3

“HOW MOVIES ARE MADE”

Hollywood and the Local Film

IN 1922, MOVING PICTURE WORLD ran an item on a minor event in its local news section. A pair of “movie scouts” were wandering the streets of South Boston, persuading parents that their child could be the next Jackie Coogan if they only paid a small fee to have a picture taken for submission to movie executives.¹ But instead of seeing this as just another variation on the screen contests that were commonplace in the 1910s, the World alerted its readers that the police were pursuing these scouts as frauds, using promises of stardom to rob their victims of ten dollars or more. A year earlier, the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America issued a warning to exhibitors “entering into or lending their names to the production of home talent motion pictures made by traveling operators” after an Ohio theater was reportedly taken for $490.² The local film, like the head shot and the screen test, proved to be an easy way to con an unsuspecting public who increasingly associated all moving images with the national motion picture industry, or, as many came to call it, Hollywood.³

The rise of Hollywood qua Hollywood in the early 1920s is well known. Less well known are the processes that produced and disseminated Hollywood culture, particularly in the thousands of small-town movie theaters that served up to half of the moviegoing public. While discursive readings of early Hollywood culture have used fan magazines, trade journals, extant films, and, to a lesser extent, archival collections to reconstruct the experience of cinema, they neglect the role individuals affiliated with the industry played in creating this culture. In this chapter I focus on local film production that was coordinated by movie theater managers and industry representatives. Because these practices were iterative, close examination makes it possible to document the development of Hollywood culture on a much smaller scale. The local film itself was transformed by its encounter with Hollywood, changing audience expectations of what it meant to appear in a motion picture screened in their very own theater.

HOLLYWOOD TAKES ON THE LOCAL FILM

While motion picture companies began to take an interest in movie fans in the early 1910s, it was not until they acquired theaters that they saw both the opportunity and the need to produce local pictures in which aspiring movie actors could appear. Through intermediaries—exhibitors, publicists, and independent camera operators—major producers made local shorts and exhibited them before their own products. Unlike the screen competitions of the mid-1910s, such as the national beauty contest Universal held in 1915 to promote the opening of their California studios, local films were not intended to promote the industry.⁴ Instead, they were made to boost the box office returns of specific films and were seen as just one of many publicity stunts a studio could try in an effort to secure the loyalty of a skeptical exhibitor. Hollywood’s interest in the local film was not as a vehicle for discovering new stars but, rather, proving that what one journalist called a “whiskered idea” still worked in the 1920s.⁵

In recounting this history, I rely heavily on the exhibitor trade press, which was particularly sensitive to the plight of small and independent exhibitors who made up a majority of their readership and ran most of the movie theaters in the small towns where local films were made. My focus on the exhibitor breaks from approaches to classical Hollywood centered on industry studies. For example, in her pioneering examination of the inner workings of the Hollywood studio system, Janet Staiger applies Alfred Chandler’s analysis of the corporation to Tinseltown to argue that the industry was best understood as a top-down system in which producers determined industry operations, and lower-level employees were merely functionaries.⁶ I instead concur with the business historian Olivier Zunz, who argues that the development of a management culture, which is transmitted from company headquarters to regional managers and local sales representatives, was equally important to the rise of the corporation as the dominant business form in the twentieth century. Zunz suggests that the new corporate culture destabilized local cultures, particularly in small towns and rural areas, and put in its place a “localized” culture that depended on national products and processes to thrive.⁷ Small theater chain owners, promotional staff, and distributors were among the mid- and low-level managers who were familiar with the day-to-day operations of the theaters they oversaw, or, at the very least, tracked closely, and made decisions about how best to promote Hollywood products.⁸

In the late 1910s, the leading exhibitor trade publication, Moving Picture World, ran editorial after editorial about whether it was the “pictures” or the “presentation” that brought movies audiences back week after week. Invariably, the World’s writers sided with exhibitors. For example, in a prose poem published in Moving Picture World in June 1917, Louis Reeves Harrison, one of the paper’s more prolific writers and a frequent critic of motion picture quality, defended exhibitors against criticism by producers, noting that “No producer made our audiences / Those audiences have been recruited / From home life and from the family.”⁹ Eight months after publishing his ode to the exhibitor, Harrison took his praise a step further, suggesting that exhibitors were pioneers in the industry, “gradually evolving ideas and ideals which may compel a revolution in producing and distributing methods.”¹⁰

