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THE SILENT PAGEANT

Municipal Booster Films

Quite recently a moving picture company sent its photographers to Springfield, Illinois, and produced a story with our city for a background, using our social set for actors. Backed by the local commercial association for whose benefit the thing was made, the resources of the place were at the command of routine producers. Springfield dressed its best, and acted with fair skill. The heroine was a charming débutante, the hero the son of Governor Dunne. The Mine Owner’s Daughter was at best a mediocre photoplay. But this type of social-artistic event, that happened once, may be attempted a hundred times, each time slowly improving. Which brings us to something that is in the end very far from The Mine Owner’s Daughter. By what scenario method the following film or series of films is to be produced I will not venture to say. No doubt the way will come if once the dream has a sufficient hold.

—Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915)

Anyone can have a film made to his order. Several films have been made in this city, for some of them, not very big ones either, as much as $500 has been paid. But what good are they. They were shown at the local theatre. That was all. Now they are tucked away in a trunk perhaps. So it would be with county fair scenes. Distributors will not distribute such films free of charge, nor exhibitors exhibit them. They are regarded by them as advertising and charged as such.

—“Educational Movies,” Oxnard (Calif.) Daily Courier, August 26, 1922

WHEN VACHEL LINDSAY, THE SELF-MADE—and self-appointed—poet and cultural critic of the Midwest, turned his attentions to the cinema in 1915, he saw in the new medium an opportunity for what Garth Jowett later called a “democratic art.”¹ In The Art of the Moving Picture, Lindsay presented a theory of film form and genre that locates the cinema in a specifically American context.² In one chapter, Lindsay described a film first exhibited in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, in the summer of 1915, just a few months before the book’s publication. In this passage, Lindsay observed that the motion picture titled The Mine Owner’s Daughter, which was made at the behest of local businesses, was a “mediocre photoplay” but brought about a “social-artistic event” in his hometown. Although he neglected to name the production company or describe the film’s plot, Lindsay speculated that such local films would be made again and again, until one day they reached the level of capital-A “Art,” using the cinema to produce local spectacles. Lindsay then summarized his own scenario for a local film in Springfield, one that would feature the goddess of the city emerging from the hills and telling the city fathers how to prepare for the future.³

Lindsay’s hopes for the local film were quickly dashed, as structural changes in the film industry make it difficult for independent producers to distribute their work, a state of affairs that turned many would-be local film sponsors into skeptics. However, Lindsay failed to realize that The Mine Owner’s Daughter, a film he almost certainly saw in July 1915 in his hometown, was not made for Springfield audiences alone. Instead, the Commercial Association that sponsored the film expected it “to be placed on show in 182 different cities throughout the United States.”⁴ By the time the Paragon Feature Film Company of Omaha, Nebraska, arrived in Springfield to produce The Mine Owner’s Daughter, the company had made dozens of similar films in cities such as Oklahoma City, New Orleans, and Montgomery, Alabama. While Lindsay thought The Mine Owner’s Daughter was on the leading edge of the cinema to come, its production company had in fact started several years earlier, and would make its last film in 1916.

Between 1910 and 1916, when the American cinema was itself undergoing what historians have identified, in retrospect, as the transition to the classical Hollywood era, there was a wave of production and theatrical exhibition of movies like The Mine Owner’s Daughter. Called booster or town advertising films, these pictures were sponsored by business organizations interested in promoting the attractions of their town to potential residents and manufacturers, and exhibited both in the town or city where they were made and, if their producers are to be believed, other towns and cities throughout the United States. While early booster films were merely collections of local views, by 1914 motion picture companies began producing narrative, semi-fictional films. These industrial romances blended the tropes of historical pageantry and transitional cinema melodrama. Most often, they used a wedding plot to build a story that advertised local manufacturing plants and resources. Over time, booster films began to incorporate elements of common narrative film plots, including daring rescues of damsels in distress, explosions, and automobile crashes.

What I call the “municipal booster film” is a local film that was sponsored by a business organization, such as a board of trade, chamber of commerce, or commercial club, of a city or town for the express intent of advertising that municipality’s virtues to its own residents as well as potential settlers and investors. The municipal booster film was not a genre but rather a mode of production that incorporated generic cues from industrial romances and melodramas. These films were distinct from the local views of early cinema in three ways. First, unlike the local view, the municipal view was not defined exclusively by the pleasure of self-recognition, that is, audiences seeing themselves on film. Instead, the films were often noted for their presentation of local places, first as attractions for businesses or people wishing to relocate and later as locations for fictionalized movie scenes. Second, in contrast to local views, which tended to be very short (one-hundred-foot reels were common) and rapidly processed and exhibited, municipal boosting films were both longer (at least a thousand feet) and more likely to be produced over a series of days or weeks. With the luxury of time to produce their film, sponsors were able to exercise much greater control over who and what appeared, and did not appear, in their production. Third, sponsors believed their motion pictures would be seen elsewhere, in neighboring cities, throughout the state, and even nationally and internationally. Although the historical evidence suggests that very few municipal booster films were exhibited so widely, sponsors were led to expect national distribution of their films, which in turn affected their production decisions.

The municipal booster film can therefore be located within ongoing debates about the possibilities for a moviegoing audience to constitute itself as a public. Miriam Hansen has argued that the classical Hollywood cinema that emerged in the late 1910s eliminated the “conditions around which local, ethnic, class, and gender-related experience might crystallize,” thus ending the potential for the cinema to serve as an alternative public sphere.⁵ While Hansen is interested in an urban, multiethnic, working-class, and gendered milieu, the phenomenon of the municipal booster film suggests that local experiences of spectatorship in more homogenous communities also thrived during the transition. As Robert C. Allen has argued, rural encounters with the cinema during the transitional era were of a markedly different character than its urban counterparts.⁶ Rather than viewing films in class-segregated and neighborhood-based nickelodeons, rural and small-town inhabitants viewed movies downtown, in theaters that were once dedicated exclusively to live entertainment. Even after the construction of purpose-built movie theaters commenced in the early 1910s, the picture show remained a venue for live performances and civic functions, serving as a cultural center in many small towns. While histories of the movies and traveling mass amusements, such as circuses and vaudeville acts, are usually told in a national framework, Gregory A. Waller argues that by ignoring the “local configuration of sites, sponsors, and occasions” necessary for these amusements to occur, we miss much of what made them significant in the first place.⁷

The shift in emphasis from national to local histories of the cinema is not made out of a desire to fully represent the kaleidoscope of movie experiences in the early twentieth century, nor to suggest that, for the sake of historical accuracy, we need to substitute studies of bejeweled metropolises like New York and Chicago for more ordinary places like Lexington, Kentucky, and Wilmington, North Carolina. Instead, work by Allen, Waller, Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, Paul S. Moore, and many others suggest that differences between and among locales of moviegoing augurs for a reconsideration of how and why the cinema developed as a mass amusement.⁸ Instead of a center-periphery model, in which all that is noteworthy about motion pictures passed through New York and, later, Los Angeles, these studies reveal multinodal networks of cinema cultures, with pathways extending in all directions. Rather than serving as prima facie evidence of the rise of national, mass culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, the cinema becomes a site where we can investigate these claims. Local studies open up new horizons of inquest, enabling a reexamination of old assumptions and revealing new fields of research.

For example, scholars have long argued for the historical significance of the cinema because of its close association with the advent of urban industrial modernity, which allowed working-class moviegoers to influence the direction the cinema would take.⁹ Operating under the assumption that films such as What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (Edwin S. Porter, 1901) was emblematic of both the kinds of movies audiences saw and their everyday experiences, scholars conflated the production and reception of such films. The longstanding debate between Tom Gunning and Charles Musser over whether early cinema is best understood as a medium that delivered “attractions” that shocked audiences, or one in which audiences “contemplated” the complex operations of the cinema, assumes that modernity was essentially an urban phenomena.¹⁰ Although Joe Kember supports the so-called modernity thesis in its broadest strokes, he suggests that scholars have missed the most salient quality of modernity for early cinema audiences: the fact that “individuals had become adept at objectifying others and detaching themselves from the responsibilities of genuine intimacy and empathy.” Kember argues that early film institutions, such as fairgrounds and theaters, “not only reproduced some of the most widely disseminated perspectives on modernity . . . but also allowed them to be registered, deliberated, and worked through.” Applying Anthony Giddens’s theorization of modernity to the cinema, Kember argues that exhibition reveals in the cinema what Giddens calls the “duality of structure,” in which the “screening of a film participates in the creation of the spectator at the same time as the conventions for film exhibition and styles of filmmaking are reassessed and reproduced by the spectator.” In this way, Kember suggests, “institutions successfully connect local contexts of action with distant imperatives, often across large spans of time and space.”¹¹ Urban sophisticates and country rubes were equally encouraged to see the cinema not just as a reflection of modern life but also as an opportunity to see in the cinema a capacity for empathy and intimacy that was elsewhere under threat.

By shifting emphasis away from experiences of shock and alienation, and toward a focus on immediacy and connection, Kember suggests that we take seriously those who made claims for the medium’s educational and socially uplifting aspects. Audiences everywhere, even in small towns, were primed to see the cinema as an expression of modernity, and yet they were also continually reminded of its association with the lecturers, showmen, and theater managers who brought them in contact with distant people and places. As he notes, exhibitors produced and sponsored local views in the early cinema period in order to “foster varied bonds of recognition and empathy with their audiences, and to generate relationships that were characterized by intimacy as well as exhibitionism.”¹² And while the local views of the early cinema period were never intended to be screened to other communities, these feelings of intimacy and exhibitionism continued to resonate in the early 1910s. The local view did not lose popularity in the transitional era, as some have suggested, but was rather transformed into new modes of local picture production that responded to the changing form and industry structure of the cinema.

In the transition, movie audiences began to think of themselves as a public, participating in the regulation and production of the cinema. One could shape the cinema by joining a censor board, by sending one’s scenario off to a production company, or by appearing in a local film. Michael Warner argues that the salient quality of a public is the “reflexive circulation of discourse,” which in a cinema context would mean the capacity for audiences to critically participate in film culture.¹³ In contrast to Hansen’s more grounded, tangible alternative public sphere, one in which audiences felt their “collective presence” in the movie theater, Warner’s notion of a public relies on a social imaginary to serve as the audiences’ interlocutor.¹⁴ In this way, the public that was constituted and reproduced in print discourse, particularly newspapers, became visible through the production, exhibition, and, imagined distribution of local films.¹⁵ Municipal booster films were produced in large numbers for a time because their sponsors believed their films could be circulated to other towns, thus constituting themselves as member of a moviemaking public that consisted of individuals from all factions of society.

