5

KIDNAPPING THE MOVIE QUEEN

Amateur Aesthetics as Cultural Critique

IN THE SUMMER OF 1927, Marion Gleason, a member of the Rochester, New York, Community Players, spent several weeks directing a troupe of “Part Time Pickfords and Vacation Valentinos” in an amateur production.¹ The motion picture that resulted, Fly Low Jack and the Game, had the backing of Rochester’s leading company, Kodak, who saw it as an opportunity to prove that its new 16mm amateur-gauge movie camera, the Cine-Kodak Model B, was as easy to use as its still cameras.² Produced with the assistance of Kodak employees and screened initially in a private home, the picture was a great success. Soon after its completion, Kodak arranged for it to be shown at the University of Rochester’s Little Theater and, according to company publicity, more than 150 cities throughout the United States.³ One of the cinematographers, Harry Tuttle, produced a local newsreel at many of the stops, giving audiences a first look at the potential of a camera that would make it almost as easy to shoot movies as it was to watch them.⁴

While one would expect that the birthplace of the amateur movie industry would also be an early production center, Kodak’s decision to roadshow Fly Low Jack, a parody of Hollywood adventure films, was at odds with the company’s strategy of encouraging consumers to use its 16mm equipment to make home movies. In addition, the local films Kodak made as part of this campaign suggested a commercial and theatrical application for a technology that the company might have foreseen but did not emphasize in the 1920s. While Kodak promoted many possibilities for its amateur-gauge cameras and projectors—from personal moving image libraries in every home to the production of community dramas and family portraits—creating local films for public exhibition was not on their list.⁵

In this chapter, I consider the impact 16mm, and the amateur and non-theatrical industry it enabled, had on the production and theatrical exhibition of local movies between 1923, when the gauge was standardized, and 1941, when the United States entered the Second World War and amateur film production was curtailed. Even though Kodak successfully branded 16mm as an “amateur” gauge, one that was unsuitable for theatrical exhibition, a new generation of filmmakers began using 16mm to produce and show local pictures independent of the movie industry that serviced Hollywood. Some were home movie enthusiasts in search of larger audiences for their work. Others were small-town theater owners who seized the opportunity to produce local newsreels. And, still others were traveling moviemakers who reinvigorated the field of local film production. The itinerant field became more inclusive in the 1930s, with greater participation from racial minority groups, women, and members of the working class, and local films became more widespread, with mill villages, hamlets, and rural outposts joining small towns and cities as sites suitable for production. This growth and dispersal of local film practices occurred as home movies remained the province of the upper middle class until after World War II, in part due to the expense of camera equipment.⁶ But for the generous budgets of itinerant filmmakers, 16mm stock was more affordable than 35mm, allowing them to shoot more footage than their predecessors. While what I call small-gauge itinerants did not attempt to record synchronous sound for their productions, the introduction of Kodachrome in 1935 gave them the opportunity to shoot movies in color when it was still a novelty for Hollywood features.⁷

Despite the promise of 16mm, its popularity among itinerants in the 1930s had very little impact on the dominant modes of production described in the previous chapters. In fact, the rush of new entrants to moviemaking meant that many rediscovered the local view, non-narrative, and nonfiction pictures that had more in common with early cinema than Hollywood. What did change, however, was how filmmakers related to their subjects, and what expectations both had for their participation in a motion picture shot using technology that, in other contexts, would be treated as a home movie or amateur production. Working in a smaller gauge allowed itinerants to be more nimble than those who stuck with larger cameras and higher budgets. They could reasonably claim to shoot everyone in town and worked in a looser, more improvisational style than was the case for their more rigid 35mm counterparts, who stuck to scripted narratives to keep costs under control.

But these small-gauge itinerants also carried the burden of associating themselves with professional, not amateur, moviemaking. Cameras were designed for ease of use, not replicating the look of classical Hollywood, effectively closing certain aesthetic choices off to all but the most determined filmmakers. Rather than running their films through the projector in the booth, small gauge itinerants had to supply their own, and often ran it in the theater itself in order to ensure the image was bright enough to be seen. Before the introduction of the semiprofessional Cine-Kodak Special in 1933, even the cameras were small and simple, making it hard for filmmakers to mimic Hollywood when they were in town. At the same time, the arrival of 16mm also enabled companies to develop new, often exploitative business models, as the ease of making a film meant that professional camera operators were no longer required. Although improved transportation networks made it easier than ever to travel from one place to the next, and loosened social and cultural restraints made it possible for many more people, including women, to consider a life on the road, making local films continued to be a difficult enterprise, particularly for those directors who desired to match Hollywood’s bravado.

While most of these nouveau itinerants accepted their lot by shooting scenes of everyday life, the women directors of the Amateur Theatre Guild saw in amateur culture and technology the opportunity to explore professional identities. Unlike other directors, these women were more than filmmakers. Trained as producers of commercial “home talent” plays, they were expected to assemble their productions from scratch, doing everything from fundraising to casting actors to acquiring costumes, props, and scenery to directing a three-act play, a fashion show, and a multireel film, all in the space of three weeks. As Angeline Howlett, one of many guild directors under contract in the 1930s, noted of her role in the process, “She Is the Show,” the instigator of the entire event.⁸

Even though 16mm expanded, rather than redefined, the local film, the versatility of small-gauge cameras allowed new entrants to the field to explore how moving images could depict and challenge social and cultural structures. For the directors of the Amateur Theatre Guild’s best-known production, a Hollywood farce titled Movie Queen, the play and film together served as a site where they could negotiate their own complicated relationships with the movie industry. The play’s narrative of a naive young woman who gets swept up in the sinister machinations of a male-dominated industry mirrored the experiences of many Movie Queen directors, who were misled into thinking that their positions would give them more autonomy than they were actually granted. At the same time, the third act of Movie Queen voiced a feminist critique of Hollywood in which a movie queen (“Marlena Slarbo”) and a hometown heroine (“Mary Brown”) outwit male agents and studio executives and make off with fame and fortune. But it was in the movies themselves, which served as a fourth act to complete the story, that we can find evidence of the guild’s directors using amateur equipment to make their sharpest critiques of Hollywood style and culture. While the local film performed many functions in the 1930s, from ethnography to documentary to publicity, it also took on the role of giving people who had grown weary of Hollywood an opportunity to mock the movies.

HOLLYWOOD COMES TO HOHOKUS: AMATEUR FILM AND THE REJECTION OF PROFESSIONALISM

One of the key reasons the local film retained its appeal well into the twentieth century was that most people did not have the opportunity to see moving images of themselves on a regular basis. Early experiments with manufacturing and selling amateur film production equipment to the masses were unsuccessful, particularly in the United States.⁹ While audiences quickly acclimated to a moving image culture, for the first fifty years of cinema, seeing images of oneself was such an uncommon event that even avid moviegoers could conceivably go years without watching themselves on screen. In the late 1910s, fan magazines wrote of the magical properties of the movie camera, which could reveal a “screen personality” invisible to the naked eye with just a few turns of the crank.¹⁰ Itinerant filmmakers took advantage of this desire for being on camera, but the logistics and economic structure of their business meant that they could not meet the demand for local movies. But in 1923, the same year when Hollywood solidified its hold on the popular imagination as the center of the movie industry, Eastman Kodak released its first 16mm camera, designed to give anyone, of means, a chance to make or star in their own movies.