In Harrison’s account, which was echoed by many other World editorialists, exhibitors were the vanguard of the entertainment industry, embracing change and leaving the old ways of the live theater manager behind.¹¹ Instead of sticking with the old slogan “Give the People What They Want,” Harrison suggested that exhibitors were shaping the public’s taste for new and more adventurous films. In a period of immense economic pressure—with theater attendance down due to World War I, the war tax imposed on ticket sales to help pay for military operations, and, later in 1918, a flu epidemic that closed movie theaters nationwide for several months—exhibitors were portrayed in the trade press as both survivors and innovators. But they were not prepared for what came next—the formation of national theater chains and a vertically integrated industry that threatened to disrupt the intimate relationship exhibitors had with their patrons.¹²

Independents and Exploitation

Independent theater managers were, of course, no strangers to national film markets, and many were likely well versed in the expectations set for their houses by trade newspapers and guidebooks.¹³ But several developments in the late 1910s alarmed exhibitors, particularly those in small towns who already felt besieged.¹⁴ As Robert Sklar has noted, small-town theater managers changed their programs as often as three times a week so their regular customers would have something new to see, and their collective demand for new, high-quality films was such that it likely forced film companies to adopt a mass-production model.¹⁵ In the spring of 1917, a group of theater chains, mostly based in large cities, formed the First National Exhibitors Circuit with plans to begin producing films. At the same time, both Famous Players-Lasky and Fox began experimenting with booking policies that allowed them to maximize returns on their own productions. In order to show the most popular films of the year, exhibitors had to agree to book a full slate of films, sight unseen, and were held to those contracts even if the films turned out to be duds. These developments threatened what independent exhibitors appeared to value most—the ability to select the films they felt would appeal to their customers.

But further changes were afoot, undermining even the area of expertise exhibitors believed was theirs and theirs alone—how best to sell the pictures to their customers. When Epes Winthrop Sargent started a column on film advertising in the World in September 1911, he saw it primarily as a venue for exhibitors to trade tips about how to design posters, programs, and publicity materials. After all, as writers in the World routinely argued, even if exhibitors could not control which films they screened, they could control how they were screened.¹⁶ But in a special section devoted to motion picture publicity published in the World in July 1918, this conventional wisdom was upended. Newly appointed heads of publicity departments for major production companies criticized current exhibition practices, patiently explaining the purpose of the press books, halftone sheets, and advertising copy that they were now routinely supplying to exhibitors. Dwight S. Perrin, publicity director for Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, summarized producer views on exhibitors when he published this analysis in the World in 1918: “The average exhibitor of motion pictures feels contented with himself. He regards himself, without outside assistance, as being a good showman. He thinks that none of these men from New York or Chicago understand either him, his field or his particular house. He thinks that they know nothing of his public. He does not stop to measure his clientele on the yardstick of human nature. He does not admit that humanity measures up about the same regardless of geography.”¹⁷ Perrin’s final claim—that all audiences were more or less alike, regardless of locality—quickly became a universal truth in the pages of the World. In September 1918, when the journal put out a call for “descriptions of ‘stunts’ or any showmanship ideas they may invent,” the writers echoed Perrin’s argument, noting that “an idea that will attract business in one town is likely to ‘repeat’ in another.”¹⁸

The publicity stunt, or, as it was more commonly called in this period, “exploitation,” was the key development in movie publicity in the late 1910s. Jane Gaines argues that the term evades definition, noting that its practice “can divert the attention of the onlooker, expand or contract to fit the occasion, and take the shape of the forms at hand.”¹⁹ Unlike the print methods of theater publicity—heralds, posters, newspaper advertisements—which were reproducible and thus easily adapted to the chain-store model of theater ownership, exploitation was rooted in performance and as such not easily described or disseminated. At the same time, its bombast gave it an outsized presence in Moving Picture World, particularly once national producer-distributors endorsed its use. As Gaines suggests, the shape-shifting capacities of exploitation “produces its own inflated reception simultaneously with its transmission.”²⁰ As a result, exploitation became both a privileged form of publicity, one that theater managers might brag about and one whose reach and efficacy was difficult to prove.²¹

