from behind.”⁴² This two-part film, which combined the staged appeal of the star contest with the desire to represent an aspect of life that was “hidden” to its residents, proved to be very successful, with productions in Oregon, Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and likely many other states. Gullette’s other major film series reworked another trope in local filmmaking, the “tourist girl” film, in which the winner of a beauty contest visits local businesses. Gullette began this series in the late 1920s, shortly after he discontinued his Who’s Who films, and within a few years he was casting the same actor, Kay Gordon, who had fleeting appearances in Hollywood productions, as a representative of the movie industry. This series, titled Our American Girl, was also made again and again throughout the United States, demonstrating Gullette’s acumen for identifying a profitable formula for local filmmaking.⁴³

In his notes for a planned autobiography, Graham commented that he began the Home Town series in the 1930s with Gullette but later decided to cede half of the country to him so he could make films in Texas, where he moved after the Second World War. In interviews, Graham claimed he was “proud of his original idea in motion picture presentation,” and in later biographies suggested that, of all his experiences in the movie industry, it was the hometown films he held dearest.⁴⁴ During the war, other filmmakers, including Sol Landsman, Arthur Loevin, Shad Graham, and Don Parisher, began making their own versions of Home Town films. By the late 1940s, there were at least a half-dozen itinerants making versions, each pairing anodyne images of small towns with a soundtrack that, to varying degrees, called attention to the ordinary distinctiveness of the community in question.

In previous chapters, I have argued that local film practices are best thought of as a mode, not a genre, as each individual movie was an assemblage of the desires of sponsors, exhibitors, filmmakers, and the people and places that appeared in the finished product. But the Home Town film operated within a narrower band of variables, set in large part by the soundtrack and the narrator’s script, which prescribed not what could be seen—canned band music serves to fill in the gaps—but what was significant enough to merit description. Furthermore, as suggested earlier, the Home Town film operated within a set of genre expectations around how small towns were depicted in the cinema, with the local iteration merely a representation and performance of a national ideal. In matching distinct images with the same, or similar, sounds, the producers of these small town movies accelerated the rise of a banal localism. The movie camera became merely another instrument in the solidification of a dominant, if ordinary, social and economic strata and topos, that of the middle-class, white, small-town resident.

Because the Home Town series was not associated with a single individual or company, it is difficult to determine the number of productions made or the contours of the practice. Shad Graham claimed to have made between two hundred and five hundred movies over a forty-year period. When they were affiliated with Park Motion Picture Productions, Don Parisher and George Gullette said that they were producing films throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Sol Landsman and Arthur Loevin made films in Connecticut and Massachusetts during the war, and in Georgia, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania afterward.⁴⁵ In several cases, filmmakers partnered with theater circuits to produce these films, suggesting that the introduction of a prerecorded soundtrack and use of 35mm film made it an easier fit for theater programs. Other producers, including Charles Wecker and A. Lincoln Eskin, made films with similar titles and themes.⁴⁶ My focus here, however, is on fourteen extant Home Town films made between 1944 and 1954 in a half-dozen states that appear to draw their script from a single, unidentified source.⁴⁷ As Jonathan Kahana suggests of voiceover narration more generally, these scripts do more than augment moving images with a comforting narrative of progress and bombastic orchestral music. Instead, the narration structures how these films can be received by audiences, as they make explicit the tacit understanding that the local film is, more often than not, a mass commodity individuated, just barely, for hometown audiences.

The earliest extant Home Town film, titled My Home Town Goes to War, was filmed in Hickory, North Carolina, in 1944 and produced by Graham, Parisher, and Gullette. Landsman made films with similar titles in New England, including Greenfield for Victory (Massachusetts, 1942) and Hartford for Victory (1943), though it is not clear whether these films used the same script.⁴⁸ (See Moving Image 7.1.) The Hickory film’s narrator, who is unidentified, opens with the following lines that announces the film’s purpose:

Yes, this is it. My Home Town. The place we as neighbors in this community call home. Sure we leave from time to time for elsewhere, but it’s home sweet home to us all.

They say every town has its Main Street. Well, this is ours. We built it with civic pride, and remain proud of its dignity, and friendly characters.