The decline of the municipal booster film in the late 1910s was not due to a lack of interest in local filmmaking. Rather, it was, as an Oxnard, California, newspaper observed in 1922, a decline in interest in making local films to be exhibited elsewhere. While there is scant evidence that booster films were exhibited theatrically, there is substantially more evidence of their nontheatrical exhibition in sites such as regional conventions, trade tours, and, more prominently, at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Many of the films produced by Paragon and other municipal film companies were exhibited at the Panama-Pacific Expo, supplementing the more elaborate displays states and cities usually sent to expositions. Reviews of the exposition note that motion pictures were shown at all the state halls, but very few visitors were interested in watching films like Fifty Thousand Feet of Kansas (1915), produced by Paragon and featuring no less than 50,000 feet of film, taken in 200 towns, of a state with a population of just 1.5 million.

By promising that their films would be circulated, booster film producers encouraged sponsors to invest more time and money in these pictures than they might have done otherwise. As a result, the municipal films of the 1910s were far more ambitious than any other mode of local film production of this or any other decade. At the same time, the transformation of the municipal booster film from a longer, carefully selected series of local views into a semi-fictional narrative film that turned a city’s attractions into key plot elements was essential, as it allowed the local film to become a mode that was primarily concerned about the production and reproduction of place. In effect, the emergence of the municipal booster film, and its subsequent decline after 1916, reveals the potential, and the limits, of local film production and exhibition in the United States.

MUNICIPAL ADVERTISING AND MOTION PICTURES

In December 1909, the magazine Town Development published its first issue on topics it identified to be “in the interest of manufacturers as well as commercial clubs, business men’s associations and like organizations.”¹⁶ While the magazine often covered the more mundane issues of municipal development, like the building of sewer systems and the platting of industrial sites, many of its articles, editorials, and advertisements were dedicated to the cause of “town promotion.” On the cover of the first issue, a prose poem printed on top of a map of the United States appears with the headline, “Our Town and the Map.” An excerpt of the poem reads,

Where is our town on this map?

Ah, yes, there it is, right at the point of my pencil—see?

Wonder who else sees

Who knows our town is on this map?

Who cares—other than our home folks?

What does our town mean, industrially, to America?

Anything?

What is its rank in the American town development game?

What’s the score?

Are we really in the game?

Boys, it is almighty important, the position our town takes in this race

for municipal supremacy,

And the old town cannot fight her battles without you and me to boost. We can boost, at least, if we do not build.

The sentiments in this prose poem—the excitement that comes with someone’s town being located on the map, the apprehension about whether anyone else knows or cares about the town, and the militaristic commitment to boosting, if not building, the town’s identity—are often repeated in the pages of Town Development, American City, and other business and urban planning publications. Read by small-town mayors and council members, business owners and itinerant entrepreneurs, lawyers and other members of the professional classes, these publications documented and encouraged the transformation of urban life in the early twentieth century. One of the municipal services often covered in the pages of these magazines—the town advertising, or booster, campaign—helped transform the function of the local film from a mode of self-reflection to a mode of self-presentation. Town promoters used the cinema as another advertising medium, one that was more portable than the convention booth or the booster train and more enticing than the brochure or booklet. By producing its own motion picture, a local municipal organization could put its town on the map, or at least in local movie theaters, with the possibility of exhibition in other cities in the United States and throughout the world.¹⁷ While the advantages of using film as a promotional tool were obvious to town promoters, motion picture producers were deterred by the difficult logistics of shooting and exhibiting pictures in all corners of the country. In fact, town promoters, not film producers, may have devised the concept of the “municipal film,” establishing modes of production, financing, and distribution that fit, not always easily, with the cinema’s fast-evolving institutional practices. The early history of the municipal film, then, is not found in the histories of film production or exhibition but, rather, in the history of municipal advertising.¹⁸

Municipal advertising, or booster, campaigns were not the most significant or longest lasting legacies of the town development movement, which transformed systems of government and brought forth major investments in infrastructure. But these campaigns were important because they allowed municipalities to create and manage their identities in a rapidly growing and centralizing nation. Given the great economic insecurities of the 1910s—when a factory relocation or a new highway or rail line could make the difference between a town’s success or failure—booster campaigns gave town residents a sense of control over their own destinies, a fact that was repeated again and again in municipal and business magazines. As one editorial writer put it in the winter of 1912: “It does not require the application of much force to send a boulder tumbling down a mountain side, but once the boulder is started everything must give way before it. That’s it! Perhaps your individual push will start the town on its way to greater prosperity.”¹⁹

The municipal advertising campaign allowed a town to demonstrate its capacity for self-confidence, and booster magazines often praised successful efforts as ends in themselves. Although the booster is perhaps now best recognized as the subject of parody, deftly captured in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt, in the 1910s boosterism was a major denomination of the American civic religion.²⁰ The booster movement was particularly strong in the Midwest, the South, and the West, regions with cities whose future prospects both seemed more promising and more fragile than those of well-established cities in the Mid-Atlantic and New England. The budgets for these advertising campaigns were substantial, with municipalities committing thousands of dollars annually to booster activities.

Although western expansion and speculative land development had fueled regional, state, and municipality promotion for decades, around the turn of the century a new phase in self-promotion was already underway.²¹ The pamphlet, long the standard form of publicity, was being replaced by a multitude of advertising materials, from mass-produced booklets to full-page advertisements in general interest magazines. Advertising agencies began to handle accounts for city and town governments and business organizations, and took on the responsibility for full-scale campaigns that included the production of elaborate displays for installation at national expositions and regional trade shows. In addition, such firms helped communities produce advertising stunts in the hopes of being mentioned in urban newspapers and mass-circulation magazines. By the time Town Development began publishing in 1909, scores of people within its pages identified themselves as town promotion “experts,” many of whom had backgrounds in advertising. By convincing civic and business leaders that a town could be advertised just like any other product, these promoters helped ignite a flourishing of commercial advertising campaigns in many towns and cities.²²

Cities large and small, new and old, northern and southern, eastern and western, all promoted themselves through advertising campaigns, but southern cities still rebuilding after the Civil War and new, small western cities tended to launch the most ambitious campaigns. For example, the Tulsa Commercial Club, a group of businessmen organized in March 1901, saw their newly established Oklahoma town grow from a population of 1,391 in 1900 to a small city of 72,075 by 1920. In 1903, 1905, and 1907 the commercial club sponsored “booster trains” that were loaded up with displays and brochures about Tulsa (with titles like “Facts about Tulsa: A Coming Metropolis”) and sent to cities on the East Coast and Upper Midwest in hopes of attracting new Tulsans. According to one history of Tulsa, in the early 1910s, “any visiting dignitary received red-carpet treatment, which usually consisted of beef barbecued over an open gas well, a Chautauqua-style lecture, and a medley of patriotic songs, which the club band performed.”²³ Whether or not the boosters succeeded in attracting new industries and residents to their city, they did help foster a culture of town promotion that linked the production of an idealized image of the town with its material prosperity. By creating and then identifying with the ideal version of their town, boosters attempted to convince others, and themselves, that their town could achieve its full potential.

The municipal film, like any number of other promotional techniques, did not emerge as the idea of a single individual, company, or even industry, but rather appeared as a response to a number of factors. In a period of economic turbulence, towns and cities were eager to try new methods of advertising, and professional “boosters” were ready to offer their services. Motion picture companies who were trying to navigate the rapidly changing film industry found that the production of municipal films was a lucrative business, and certainly more stable than the search for which stories and stars would prove profitable in the marketplace. And, of course, some of the residents of small towns and cities who appeared in municipal films became entranced with the idea that appearing in a film was the first step in their quest for greater recognition or even national fame.

The confluence of these factors helped transform the local film from a mode of production associated with self-recognition to one that was primarily associated with self-promotion. In the early 1910s, sponsors of municipal advertising films boasted that the motion picture had unparalleled potential to reach audiences. Seemingly unburdened by the challenges of production and distribution that troubled many companies of the period, municipal film producers could rely on both substantial budgets and receptive local audiences. While some of these appeared to be no more than another set of local views, audiences saw them as something different precisely because they could imagine audiences elsewhere appreciating images of their town. As the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, believing it had commissioned the first-ever municipal motion pictures, noted in its May 1913 newsletter, “The projection on a screen in the place of meeting before the entire assemblage of the beauties and advantages of Kansas City will be, beyond question, more forceful and convincing than all the ‘wirepulling’ and distribution of expensive souvenirs possible.”²⁴

This shift in expectations for the cinema both recalled the cinema’s earliest moments—when itinerant exhibitors inserted a local view into a program of views from elsewhere—and signified the increasing importance of distributors in determining which pictures could be seen where. The producers of municipal films offered products that were both local and had promise for distribution, which enabled them to convince sponsors to invest in their production. Moreover, a local film that audiences expected to be seen elsewhere proved to be a greater draw than the local views of the itinerant exhibition era. Once municipalities realized that they could make back some of their production budgets through local screenings, they were eager to produce such films.

The sponsors of municipal advertising films called attention to their novelty, making it difficult to identify just how widespread the practice was in the early 1910s. One indication of the popularity of the town boosting film, however, was a November 1912 article by Leo L. Redding, the editor of Town Development. In “Town Boosting with the ‘Movies,’” Redding gave a thorough accounting of the use of the motion picture in booster campaigns. One of the first municipal campaigns to incorporate motion pictures, Redding wrote, took place in Wisconsin in the fall of 1910. J. F. Carter, the ambitious secretary of the Mobile Progressive Association in Alabama, sent out postcards to Wisconsin farmers inviting them to a film screening of life in the South. Town Development described what the farmers saw at one of five moving picture theaters in southern Wisconsin towns: “They saw actual pictures of actual things—the parade and crowds in the streets of Mobile at the bi-centennial celebration of the ancient city; the fertile pine stump land of the nearby country and the blasters at work blowing up the stumps with dynamite, and burning them. Striking pictures, these, with plenty of action in them.”²⁵

The film also included a view of the city from a ten-story building, shots of its port and railroad lines, and “some more farming pictures designed to emphasize such points as the plentifulness of cheap labor and the fact that the crop season is a long one in the sunny Southland.” Farmers who attended the screening soon received publicity literature from real-estate promoters in Alabama. Redding wrote that as long as town advertising motion pictures appealed to “a miscellaneous public there is no surer way of arousing favorable comment, provided means can be found for getting the films widely distributed.” Surprisingly, but perhaps reflecting the inchoate state of the film industry at the time, Redding claimed that distributing a town advertising film was “not particularly difficult,” as long as the film was unique, had “plenty of action,” and did not look too much like an advertisement. The article closed by listing a dozen other cities where films had been made in the past two and a half years, and noted, “It is a pretty slow town, in these days, that hasn’t had its picture taken.”²⁶ In two years, the municipal film went from being a novel form of advertising to a routine activity for ambitious towns.