Hollywood and what came to be called “home movies,” however, grew further apart in the 1920s and 1930s. Even after an amateur film market developed in the United States in the mid-1920s, its chief promoters sought to keep it far from the movie colony. Kodak set the tone by defining its cameras and projectors as parallel technologies to those used in its profitable still photography business, which privileged ease of use and depictions of domestic life. As early as March 1924, one of the company’s publications alerted potential customers that for its home movies, “you press the button, we do the rest,” reusing the slogan that originated with its first Kodak camera in 1888 and effectively created the field of amateur photography.¹¹ Home movies were intended to be shot and shown in domestic environments, and for the next decade Kodak did little to pursue professional users. Early projector bulbs were too dim to shed sufficient light in even a small theater, and early cameras were fairly unsophisticated.¹² When the Amateur Cinema League (ACL), an association of moviemaking enthusiasts, was founded in 1926, its members made a full-throated defense of amateurism, recalling its Latin cognate, amator, or lover, as the very opposite of the crass, profit-driven commercialism that dominated the professional studios in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Ironically, the ACL itself supplied some of the individuals who were the exceptions to the general rule that most 16mm films were made for home use in the 1920s and 1930s. Charles Tepperman argues that so-called practical amateurs, those who sought to make money from their movie equipment, were initially supported by the ACL, who “defined and encouraged the production of four different subcategories of the genre: educational, industrial, social problem, and religious.”¹³ The ACL’s monthly magazine, Amateur Movie Makers, later shortened to Movie Makers, was an important resource for these practical amateurs, advising them about how they might make their hobby profitable or, for a lucky few, a new career.

In the very first issue of Amateur Movie Makers, published in December 1926, J. H. McNabb, then the president of Bell & Howell, one of the leading manufacturers of amateur film equipment, wrote an article titled “The Amateur Turns a Penny,” which anticipated a variety of applications of 16mm technology. After speculating on industrial, scientific, educational, civic, athletic, and home uses for the camera, McNabb closed by contending that “the element of pleasure and entertainment are secondary to the actual value in the more serious things which no other form of communication can possibly produce.”¹⁴ McNabb implicitly suggested that the movie camera was profitable because it saved the user money—for example, a coach might be able to more quickly train an athlete if he or she was shown their flaws on film—not because it provided new avenues of work for the nonprofessional. A few months later, in March 1927, a staff editorial promised articles on the “relation of amateur motion pictures to medicine and surgery, architecture, charitable fund raising, law and public safety, community advertising, and a score of other practical problems of our complex modern life.”¹⁵ Amateur filmmakers were encouraged to justify their hobby by exploring its many “practical uses” rather than focus solely on its commercial potential. When money-making opportunities were mentioned in Amateur Movie Makers, it was often in the context of producing income for cinema clubs, groups of filmmakers that joined together to produce longer and more elaborate amateur films. The magazine reported in late 1927 that the Little Screen Players of Boston raised money by charging fifteen dollars for screen tests of young men and women interested in “getting an opening in the professional movie world.” As the article noted, “Five tests a week means a fifty-dollar profit and with fifty dollars—well, just take another glance from the advertising pages.”¹⁶

Despite publishing the occasional article about the commercial potential of 16mm production, the magazine dismissed filmmakers who sought to generate revenue from their hobby. In 1928, an editorial went so far as to define an amateur filmmaker as a “person who makes movies but who does not devote the major part of his time to making them for profit.”¹⁷ In an article in Movie Makers (the “Amateur” had been dropped) in late 1928, Epes Winthrop Sargent, author of the long-running “Advertising for Exhibitors” column for Moving Picture World, admitted that “the sincerest form of appreciation” a filmmaker could receive was a paying audience, but rather than advising the magazine’s readers to go professional, he suggested that they make movies for charity events.¹⁸ While Sargent laid out a business model for the production and exhibition of local films—which he had discussed more than a decade earlier in a guidebook for exhibitors—he did not encourage amateurs to follow in their footsteps. Instead, he argued that a successful director should not grow his or her own business but instead “spread interest in amateur movies and lead others to share in this delightful pastime.”¹⁹

Left out of many of the discussions about whether amateur filmmakers should profit from their hobby was the largest sector of the motion picture industry—Hollywood. As Patricia Zimmermann has argued, many amateur filmmakers did not achieve mastery of continuity editing and instead looked to other film forms, particularly the avant-garde, for inspiration.²⁰ Many scholars, including Jan-Christopher Horak and David James, have explored the connections between amateur filmmakers and avant-garde films in the 1920s and 1930s.²¹ But Hollywood is not absent from the pages of Movie Makers. Instead, it was initially presented as an aesthetic, one that amateurs could mimic in order to produce films that would please their audiences, before the magazine turned decisively against the mainstream in the 1930s. In February 1927, Amateur Movie Makers published one of its first scenarios for its readers to replicate in their own towns. Jerome Beatty described his scenario, titled “The Great Yonkers Jewel Robbery,” by noting that the “story goes back to the sure-fire ‘chase’ idea, which was basis of early motion pictures, and has combined it with the ‘U.S. Cavalry to the rescue’ motif which also is not original with this writer.”²² Although Hollywood was not mentioned by name in the script, the published scenario employed many of the formal techniques associated with commercial films of the period, including extensive use of close-up shots. A 1935 editorial in Movie Makers openly dismissed “trite or ‘sure fire’ scenes” that mimicked those found in Hollywood.²³ In their view, amateurs were free of the constraints placed on Hollywood production precisely because they did not expect to make a profit. Hollywood was used pejoratively in Movie Makers as shorthand for any profitable use of amateur equipment, which allowed the ACL to dismiss the production of film for profit as a whole.

Hollywood did have a place, however, in amateur film production as the object of farce and satire. In a 1932 article in Movie Makers on the advantages of Hollywood burlesque as an amateur film motif, Theodore Huff argued that “while it is difficult to compete with Hollywood producers on their own ground in a straight story since amateur actors are apt to suffer by comparison, in a burlesque, errors and crudities only add to the fun.”²⁴ Huff went on to write that filmmakers should cast children, given their natural ability to mimic others, and that Hollywood’s failure to convincingly mock itself meant that satire was one area where the amateur “can outdo the professional.”²⁵ An article in the November 1935 issue of Movie Makers reveals how amateur filmmakers might have seen itinerant filmmakers who claimed to be associated with Hollywood in order to make a profit on their activities: “News items in the daily press on the activities of local movie makers are fairly common by this time, and sometimes pretty silly. ‘Hollywood Comes to Hohokus!’—you know the kind of thing we mean. In the articles which follow such headings, the editors suggest their amazed belief that a unit of Paramount or M-G-M has just hit town, simply because a group of movie makers was seen on Main Street with a camera and a couple of reflecting boards.”²⁶

The article went on to downplay the significance of such events because it assumed that there were so many amateur filmmakers in the country that every town had at least one or two producing films for fun. But, as the directors of Movie Queen and many other itinerants who hit the road with amateur-gauge equipment in 1930s learned, there were many people left in Hohokus who were eager to see themselves in the movies.

SHE IS THE SHOW: MOCKING HOLLYWOOD FOR PROFIT

While it is unclear when the first itinerant filmmaker picked up a 16mm camera and hit the road, by the mid-1930s there were dozens of them traipsing through the countryside, asking townspeople to “Watch for the Cameraman [or -woman]” who was there to take their picture. In most cases, these itinerants were lone operators, hiring extra crew only when absolutely necessary. Taking advantage of the economies of scale set up for amateur filmmakers, itinerants shot several hundred feet of film, mailed the exposed footage to Eastman Kodak or Agfa-Ansco, and waited a few days to get back the results. Reels could be quickly spliced together to make for longer movies, and itinerants routinely projected up to an hour of footage, the same length as the “B” movies of the period. Because most theaters were not equipped with a 16mm projector, filmmakers supplied their own, along with any sound equipment they thought necessary for the show.²⁷ In fact, it might have been developments in projectors, not cameras, that allowed the itinerant business to boom in the mid-1930s. As American Cinematographer noted in April 1934, projector lamps introduced between 1933 and 1934 were “300 per cent” brighter than those in use earlier in the decade, and the corresponding push by theatrical exhibitors to project more dimly to save money meant that 16mm projection could be the equal, in terms of the size and brightness of the image, of 35mm.²⁸ Compared to the elaborate and costly productions discussed in previous chapters, these 16mm productions were of drastically smaller scale, so much so that it is surprising that the filmmakers were able to maintain the bravado of their “big picture” predecessors. There is not any evidence of 35mm itinerants switching to a smaller gauge, or the reverse occurring once an itinerant became a professional.