While Sargent’s weekly column continued to circulate ideas about how exhibitors could best advertise pictures, “exploitation” experts affiliated with producer-owned exchanges began interjecting their own ideas about how a particular film was best advertised. In 1918, First National placed an advertisement in the October 19 issue of the World announcing a publicity contest for theater managers, who were asked to contribute their advertising ideas for The Romance of Tarzan, a sequel to the popular Tarzan of the Apes, made earlier that year. In the advertisement, the company revealed how little it knew about the theaters it was servicing:

For the edification of the industry, as an illustration to other distributing agencies of the possibility for more intimate and practical cooperation with exhibitors by keeping all of them informed of what the comparative few are doing to attain consistent returns on their bookings, and for the particular benefit of those exhibitors who play features after they are ninety days old, and want a comprehensive illustration of how all earlier run accounts advertise and sell to the public, the First National Exhibitors’ Circuit announces this contest, to be conducted with one specific release as a means of more accurately gauging the retail sales capacity of theatre variations in method according to house location, class of patronage, competition, and conditions generally affecting the box-office.²²

In this advertisement, the company codified what had already been implied in trade publications for many years, that the purpose of such columns as Sargent’s “Advertising for Exhibitors” was not to spotlight the creativity of exhibitors but to allow less resourceful exhibitors to borrow publicity ideas already in circulation. Even as First National executives sought to apply management theory to their newly acquired theaters—breaking them down into categories (“classes”) and determining which publicity techniques were most successful in specific types of theaters—they also created a structure whereby individual exhibitors could experiment with publicity techniques, often in cooperation with regional publicity managers, and let others know about their successes.

The results of the First National contest were reported in March 1919. Sargent, characteristically, chose to spotlight the winning entry for “fourth class” theaters, those with fewer than 750 seats: L. L. Willey, manager of the Colonial Theatre in Rochester, New Hampshire. After noting Willey’s print publicity campaign for The Romance of Tarzan, which included a half-page advertisement on the weekly newspaper’s front page, Sargent described Willey’s “Stunt Publicity” entry: “He wrote a prologue with a full scenic setting, for which he composed an original score. This used a man for Tarzan, some sailors, savages and a lion, tiger and ape, obtaining the costumes from a theatrical costumer. These players were paraded through the town with a band in addition to appearing in the prologue. The prologue even offered a rain effect with real water and calcium lights.”²³ By showing that even a small theater could produce an exceptional advertising campaign, Sargent proposed that the local theater manager take on a new role. Instead of assembling picture programs and advertising campaigns for provincial tastes, the manager was instead responsible for promoting movies with the materials given to them by film producers. As a junior partner to the regional “exploitation manager,” who in turn answered to the major film exchanges, the theater exhibitor was now fully part of a national system, rather than an independent owner or manager.

First National continued its efforts to redefine the exhibitor’s role as the purveyor of both a standardized product and localized, but not local, advertising campaigns for that product. Just as exhibitors used screen contests to determine the type and intensity of movie fans, First National used advertising contests to find exhibitors who were particularly talented at promoting their films. In effect, company executives wanted to prove their conviction that the failure or success of a film was not due to its intrinsic quality, as exhibitors implied, but its publicity campaign. While holding to their belief that audiences everywhere were generally alike, advertising executives acknowledged that there were differences between small theaters and large theaters, first-run houses and those that operated on the margins. As C. L. Yearsley, the publicity director for First National, told Moving Picture World in April 1919: “There is little use in trying to create advertising that will appeal to everybody, everywhere, in the thought that all classes of showgoers can be attracted to every film that is screened. We aim here to have pictures of sufficient variety to appeal to all types of theatergoers and fit each picture with publicity helps and advertising copy that will appeal directly to the class of people whom we believe will be most interested.”²⁴ Here Yearsley presented the central tension in First National’s publicity campaigns: nationally coordinated campaigns were more efficient, but localized campaigns were more effective. As exhibitor Edward L. Hyman put it in 1920, a poorly managed theater would soon go bankrupt, but “when you turn the job of managing your house into a cut and dried proposition and lock out individuality and personality you are going to hit the down grade so fast that efficiency can’t avert the smash-up.”²⁵ For exhibitors in the early 1920s, the production of outstanding, original, and local publicity campaigns was the ticket to a successful theater.