OPTIMISTIC TWINS: INDUSTRIAL FILMS AND BOOSTERISM

While the origins of the local view lay in exhibition practices, the form and function of the municipal booster film was indebted to early industrial films. Frank Kessler and Eef Masson have argued that industrial films were often complex, multi-generic products that resisted classification and definition. In order to push against an impulse to over-categorize industrials, they argue for the films’ evaluation in “historically specific, pragmatic contexts.”²⁷ In the United States, industrial films produced in the early 1910s were intended to be advertisements for their sponsors. In 1911, Watterson Rounds Rothacker—who claimed that his Industrial Moving Picture Company, founded a year earlier, was the first company to specialize in advertising film—argued that the industrial motion picture was a natural evolution of both the medium and the advertising industry. Motion pictures could become “advertising educators” that had limitless possibility, potentially transforming the cinema into a site of industry-sponsored visual education.²⁸ By combining what were thought to be discrete fields—advertising, industry, education—Rothacker signaled the capacity for industrials to define, and be defined by, their circumstances of production and exhibition. By producing motion pictures that could be educational and entertaining, Rothacker could assure advertisers that their sponsored product would be able to compete in the film marketplace. For several years, advertising films appeared to be tolerated by exhibitors, a rare period of comity that abruptly ended in June 1913, when Epes Winthrop Sargent penned a strongly worded article against the advertising film in Moving Picture World. He pleaded to exhibitors, “Run a theater, not a bill board, and you’ll be treated like a manager instead of a bill poster.”²⁹

Although the Industrial Moving Picture Company produced more traditional industrial pictures in the early 1910s—an early film, the Du Pont–sponsored Farming with Dynamite (1910), was particularly popular in rural areas—some of the company’s most publicized clients were municipalities.³⁰ While Rothacker mentioned other uses for the industrial film in the articles he published in the first few years of his company’s existence, he vociferously supported town advertisements. In a 1911 article that appeared in a compendium of advertising techniques, Rothacker wrote, “For advertising a community or a territory Moving Pictures are the medium par excellence. At Land Shows or at any exhibition they convey to an audience a graphic idea of the beauties and opportunities which the smoothest of tongues can at best but faintly conjure to the mind’s eye. Moving Pictures are manifestly reliable exponents. Those who view them have not to make allowance for exaggeration.”³¹ While the company’s activities were reported in Moving Picture World and local newspapers, in many cases the articles focused on the company’s failures. In July 1911, the World reported that the chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee, had rejected a film produced by the Industrial Moving Picture Company, calling it “inaccurate, badly shaded and lacking in vivid motion.”³² The following week, the World defended the film company, asking, “How is it possible to take a moving picture of a comatose town?”³³ A few months later, The State, in Columbia, South Carolina, reported that a camera operator from the Industrial Moving Picture Company had failed to arrive as promised, leaving the secretary of the city’s chamber of commerce to explain the photographer’s absence to an angry crowd. According to the newspaper, the group that had gathered on a Sunday in early October to have their pictures “tuk” was so angry that the secretary fled the scene “in terror of his life and limb.” Within a few hours the film’s sponsor sent a telegram to Rothacker demanding that the camera operator arrive in the next few days or he would cancel the contract for the state’s films.³⁴

Nevertheless, other companies soon joined the municipal film field. In February 1911, the Advance Motion Picture Company was founded in Chicago, and within three years was successful enough to increase its capital stock from $2,000 to $150,000.³⁵ In March 1911, Horatio F. Stoll, a California correspondent for Moving Picture World, noted an advertising scheme in the West where chambers of commerce sponsored the production of advertising films for exhibition in the state’s theaters.³⁶ By October, the production of city booster films was so commonplace that the World reported, “this idea of picturing cities the motion picture way is becoming quite popular throughout the West, and the Advance Motion Picture Company” had landed many contracts to do so.³⁷

In the examples cited so far, municipal films were produced at the behest of booster organizations, which sought out production companies to realize their campaigns. By 1911, however, motion picture companies were approaching municipalities to fund their own advertising films. In many cases, production companies advertised in local newspapers, even going so far as to send their query letters to newspaper editors in hopes that the prospect of a plan would itself be news. For example, on January 23, 1912, the Industrial Film Syndicate sent a letter to the mayor of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and to the editor of the New Brunswick Times, laying out its plans for the film it would make in their city:

Immediately after we take your city, it is our intention to show the picture at your local theatre and then further exhibit it throughout the state and country where necessary, among a series of films, now so interesting to the public, under the title of “Civic America”; the system is our profit in this enterprise, there being no expense to your city further than such support as your merchants and industries might give us for personal additional representation and the assistance we require to have interesting events carried out in the streets while we are taking the city, such as parades, fire runs, and such activities as would tend to give your city a metropolitan air.³⁸

Similar letters were sent to cities in New York, including Mount Vernon and Schenectady, though the films shot in those cities were not exhibited in New Brunswick.³⁹ The company’s sales tactics were in keeping with those of other booster film producers. By first dangling the possibility of screening New Brunswick’s film in other cities, the Industrial Film Syndicate was able to interest the mayor and, more importantly, the Board of Trade in the film. Once they convinced sponsors to fund the film’s production, the company asked the city to stage an event in order for them to have something of interest to film. After filming a local spectacle, the company found it easier to attract people to the theater, and the sponsor could make back its investment from local box office receipts alone. By asking the city to pretend to be “metropolitan,” the company called attention to the booster agenda.

In fact, after reprinting the Industrial Film Syndicate’s letter, the editor went on to speculate what might happen in New Brunswick were the city to take the company up on its proposition:

If we wanted to, or if everybody wanted to, we could have a parade of the Rutgers faculty, duplicating, shall we say, the parade at the installation of the president or at commencement.

Company H could turn out in full marching order, and show that New Brunswick is not lacking in patriotic fervor or in the means wherewith to sustain it.

The firemen and the policemen might parade, the Rutgers sophomores might haze a few freshmen, the big factories might send forth floats and the banks might have a line of depositors marching to the receiving window.⁴⁰

As in the earlier examples, the municipal film was imagined to be an amalgam of local views of city institutions and municipal leaders, displays of patriotism and advertisements for local businesses, who were expected to pay for the production under the auspices of the booster organization. The writer of this article turned the company’s request for New Brunswick to put together activities worthy of being filmed into a challenge to the community. Because the letter from the Industrial Film Syndicate alludes to the “twenty million” people attending movies daily, the paper readily imagines an audience much larger than New Brunswick: “If the people of New Brunswick were to take the moving picture proposition seriously they could make a showing that would make theatre goers in other parts of the country sit up and take notice.”⁴¹ With just the promise of a motion picture, companies could excite the booster spirit, turning what could have been an ordinary “local view” into an event to be produced by the municipality.

Two months after the Industrial Film Syndicate’s letter was printed in the New Brunswick Times, another article appeared on the front page, this time announcing that the board of directors of the Board of Trade had approved the motion picture proposal. With the contract signed, the New Brunswick Board of Trade prepared for the production of the city’s motion picture. As the pithy editorial writer put it in the next day’s newspaper, “Everybody in the city is requested to get in motion before the film man comes to take the pictures.”⁴² The connection between a moving picture and a town “on the move” became a running joke in the newspaper for several months, underlining both the novelty of the film’s production and the assumptions the community made about what a local motion picture should look like.

After winning local approval, Edwin S. Carman, the film’s producer, visited the city’s manufacturers, fire companies, and Rutgers College to arrange when and where to shoot the pictures and, presumably, to sell advertising space in the film. Two days later, the newspaper announced that New Brunswick would hold a “Boost New Brunswick” week in May, and that the moving pictures would be a feature attraction. New Brunswick’s population was booming, and its boosters had no trouble raising $1,700—$50 dollars a piece from 34 Board of Trade members—as a down payment for the event.⁴³ One week later, the first moving pictures were shot in New Brunswick, with thousands of people showing up on Livingston Avenue, the central thoroughfare in town, to watch the city’s firefighters on the run, just as if, the newspaper reported, “they were responding to an alarm of fire.” The shot itself was staged, with the camera operator positioned at one street corner and the fire companies at another so they could all be filmed in passing. In addition, the paper reported that the day’s footage would be edited with images shot at a later date in order to tell a narrative: “Tomorrow the camera man will visit all of the fire houses and photograph the companies as they are leaving houses. Then the pictures will be patched together, so that when the film is completed it will show just how the New Brunswick firemen respond in an alarm; will show the hitching of the horses. There was some talk of having an imaginary fire, with the placing of ladders up a house and the firemen at work with hose, but this was abandoned.”⁴⁴

Fires and firefighters were common themes in early American cinema, and “imaginary” fires, along with fake traffic accidents, were tropes of local films in the early 1910s, particularly once fictional elements began to be incorporated into municipal advertising films.⁴⁵ Over the next two weeks, the company shot many scenes in New Brunswick, including a Rutgers basketball game, interiors of the Johnson & Johnson manufacturing plant, and activity on business and residential streets. One of the more unusual scenes was made at the Rutgers campus, with cadets engaging in a “sham battle” on the university’s football field, “using up a lot of cartridges and making much smoke.”⁴⁶ Although filming ended in late April, the completed picture was not exhibited until late May, so it would coincide with New Brunswick’s booster week.