Local views were the stock in trade of many 16mm camera operators. Directors from Amateur Service Productions, one of the most active producers in the 1930s, made such movies throughout the country. The company appeared to pick up on a business model established years earlier by companies such as Special Event Film Manufacturing Company of New York and Superior Film Company of Des Moines. They provided the training, equipment, and possibly the leads of potential clients, and the contracted itinerant, who was often a woman, was responsible for filming the town and collecting the revenue necessary to pay for it. More entrepreneurial itinerants, such as H. Lee Waters, who is discussed at length in the next chapter, created their own business enterprises, devising promotional materials and business models that allowed them to maximize profits. Some directors like Waters had experience as photographers, while others were new to moviemaking entirely.

If many producers of local views were camera operators first, and only later learned the ways of the road, others were experienced itinerants who added a movie camera to their repertoire of attractions. For example, the Universal Producing Company, a commercial home talent producer based in Fairfield, Iowa, was known throughout the country for its coarse comedies and fundraising success, producing more than three thousand shows in 1934 alone.²⁹ Female directors traveled throughout the United States producing plays like Aunt Lucia, whose highlight was a “flapper chorus” that consisted of community businessmen in drag.³⁰ Enlisting as many as two hundred people in the cast, directors would sell advertising to local businesses, work with newspapers to ensure a steady stream of publicity, and put on several performances, all in the course of a week.

One of the advance men for Universal, Lauren Kenyon Woods, who had been responsible for persuading civic organizations to sponsor the company’s plays, broke off from the group in the early 1930s and started the Amateur Theatre Guild in Boston.³¹ In 1935, the new company began producing its own home talent shows, including The Circus, a stage show, and Movie Queen in small towns throughout New England. A broad farce of the movie industry, Movie Queen was different from the Hollywood films discussed in the previous chapter because no one associated with the production seemed to take it seriously. Of course, it seems unlikely that anyone in the towns visited by Don Newland or Melton Barker ever believed that an out-of-work Hollywood filmmaker was there to find the next Mary Pickford or Our Gang child star. But the directors themselves never fully let on that their intentions to make a professional picture were anything less than sincere.

In contrast, Movie Queen embodied what Lea Jacobs has identified as the “decline of sentiment” in movie culture that began in the 1920s.³² Rather than traffic in the dopey melodrama of Paragon’s booster films, the slapstick of Tinsley’s Tramps series, or the small town romance of Newland’s comedies, Movie Queen pushed a cynical, up-to-date take on Hollywood, one in which only suckers would think they had a shot at being in the movies. As a newspaper in Ludington, Michigan, noted in 1937, “People have known about movies a long time. That is they have seen them on the screen since the days when the May Irwin kiss startled the nation and the ‘Great Train Robbery’ was regarded as a most elaborate feature—one that people could go home and talk about. Now they can know the ‘truth’ about Hollywood by seeing the Lions Club presentation of the ‘Movie Queen.’”³³

Of course, the “truth” that the play reveals is so jaded that the entire production works as a burlesque of the local film, particularly those made with Hollywood aspirations. But even if audiences were encouraged to mock Hollywood, even when their own friends and family were on screen or stage, the women behind the show took the matter seriously. It was, after all, their responsibility to make it a success.

PILGRIMS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE: THE “TRUTH” ABOUT HOLLYWOOD

If the Movie Queen itself was a calculated ploy to turn the public’s distrust of the movie industry into fodder for a fundraiser, the female directors who realized these productions were led into the itinerant field with hopes for steady employment. Like similar companies, the Amateur Theatre Guild sought out young women, many of them with professional ambitions of working in the theater or movies, and thus would accept long hours, grueling travel, and low pay for the opportunity of putting on their own productions. While the guild spent its early years producing work in New England, by 1936 it had set its sights nationally, first testing the waters in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina, before venturing to Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Carolina in 1937. Tina Appleton Bishop, a New York native and one of many directors of the guild’s other show, The Circus, recalled decades later that by 1938, the guild had thirty-five directors under contract and ten show-bookers who were busy drumming up business around the country.³⁴ Bishop, like many others, learned of the opportunity by answering a classified ad that ran under the “Help Wanted—Female” heading in the back pages of the New York Times.³⁵ The Times ad was placed in the commercial-miscellaneous category next to pitches for modeling classes and dental schools, calling for “Three Intelligent Girls”: “Boston organization needs amateur play directors; permanent; traveling; Southern territory this Winter; all expenses paid with excellent remuneration after training; we train you in beautiful Maine resort starting Aug. 23; applicant must pay fare to Boston, pay own living expenses for two weeks training; $10 surety bond. Write for details immediately, Amateur Theatre Guild, Skowhegan, Me.”³⁶ Starting in August 1937, this ad, or one similar to it, ran in the Times for several years, looking for women to direct amateur plays.³⁷ Later ads specified that the group was looking for “college girls” between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, and the training locations shifted from Skowhegan, a town in central Maine known for its summer theater, to Boston, to New York, to Ashton, Rhode Island, before finally ending in Providence, where the last training program advertised in the Times started on March 11, 1940.³⁸

While the ads do not state the name of the play to be produced, many of these women were likely recruited to direct Movie Queen.³⁹ Copyrighted on August 13, 1934, by an eighteen-year-old Adella Cramer, one of the group’s members, the play was produced in scores of towns across the United States from 1933 to 1941, from Florida to Minnesota, Texas to Maine, and most of the states in between.⁴⁰ In May 1938, an ad for the organization ran in the Rotary International’s magazine, The Rotarian, noting, “We have produced amateur plays and movies on a 50–50 basis for Service Clubs throughout the United States. We direct, furnish equipment, and promote productions.”⁴¹ Although this ad specified service clubs, the guild would partner with any organization that was willing to share the costs of production and assist with fundraising. In addition to Rotary chapters, Kiwanis and Lions clubs, Moose and Elk lodges, Boy and Girl Scout troops, and local churches all partnered with the guild in hopes of raising money for charity or themselves.