With minor changes, adding “tolerable” to describe the town’s characters, and replacing the “Sure” with an “and” in the first line, these lines are repeated in almost every Home Town film, with the narrator, most often Vincent Connolly, speaking in a tone that suggests both resignation and self-confidence. The repetitive nature of the narration, which rarely makes up more than a quarter of the running time of the film, with the remaining soundtrack filled with orchestral music, adds an element of dreariness, making even those rare images in which people engage with the camera operator appear perfunctory. Later in the film, the narrator even admits defeat, noting, “It’s not the greatest town in the world—our home town—but can you imagine all these nice, peaceful towns like ours, here in our beloved America, with all its folks like us pulling together?”⁴⁹ While the producers of this series, unlike their predecessors, never oversell the import of their movie, the narrator appears to undercut the town at every turn.

These Home Town films celebrate what I have identified as banal localism in part because they see it as essential to the narrator’s vision of postwar democracy. Although Shad Graham claimed to be nonpartisan, in 1960 he made an anticommunist film titled To Sow This Seed, starring Martin Dies Jr., best known as the first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film was intended to be a follow-up to the committee’s own Operation Abolition, released the same year. Although the narrations analyzed here do not betray such explicit political leanings, they do suggest that the small town is a key player in the maintenance of the postwar order, an order that is best kept by cooperation with, and appreciation for, authority figures.⁵⁰ We see this milieu of banal localism emphasized in another line that is often repeated in these films, that “our fathers and mothers in our home town are just plain nice living folks, the kind you read about in storybooks, you know, Main Street folks who say hello, nice morning, even when it rains on Mondays. You see we really are the folks folks in other nations would like to change places with. These civic-minded familiar faces we all know in my home town think our town is something to shout about. Don’t you?” Even at its most anodyne, the narration reproduces a feeling that everyday life is not just ordinary but largely indistinguishable from “storybooks,” those fictional accounts of small towns that were familiar to audiences and part of the mental furniture that constituted cultural and social life in this period. Unlike the booster films of the 1910s, which sought out local landmarks that distinguished a town from its neighbors, the producers of the Home Town pictures liked familiar views—fire departments, milk bottling facilities, pharmacies, and churches—all of which were captured with medium shots that kept buildings of architectural distinction, or the surrounding built environment, out of view.

After a few more opening remarks, the narrator gets down to business, that is, the local merchants who sponsored the film’s production. As Alison Isenberg notes in her study of central business districts, colloquially known then and now as “Main Streets,” local merchants felt threatened on all fronts during the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to facing the same economic uncertainties as everyone else, small-town merchants were beset by two additional crises—the rise of the chain store and the decline of the downtown. Shoppers with limited means were increasingly drawn to chain stores, while well-heeled residents went to cities to make major purchases, leaving behind the small businesses who could not compete on price or selection. While wartime restrictions on gasoline and the entry of women, who were already responsible for the vast majority of retail spending, into the workforce temporarily revived downtowns everywhere, these gains were tempered by the rationing of many consumer goods. When the war ended, rationing subsided, but now businessmen feared that the postwar drop in government spending would bring on another recession.⁵¹

Although one might expect businesses to put their best face forward in spite of these difficulties, the narrator instead gives voice to these anxieties, introducing the long sequence of shots of local businesses with the following:

Let’s call on some of our business firms and see what they are doing to help make our life more pleasant. Let’s see how they work to give us the best the markets have to offer. Their purpose is to please you, to fulfill your desires and needs, to keep you well dressed and to keep your homes well-furnished, so you may maintain your place in society.

They are always there to greet with you a friendly smile, and to give you the best possible service. You have assurance of their dependability because they are one of us in the permanence of our community.⁵²

In the films produced by Arthur Loevin, who worked with both Landsman and Graham, this celebration of local businesses takes on a barbed tone in an added section of the narration, in which a nonprofessional narrator, likely Loevin himself, implores the audience to adopt a “fair response to local buying” and be patient in waiting for consumer goods to arrive to town.⁵³ In Graham’s film of San Marcos, Texas, he makes the point even more explicit, with the narrator commenting, “This is precisely why this movie reminder has been assembled for you—to inform you of the many contributions made by our home town, local merchants and businessmen, for the betterment of our town.”⁵⁴ While the Home Town series was not the only itinerant series to push such a message—Maurice Blaché’s Buy at Home films were produced with similar aims—the addition of a narration implied that the images themselves were secondary to the importance of supporting local businesses.⁵⁵

Rather than underscoring the collective sentiments that run throughout the narration, this second narrative suggests that the “hometown” is in a defensive posture, under threat from distant forces who seek to undo the economic, and thus social and political, dominance of local merchants. Later in the film, the original narrator returns to note that the service clubs—Lions and Rotary are invariably pictured—are the “backbone” of the town, “for it is through them that our business and social activities are welded together.”⁵⁶ In effect, the narrator seeks to persuade the audience that the social and cultural goods they associate with their community are actually economic ones, and that their consumer choices may undermine the institutions—tellingly, schools and churches are discussed toward the end of the film—on which they depend.