On May 25, the New Brunswick Times announced plans for the exhibition of what the paper was now calling the “industrial films.”⁴⁷ The films now ran 4,500 feet, far longer than the typical “feature” film of the period, and would debut in the Airdome, a seasonal open-air theater that opened in July 1910 in nearby Highland Park.⁴⁸ Three days later, the film was reviewed for the first of several times, with the paper observing that the mayor’s smile for the camera was the most surprising scene in the four-reel film. Even though the untitled film was first exhibited at the Airdome, the camera operator chose to film crowds leaving the Opera House, the largest theater in New Brunswick, capturing people who did not expect to be filmed.⁴⁹

After the New Brunswick films concluded their run at the Airdome, they moved to the Opera House, replacing a long running residency by a theater company. The picture had grown to a remarkable six thousand feet.⁵⁰ The films were shown with “several other reels of foreign make,” implying that the company might not have been carrying out its proposed plan for a Civic America series featuring films made in many cities.⁵¹

By the end of 1912, dozens of companies specialized in the production of local films, and many of them advertised in national publications, including Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News, Town Development, and American City. Gunby Brothers, based in New York, placed an advertisement in the World in August 1912 offering to make “any local picture to order” for just ten cents a foot, half the cost charged by the Industrial Film Syndicate.⁵² Another New York outfit, the Special Event Film Manufacturing Company, began advertising in the World in April 1912. After initially offering to make local films for theater managers, the company switched its marketing strategy in 1913, advertising “Moving Picture Cameras for sale cheap. Local Pictures Made. We rent cameras and cameramen.”⁵³ The Commercial Motion Picture Company started in New York in 1913, and in August placed an advertisement in Moving Picture World announcing that they specialized in making “motion pictures of local events.”⁵⁴ Even though the company promised a 25 percent commission to anyone who secured a film contract, its stint in the municipal film business was shortlived, a fate shared by many of its competitors. By October, the company was instead advertising its films of the World Series.⁵⁵

As the municipal advertising film became more commonplace, theater managers and other entrepreneurs tried their hand in the business, but without access to film exchanges, these individuals and companies did not try to distribute their films to larger audiences. While local films were still being used for civic purposes, theater managers and metropolitan or regional companies had a more expansive definition of the municipal advertising film than the companies that had national aspirations. In Philadelphia, city businessmen started the H. B. B. Motion Picture Company in February 1914 for the “special purpose of featuring Philadelphia, her industries and developing the activities of Philadelphians.”⁵⁶ The same month, the Magnet Film Manufacturing Company started in Evansville, Indiana, advertising that they made “Motion Pictures of Home-Comings, Carnivals, Conventions, Celebrations and Athletic Events,” in addition to educational, industrial, scenic, historical, and scientific films.⁵⁷ Despite this ambitious menu of production possibilities, the company did most of its work in nearby towns.⁵⁸ In Manhattan, Kansas, O. W. Holt started an eponymous film company, producing a film in June 1914 of the dedication of the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall in nearby Topeka. Instead of sending the film around the country, the local chapter of the GAR, a fraternity of Union veterans of the Civil War, decided to bury (literally) the film for fifty years so future generations could view their dedication ceremony.⁵⁹

In her study of the standardization of everyday life in the early decades of the twentieth century, Marina Moskowitz argues that the widespread adoption of zoning codes helped manage the growth of cities and small towns. City planners, like the professional boosters discussed earlier, traveled from town to town giving speeches about their latest ideas and published articles in national magazines about the importance of their work. Moskowitz suggests that in the promotional literature and speeches by municipal boosters and planners, “zoning provided both a process, arranged daily life in a city, and a product, an image of urban life.”⁶⁰ A municipal booster film had many of the same advantages as a zoning code, if not the same degree of permanence, because cities both had to change themselves to look suitable for the motion pictures and, once recorded, could use the film as a representation of their ideal selves. But by 1914, the local view was no longer a sufficient representational form. In order to make local films that would have nonlocal appeal, filmmakers needed to match the industry in its use of genre, narrative form, and special effects.

PARAGON FEATURE FILM COMPANY

Many varieties of the municipal booster film were produced in the early 1910s, from parade and convention films to real-estate advertisements to memorial films. Producers told sponsors that their films would be screened elsewhere as distinct works, or that excerpts from their films would be included in newsreels or travelogues.⁶¹ Made aware of the wider audience for their movies, sponsors and producers began rethinking the form of the local view as film style itself changed. Instead of shooting thousands of feet of film, companies began shooting one- or two-reel films that could more easily fit into an evening program. One of the most significant tendencies, however, was the incorporation of fictional and semi-fictional scenes into booster films. Filmmakers adopted narrative techniques from the theatrical motion picture. Several production houses made such movies, but the best examples come from the semi-fictional narrative versions of municipal booster films produced by the Paragon Feature Film Company, three of which are extant. Paragon’s work is indicative of how producers responded to changing distribution and exhibition patterns.⁶² In order to convince audiences that his films could be exhibited theatrically, Oliver William Lamb, the director of Paragon, defined his films as “motion pictures ‘with a plot.’”⁶³ Lamb made as many as one hundred booster films between 1912 and 1916, but there is scant evidence of their exhibition in theaters in towns other than their sites of production.

In May 1912, Lamb, a thirty-four-year-old who had previously been employed as a secretary-treasurer for a manufacturer of streetcar equipment and, more recently the secretary-treasurer for a company that produced a treatment for hog cholera, entered the motion picture business.⁶⁴ Living in Topeka, Kansas, Lamb joined other local businessmen to form the short-lived Victor Film Advertising Company, which produced booster films in Topeka and Lawrence, Kansas, before selling the business in July of that year.⁶⁵ A few months later, Lamb rejoined the movie field, traveling to McAlester, Oklahoma, to make a picture. Now representing the Special Event Film Company of New York, Lamb told the McAlester News-Capital that the films had been sent to his address in Illinois from New York.⁶⁶ The Special Event Film Company was incorporated on January 12, 1912, and advertised in Moving Picture World throughout that year. In April it first offered “motion pictures taken to order.”⁶⁷ Lamb may have encountered the company through the magazine Popular Mechanics in July 1912, in which its classified ad stated, “Have a local motion picture taken. It will pay you. We make ’em. Write for terms. State how many feet you want. We do the rest. Moving picture cameras and printers, bought, sold and exchanged. We rent Moving Picture Cameras.”⁶⁸

Lamb’s exact role with the company was unclear. On October 15, 1912, the Commercial Club of McAlester signed a contract to produce a picture of their city and the coalfields nearby. A camera operator and stage manager were expected to come to McAlester to take the pictures, and once the film was made, the paper reported that the reel would be sent “on the road in charge of a competent operator [presumably Lamb] throughout Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.”⁶⁹ That very evening, company director Fred Beck left New York for McAlester with a camera operator and stage manager, a trip of 1,400 miles.

Like the Industrial Film Syndicate, the Special Event Company asked its sponsor to stage a parade for the benefit of the cameras. But the News-Capital also reported that “the pictures will be staged just as the pictures in a regular company,” in order to make the film attractive to other audiences. The paper summarized the film’s plot as follows: “Six young ladies will be picked out who are to act as escort for the picture people. They will be taken aboard the Katy flyer, probably from the south, and the train will be shown coming into town. This gives an excuse for showing the union station, also.”⁷⁰

The plot summary notes that the women will be shown visiting the Busby Hotel, five of the best houses in McAlester, coal mines, cotton gins, and the agricultural exhibits at the county fair. The set-up for the film was common. Edwin S. Porter made a similar picture, Boarding School Girls, in Coney Island in 1905. Charles Musser has argued that the Porter film’s use of young women to provide a “seamless mimetic consistency” between scenes anticipated classical cinema.⁷¹ While the MacAlester film was made to advertise the surface rights to nearby coalfields, the newspaper points out that the picture will also “show to the east that this wild western country is as highly civilized as the most effete portions of ‘back east.’”⁷²

Renting the Forum Theater, the commercial club ran the film, titled Seeing McAlester, November 13–17, 1912.⁷³ While community members funded the film’s production, the film’s exhibition was intended to raise enough money for it to be distributed, for free, to the eastern states. The newspaper reviews were critical of the film, which was highly unusual as publishers were often aligned with booster organizations. In one scene, a local bank president appears with a hoe handle, which the newspaper describes as “the poor man’s golf stick,” and pretends to labor at a cottonseed oil mill, which some viewers perceived as a parody of either the bank president or common laborers.⁷⁴ After the first day of exhibition, the newspaper defended what appears to have been strong criticism of the film by those who saw it: “It should be remembered that the folks are not trained motion picture actors. The admonition to ‘not look at the camera’ had little effect. It was impossible to keep some folks from looking square at the camera and to that degree the pictures were impaired.”⁷⁵

Others complained that the people were too self-conscious before the camera and that some appeared repetitively, while others were left out entirely. The newspaper also admitted that the “story is necessarily not very thrilling.” The two-reeler was exhibited every hour during its run at the Forum, with comedy pictures added to fill out the program.⁷⁶

One month later, in December 1912, Lamb visited Wichita Falls, Texas, this time as a representative of the Special Scenic Film Company of Denver. Having adopted Special Events’ business model whole-cloth, Lamb proposed to the directors of the local chamber of commerce that he would shoot a thousand-foot film showing the scenes of Wichita Falls.⁷⁷ As part of his presentation, Lamb screened Seeing McAlaster at the Gem Theater. For $750, Lamb promised he would make the film and distribute it for a year, with the chamber picking the theaters where the film would be seen. While the Wichita Falls picture was not made, likely due to the expense of the production, Lamb proposed making similar films for dozens of towns.⁷⁸ On April 28, 1913, Lamb incorporated the Special Scenic Film Company in Colorado, with his wife and the owner of the hotel where they were staying serving as witnesses.⁷⁹ Soon after Special Scenic incorporated, Lamb either left it to start another company or, more likely, unofficially changed the name of his firm to the Paragon Feature Film Company.⁸⁰ By exchanging “Special Scenic” for “Paragon Feature,” Lamb signaled his awareness of what audiences were now expecting from the movies. Scenic films, a popular genre in the early cinema era, were receiving less play as narrative fiction films began to dominate movie theaters. Likewise, Paragon Feature suggested both the high expectations audiences had for films in the early 1910s and the growing popularity of the feature film, which in this period was as likely to connote the film’s distinction within the regular program as it was to indicate the length of the film.⁸¹ For the remainder of 1913, Lamb continued to make his sightseeing films, producing motion pictures in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Wichita, Little Rock, Kansas City, Houston, and several small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

Even though Lamb continued to produce sightseeing films throughout 1913, he experimented with the addition of fictional and narrative elements into a genre that had hitherto been strictly nonfiction and, for the most part, non-narrative. Lamb might have been influenced by the work of other industrial film companies, who began adding more fictional elements to local films in order to make them more attractive for audiences in other cities. For example, in June 1913, the Industrial Moving Picture Company turned an assignment to shoot a track meet in Springfield, Illinois, into an opportunity to write a scenario based on “one of the popular boys’ stories,” in which a track star is kidnapped by his rivals in order to keep him from competing but is rescued just in time for him to win the race. The World noted nationwide attention because “a scenario was written around what is generally a common place event.”⁸² By incorporating fictional scenes into the municipal film, Lamb was able to both distinguish his films from competitors offering similar services and assuage any fears that the films would be unsatisfactory to local audiences and unappealing to audiences elsewhere.