Lauren Woods, like the owners of other home talent producing companies, saw to it that his contract employees, who he euphemistically referred to as “directors,” were well trained and, more importantly, closely managed. Surviving accounts of the training process suggest an intense two- to six-weeks of learning the procedure of putting on a show, including a day-by-day checklist of activities to be conducted and emphatic lessons in the hard sale tactics necessary to “pull off” a successful show.⁴² Bishop, one of many women who underwent the training in the guild’s Boston offices, recalled years later Woods telling the assembled directors:

Forget any dramatic ability, girls. I’ve worked out a foolproof way to work with the costs. What you’ll need is salesmanship. You’ll have just ten days to enter a strange town and talk a lot of people into getting up on a stage and making fools of themselves. You see, it’s all a matter of arithmetic. For every person involved there will be three persons in the audience. When you count the cast as well as the stage-hands, ticket sellers, ushers, and so on, it could add up to a hundred people. At seventy-five cents a ticket, plus the money made on the ad sales, this can mount up. The Guild gets half the gate; the sponsoring organization gets the rest.⁴³

While Bishop traveled from New York to audition for a director position with the guild, many of their directors were natives of New England. Marion Angeline Howlett became an associate with the company after a long career as a traveling etiquette instructor, lecturer, and freelance writer.⁴⁴ Madeline Anne Chaffee wrote plays and poems before becoming a Movie Queen director in 1938, and after spending several years on the road moved back to Rhode Island, where she became the editor of the Cranston Herald and, later, the first woman president of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches.⁴⁵ Margaret Cram, who produced many Movie Queen films in Maine, dropped out of a women’s college in Ohio in order to become a director for the Boston Amateur Theatre Guild.⁴⁶ Intriguingly, there was a smattering of men who also directed Movie Queen, though evidence suggests that they were in the distinct minority. Once the directors were fully trained, they hit the road, traveling, often by train, for days on end to small towns where they would frequently meet people who were no longer sure they wanted to commit the time and resources a show like Movie Queen required. Through the submission of daily reports, Movie Queen directors kept Woods apprised of their work, and he orchestrated their travel schedules from afar, all in the interest of keeping the company’s finances in shape. According to Howlett’s notes, directors were expected to clear one hundred dollars profit in each town, and if they failed to hit their mark, they risked being pulled off the road.⁴⁷

Figure 5.1. Still frame from Movie Queen, Lubec, Maine (1936). Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film, Bucksport, Maine

The fear of losing money, or worse the cancellation of a show altogether, loomed large for the guild’s directors, many of whom found themselves having to sell the show all over again when they arrived in town. As Howlett noted in one director’s report: “The townspeople talking about the show after the booker leaves bring up objections that the organization cannot answer, and that throws cold water on the show and consequently, when the director arrives they are ready to cancel—through their fear of losing money, fear of a flop show, fear of work, fear because another show flopped, etc.”⁴⁸

While all itinerant directors had to calculate and manage the risks that went into their productions, the business model of the commercial home talent company allowed less room for error, in part because so many entities—the company, its hired director, the sponsoring organization—were trying to extract profit from the enterprise. A theater owner, business organization, or newspaper could plausibly write off the costs of a local film to its desire to foster “goodwill” among its readers, patrons, or customers. The directors of Movie Queen, on the other hand, were taking advantage of this goodwill to produce their show at the expense of the time, talents, and patience of the communities they visited. But even the most road-weary director would have found it hard to be more cynical about their precarious occupation than the characters in the show they staged in town after town.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOVIE QUEEN

When Adella Cramer copyrighted Movie Queen in 1934, the term “movie queen” had long been used to describe female movie actors who achieved success through a mixture of talent and cunning. Twenty-one years earlier, in August 1913, the silent film star Martha Russell was described as a “movie queen” in an article about the production of a local film. In the article, Russell was quoted as telling aspiring actresses, “it looks like fun, and sometimes it really is, but it is hard work to act before the camera.”⁴⁹ In 1914, Warner’s Features produced a film titled The Movie Queen, one of several pictures with that title produced in the silent era. The following year, the Hazard Motion Picture Company in Kentucky filmed a series of Movie Queen home talent films, with the queen elected in a contest.⁵⁰ In Zelda Fitzgerald’s short story “Our Own Movie Queen,” published in 1925, a young woman wins a local screen talent competition only to find that the final cut of the film minimized her role so the daughter of the owner of a local department store could be featured. The woman takes her revenge on the filmmaker, an out-of-work Hollywood director, by conspiring with the film’s assistant director to produce her own cut of the film. After the new film is exhibited, with the expected scandal that results, the woman marries the film’s assistant director and appoints herself an expert on the movies even though she has never left her hometown.

Although the “movie queen” almost always referred to a female actor, rather than a screenwriter or director, the term connoted not just stardom but also knowledge about the film industry. As early as 1915, film production companies cooperated with newspapers to put on elaborate and lengthy screen acting competitions, with the winner receiving an opportunity to act on film. Later, movie theaters staged similar contests, with local exhibitors, regional advertising or exploitation, and staff and studios cooperating to promote a specific film or studio by holding a “screen test” competition. As beauty pageants became more popular in the 1920s, many theaters and civic groups adjoined the lure of the movies with the pageants, sponsoring “Movie Balls” in which a movie queen contest was the key attraction.⁵¹ By the early 1930s, the term “movie queen” operated as a way to describe a form of domesticated stardom, its royal connotations suggesting that the holder of the title was removed from the everyday labor of the movie world.⁵²

Cramer’s play opens with a prologue that takes place at the Podunk railroad station. At the station, the character’s speeches are written in a rural, perhaps southern, colloquial dialect, with the station agent, surprised that the “Hollywood ‘special’” is stopping in town, noting the reason for the play by saying, “If it hadn’t been for Mary Brown’s a-writin’ that swell essay on home gar’enin’ and a-winnin’ a free trip to Hollywood, I guess the spacial wouldn’t even know Podunk was on the map!”⁵³ Mary Brown, described as “no public speaker,” stammers her way through a speech before boarding the train. Before it pulls off, Roy, a local pastor, steps up and says, again in scrambled English, “going off to a far-away town of reputed wickedness as does this gentile girl of our flock, we come and gather to bid her godspeed and goodwill.” He then presents her with a flowerpot full of geraniums, which Mary brings with her on board. The train then makes a number of stops in its trip across the country, with each stop being used as a set-up for a joke. The stage goes dark, and when the lights rise again, the Podunk train station has been transformed into one in Hollywood. But instead of waiting for Mary Brown to arrive, the agent James Cain is eager to receive Marlena Slarbo, a Russian actress whose name, Cain says, “will be on every one’s lips—it will be a by-word, a password, a magic word!” When Brown arrives, carrying the potted plant, she is mistaken for Slarbo by Cain, who immediately begins touting her arrival as the “colossal, gigantic, stupendous” new star. Startled by the attention, Brown tells Cain that he has mistaken her for someone else and promptly faints.

The first act opens at the Ritz Hotel, where Brown is still being mistaken for Slarbo. Cain and Brown are about to call off their short-lived partnership when Slarbo calls Cain to inform him that she is no longer coming to Hollywood to make her film debut. When the studio executive Abe Goldstein, of Goldstein, Goldstein & Goldstein, accompanied by several “yes men,” walks into Brown’s hotel room ready to sign who he believes is Slarbo, she decides to keep up appearances. After fierce negotiations, she signs a thirty-thousand-dollar contract. Slarbo, apparently having decided to come to Hollywood after all, overhears how lucrative the contract will be and intends to take it. Meanwhile, Goldstein’s wife, Molly, is touching up her screenplay to be used for Brown’s screen debut. Cain successfully blocks Slarbo from meeting Goldstein and unmasking his ruse, and Slarbo, frustrated, decides to give up the check and return to New Jersey.

In the second act, the action has moved to a set at a studio, where two prop men are criticizing Brown’s debut film for having “about as much emotion in the whole thing as there was in a dead jelly-fish.” Part of the problem, one man said, was that the scenario writer, Molly Goldstein, had based the film on a short story from forty years earlier. The director enters the set, complaining about the difficulty of finishing the picture. The production is floundering. The actors are having trouble remembering their lines and places. When Goldstein arrives, flustered, he speaks with a dialect easily read as ethnic and Jewish. Cornball ethnic and regional humor runs throughout the play, as seen when Goldstein tells Molly he’s getting a “noivous breakdown,” and she responds by telling him, “Abie, you know right well we don’t want no more of them foreign cars.”