Localizing the Movies

Two factors shaped the localization of the film experience in the late 1910s: trade paper advice to exhibitors and distributors’ industry-wide creation of exploitation and publicity departments. First, the trade papers continued to be valuable sources of information about publicity techniques. Sargent’s “Advertising for Exhibitors” column began including more ideas for publicity stunts in 1919, and as a result the column grew from its two- to three-page average throughout the 1910s to up to ten pages a week in 1920.²⁶ In March 1920, Sargent even changed the name of his column to “Advertising and Exploitation.” Previously, exhibitors had referred to exploitation as “ballyhoo,” extravagant publicity campaigns such as street parades and crowd-gathering performances, that were intended to draw people into the show. Because ballyhoo was associated with the circus and other “lower” forms of entertainment, some exhibitors preferred to use the term “exploitation” to raise the status of an effective, if expensive advertising technique.²⁷ In August of the same year, Sargent defended his decision to focus on exploitation, arguing, “Some few films are sold through interest in the star. The rest must be sold through locally created interest, intelligently aroused. The better the exploitation, the larger the receipts.”²⁸ By investing so heavily in local publicity efforts, Sargent helped exhibitors, particularly independent and small-town theater managers, find a foothold in a rapidly changing industry in which each development seemed to strip away more of their autonomy.²⁹

The second mechanism for the localization of the film experience did not occur through the trade papers but, rather, through the distribution arms of theater and motion picture conglomerates, which initially meant First National, Famous Players-Lasky, and Loew’s. Studios invested in exploitation departments because standardizing publicity practices allowed them and their affiliated or wholly owned theaters to determine cost-effective ways to increase box office returns. Furthermore, by organizing exploitation departments that attended to the needs of local exhibitors, producer-distributors could secure their own revenue sources by persuading reluctant independent and small-town exhibitors that they would deliver the box office returns necessary for their long-term contracts to pay off. By establishing these departments in the late 1910s and early 1920s, studios also created a direct link to individual exhibitors. These departments had relatively small staffs. In August 1920, for example, Famous Players-Lasky’s exploitation department had just thirty field managers for twenty-eight exchanges, serving up to twenty thousand theaters.³⁰ However, these managers traveled constantly, so even small-town managers had the opportunity to make direct contact with a representative from the studio.³¹

While localization usually meant an advertising campaign tailored for particular audiences, in some cases exhibitors were also able to present the film itself as local. In January 1920, the Garden Theatre in downtown Baltimore promoted the Universal feature Paid in Advance by noting the hometown roots of the film’s star, Dorothy Phillips. As Moving Picture World noted, “There is a certain amount of local pride which can be appealed to for a bigger clean-up than the play angle although the Garden by no means neglected to advertise the play as well; making it secondary to the star. This works so well that it even pays in a small place to boom a supporting player above the star; provided that the I-knew-him-when Club does not have too much material for reminiscence.”³² The next week, the World observed another way a film could be localized, this time by noting its location shooting. In New Orleans, the Trianon Theatre promoted the William S. Hart picture John Petticoats by printing a map of where key scenes were filmed. In the same article, which was printed in a special section titled “Proven Profitable Publicity Plans,” a history of local motion pictures was published. Written with a breezy familiarity that marked much of the movie history printed in the trade press, the anonymous author observed, “Twenty-three years ago the Lumiere machines were thrown out of American theatres because they could only supply a limited number of local subjects while the Edison and Biograph companies offered nothing else. At no time in the interval has the charm of seeing your own neighborhood failed to draw, and the local angle is still the most powerful selling stunt. Because of the centralization of production not many cities can use the locally produced pictures.”³³ This brief history, which suggests that the “local angle” was an enduring selling point for an exhibitor, signals what was to become a regular, if not commonplace, tactic of the studio-affiliated exploitation manager: the local film produced in association with a studio product. While the local film was not seen as novel, its proven success meant that exhibitors could be convinced that making hometown movies was worth the effort. By tying the local production to the promotion of a specific, nationally distributed motion picture, exhibitors once again used the “local” as a way to orient themselves, and their audiences, amid the dominance of the centralized film industry.