Figure 1.1. Brochure (c. 1913) from the Paragon Feature Film Company, Panama-Pacific International Exposition Records, 1893–1929. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley

In July, Lamb approached the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce with a plan to make a film about the rapidly growing city. Again, Lamb proposed to make a two-reeler (1,300 feet in this case), which had become Paragon’s standard. His business model had also changed slightly. Instead of requiring the booster organization to pay up front, Lamb said he would make the film at no charge but would use the receipts from its local exhibition to pay for production and distribution costs, thereby reducing risk for the sponsoring organization. Lamb also detailed his distribution plans. According to the newspaper, the Oklahoma City film would first be screened throughout the state, and then in theaters across the nation. As he told the chamber, the company would “furnish weekly reports showing the number of persons who see the film daily when it is exhibited.” While Lamb’s sales pitch was not new, the more interesting moment came when he described the film he planned: “My idea of taking Oklahoma City for the ‘movies’ would be to first show Oklahoma City as it was in 1889, a small town with a boxcar for a railroad station and cowboys and Indians about. It is somewhat like many persons suppose Oklahoma is today. Then we would show Oklahoma City in 1913.”⁸³

From there, Lamb went on to describe his formula to find six attractive young women and record them touring local sights. But his proposal that the city recreate a fictional version of Oklahoma City’s recent past is revealing, in part because Lamb once again supposed that the imagined audience for this film—namely, the large moviegoing public in the East—would be drawn to a narrative that depicted the city’s past, not its present. Lamb added more details to his distribution plans, suggesting the Oklahoma City film would be seen by three thousand people daily, just a small portion of the 20 million who regularly went to the movies.⁸⁴ Local businesses took him seriously. Speaking before the chamber of commerce in a special Saturday meeting, Lamb argued that “the clamor now is not for rough comedy, but for educational reels, as may be seen from the popularity of the animated weeklies,” using a synonym for newsreels.⁸⁵ Lamb proposed that the films could be shown at the Oklahoma building at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, then being organized. Lamb also screened films of Sherman, Texas, and Lincoln, Nebraska, before the chamber at the Overholser Theater, the largest in the city. Speaking to the local newspaper, Lamb speculated that the Oklahoma City reels would be superior to any his company had produced thus far.

The contract was signed on July 14, and the title—Seeing Oklahoma City in the Days of ’89—was announced in the next day’s paper, along with the estimate that 2 million people would view the film in a year’s time. For the first, historical reel, Lamb proposed recreating the scene of the 1889 land rush.⁸⁶ As Lamb described the scene in the shot-by-shot list reprinted in the newspaper, the event would feature “firing of gun, staking off claims, a gun fight or two, something that will cause the audience to raise up in its seats and reach for the ceiling.”⁸⁷ After a two-week delay, the scene was filmed at Northeast Lake on Sunday, July 27, with two thousand spectators. More than one hundred people participated in the scene itself, all of them dressed in regalia appropriate to 1889. The newspaper noted that automobiles, telephone poles, and other signs of modernity were left out of the scene. Lamb’s commitment to historical accuracy was evident in an encounter with a participant in the film, which was recorded by the newspaper:

In staging the scene, one man insisted on climbing to the top of a small oak tree and watching the scene. Director Lamb spied him and yelled:

“Say, you in the tree; climb on out—it wasn’t stylish to do that in ’89 I’m told.”

“Oh, yes it was,” the old timer replied. “That was just where I was when the run was made.”⁸⁸

As this interaction shows, Lamb used reenactment of locally important, nationally known events to appeal to larger audiences, as well as to give “old-timers” an opportunity to participate in a movie reproduction of the recent past. Soon after shooting the scene, Lamb called the picture the “greatest thing we have ever attempted” and noted a similar film shot with professional actors would cost three thousand dollars and take two weeks.⁸⁹ William Lou Gullett, the camera operator and scenario writer for Paragon, went even further in this self-praise, claiming, “It is probable that the Gaumont company will build a story about this feature of the Oklahoma City reel and advertise it throughout the United States.”⁹⁰

Before shooting in Oklahoma City was even finished, Lamb had already started soliciting towns for other Paragon films. For the rest of the year, Lamb produced films in Muskogee, Oklahoma; Wichita, Kansas; Billings, Montana; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Tulsa, Kansas City, Little Rock, and several more cities in Missouri and Texas.

FROM PILGRIM FILMS TO INDUSTRIAL ROMANCES

In January 1914, Lamb made what was probably his first industrial romance, A Council Bluffs Courtship, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, located just across the Nebraska border from Omaha, where Paragon had relocated a month earlier.⁹¹ The term “industrial romance” was often used to describe narrative industrial films, and such films used the word “romance” in their titles, including the International Harvester Company’s The Romance of the Reaper (1911).⁹² Although Lamb’s new narrative centered on romantic love, his films also reflected the literary tradition of the romance, in which the ideals of the city are personified in its native youth. Produced in an era in which civic promoters were considered the vanguard of business culture, municipal booster films were well suited for romantic themes.

Industrial romances inserted the views emblematic of the local film into the mise-en-scène of narrative fiction films. For Paragon’s industrial romances Lamb, or the sponsor, cast a young man and woman, in most cases the sons and daughters of prominent society members, to play the leads. The particularities of the films differed. Some included historical reenactments, while others explored contemporary political tensions over class, labor, and gender equality. However, they all incorporated the narrative of a courtship, often set against a backdrop of views of local industries, culminating in a wedding. In each, a couple meets, the man proposes, the woman accepts, and they marry. While this plot was not unusual, Lamb may have been the first itinerant filmmaker to make narrative “wedding” films, a trope that was used by many of his successors.⁹³

Soon after producing the Council Bluffs picture, Lamb traveled to San Antonio, Texas. While Lamb had already made his pilgrim films in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, as well as a number of smaller Texas towns, he had more ambitious plans for San Antonio. On January 12, 1914, Lamb signed a contract with the chamber of commerce to produce a “dramatic scenario” of the city that Lamb estimated would be seen by 500,000 people by the end of the film’s twenty-six-week run. Instead of shooting a reenactment of the Alamo, which had been staged for cameras in San Antonio in 1911, Lamb chose a contemporary story, which he titled An American Citizen.

According to the scenario printed in the newspaper, the film opens with a shot of a small house in the Chicago suburbs.⁹⁴ John Mason, a municipal engineer, is walking home when he sees his wife in tears, and her physician, Dr. Tadmas, leaving their house. The doctor informs him that his wife must be taken to a higher, warmer climate in order to get better. The couple’s daughter joins her parents on their porch, and Mason pulls out a publicity brochure for San Antonio. In the next scene, the family arrives to San Antonio, visits the Alamo immediately upon arrival, and then settles into their new home. In the first few scenes, the film establishes both San Antonio’s historical importance and its sunny weather, considered to be a key advantage over northern cities. While most of Lamb’s films did not portray life in other places, sponsors and audiences alike assumed that one of the purposes of their films was to entice people from larger cities to smaller, growing ones, and from the East to the West. By making this dynamic explicit in An American Citizen, Lamb represented in fictional form the possibility for cities to win new residents by producing attractive brochures or sponsoring interesting films.

After this optimistic beginning, the narrative turns darker, as we learn that, six months later, Mason has still not been able to find work. At that moment, Mason’s wife hands him a newspaper with the headline “Citizens Will Vote for Bonds.” The next day, Mason picks up the newspaper and learns that the city approved $20 million of bonds for municipal improvements to be made in the city over the next five years. Buoyed by this good news, the couple takes a sightseeing tour of San Antonio. While on tour, the Masons meet the Warrens, old friends from Chicago who also relocated to San Antonio. Frank Warren, the couple’s son, and Louise Mason, the Masons’ daughter, reconnect, and within a few minutes of screen time, Frank kisses Louise. As the scenario put it, “the flames of an old love are fanned afresh.” The elder Warren offers John Mason a job on the project that will widen Commerce Street. A few scenes later, Frank decides to visit Louise at her home. When he arrives, he discovers that the house is in flames. Although the fire department has already arrived, it is up to Frank to rescue Louise. With the Mason house destroyed, Frank and Louise go back to the Warren home, where the couple’s parents both bless the marriage. A wedding follows, and the film closes with a shot of the couple at the railroad station, about to embark on a honeymoon. The final scenes in An American Citizen—a courtship, a fire, a rescue, and a wedding—are repeated in almost every Paragon film made between 1914 and 1916.

For most of 1914 and 1915, Lamb produced moving pictures in the Midwest and Upper Midwest, working in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Kansas. Three shot in this period have been preserved and are among the few extant municipal booster movies. All three films—The Lumberjack (1914, Wausau, Wisconsin), Present and Past in Cradle of Dixie (1914, Montgomery, Alabama), and The Blissveldt Romance (1915, Grand Rapids, Michigan)—are mostly intact and indicate the vibrancy and skill of Lamb and his crew. While these films represent a small percentage of the work the company produced in its brief yet prolific history, the films show the changing status of local scenes in Lamb’s mostly pre-scripted narratives.

In February 1914, just after he finished An American Citizen, Lamb returned to the historical reenactment film, shooting Present and Past in Cradle of Dixie in Montgomery. Six months earlier, Lamb had treated the Oklahoma land rush as a historical event spatially and temporally disconnected from the rest of the film. But for the Montgomery film, Lamb used this historical event as the backdrop for a story that addressed the tension between the South’s agricultural past and its industrial present. In addition to resonating with other movies commemorating the Civil War, with 1915’s The Birth of a Nation being the most prominent, Present and Past was also in keeping with the newly popular historical pageants, elaborate outdoor stage dramas used to celebrate local history.⁹⁵

In Montgomery, Lamb had William Gullett, his “scenario expert,” write a plot that featured a reenactment of Jefferson Davis’s 1861 inauguration as the president of the Confederacy. In this fictional film a group of businessmen from the North come to Montgomery to witness this reenactment. After touring local sights and industries, one of the visitors, Bertram C. Lawton, falls in love with southern belle Elinore Harrison, who is described in a plot summary printed in the Montgomery Advertiser as the “beauteous link of the chivalrous past and the dreaming present.”⁹⁶ But the past is not really past, as Elinore’s grandfather, a Confederate colonel in the Civil War, refuses to allow his granddaughter to marry a northerner. The couple agrees to break off their wedding plans, but soon after a fire breaks out in the colonel’s home. Lawton races to the house and saves the life of Elinore’s grandfather, who then blesses the wedding.