It soon becomes clear that this act is dominated by slapstick comedy, with the film’s director abruptly quitting, a horse called “Smoky the Cow” appearing, and Mary, acting as a typical Podunk native, carrying a kitten on set and discussing her plans to marry “Bill Slocum of the Hicksville Slocums.” Goldstein, frustrated with Brown’s acting, discovers that because she signed the contract as Slarbo, she cannot collect her pay. Brown realizes that her dreams of being a Hollywood actress will not work out, and she apologizes to Cain for causing him trouble. Brown, having had a change of heart, tells Cain she wants to be with him, and Cain tells her, “Mary, darling, you may not mean a thing to moviedom, but you’re everything in the world to me.” Cain and Brown leave the set as creditors, assuming they would be paid by Goldstein, chase after them.

The third and final act of the stage play opens back at the Ritz. Brown and Cain are packing, making plans to leave Hollywood when they realize that they are not ready for the sleepy life of Podunk Center. By this point, Brown is very down on her performance as an actor, and she and Cain decide to go to New York instead. Before they leave, Cain receives a call and learns that the picture is a success. Startled, he immediately goes to see Goldstein to learn more:

GOLD: Went over? Why there’s been nothing like it in Hollywood for years. Critics are proclaiming Slarbo an actress of a new type. What was it you said, Miss Bowland?

MISS B: Why the restrained type. No emotion. The public is fed up with gushy engenues and hard-boiled bleached blonde gangster molls. This new type of acting Miss Slarbo has will revolutionize acting. Every star in Hollywood will imitate her. (To Mary) You were simply grand this evening, Miss Slarbo. You have all Hollywood at your feet tonight and tomorrow when this film opens in other cities, you will be an idol of the silver screen. The world will acclaim you.

Figures 5.2 and 5.3. Still frames from Movie Queen, Lubec, Maine (1936). Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film, Bucksport, Maine

Having realized that her acting contract is good again, Brown decides to re-sign it, although she still needs to pretend to be Marlena Slarbo. Goldstein ups her contract to $200,000 a picture, and Cain faints at the good news. Although no stage instructions are given, one assumes that the curtain closes on Cain’s swoon, and, after a brief pause, the play’s filmed fourth act appears on the makeshift screen.

THE “PLOT SHOTS” OF THE FOURTH ACT

As Charles Tepperman notes, the very omission of amateur motion pictures from traditional scholarly and popular inquests is due in part to an unsettled debate about what significance, if any, they held as cinema. Tepperman suggests that the work of advanced amateurs at least occupied a “middle ground” between commercial production and the avant-garde. While the former was governed by the needs of the motion picture industry, and the latter indebted to theories of sound and image, Tepperman argues that for amateurs, cinema was “a powerful new tool for both recording and reflecting on everyday life,” and thus responsible for developing what he terms a “pragmatic imagination.”⁵⁴ The producers of local films were not caught up in such debates, but nonetheless were drawn to the mode, in terms of both practice and aesthetic, that dominated the theaters where they showed their movies. Even so, the filmed fourth act of Movie Queen, which was shown in the movie theater or community hall after the play’s performance, simultaneously embraced and pushed away from Hollywood as its model for how movies should be made. In fact, it seems as if the directors themselves were like the character Mary Brown, making a movie that breaks the rules of the industry but is all the more intriguing as a result.

In the film, we see Mary Brown arrive back in her hometown, which is no longer the fictional Podunk Center but instead the very town where the film is being screened.⁵⁵ Each picture, which ranged from twenty to forty-five minutes in length, follows roughly the same trajectory.⁵⁶ The movie queen returns home to the train station or, in some cases, boat dock or airport, and immediately takes part in a parade the town stages in her honor. The parade is followed by voluminous footage of the movie queen stopping by the local businesses that sponsored its production. At the end, however, the film returns to the narrative with Slarbo, presumably angry that her role has been taken by Brown, convincing several local men to kidnap the movie queen. Brown is kidnapped, but she is quickly found and freed by James Cain, thus reuniting the couple. The films abruptly end at this point, leaving it uncertain whether Brown and Cain return to Hollywood or decide to stay in her hometown.

Unlike other itinerant filmmakers, who tended to shoot films in a day or two, Movie Queen directors shot intermittently throughout the seventeen-day (not counting Sundays) production, with the closing reel taken the final weekend before the play’s premiere. Like other itinerants, the guild’s directors sold movie “advertising,” which was usually just a few dozen feet taken of factory plants, shops on Main Street, and automobile dealerships. The directors were expected to make selling the film a priority and to schedule meetings with local businesses as soon as they arrived in town. Also on the first day, directors were asked to go to the post office to check film and mail processing time for Agfa Ansco, which provided service out of New York; Chicago; Jacksonville, Florida; and Kansas City, Missouri. Filming began on the sixth day, usually a Saturday, with Brown’s arrival on a train. The parade was filmed immediately after, and directors were encouraged to make plans to film churches on Sunday, starting with the largest congregations. Sunday was the first big shooting day, with country clubs, bakeries, soda bottling facilities, and nightclubs all potential subjects for the movies. Directors were also expected to splice film titles and send exposed film to Agfa for processing.

In his instructions for the “plot shots,” Woods suggested that directors aim for scenes with slapstick and action, taken in the shortest period of time, in the smallest amount of space, with the interest of keeping crowds engaged and in the picture. Monday and Tuesday, the seventh and eighth days of a director’s visit, were significant days for picture taking, as she was encouraged to film additional industries as well as school children and service clubs. Woods suggested that directors be aware of the tight shooting schedule necessary to film every business, particularly because many merchants were waiting for the camera operator to arrive before unloading a truck of goods or otherwise performing for the camera. Directors were expected to continue to shoot advertising pictures for the rest of the week and finish no later than the twelfth day, a Saturday, in time for the “gangster pictures,” a fictional sequence featuring townspeople as criminals, that would serve as the closing scenes for the entire production. Movie Queen opened on the seventeenth day, a Thursday, which suggests that the film was able to be processed and returned to town within just a few days after the closing scenes were shot.

The Movie Queens that are extant all appear to be products of the method outlined in Woods’s day-by-day instructions. While premade intertitles were ready for use, the extant prints suggests that they were not deployed systematically, perhaps because they added little value to the audience, who would recognize the churches, businesses, schools, and civic organizations that appeared in the film. Instead, these films function as semifictional depictions of a town as if the location were being visited by a Hollywood star, with the camera operator often flitting back and forth between subjective and objective viewpoints. For example, the Van Buren, Maine, show opens with what appear to be point-of-view shots taken from the perspective of the Mary Brown character as she arrives back home. A high-angle shot depicts crowds of people waving, suggesting just how overwhelming the fictional experience must have been for Brown. Soon, however, the camerawork becomes more ordinary, filming parade scenes and, later, the Brown character herself shaking hands with town leaders. The character playing Monsieur Flowers, a costume designer, is particularly prominent in these scenes, hamming up his performance as an effeminate man. The continual presence of the movie queen reminds the viewer that this is a fictional narrative, yet everything else that appears is observational, as if it were ordinary life in the small town.