For the next several years, Moving Picture World printed numerous accounts of exhibitors teaming with exploitation departments to produce local films. In June 1920, Mildred Harris Chaplin, then in the middle of a high-profile divorce from Charlie Chaplin, traveled to San Francisco to witness a screen contest held at the Sun Theater on Market Street. As the World reported, “several hundred girls are competing for the honor of being selected to enter the company of Mildred Harris Chaplin at Los Angeles.” Jack Laver, identified as a director for Chaplin, and Pliny Goodfriend, a cinematographer, ran the contest. The screen tests were shown in conjunction with Chaplin’s latest film, The Inferior Sex.³⁴ The Australian actress Louise Lovely also produced local pictures in the early 1920s, first in the United States and Canada, and later back home in Australia.³⁵ In 1921, the World reported that a theater manager in Madison, Wisconsin, hired a local camera operator to take five hundred feet of film of local babies to publicize Scrambled Wives, which was distributed by First National.³⁶ Sargent advised, “Scout around and see if you can locate a news camera in your own or a nearby town. They are numerous these days, and there are several hundred titles the stunt will fit besides this First National.”³⁷ In Sargent’s view, the local film was most valuable because of its versatility, as any motion picture could be associated with audience desire to appear on screen. In fact, press accounts suggest that many of the local motion pictures made were advertised as “screen tests,” which played into Hollywood studio and fan magazine discourses of the time.³⁸

The Crossroads of New York

While most of the local films produced in association with Hollywood in the early 1920s were variations on the screen test or the local view, the exploitation campaign for Mack Sennett’s The Crossroads of New York was considerably more ambitious—and likely contributed to the film’s success in certain markets. A follow-up to Sennett’s hit 1921 film A Small Town Idol, which stars Ben Turpin as a young man who goes to Hollywood to escape false charges of being a thief, Crossroads was originally intended to be a melodrama about a rural youth who travels to New York in search of a job with his rich uncle.³⁹ After early screenings were poorly received, Sennett reworked the film as a comedy, but his efforts were for naught as the film was still widely panned.⁴⁰

Despite, or perhaps because of, unfavorable reviews, First National’s exploitation staff put considerable effort into promoting the film, which premiered in New York on May 21, 1922, at the Capitol Theater, one of the city’s flagship venues. According to the World, the summer of 1922 was a poor season for motion pictures, and, as Sargent noted in mid-July, exploitation was seen as the answer to exhibitors’ woes.⁴¹ First National itself was also in trouble due to the poor performance of its pictures and lost 20 percent of its sub-franchise holders between the fall of 1921 and the spring of 1923.⁴² In an effort to stem these losses, First National had started its own exploitation division just weeks before the Crossroads premiere, making the film an ideal test case for novel forms of publicity.

In June 1922, Joseph Goldberg, advertising manager of the Mary Anderson Theater in Louisville, Kentucky, devised a unique promotion for The Crossroads of New York—a local version of the First National release, including recreations of several key scenes that appeared in the film. As Goldberg told Moving Picture World in late July, “As soon as I saw the advance literature of ‘The Crossroads of New York’ it struck me that a ‘Crossroads of Louisville’ picture, to be run in conjunction with the Mack Sennett feature, would prove a good thing.”⁴³ Goldberg enlisted Al Sobler, one of First National’s exploitation representatives, and the local newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, to participate in the production of a home talent film. Sobler was a former journalist and publicity man whose crowning achievement was the establishment of a Mark Twain anniversary celebration in order to promote the Fox film A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1921). Based in Louisville, he was one of twenty-nine First National representatives in the United States.⁴⁴ According to an article published in the World just before the Crossroads premiere, these representatives were “subject to the call of any exhibitors in putting over a First National attraction anywhere.”⁴⁵ Ned Holmes, a former journalist who had experience as a publicity manager for a variety of entertainers—including Buffalo Bill and Jack Dempsey—led the organization, and most of his employees had similar backgrounds.⁴⁶