Lamb’s decision to make another historical reenactment film was in part driven by market considerations and, likely, his sense that white southerners would be interested in participating in yet another commemoration of the Civil War. In an interview with the Montgomery Advertiser, Lamb said that “one of the most attractive features of all moving picture productions is the reproduction of the scenes of the past through a series of shadow or memory pictures,” and that viewers of Present and Past would witness a “glimpse, dramatic and vivid, of the epic past, through incidents of the day.”⁹⁷ The film, including the “memory pictures,” was sponsored by the Business Men’s League.

In one early scene, Elinore brings Lawton and the other visitors to the capitol, where they all take out binoculars to observe the city. Although the party is shown to be on the steps of the Greek Revival capitol building, only some of the subsequent point-of-view shots were taken from the capitol. Others were taken from the higher vantage point of high-rise office buildings. Matte framing is used to simulate the binocular point of view, underlining the importance of seeing these scenes as a tourist would.

After the sightseeing shots, Present and Past in Cradle of Dixie transitions to the historical reenactment of the early days of the Confederacy. The first intertitle announces that the event is the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis at the Alabama State Capitol, even though the actual anniversary took place three years earlier. The next intertitle reads “Crowd cheers as Governor appears,” although it is not immediately clear whether the governor being cheered is the 1914 governor or the 1861 governor. The two intertitles are followed by a pan of the crowd, with many feather-hatted women and top-hatted men waving to the camera, making this shot one of the few in the film where local audiences would see themselves on screen. As the Montgomery Advertiser reported, members of historical and patriotic societies were invited to participate in the scenes, and men were asked to “wear the big old fashioned black bow ties, Prince Albert coats, and high hats.”⁹⁸ While the paper assured its readers that those not in costume would still be able to appear on camera, it is significant that one of the few crowd scenes in the film asked participants to be reenactors. The next intertitle introduces Alabama’s governor, Emmet O’Neal, himself the son of a former governor and Confederate general, informing the viewer that his speech “paints thrilling word pictures of the stirring days of the early sixties.” The next shot shows the governor giving a speech, followed by a shot of several men in a conference room.

Figures 1.2 and 1.3. Still frames from Present and Past in Cradle of Dixie (1914). Courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery

Unlike the Oklahoma City film, which featured a reenactment of the dramatic land rush, Present and Past depicts the early days of the Civil War as a series of heated discussions, all taking place within the confines of the capitol. Even the reenactment of the Davis inauguration is shot more like a newsreel than a fictional narrative. Lamb told the Montgomery newspapers that the scenes would be used in Pathe’s Weekly, the Mutual Weekly, and the Animated Weekly newsreels.⁹⁹ Audiences could thus read these reenactment scenes in two ways. First, they could be seen as fictional scenes within a narrative that was filmed in Montgomery. Alternatively, they could be read as documentation of the people of Montgomery re-enacting an historical event. In the first case, the picture would only be legible if it was seen in its entirety. In the second, the reenactment scenes could be cut out of the film and inserted into a newsreel. Based on Lamb’s statements to the local press, he intended for the film to be used in either way.

With the historical section of the film complete, Lamb returned to the wedding narrative, which starts with a ball at Morning View, an antebellum mansion used as the location for the remaining scenes. Bertram proposes to Elinore at a fountain, a prop that appears in several of Lamb’s films. The lovers visit Colonel Harrison, who signals his disapproval. Bertram returns to the dance and a crowd gathers round to hear his troubles. An intertitle informs the viewer that Bertram has decided to steal Elinore away, which in effect realizes grandfather’s fears and, by extension, the fears of many white southerners wary of northern investors. In the next sequence, a horse-drawn fire engine races to the house where Elinore lives. Three women, shown earlier to be on the second floor of the house, jump out the window, and in the next shot we see firemen rush into the building. The film ends with a quick intertitle—“A Happy Reconciliation”—followed by a shot of Bertram and Elinore with a minister. (See Moving Image 1.1.)

This tidy ending connects Montgomery’s past with its present and suggests that the future of the city lies in greater economic and cultural ties between New England and points south and west. In a Paragon Feature Film brochure, likely produced in 1913, Lamb claimed that the purpose of his films was to counteract regional prejudices. For example, he told potential clients that “there are a lot of young men and women in New England with PhDs after their names who ‘want to know’ if the inhabitants of your city live in sod houses and take the children to school under an escort of armed cowboys.”¹⁰⁰ In a few cases, like the Montgomery picture, Lamb incorporated reenactments of widely known historical events from a town’s history into the narrative, but he was careful to include scenes of modern life as well. While sponsors saw scenes of coalfields as suitable attractions for Lamb’s early film of McAlester, Oklahoma, by 1914 sponsors were enticed by films that integrated local attractions—factories, local landmarks, and prominent citizens—into a film narrative. In Muscatine, Iowa, Lamb highlighted the city’s pearl button industry by incorporating the process of their manufacture into the plot.¹⁰¹ For his romance of Jackson, Michigan, Lamb staged a race between two automobiles made in the city.¹⁰² Unlike the pilgrim films, where the various sights of the city were treated equally, with a shot of a local church just as important as a shot of farm land or an industrial plant, the industrial romance films centered their narratives around particular industries.

Figure 1.4. Program from Present and Past in Cradle of Dixie (1914). Courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery

For The Lumberjack, filmed in Wausau, Wisconsin, in July 1914, Lamb used the industrial romance storyline, with the town’s lumber mill serving as the principal attraction. A married couple, Hans and Helen Hagge, played the leading roles. Hans Hagge had moved to Wausau several years earlier to head a new mutual insurance company, while his wife, Helen, was the daughter of a lumber pioneer.¹⁰³ In the fictional story, Helen and Hans spend their courtship visiting the town’s industries, including a lumber mill and granite quarry. One scene, which takes place at the park where the couple plans to marry, features shots of log rolling, a local folk practice that Lamb filmed in many Wisconsin cities in the summer of 1914. At one point, Helen takes out glasses to survey the city. As with other Paragon works, her point-of-view shot is framed by a matte. The following shots, all pans, demonstrate the size of the city and its principal attractions, including the river and lumberyards. These industrial scenes are followed by views of the country club, including shots of golfers. One obvious, if not directly stated, difference between the municipal booster film and the local view is the former’s emphasis on the upper class, or “society,” instead of the latter’s emphasis on democracy before the eye of the camera.¹⁰⁴

For the rest of 1914 and early 1915, Paragon produced more films in Wisconsin and Kansas, and received contracts to produce films for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In April 1915, Paragon returned to the South, shooting From Wedding Bells to Cotton Bolls in Memphis, Tennessee, and The Spirit of Columbus, 1865–1915 in Columbus, Georgia. In Memphis, Lamb staged the burning and sinking of a steamboat on the Mississippi River, an event that was spectacular enough to win the film limited distribution in Ohio.¹⁰⁵ For the Columbus film, Lamb appears to have reused the reenactment footage originally shot in Montgomery and filmed a new reenactment of the “last battle” between the North and South, with local people playing soldiers on both sides.¹⁰⁶ Even though the stunts in Lamb’s Midwestern films were not as spectacular as those used in the South and Southwest, he made up for the lack of special effects with increasingly complex narratives.

Although Lamb had been flirting with melodramatic plots for more than year, by September 1915 he had fully committed to the mode. Film theorist Linda Williams argues that melodrama was the dominant form of popular cinematic narrative in the silent era, one particularly suited to address questions of morality. In Paragon’s late films, the moral question appears to have been, what is the human price of progress? The factories that boosters once fought to get were now depicted as hazardous workplaces. Urbanization meant an abandonment of rural life. Access to national markets brought with it threats to family unity. As Williams argues, melodrama promises that we can always reverse time, return to a “space of innocence.” She continues, “Melodrama offers the hope, then, that it may not be too late, that there may still be an original locus of virtue, and that this virtue and truth can be achieved in private individuals and individual heroic acts.”¹⁰⁷ The wedding scenes in the Paragon films signal the close of a progressive narrative. The couple overcomes physical danger and protestations by family members in order to ensure the community’s continued development and growth. At the same time, these scenes are an attempt to wish away the tensions between modernity and tradition, nationalism and localism, the uncertain present and the unviable past. Entering its last year of production, Paragon began making pictures that overflowed with melodramatic scenes, threatening their very function as town boosters.

In the early autumn of 1915, Lamb traveled to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to make The Blissveldt Romance, a melodrama contrasting rural and city life. The film opens in Jennison, Michigan, a small town a few miles from Grand Rapids. John Graham has just accepted a job offer from a bank in Grand Rapids, leaving behind his girlfriend Lizzie Johnson, who works at the Blissveldt dairy farm. When John arrives at the train station in downtown Grand Rapids, he is so overwhelmed by city life that he is struck by a car when he tries to cross the street. The driver of the car, the urbane and wealthy Amelia Brown, takes him to her palatial estate and nurses him back to health. Within a few days, John asks Amelia’s father if he can marry his daughter, but he is turned down. However, the mansion soon catches fire, as mansions tend to do in Paragon films, and John rescues Amelia, convincing her father to approve the marriage.

At this point, The Blissveldt Romance takes an unexpected turn. Back in Jennison, Lizzie reads of John’s nuptials in the Grand Rapids newspaper. She gets on a horse, not in a car, and heads to town to find John. In the next scene, she stops the horse and takes out a telescope, which she uses to find John in the crowd. The matte shots we see do not show John, however, but instead the crowd scenes for which local films are best known. The people waving to the camera are not waving to Lizzie but instead to audiences in Grand Rapids and other cities where the film might be shown. Once Lizzie locates the wedding party at an elite rowing club, she makes the brash and unexpected decision to commit suicide by jumping off a pier. This melodramatic scene is unusually dark for a town promotional film, and Lamb only managed to pull off a happy ending by showing a scene of Amelia and John with their young daughter a few years later.

When Lamb used the same ending for The Maid of the Mississippi, produced in Rock Island, Illinois, in October 1916, he ran into censorship troubles. Described in the Moving Picture World as a “home talent photoplay,” the film stood out because it lacked the “traditional happy ending” for which such pictures were known.¹⁰⁸ While the mayor of Rock Island eventually relented and approved the sponsored film’s local exhibition, the fact that such a confrontation happened at all suggests the perils of making local films that were thrilling enough for the national marketplace. In an effort to match the standards of popular narrative movie productions, Lamb ended up producing pictures that aimed to succeed as entertainment rather than as town advertisements.