The narration of the Home Town films ends on a brighter note, discussing, as so many films did in this period, the “world of tomorrow” that awaited Americans returning from war. Like corporate-sponsored educational films from the same period, the narrator emphasized the importance of repurposing wartime technologies for the production of domestic goods, thus ensuring the “progress and happiness of America and the world.”⁵⁷ Later versions of the film omitted this part of the narration but left a final section in which the exhibitor, operating under the guise of “your theater,” thanks theater patrons and promises “excellent entertainment for the future.”⁵⁸ In the final analysis, it seems, it is the movie theater itself that had the most to gain, or lose, from the exhibition of local moving pictures. The anxieties voiced in these films proved to be well-founded, as both small towns and, even more so, small-town theaters struggled to adapt to other postwar technologies and landscapes—highways, suburban housing developments, and television—making these films a record of a way of life that was fast disappearing.

RECORDED ON THE CELLULOID RIBBON—THE LONGUE DURÉE OF THE LOCAL FILM

Even though the banal localism of the Home Town series appears, from a certain vantage point, to be an end point for the mode, from another it is the beginning of a genre—the sponsored town portrait film—that persists in a familiar form to this day in television and new media. Although I have suggested earlier that Shad Graham was just one of many producers of Home Town films in the 1940s, by the 1950s he was one of the most prolific filmmakers of such pictures, producing dozens of films every year until at least 1959, when he made a picture in El Dorado, Arkansas. In a form letter, Graham noted that his company was in town to make “one of their State wide pictorial reviews, a special motion picture production of what makes El Dorado ‘tick’—strictly a Booster subject for our Home Town.”⁵⁹ Although theatrical exhibition was still seen as the preferred outlet for the films, when the El Dorado Chamber of Commerce wrote back about their 16mm copy of the film, they noted that they were “notifying the companies who sponsored this film that we have their TV film for them,” which they called “much more useful” than the 35mm version.⁶⁰ Even though Graham never wavered in his commitment to theatrical exhibition, business sponsors were less convinced by its value.

In fact, in the 1950s, a number of local films were shown on television stations, whose need for local content might have contributed to a boomlet in the production of local films.⁶¹ For example, in 1953, a new company called Americana Productions first screened its film of Brazil, Indiana, on WTTV in nearby Bloomington.⁶² Those who did not have their own television sets were encouraged to go to the First Presbyterian Church, which invited the community to see the Sunday noon broadcast on their “large screen set.”⁶³ Other filmmakers, such as Robert M. Carson, began producing long promotional documentaries, taking advantage of the low costs of 16mm stock to make two-hour movies that would test the patience of all but the most committed local boosters. In the 1950s, Don Parisher relocated his business to Florida and began a second career as a director of promotional films for the towns and cities in the state.

Itinerants who first entered the field in their youth, including H. C. Kunkleman and Melton Barker, remained active filmmakers well into their seventies. In 1969, a seventy-one-year-old Kunkleman, who was making films at the Lorain County Fair in Ohio, put down his camera to tell the newspaper of the historical importance of his own work and to mourn the loss of many early films: “It is a shame that youngsters of today can not sit down and see a good Mary Pickford movie. These have all disintegrated now. Nitrates used in early films were their downfall.”⁶⁴ Many other itinerants realized that the days of small-town single-screen theaters where they exhibited their films were numbered, and that they had little hope of getting their pictures to play at the suburban multiplexes that had replaced them. Although the heyday of itinerant film production had long passed, the shuttering of small-town theaters proved to be the event that effectively ended the production of the kinds of local films discussed in this book.⁶⁵