But Movie Queen breaks from showing views of everyday life in its final sequence, featuring the so-called gangster pictures, which attempted to replicate Hollywood storytelling techniques. While Woods gave fairly general guidance for the shooting of most scenes, he offered exacting instructions for what he called the “plot shots,” thirty-seven shots that were intended to incorporate some of the “business shots,” such as a scene at the local drug store, with the narrative that was set out in the three-act play that preceded the film. In the training materials he prepared for Movie Queen directors, Woods noted that these scenes were essential to the production’s success: “Your plot shots are most important in making your film interesting. They are to be made as humorous as possible and are to be cut up in scenes and spliced in between and throughout the commercial paid shots. There is a stock title for each scene, to be run previous to the respective shot. . . . Another important reason for plot shots is the added publicity obtained by taking them. It has been definitely proven in town after town that the plot shot day is as important a factor of ‘Movie Queen’ procedure as the ‘Movie Queen’ parade.”⁵⁷

Even though the director’s manual described each shot in detail, discussing such matters as stage directions and distance of the camera from the scene of action, such instructions appear to have been mostly ignored, and some Movie Queens appear to eschew the gangster pictures entirely. However, several extant Movie Queens do depict those scenes, which feature the kidnapping and rescue of Mary Brown, the star of the hour. While one could argue that home talent plays like those produced by the Amateur Theatre Guild were overly scripted and, in the end, stale attempts to provide local entertainment on the cheap, the Movie Queen films counter such assumptions by revealing how different directors, and townspeople, interpret even the most detailed instructions. (See Moving Image 5.1.)

For example, the Lincoln, Maine, production of Movie Queen appears to invert the order of several key shots even as many of them depict more or less what is suggested by Woods. After a shot of several kidnappers entering a building and capturing what appear to be two businessmen, the first shot in Woods’s list, of a “Ford coupe” coming down the road, is quickly followed by his second shot, in which Slarbo; Public Enemy no. 999, the gang leader; and nine kidnappers—not eleven, as Woods suggested—exit the vehicle. This visual gag, common to slapstick comedy, does not require particular technical proficiency, yet Woods warned the director to forbid the kidnappers from smiling for the camera. The third shot, which was intended to provide continuity between exiting the car and going to the gangsters’ hideout, is not included in the film and instead replaced by the second half of what was intended to be the fourth shot, in which Slarbo describes Mary Brown using hand gestures to indicate her hourglass figure.

The next four shots, which were to depict the gangsters visiting a confectionary store for a treat and traveling to the scene of their first kidnapping, are omitted entirely, and the gangster pictures resume with shot nine, a medium shot with two kidnappers, one carrying rope and the other a rifle, preparing to capture their first victim. The next shot features a young woman, clearly not Mary Brown, standing in front of a restaurant’s glass window. The kidnappers are reflected in the window before they enter the frame and quickly cover the woman’s face with a handkerchief before other kidnappers come into view. Two of them carry the woman off, and the camera pans right to follow her. Shots eleven through nineteen, which were to depict the transport of the kidnapped woman to the gang’s hideout and a police chase, are omitted. Instead, we see another kidnapping shot, this time of an elderly woman, and then the story jumps to shot twenty, where Slarbo is waiting to see whether the kidnappers have successfully found Mary Brown. Two brief shots show Slarbo revealing that the kidnappers have failed to find Brown, and Slarbo gestures as if to lead the gangsters herself. The next shot depicts several of the gangsters with lassos, standing on a busy street. The camera pans right again, and we cut to a shot of several kidnappers attempting to lasso a passerby. She is quickly caught and thrown into Slarbo’s automobile.

These scenes diverge sharply from the plot shots—which make no mention of lassos, and instead imagine Slarbo spotting Brown and then enlisting the gangsters to chase her down. Instead, the story advances to shot twenty-six, with the kidnapper’s car racing through the town’s main street. The next shot depicts a man one assumes to be James Cain, who, from the plot shots, is there to save Brown. Cain jumps into another vehicle, but before he can turn the ignition, the film cuts once again to shot thirty-five, with Brown tied up and the gangsters all guarding her. Cain enters from the left-hand side of the frame, knocking down the gangsters as if they were bowling pins and hugging Brown, who remains tied up. Although this final scene is described as a series of three shots—a close-up of the gangster’s hideout, a medium shot with the gangsters on the ground, and a close-up of Cain and Mary embracing—in the Lincoln film these three actions are presented as a single take. While the plot shots serve as a rough guide to the only fully narrative section of the Movie Queen films, the director ignored so many sections that we can safely assume she was willfully disregarding Woods’s orders.

Other Movie Queens strayed even further from the plot shots, allowing directors, with the input of the actors, to explore darker aspects of the show. The Lubec, Maine, film, for example, featured four violent kidnappings, each of which features the gangsters putting a full-body white sack over unsuspecting women and carrying them kicking and screaming into the gangsters’ car. While James Cain’s use of a bicycle to chase the car may be read as comic, the drawn out fight sequence that follows is also unsettling, with the scene resembling a battlefield rather than a hideout. In the Belfast, Maine, film, all of the gangsters wave pistols before they go out to search for Brown. The kidnapping shots show the woman in the foreground, and a crowd of gangsters run forward to capture her, inverting the logic of the typical crowd shot in which people walk toward, and past, the camera with little consequence. In Belfast, Brown is tied to a tree, and Cain’s successful take down of the gangsters is followed by close-ups of each gangster lying on the floor. Even if the directors were following a script, their embrace of these violent and sexually transgressive scenes suggests that Movie Queen was more than just an innocent romp through Hollywood’s hoariest genres.

THE CULTURAL ANXIETY OF THE MOVIES

While producers of other local Hollywood movies sought to assuage concerns about the moral turpitude of Tinseltown, the guild’s staging and filming of Movie Queen mercilessly mocked the film industry and its small-town fans. Brown and other residents of Podunk Center are presented as naive, uneducated, and, at least in the version submitted for copyright, southern. Hollywood, on the other hand, is presented as a place dominated by ethnic Jews, foreigners, and, in one of the play’s minor characters, the costume designer Flowers, gay men. In Middlebury, Vermont, where Movie Queen was staged in the late 1930s, the director’s name was changed from Mr. Williamson to Von Vonheim, an obvious play on Erich von Stroheim.⁵⁸ In effect, the Movie Queen demonstrates the flip side of the “decline of sentiment” identified by Lea Jacobs. Once one disregarded the sincerity of motion picture actors and the stories in which they appeared, it became easier to apply nativist suspicions of urban America to the movie industry full cloth.⁵⁹ And, once one is comfortable with mocking the very movie fans who, through their loyalty to particular genres and stars, ensured the industry’s economic stability, it becomes easier to suggest that the movie star and the star-struck fan are equally to blame for degrading American culture.

Thus, the efficiency of the Movie Queen’s production was undermined by the play’s suspicions that such industriousness was a sign of a worthwhile enterprise. The sharp satire of the play cast doubt on the sincerity of many of the newspaper articles that advertised its production. For example, like other itinerants, the guild’s directors used the casting process, particularly the selection of the movie queen, to build interest in the production. In 1938, the Butte, Montana, newspaper noted that “Mary Brown, stage name of the lead in ‘Movie Queen,’ is a Butte girl, selected from a group of hundreds of aspirants for this important role, whose identity will not be made known until she steps from the plane at the Butte airport.”⁶⁰ In Menasha, Wisconsin, the local paper noted that “the production is expected to be something entirely different than ever stages in Menasha before. Stage show, style show, comedy, dancing choruses and local movies are all combined in the play.” When the movie queen arrives to town, “ostensibly from Hollywood,” she was to be feted with a “royal welcome and will be given the key to the city by the mayor. A parade will be staged in her honor and movies will be taken of both the parade and spectators along the way.”⁶¹ Unlike the “movie-struck girls,” to use Shelley Stamp’s phrase, who pined so much to be in the movies that they represented a danger to the industry, the local people involved in the production of Movie Queen were able to reproduce the excitement of the movies without making plans to run off to Hollywood.⁶²

As Movie Queen demonstrates, a take on Hollywood could envelop many competing ideas and stereotypes about rural and urban life, native and immigrant populations, and other minority groups. By reproducing the industry’s most hackneyed plots and stereotypical characters, these films suggest that Hollywood lacked original ideas and was out of touch with the desires of rural audiences. By “kidnapping” the movie queen from Hollywood, the directors of the Boston Amateur Theatre Guild encouraged local people to mock the nation’s leading culture industry at the height of its power. While the producers of other Hollywood local films may have taken themselves seriously, the experience of Movie Queen suggests that rural audiences saw the chance to “see yourself in the movies” for what it was, a clever scheme to get them to participate in that eternal fantasy of Hollywood: anyone can be a star.