Although its pace of production slowed sharply after 1915, Paragon continued to make films in the Midwest for another year or two. In May 1916, Paragon shot A Cedar Valley Romance in Waterloo, Iowa. While Lamb still told the film’s sponsor that he planned to exhibit the film for 182 days and nights, he no longer emphasized the appeal of local monuments and buildings as attractions in themselves. Instead, Lamb set narrative pieces in locations within the city. “He will make use of St. Francis hospital for an injured patient,” the Waterloo paper reported, “Grace Methodist church for a wedding, the rear of an observation car on the Cedar Valley line for a honeymoon scene, the Cedar river for a boat regatta, and the Fourth street bridge for a parade.”¹⁰⁹

The paper also reported that similar films had been made in eighty-six cities, of which fifty titles have been identified. While the film’s production and initial reception was not unusual, its distribution was covered in more detail than the typical Paragon film. In December 1916, six months after the film was first exhibited in Waterloo, the newspaper reported that Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company wrote the town’s commercial club, asking if they could exhibit its sponsored film in cities where they had branch factories.¹¹⁰ In April 1917, a Waterloo resident reportedly saw herself on screen in a movie theater in Clarksville, Kentucky, which exhibited her hometown’s moving picture.¹¹¹ The same month, John S. Conger, then president of Paragon, wrote the commercial club that its film had been seen in dozens of cities in Indiana and Kentucky.¹¹² In June, the club was informed by Paragon, now based in Des Moines, that the film print would be returned to them after its exhibition in Minneapolis and St. Paul.¹¹³ A year after its return to Waterloo, A Cedar Valley Romance was shown at Electric Park, an amusement center.¹¹⁴

One bright spot in the waning years of the booster film was the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. As early as September 1913, Lamb encouraged the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce to turn over Seeing Oklahoma City to the state’s Panama-Pacific Exposition Commission, which took the films on a tour to raise funds for the Oklahoma State Building.¹¹⁵ At the end of 1914, Lamb signed a contract with the Panama-Pacific Commission of Kansas to take fifty thousand feet of film in two hundred towns in Kansas.¹¹⁶ In January 1915, the city commissioners of Emporia, Kansas, agreed to pay seventy-five dollars for a thousand-foot film of their town, which would be screened at both the Panama-Pacific Exposition and the later Panama-California Exposition in San Diego.¹¹⁷ The films were to be accompanied by a lecture from Major W. L. “Iron Jaw” Brown, then the speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives.¹¹⁸ For 50,000 Feet of Kansas, Lamb returned to shooting local views, including ample footage of schoolchildren, prominent buildings, fire engines, and automobiles.¹¹⁹ In addition to being screened at the two expos, the films would be shown, Lamb said, in the eastern United States by the National Association of Real Estate Dealers.¹²⁰

Paragon was not the only film company making films for states interested in novel methods of fundraising. For example, the Kentucky commission contracted with the National Film Products Company of Cincinnati to produce a state film for two dollars a foot, with some of the proceeds being used to erect a state building.¹²¹ Similar schemes were used in Michigan, Colorado, and Tennessee.¹²² By the time the exposition opened in February, many state buildings featured motion picture rooms, where expo-goers could see films of the state. One observer counted seventy-seven motion picture projectors at the state and country halls.¹²³ Many of the films produced by Paragon and other municipal film companies were exhibited at the expo, supplementing the more elaborate displays states and cities usually sent. In some cases these served as fundraisers to erect buildings. The sheer amount of footage shot in preparation for the exposition may have exhausted business groups’ enthusiasm—and budgets—for such productions.

Around 1917, the Paragon Feature Film Company dissolved.¹²⁴ In September 1918, O. W. Lamb registered for the draft, identifying himself as a shoe salesman for a company in Akron, Ohio.¹²⁵ A few years later, he moved to Detroit, where he died on July 19, 1931. While Lamb appears to have been a particularly successful itinerant filmmaker, his relatively brief stint was typical of the trade. Of the dozens of companies that specialized in the production of municipal boosting films, few lasted more than three years. The Industrial Moving Picture Company, renamed the Rothacker Film Manufacturing Company in February 1916, is the only significant producer of booster films that survived the wave of industry consolidation and centralization in the late 1910s, but it too limited production of booster films by the end of the decade.¹²⁶

There is little evidence that booster films received national distribution, and the trade press suggests that many producers misled sponsors about the potential reach of their films. As early as March 1914, an editorial in the Moving Picture World warned that municipal film producers exaggerated the circulation of their films.¹²⁷ The sponsors for municipal booster films quickly lost their aspirations for national audiences. By 1922, trade paper suspicions of booster films had filtered down to the local press. That year, following yet another story announcing a plan for motion pictures to be made of the county fair, an Oxnard, California, newspaper complained that as easy as it was to make a motion picture, distributing it was all but impossible.¹²⁸

By 1915, municipal advertising film producers were already curtailing their ambitions. The national consolidation and centralization of motion picture distribution operations made it difficult for companies like Paragon to promise towns that their films would be screened in other cities. While booster pictures were occasionally produced after 1915, such films tended to either be limited to the local market or one-off projects with uneven results.¹²⁹ Furthermore, the booster movement itself shifted directions soon after the entry of United States into the Great War in 1917, as national unity became paramount. Local film producers once again had to be content to make films that created, as Lamb put it in one of his company’s brochures, “a flurry of local interest” and were then “never shown outside of the City limits again.”¹³⁰

The producers of municipal advertising films expanded the category of local motion pictures by making films that boosters saw as equal to those produced by the national companies, even if they failed to received distribution. While local movies of all modes continued to be made after the transitional era, by 1917 producers rarely promised that their films would be screened elsewhere. Instead, the municipal advertising film retained one function: showing local people themselves and the attributes of the place where they lived in hopes that they would stay put. The production and exhibition of municipal advertising films in the early 1910s established both the possibilities and limits for the local film in the transitional era.

NOTES

1. Jowett, Film.

2. In fact, the work could also be said to put cinema in a local contest. Lindsay’s hometown newspaper noted that the book, originally entitled A Higher Criticism of the Movies, was “based entirely on personal observation of the movies in this city.” See “Criticizes ‘Movies,’” SNR, July 17, 1915, 7.

3. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 146–150.

4. “Society to Show in Elopement of Beautiful Heiress, Filmed in Novel City ‘Booster’ Drama,” SNR, June 16, 1915, 1.

5. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 44.

6. See Robert C. Allen, “Decentering Historical Audience Studies: A Modest Proposal,” in Fuller-Seeley, ed., Hollywood in the Neighborhood, 20–36.

7. Waller, Main Street Amusements, 64.

8. Although this project focuses on the United States, moviegoing research is increasingly an international field, with recent contributions only confirming how narrow, and atypical, New York was as an early site of cinema culture.

9. This argument is presented most succinctly in Vanessa Schwartz and Leo Charney’s edited volume Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life.

10. For an overview of this debate, see Wanda Strauven’s edited volume Cinema of Attractions Reloaded.

11. Kember, Marketing Modernity, 26, 22, 32, 27.

12. Ibid., 142.

13. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 90.

14. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 43.

15. On the central role newspapers played in shaping movie publics, see Abel, Menus for Movieland.

16. Town Development, December 1909, 1.

17. In 1914, a thousand-foot municipal film of St. Louis produced by the St. Louis Motion Picture Company and sponsored by the Business Men’s League was sent to South America. See MPW, April 18, 1914, 381. A similar film of Cincinnati also toured cities in South America that year. See MPW, June 13, 1914, 557.

18. For a very broad overview of municipal advertising, see Ward, Selling Places.

19. E. L. McColgin, “Putting Your Town upon a Map: A Few Intensely Practical Suggestions from a Town Developer Who Takes His Own Advice and Delivers the Good Thereby,” Town Development, December 1912, 175.

20. See Daniel J. Boorstin’s chapter on boosters in The Americans, 113–161.

21. See Wrobel, Promised Lands. See also Teaford, Cities of the Heartland.

22. This movement to standardization took place across a number of areas of civic life. See Novak, The People’s Welfare; Reps, The Making of Urban America; and Moskowitz, Standard of Living.

23. Vaughn-Roberson and Vaughn-Roberson, City in the Osage Hills, 69.

24. “The First Municipal Motion Pictures Ever Made,” Kansas Citian, May 1913, 64.

25. Leo L. Redding, “Town Boosting with the ‘Movies,’” Town Development, November 1912, 129–131, 129 (quotation). The piece was reprinted in the short-lived film advertising trade publication Moving Picture Publicity a year later. See Moving Picture Publicity, December 1913, 3–8.

26. Ibid., 131.

27. Kessler and Masson, “Layers of Cheese.”

28. Watterson Rothacker, “Advertising by Moving Pictures,” in Johnson, comp. and ed., Library of Advertising, 250.

29. Epes Winthrop Sargent, “Advertising for Exhibitors,” MPW, June 21, 1913, 1244.

30. Watterson Rothacker, “Industrial Uses of the Motion Picture,” Scientific American, June 15, 1912, 536. There are a handful of examples of industrial municipal advertising films made before 1910, including films of Chicago’s factories, which were produced for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, held in Seattle in 1909. See “Chicago to Be Advertised,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 20, 1908, 13.

31. Rothacker, “Industrial Uses of the Motion Picture,” 536.

32. MPW, July 29, 1911, 221.

33. MPW, August 5, 1911, 297.

34. “Crowd Was There, But No Pictures,” The State (Columbia, S.C.), October 8, 1911, 9. The telegram was reprinted in the newspaper.

35. MPW, May 23, 1914, 1131.

36. Horatio F. Stoll, “Value of the Moving Pictures for Advertising,” MPW, March 11, 1911, 521.

37. MPW, October 14, 1911, 133.

38. “Moving Pictures Will Show Busy New Brunswick to the Rest of the State and Country,” NBT, January 26, 1912, 1. The company identified themselves as the Commercial Film Syndicate in this letter, but the company later returned to using the name Industrial Film Syndicate, which was also the name used to register their incorporation in the state of New York on May 31, 1912, New York State Division of Corporations, State Records. In Iowa, the company called itself the Independent Film Syndicate.

39. See “Moving Pictures Will Show Busy New Brunswick to the Rest of the State and Country,” and “Moving Picture Films Will Advertise City’s Attractiveness,” Municipal Journal, February 29, 1912, 323.

40. “Moving Pictures Will Show Busy New Brunswick to the Rest of the State and Country.”

41. Ibid.

42. NBT, April 6, 1912, 4.

43. “Starting to Get Town on the Move,” NBT, April 9, 1912, 1; “Boost New Brunswick Is Helped Along by Donations of $1,700,” NBT, April 11, 1912, 1. Between 1910 and 1920, the city’s population grew by 40.2 percent, to 32,779. See Fourteenth Census of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 1:524.

44. “Firemen Snapped on the Run,” NBT, April 20, 1912, 1.