However, local films continued to be made, even if they were shot on video and, later, digital media. By the 1980s, the same booster organizations that once backed local films were now investing in the production of videos that promoted a region’s business climate and appeal to tourists. With consumer-grade video camcorders, it became possible to record “home talent” performances of all sorts, and many communities regularly documented local functions with video equipment.⁶⁶ In 2004, an enterprising Iowan, Scott Thompson, started My Town Pictures, a regional film production company that has made more than fifty feature-length motion pictures in the Midwest, almost all of them written and directed by Thompson himself.⁶⁷ In 2013, Thompson asked the residents of Zumbrota, Minnesota, population 3,252, to raise $95,000 for the production of a feature film made in town with a mixture of professional and local actors.⁶⁸ While some in town were skeptical of the proposition, the former owner of the town’s single-screen theater, which had recently closed and was now in the hands of an arts organization, told a regional newspaper that he would contribute several thousand dollars to see the film produced in Zumbrota. After all, he told the newspaper, “I’ve thrown money down worse ratholes than this.”⁶⁹ Even after the local theater closed, and verifying the credentials of an out-of-town filmmaker is an easy web search, there were still people who put their hopes in a motion picture. Thompson’s local feature film, His Neighbor Phil, had its premiere at the State Theatre in Zumbrota in the fall of 2014.⁷⁰

NOTES

1. Beck, Writing the Radical Center, 82.

2. John Dewey, “Americanism and Localism,” The Dial, June 1920, 685.

3. Wiebe, Self-Rule, 141–142, 147.

4. Billig, Banal Nationalism, 95, 127.

5. Robertson, “Glocalization.”

6. See Billig, Banal Nationalism, 145.

7. It seems telling that such rivalries between localities are often expressed by loyalties to sports teams, which are, after all, a playful means of battle.

8. I have not found any evidence that local films were made to be shown exclusively in drive-in theaters, though local movies were shown in drive-ins.

9. Of course, local broadcasting has its own vital history. See Kirkpatrick, “Localism in American Media.”

10. While there are many books on the cultural history of the small town, Miles Orvell’s The Death and Life of Main Street is an effective introduction to the subject.

11. Nonfiction examples prevailed also, particularly the Lynds’ Middletown, which was an increasingly thinly disguised Muncie, Indiana, and has long been a site for documentarians. Local films were also made in Muncie, including The Manhaters (1915), discussed in chapter 2, and Your Own Home Town—Muncie, Indiana (1936), which is similar to the films of mutual recognition discussed in chapter 6.

12. As Ryan Poll notes in Main Street and Empire, Frederic Jameson suggests that postmodernism emerged precisely at the moment when “real, material small towns become obsolete.” Poll goes on to argue that what he calls the “ideological small town” in postmodern culture becomes “reified fictions that ideologically block subjects from recognizing the complex, historically mediated social relations that constitute global capitalism” (126).

13. Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 8.

14. Poll, Main Street and Empire, 158.

15. Wuthnow, Small-Town America, 351.

16. Shad Graham supplied 16mm reductions of his films to several cities in the 1950s, including El Dorado, Arkansas. See Ann H. Cordell, El Dorado Chamber of Commerce, to Shad E. Graham, July 6, 1959, 3U307, SG.

17. Charles W. Herbert, “Commercials as They Were—and as They Are Today,” American Cinematographer, May 1940, 208–209, 247.

18. “Money-Getting Schemes Bared by Chamber of Commerce Committee,” Riverside (Calif.) Daily Press, February 28, 1933, 2. This notice appears to have been distributed widely, though I do not have evidence of its being reprinted in other newspapers.

19. Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies.”

20. “Movie Star Will Sign Contract Here,” Pittston (Penn.) Gazette, March 28, 1916, 6. In some cities, theaters displayed photographs of movie aspirants. See “Photos of Leaders Are to Be Shown,” Scranton (Penn.) Republican, April 1, 1916, 3.

21. “To Make Motion Picture of City: No Plot or Characters to Be Used,” Decatur (Ill.) Review, January 18, 1921, 12.

22. “Civic Film Is Near Completion,” Waterloo (Iowa) Times-Tribune, May 20, 1921, 9.

23. Advertisement, East Liverpool (Ohio) Review, November 13, 1937, 6.

24. Alicoate, ed., Film Daily Year Book, 595. Other producers discussed in this chapter did not report their activity to Film Daily, making it impossible to know how many films they were producing in a typical year.