AMATEUR EQUIPMENT WITH PROFESSIONAL RESULTS

The directors of Movie Queen were not the only itinerant entertainers to take up 16mm cameras in the 1930s, even among home talent producers. Late in that decade, a competing company, John B. Rogers, began making its own copycat production, the more plainly titled We’re in the Movies. In Rogers’s version, a Hollywood director comes to town and conducts a movie queen competition. The winner of the competition was actually set in advance, as the sponsor held its own competition before the filmmakers arrived to stage one.⁶³ Unlike the Amateur Theatre Guild, the Rogers Company concentrated its efforts in the upper Midwest and employed male directors, but they too appeared to cut short their work before the United States’ entry into World War II. Other fictional local films were made by amateurs, including members of cinema clubs like those discussed earlier in this chapter, who nonetheless managed to show their movies in movie theaters and municipal auditoriums.

Exhibitors, desperate to find new ways to attract audiences, also expressed renewed interest in acquiring movie cameras, but instead of producing home talent films, they wanted to make their own local newsreels. In October 1937, the Motion Picture Herald suggested that theater managers, “looking about for some device to take the place of chance games, pot-and-pan giveaways and other gift forms as the seemingly necessary added attraction,” should begin using local newsreels, which featured local events, to win over audiences.⁶⁴ There was even an attempt to create a national network of local newsreels. In November 1937, the Motion Picture Herald reported a plan by the Herman A. DeVry Company, a manufacturer of 16mm projectors, to lease film-making equipment to cinemas so that they could make their own local newsreels.⁶⁵ The company would then use the footage to produce a national newsreel, which would be screened, in 16mm, alongside the local newsreels in each community. The article reported local newsreel activity in Colorado, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, and North Carolina, suggesting that its use by theater managers was widespread by the end of 1937.⁶⁶ Although many of these local newsreels do not survive, collections in Britton, South Dakota, and Warsaw, Indiana, suggest the vibrancy of the practice in the late 1930s.⁶⁷

But the itinerant filmmakers who produced impressionistic non-narrative and nonfiction works were particularly successful in the 1930s. In 1941, a representative of Amateur Service Productions of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, claimed that the company had produced 1,500 movies in 27 states, a boast that is supported by the many surviving examples of their work.⁶⁸ An independent producer, Arthur J. Higgins, made movies in at least 114 towns throughout the United States between 1936 and 1942, shooting in places like Agua Dulce, Texas, which reported just two hundred residents in the 1940 census.⁶⁹ But despite the frenetic activity of these itinerants, they left few traces of their practice, other than the occasional reel with an edge code that reveals its age and the premade title cards that mark its provenance. Produced just a few years before home movies became the dominant mode of amateur filmmaking, these town portraits offer another way of thinking about the local film, as a motion picture of life “caught unawares” in a particular time and space, unencumbered by larger ideas of what those moments might signify.

It is telling, then, that the best-known producer of these town portraits, H. Lee Waters, who ran a portrait studio in Lexington, North Carolina, referred to his practice as “Movies of Local People.” Made between 1936 and 1942, Waters focused on a specific region of the country, the mid-Atlantic, mostly towns within a few hundred miles of his home, and kept both his films and production records, providing a surfeit of detail for what is otherwise a largely undocumented phenomenon. But Waters’s attention to recordkeeping was outmatched by his film style, which, in its use of camera tricks, staged events, and endless personal encounters between the cameraman and his chosen subjects, created work that captured and reproduced the communities he depicted. By operating in a smaller gauge, Waters realized the ambitions many itinerants had for their work—to show a community to itself.

NOTES

1. For more on Gleason, see Swanson, “Inventing Amateur Film.”

2. An Amateur Photoplay in the Making: The Story of “Fly Low Jack and Game” Produced by the Rochester Community Players, c. 1927, Eastman Kodak, 3. http://digital.hagley.org/cdm/ref/collection/p268001co1112/id/8018.

3. Swanson, “Inventing Amateur Film,” 130.

4. “Home Movie Pioneers Recall Films of Early 20s,” Evening News (Newburgh, N.Y.), December 7, 1968, 6.

5. My claim rests on examination of trade and popular publications produced by Kodak in the 1920s, including the Eastman Kodak Company Trade Circular, Kodakery, and materials kept in company scrapbooks. None of them suggested that 16mm equipment ought to have been used to make local movies, and few discuss how it might have been used outside the home. Haidee Wasson notes that Kodak did introduce a projector for traveling salesmen in the late 1920s but also suggests that projectors with bulbs bright enough for theatrical exhibition were not widely available until around 1934. See Wasson, “Suitcase Cinema.” For more on domesticity and home movies of the 1920s, see Wasson, “Electric Homes! Automatic Movies!”

6. As Charles Tepperman suggests, determining the exact relationship between the prices of camera equipment and the demographic makeup of amateur movie enthusiasts in the 1930s is a difficult task, particularly because new technologies, such as 8mm, introduced in 1932, and fluctuating prices made moviemaking more accessible over the course of the decade. Nevertheless, the Great Depression helped ensure that amateur moviemaking would not be a mass phenomenon until after World War II. See Tepperman, Amateur Cinema, 80–81.

7. Even though 8mm was introduced as a cheaper alternative to 16mm in 1932, I have not come across any examples of itinerants working in 8mm, most likely because obtaining a bright and large enough projected image would have been impossible in the 1930s. There was an 8mm itinerant film series made in Canada in the postwar period called Stars of the Town.

8. “Amateur Theatre Guild: Director of “The Circus” on the Road, 1937–8,” MAH (5).

9. In both the United States and Europe, small-gauge cameras and projectors were primarily the toys of the elite until the 1930s, and it was not until after the Second World War that they were inexpensive enough to be purchased by middle-class consumers. See Nicholson, Amateur Cinema, 3–5.

10. Luckett, Cinema and Community, 115.

11. Advertisement, Kodakery, March 1924, 30–31. In her history of Kodak’s marketing for the camera, Nancy Martha West argues that this slogan refers to the company’s wish to position photography as a playful activity. See West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, 12–13.

12. According to Charles Tepperman, Kodak released its professional grade Cine-Kodak Special in 1933, and it was not until 1936 that “advances in 16mm projector illumination and optical sound track reproduction” made it possible to show amateur-made films in movie auditoriums. See Tepperman, Amateur Cinema, 121.

13. Ibid., 218–219. As Tepperman notes, the ACL turned against “practical films” after World War II, in part because of the awareness that there was a large 16mm nontheatrical film industry that met the needs previously filled by amateurs. The magazine Home Movies, which was published out of Los Angeles starting in the mid-1930s, also covered practical—and profitable—uses for motion pictures.

14. J. H. McNabb, “The Amateur Turns a Penny,” AMM, December 1926, 19, 30–31.

15. “Through the Telephone,” AMM, March 1927, 2.

16. “Finance!” AMM, November 1927, 50.

17. “Amateur—Typical?” AMM, May 1928, 295.

18. Epes W. Sargent, “For Charity’s Sweet Sake,” MM, November 1928, 712.

19. Ibid., 735.

20. Zimmermann, Reel Families, 83–89.

21. See Horak, “The First American Film Avant-Garde,” and James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde, 137–154. David James explores the connection between the avant-garde and amateur filmmaking in the chapter “The Idea of the Amateur,” which argues that in the post–World War II period, the lines between the two were diminished in favor of a more broadly defined experimental cinema.