45. For more on fire and early cinema, see Moore, Now Playing, 45–74.

46. “Take Pictures That Show City Is on the Move,” NBT, April 23, 1912, 1; “Moving Pictures Taken of Times Plant,” NBT, April 26, 1912, 1.

47. “Latest News Concerning Booster Week,” NBT, May 25, 1912, 1.

48. “New Airdome Opens Tonight,” NBT, July 7, 1910, 1. While the theater featured live performances, films were screened between acts. See advertisement, NBT, July 27, 1910, 5.

49. “Mayor’s Wink at Camera Man Is Discovered,” NBT, May 28, 1912, 3.

50. “Week of Moving Picture Views of Local Scenes,” NBT, June 5, 1912, 3.

51. “Can See City All on the Jump at One Glimpse,” NBT, June 6, 1912, 3.

52. MPW, August 24, 1912, 781.

53. MPW, April 12, 1913, 200.

54. MPW, August 2, 1913, 574.

55. MPW, October 18, 1913, 247.

56. MPW, February 14, 1914, 828. For more on local films in Philadelphia, see Fryk-holm, Framing the Feature Film, 131–132.

57. MPW, February 7, 1914, 708.

58. For example, in July 1914, Magnet made a film of the Elks state convention and silver jubilee and exhibited it throughout Indiana. See MPW, July 11, 1914, 324.

59. MPW, June 13, 1914, 1556.

60. Moskowitz, Standard of Living, 184, 216.

61. Raymond Fielding suggests that in the silent era, freelance cameramen provided a significant portion of the footage used in the national newsreels. See Fielding, The American Newsreel, 134. For more on travelogues, see Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams. While some municipal booster films could also be classified as travelogues, there is scant evidence that booster films were received as such.

62. For example, in 1914, the Scenic Film Company of Atlanta produced a film in connection with the business-led “Buy-a-Bale” campaign, which asked Georgians to purchase extra bales of cotton in order to keep up commodity prices. The film starred Atlanta mayor James G. Woodward and was written and directed by Mrs. J. Garnett Starr, who the paper claimed had acted in films by D. W. Griffith. See Atlanta Constitution, October 11, 1914, 11M.

63. PPIE, carton 58, folder 21.

64. “Factory Company Will Build Here,” Topeka (Kans.) Daily Capital, February 18, 1908, 7.

65. The company used a variation of the “tourist” plot described below. See “A Kansas ‘Rube’ in Topeka’s Film,” Topeka (Kans.) Daily Capital, May 17, 1912, 14, and “Films Tuesday,” Jeffersonian-Gazette (Lawrence, Kans.), May 29, 1912, 5. The company was bought by James Calvin and renamed the Best Film Manufacturing Company. See “Victor Film Company Has Changed Hands,” Topeka (Kans.) Daily Capital, July 24, 1912, 10.

66. “Pictures Shown. McAlester ‘Movies’ Being Shown by Commercial Club at the Forum,” MNC, November 13, 1912, 1.

67. A certificate of incorporation was filed with the state of New York. According to the same records, the company dissolved on November 23, 1915. In January 1913, the Moving Picture News reported that the company’s president, Fred Beck, had covered ten thousand miles that month alone, taking pictures for his educational series and promoting his company’s new camera. See Moving Picture News, January 25, 1913, 22.

68. Popular Mechanics, July 1912, 19.

69. “Picture of City,” MNC, October 15, 1912, 1.

70. Ibid.

71. Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903–1940,” 125.

72. “Picture of City.”

73. “Pictures Shown,” MNC, November 13, 1912, 1.

74. Ibid.

75. “All ‘Seeing McAlester,’” MNC, November 14, 1912, 1.

76. Ibid. See also the advertisement for the Forum in the same issue, 5.

77. Wichita (Kans.) Daily Times, December 3, 1912, 1.

78. Wichita (Kans.) Daily Times. December 11, 1912, 4.

79. Incorporation records, Secretary of State, Colorado, April 28, 1913, Colorado State Archives, Denver.

80. The secretary of state’s incorporation office in Colorado does not have a record of a Paragon Feature Film Company. Personal correspondence with the author, August 20, 2010. The state of Nebraska also does not have a record of Paragon’s incorporation. Personal correspondence with the author, June 1, 2010.

81. As Charlie Keil notes, 1913 also marks the advent of the feature film. See Keil, “1913.”

82. MPW, June 14, 1913, 1149.

83. “‘Movies’ of Oklahoma City Made in 1889 and 1913, Proposal Made to Chamber of Commerce,” DO, July 12, 1913, 10.

84. “Motion Picture Plan Considered,” DO, July 13, 1913, 5. Russell Merritt estimates that by 1910, nickelodeons drew 26 million Americans every week. See Merritt, “The Nickelodeon Theater, 1905–1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” in Exhibition: The Film Reader, ed. Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 2002), 22.

85. “Motion Picture Plan Considered.”

86. “Contract Signed to Show City in Motion Pictures,” DO, July 15, 1913, 1.

87. DO, July 15, 1913, 2.

88. “Run of ’89ers Was Picturesque Sight,” DO, July 28, 1913, 8.

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid. In 1913, Gullett was listed as the manager of the Empress Theater in Ballenger and Richards Forty-First Annual Denver Directory (Denver: Ballenger and Richards, 1913).

91. MPW, January 24, 1914, 428.

92. See MPW, April 15, 1911, 822. As the Educational Film Magazine defined the term in 1919, an industrial romance is a “motion picture advertising feature in which business is combined with sentiment to form a basic theme.” See “‘Industrial Romance’ in Theatre,” Educational Film Magazine, March 1919, 32.

93. For example, Walter Steiner, of the Hudris Film Company, also made wedding films in the 1910s.

94. “Begin Taking Film Showing San Antonio,” San Antonio (Tex.) Light, January 14, 1914, 11.

95. For more, see Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry.

96. MA, March 22, 1914, 23.

97. “Moving Pictures to Hold Sway in City for Two Days,” MA, February 22, 1914, 12.

98. Ibid.

99. “Merchants to Be Shown on Screen,” MA, February 20, 1914, 9.

100. Brochure, PPIE, carton 58, folder 21. Thanks to Paul Moore for suggesting that the flyer is from 1913. According to Moore, the list of distributors is identical to those used by the Universal Film Company.

101. MPW, June 6, 1914, 1426.

102. MPW, June 20, 1914, 1717.

103. See “Marathon County Historical Society: People of Marathon County,” http://www.marathoncountyhistory.com/PeopleDetails.php?PeopleId=157.

104. In some cases, local views also privileged the upper classes, but given the large number of street scenes, it was possible for someone like an overeager child to appear in a local view multiple times even if he or she was not invited to do so.

105. See Advertisement, Evening Tribune (Marysville, Ohio), December 9, 1915, 2.

106. “Columbus Pictures to Be Shown Tomorrow,” Columbus (Ga.) Ledger, April 11, 1915, 10. The battle referred to an actual “last battle,” which took place on April 16, 1865, in Columbus. See Charles A. Misulia, Columbus, Georgia, 1865: The Last True Battle of the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

107. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 28, 35.

108. “Censorship and Home Talent Films,” MPW, October 28, 1916, 583.

109. “Waterloo Women to Act in Movies; Suffragists Will Play Their Part,” WEC, May 19, 1916, 1.

110. “Waterloo Film Sought,” WECR, December 18, 1916, 11.

111. “Sees Self in Movies in Kentucky Theatre,” WECR, April 17, 1917, 3.

112. “Show the Waterloo Film in Minneapolis,” Waterloo (Iowa) Times-Tribune, April 6, 1917, 6.

113. “Cedar Valley Romance Coming Home after Long Tour for Last Showing,” WECR, June 9, 1917, 3. In July 1915, the company was identified in the SNR as being located in Des Moines, Iowa. See SNR, July 24, 1915, 3.

114. WECR, August 24, 1918, 7.

115. See MPW, September 20, 1913, 1294.

116. “Emporia in Panama Show,” EG, December 28, 1914, 1.

117. “Pictures for Big Shows,” EG, January 19, 1915, 1.

118. “Children in Movies,” HN, January 9, 1915, 2.

119. In 1916, Lamb also shot fifty thousand feet of Texas towns for the picture titled Texas as It Is Today. See “Films to Show Industries in the Southwest,” Kerrville (Tex.) Mountain Sun, January 29, 1916, 1.

120. “Getting in the Movies,” HN, January 18, 1915, 3. Lamb may not have lived up to his promises to the people of Hutchinson, as visitors from that town to the exposition could not find the Kansas films on display. See “But Where Are the Films?” HN, December 16, 1915, 10.

121. Telegram from F. G. Hogue. November 18, 1914, PPIE, carton 58, folder 22.

122. Michigan used proceeds from film production to pay for its building. See Telegram to George Hough Perry, July 9, 1914, PPIE, carton 58, folder 28. In Colorado, boosters planned to raise fifty thousand dollars by charging towns to shoot ten thousand feet of film, which would then be exhibited in their state hall. See letter to Frank Burt, June 11, 1914, PPIE, box 12, folder 3. In Tennessee, state boosters reported receiving seven thousand dollars from the sales of film contracts to go toward construction of their hall. See Telegram from F. G. Hoge, November 23, 1914, PPIE, carton 59, folder 14.

123. Macober. The Jewel City, 149.

124. City Directory of Greater Omaha (Omaha: Omaha Directory Company, 1917), 1255.

125. Draft card, September 12, 1918, “U.S. World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918,” Ancestry Library Edition, ancestry.com.

126. Rothacker’s name change, which was accompanied by the company’s expansion, was reported in the Chicago Daily Tribune (“Industrial Changes Its Name”), on February 19, 1916, 14. For an account of the company’s post-1916 work, see A. S. Witmer, “Motion Picture and City Publicity,” American Municipalities 38, no. 2 (November 1919): 198. The film described was produced in Louisville for the benefit of the shareholders of the Louisville Industrial Foundation. While the film was exhibited theatrically, and the article discusses plans to distribute the film, neither was proposed by the Rothacker Film Manufacturing Company.

127. MPW, March 14, 1914, 1405.

128. “Educational Movies,” Oxnard (Calif.) Daily Courier, August 26, 1922, 2.

129. For example, in 1923, the Rothacker Film Company produced the seven-reel booster film The Spirit of St. Louis. See Louis J. Manar Papers, 1915–1935, Missouri History Museum Archives, St. Louis. Personal correspondence with the author, June 5, 2010. While the film was intended to be distributed nationwide, its producers focused on nontheatrical exhibition.

130. Paragon brochure, PPIE, carton 58, folder 21.