25. According to his granddaughter Kathryn Gangel, Kunkleman would travel with his family and set up business in one town, then travel to cities in the region for six months or more. Personal correspondence with the author, September 6, 2015.

26. According to University of Georgia film archivist Margie Compton, only the company, Pacific Film Productions, is credited in the local newspaper articles about the film’s production, but Kunkleman, who made several films in the region between 1934 and 1936, was most likely its director. Personal correspondence with the author, November 25, 2015.

27. For more on the Anderson film, see Streible, “Itinerant Filmmakers and Amateur Casts.”

28. According to Margie Compton, the film’s shorter running length may be due to a lost reel. Personal correspondence with the author, November 25, 2015.

29. Wolfe, “Historicising the ‘Voice of God,’” 152.

30. Kahana, Intelligence Work, 93, 94.

31. I have not encountered any examples of civic films narrated by women, though the points made here would hold.

32. Wolfe, “Historicising the ‘Voice of God,’” 153.

33. Graham’s birth name was Edmond S. Walstrum. When he entered the motion picture business in the 1910s, he went by S. Edwin Graham, which may have been a sly reference to Edwin S. Porter. He appears to have adopted Shad as a first name only after the end of the Second World War.

34. Graham’s papers at the University of Texas contain several versions of this biography, but the most complete, and seemingly accurate, version appears in the posthumously published The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (Clinton, N.J.: James T. White, 1973), 54:396–397.

35. In a job application to the Office of Strategic Services, where he worked as a ten-dollar-a-day contractor for just under a year, Graham gave a more complete resume, listing stints such as directing a picture of Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, and, with George Gullette, making a newsreel series titled “The Guest Newsreel Reporter.” See Personnel File, Edmond Shadrack Walstrum, Record Group 226, Records of the Office of Strategic Services, 1919–2002, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

36. Ibid.; “Biographical Sketch,” SG, box 3U308. Graham was also proud of his role in filming the Texas City Disaster, a ship explosion that killed more than five hundred people, in 1947 for Fox Movietone. Graham testified before Congress on his role in filming the disaster and in the class action lawsuit that followed.

37. Although the University of Texas still has Graham’s films, they are not currently available to be viewed. Graham himself tried, and mostly failed, to sell his films to the towns he visited in the late 1960s, although it appears that he was more successful selling 16mm and 8mm reductions of his films after they were made.

38. Brokenshire, This Is Noman Brokenshire, 291.

39. For example, see advertisement, Middletown (N.Y.) Times-Herald, October 12, 1946, 2.

40. In notes for a planned autobiography, Graham claimed to have made films in Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Colorado, Nevada, California, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia between 1929, when he left Hollywood, and 1935, when he returned to make the Mexican–US coproduction The Great Manta, under the name S. Edwin Graham. Of course, Graham could have been working under yet another name and calling his series something other than Our Home Town, but exhaustive searches of newspaper databases have not revealed any films that appear to be related to this series. Other filmmakers, such as Edwin Cooper, made similar films in the 1930s. There is a record of two Graham productions in 1945, Bangor at War and Mount Carmel at War, both made in Pennsylvania.

41. “Allentown and Allentonians in Moving Pictures,” Allentown (Penn.) Democrat, July 13, 1912, 5.

42. Copyright deposit, April 11, 1921, Moving Image Research Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Gullette began his Who’s Who series as early as 1918, when he made one in Mansfield, Ohio. See “Who’s Who in Mansfield? Th’ Movies ’ll Show You,” Mansfield News, August 15, 1918, 3. A film with the title Who’s Who in Corpus Christi is among the films in the Graham archives at the University of Texas.

43. Several films from this series survive, including ones made in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. A similar film, See America First, also starring Kay Gordon, was made in Oakland, California, and is also extant. See “To ‘Star’ in Local Film,” Oakland Tribune, November 21, 1930, 55. Gullette made an earlier film series, The Princess Visits, which follows the same structure as the American Girl series. See “To Make Movies of Mansfield,” Mansfield (Ohio) News, May 6, 1915, 5.

44. “Work on Movie of Freeport and Velasco Is Started This Week,” Freeport (Texas) Facts, August 1, 1946, 1.