22. Jerome Beatty, “The Great Yonkers Jewel Robbery: An Amateur Scenario,” MM, February 1927, 12. Bernard Kemper produced this script in 1926 and 1927, making a film he titled The Great Perham Jewel Robbery. The 16mm print is held by the Minnesota Historical Society.

23. “The Free Screen,” MM, February 1935, 61.

24. Theodore Huff, “The Mirror of Burlesque,” MM, October 1932, 428. Charles Tepperman argues that Huff’s films were in “an awkward position between amateur and avant-garde filmmaking of the 1930s.” See Tepperman, Amateur Cinema, 264.

25. Tepperman, Amateur Cinema, 448.

26. “Closeups—What Filmers Are Doing,” MM, November 1935, 498.

27. While synchronous sound was not used, itinerants often played music to accompany their films and spoke over a loudspeaker to identify people and places.

28. “Cinematic Progress in 1933: A Technical Review,” American Cinematographer, April 1934, 495. The article notes that the first projectors, introduced eleven years earlier, featured 250-watt bulbs, while recently introduced projectors used 750-watt bulbs, permitting projection on screens that were between 15 and 18 feet wide. The projector used by the Movie Queen directors required a 750-watt bulb. See “Amateur Theater Guild, 1937–1938,” MAH.

29. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, 388.

30. See Senelick, The Changing Room, 328.

31. For example, Woods visited Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1931. See Portsmouth Herald, January 14, 1931, 4.

32. Jacobs, The Decline of Sentiment.

33. “The Truth about Hollywood Life,” Ludington (Mich.) Daily News, July 9, 1937, 8.

34. Tina Appleton Bishop, “A Southern Odyssey (How to Succeed in Show Business),” http://web.archive.org/web/20131210185044/http://tinabishopauthor.com/short-story-a-southern-odyssey/.

35. The Boston Globe also ran such ads.

36. Classified advertisement, New York Times, August 1, 1937, 173.

37. Ads in the Boston Globe appeared as early as 1934, though some of these ads were for the company’s other plays.

38. Classified advertisement, New York Times. January 26, 1940, 17.

39. The guild’s other productions included The Circus and Boomerang.

40. Catalog of Copyright Entries. Part 1. [C] Group 3. Dramatic Compositions and Motion Pictures, vol. 7, Nos. 1–123 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1934), 4814.

41. The Rotarian, May 1938, 64. While the ad notes other productions, including Boomerang and Dress Rehearsal, to my knowledge Movie Queen was the only production that had a film component.

42. One of the directors of Movie Queen, Marion Angeline Howlett, kept the memoranda and instructions produced by the Amateur Theatre Guild, as well as her own records of her experience as a director, and donated her collection to Harvard in the early 1970s.

43. Bishop, “A Southern Odyssey.”

44. One brochure lists Howlett’s accomplishments as follows: “Lectured at University of Phillipines, in Manila; Was received by the Sultan of Zulu; Was fifteen days alone in the jungle of Cambodia; Was received by Crown Prince of Siam; Was entertained by Arabian Sheiks; Was at the mercy of Chinese coolies in North China; Learned * Pung Chow (Mah Jongg) in an exciting adventure in plenty of Chinese atmosphere, and is now an expert player of this most fascinating game.” Brochure, MAH, series 3, folder 3.

45. “Madeline Chafee [sic] Clark,” in Sharon Coleman, A Salute to Rhode Island Independent Women (Providence: Rhode Island Commission on Women, 1976), 11.

46. Jill Tatem, Western Reserve University, personal correspondence with the author, February 15, 2010. Cram was enrolled in the university from 1932 to 1934 but did not graduate.

47. Directors received fifty dollars’ salary for each production. The advance booker was paid twenty dollars. Profits were split with the sponsoring organization after local costs, such as renting the theater or hall. Directors were expected to generate $150 profit for each venture, which meant that the home office would receive $8 after the director’s salary and the booker’s salary were paid. See L. K. Woods to Howlett, November 11, 1927, MAH (2).

48. “Amateur Theatre Guild: Director of ‘The Circus’ on the Road, 1937–8,” MAH (8).

49. “Essanay Artist—A Movie Queen—Says Local Girls Fine Actresses,” News-Palladium (Benton Harbor, Mich.), August 8, 1913, 7.

50. “Louisville Notes,” MPW, August 14, 1915, 1187.

51. For two examples of this use of the “movie queen” contest, see “Grand Movie Parade One of Many Features for Movie Ball,” Delphi (Ind.) Journal, January 8, 1931, 1, and “Local Beauties to Compete in Shore Contest,” Denton (Md.) Journal, July 8, 1933, 1. Some of these movie balls were run in connection with the production of civic films, which are discussed in chapter 6.

52. For more on women and labor in early Hollywood, see Hallett, Go West Young Women!

53. Adella Cramer, “The Movie Queen,” August 13, 1934, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. All quotes from the play refer to this unnumbered edition. Another copy is found in MAH, series 3, folder 9.

54. Tepperman, Amateur Cinema, 191.

55. It is not clear whether the Amateur Theatre Guild substituted the name of its host town in the play, or if “Podunk Center” was used to stand in for all small towns. Although the classified ads printed in the New York Times, as well as the dialect of the Podunk natives, indicate that it was intended to be produced only in the South, the play was in fact performed in many regions of the United States.

56. While many of these films no longer survive, more than a dozen films made in New England are available due to collection and preservation efforts by Northeast Historic Film. In addition, copies of films made in Bogota, New Jersey, and East Palestine, Ohio, circulate online.

57. “Plot Shots (‘Gangster Pictures’),” MAH (12).

58. “Middlebury Movie Queen Welcomed by Big Parade,” Middlebury (Vt.) Register, 1939, Sheldon Museum Collection, Northeast Historic Film.

59. As Francis G. Couvares has noted, such tensions between small-town audiences and the motion picture industry developed in the 1910s, and were encouraged by exhibitors in small towns, who sought to use concerns about the morality of the movies in order to secure economic advantages, such as making the “block booking” of pictures illegal. See Couvares, “Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church.”

60. “‘Movie Queen’ Arrival Is Set,” Montana Standard (Butte), August 7, 1938, 35.

61. “Proceed with Plans for Lions’ Stage Production,” Appleton (Wis.) Post-Crescent, May 30, 1938, 13.

62. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, 37–40.

63. See “‘Hollywood Premier’ for ‘Glamour Girl’ of Indiana,” Indiana (Penn.) Gazette, November 27, 1940, 3.

64. “Theaters Turn to Local Newsreel as Substitute for Chance Game,” Motion Picture Herald, October 16, 1937, 16. Chance games were used by theater mangers in the 1930s to win audiences. But theater managers ran into trouble in the late 1930s when states started to investigate their use as a form of illegal gambling. One cash giveaway chance game, known as “Bank Night,” was particularly popular during this period, and many state and local governments tried to shut it down using antigambling laws. For an account of this phenomenon, see Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 32.

65. “Sixth National Newsreel on 16 mm., Starts Jan. 1,” Motion Picture Herald, November 20, 1937, 13.

66. See Johnson, “‘An Added Bonus.’”

67. The Britton, South Dakota, films are on the internet, while the Warsaw, Indiana, films are held by the Kosciusko County Historical Society.

68. “Altoona Motion Picture Is Planned,” Altoona (Penn.) Tribune, February 6, 1941, 10. See the filmography.

69. Steg, “The Itinerant Films of Arthur J. Higgins.”