45. In the early 1950s, Loevin broke off from Landsman and made films in Texas, including one in Bryan, where he may have first met Graham, with whom he later worked. Gullette does not appear to have made any Home Town movies after the war and described himself as “retired” in an application to the Motion Picture Pioneers in 1952. See “12 More Apply to Join Pioneers,” Motion Picture Daily, November 6, 1952, 6.

46. Charles Wecker made films in several towns, all titled My Home Town, in Pennsylvania and in Richmond, Virginia, in 1948, with narration by Bill Stern. None of the films are known to survive. A. Lincoln Eskin, under the auspices of the Progressive Pictures Company, made My Home Town in Newark, Ohio, using a soundtrack similar to the other films described in this chapter.

47. These films were made in North Carolina, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

48. “To Make Movie of Local Groups in War Effort,” Greenfield (Mass.) Recorder-Gazette, November 10, 1943, 10; “Local War Effort to Be Subject of Newsreel Picture,” Hartford Courant, March 15, 1943, 8.

49. My Home Town, Hickory, N.C.

50. Starting in 1946, the Home Town films added a nod to local police, observing, “for through this force our town is kept in order and we are protected from unlawful influences.” Our Home Town, Mooresville, N.C. Later films revised the last line to “unlawful and disrupting influences.”

51. Isenberg, Downtown America, 97–98, 161–162.

52. My Home Town, Thomaston, Ga.

53. Ibid.

54. Our Home Town, San Marcos, Texas.

55. An earlier film, Man Power (1930), made in Council Bluffs, Iowa, tried a different tact, blaming the town’s lazy populace for its failure to live up to its potential.

56. My Home Town, Monroe, N.C.

57. My Home Town, Mooresville, N.C.

58. Our Home Town, Denville, N.J.

59. From James W. McWilliams, May 1, 1959, SG, 3U308.

60. Ann H. Cordell to Shad E. Graham, July 6, 1959, SG, 3U307.

61. For accounts of the many efforts to provide local programming on television in the 1950s, see Michael D. Murray and Donald G. Godfrey’s edited volume Television in America. In the early 1950s, television stations often used the terms “local film” to distinguish prerecorded moving images they held from those that were supplied by a national network. Many radio and television historians have pointed out what David Goodman calls the “paradox” of broadcasting, that these national media were regulated with the assumption that “local service to a place-based community” was paramount. See Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition, 105. In her analysis of television’s depiction of, and relationship to, the Midwest, Victoria Johnson instead focuses on regionalism as the site where “institutional and cultural struggles over networking” congealed. See Johnson, Heartland TV, 34.

62. “Brazil Story in Television Show Well Received,” Brazil (Ind.) Daily Times, October 5, 1953, 1.

63. “Brazil Story on TV Tomorrow Is a Local ‘Must,’” Brazil (Ind.) Daily Times, October 3, 1953, 1.

64. “Akron Man Filming County Fair for Benefit of Future Generations,” Chronicle-Telegram (Elyria, Ohio), August 23, 1969, 7.

65. For more on the decline of the small-town theater, see Robert Sklar’s introduction to Michael Putnam’s photobook Silent Screens. Theaters like the “last picture shows” Putnam photographed hosted local film screenings until the very end.

66. Judi Hedrick has identified these videos as “community vernacular video,” which she defines as nonprofessionally produced videos that “document the activities of various communities outside the family.” Hedrick, “Amateur Video Must Not Be Overlooked,” 79. While this study has excluded local video production, clearly such practices are similar in some ways to local films.

67. “Meet the Creative Director and Screenwriter,” http://www.mytownpictures.com/writer.html. Of course, regional and local film production also continued apace in this period, but the directors of such films expected them to play at festivals and, hopefully, be picked up for distribution.

68. Thompson charges towns $4,500 for the production of what he calls “community movies,” which are not expected to receive wide release. Personal conversation with the author, December 14, 2015.

69. Rich Larson, “Gone Hollywood? Zumbrota Ponders a Feature Film in Their Back Yard,” Southern Minn Scene Magazine, September 12, 2013, http://www.southernminn.com/scene/movies/article_e65af6d0-1c28-11e3-af0d-0019bb30f31a.html.

70. Sandy Hadler, “Zumbrota Prepares for Sneak Peak of Film,” Red Wing (Minn.) Republican Eagle, October 17, 2014, http://www.republican-eagle.com/content/zumbrota-prepares-sneak-peak-film.