According to Film Daily, which glowingly reviewed Sobler’s publicity stunt in August, Louisville had actually banned all forms of ballyhoo, so it was illegal for Sobler to use traditional forms of live publicity, such as a parade.⁴⁷ Eager to make a name for himself, Sobler realized that he could skirt the city’s regulations by producing a film instead. He ordered eight hundred feet of film stock and convinced the International News Service camera operator to shoot the film in exchange for the newspaper publicity he would attract. Sobler wrote the film’s script, which integrated local views into a narrative film. In a follow-up article, the World, this time crediting the idea to George A. Sine, the manager of the Mary Anderson Theater in Louisville, described the film’s production in greater detail:

Three men were picked for comedy leads, with others in the support, and for three days the scenes were shot in the busiest streets of the town while the ballyhoo-hating cops industriously pushed back the populace.

Figure 3.1. “Film Stunt Stirs All Louisville,” Exhibitors Trade Review, July 29, 1922, 650

Then the paper came out with the announcement that, unknown to them, the crowds had been worked into some of the scenes, and there was a stampede for the M.A. [Mary Anderson Theater] to see who was in the picture. As a result an investment of $160 brought in so much money they had to raise the salary of the receiving teller in the bank where Sine makes his deposits.⁴⁸

Sobler’s success in both pulling off the stunt and circumventing laws against ballyhoo drew him considerable praise in the trade press. But the World downplayed the significance of the film itself, calling it a “revival of a whiskered idea” while noting that “if it still works there is no need to worry about its antiquity.”⁴⁹

Antiquated or not, the success of The Crossroads of Louisville prompted many imitators. Seven days after the Louisville film premiered, casting began in Kentucky for The Crossroads of Lexington.⁵⁰ As the Lexington Herald noted on June 30, 1922, “In addition to getting an unusual opportunity to break in the movie game via the Mack Sennett Company, those participating in the picture are having the time of their lives acting before the camera.”⁵¹ In August, First National ran a two-page advertisement in Moving Picture World on the success of the “exploitation stunt” for Crossroads, which included several photographs of the filming of The Crossroads of Louisville and The Crossroads of Lexington. While the ad did not explicitly mention that the stunt was a local film, it exhorted exhibitors to “Read How to Put It Over in Your Theatre and Clean Up” and noted that “Exhibitors Are Doing It All Over the Country.” On the first page, the headlines from eleven newspaper articles were arranged in a collage, as if to suggest the quantity of publicity that resulted from the stunt, while the second page featured three photographs from the Kentucky films and a write-up in Film Daily praising the stunt.⁵² First National’s decision to place an advertisement on a local publicity campaign, rather than The Crossroads of New York itself, shows the importance of such campaigns to maintaining exhibitor interest in a motion picture long after it was first reviewed in the trade press, particularly if the film was perceived to be a flop. First National encouraged exhibitors to screen Crossroads not for its own merits but, instead, to see for themselves whether they could repeat the stunt in their own towns.

Several exhibitors saw the publicity around the Louisville film as an opportunity to make their own local motion pictures. For example, The Crossroads of Cincinnati, produced in July 1922, was intended to be a booster film for the city. According to Reel Facts, a Cincinnati-based exhibitor trade publication, the film “depicted the experiences of a man and his wife who had grown tired of the city and decided to look for a better place to live. When they reached the crossroads they were halted by the traffic cop, ‘C. Vie Pryde,’ who referred them to ‘Cincinnatus,’ the spirit of civic loyalty and the latter took them over the scenic detour, proving to them that there was much opportunity for pleasure and happiness in the old home town. In the end the couple decides to remain in the home town.”⁵³ While The Crossroads of New York focused on the small-town resident who went to the city, The Crossroads of Cincinnati instead attempted to convince audiences never to leave their hometown. Like previous Crossroads movies, Cincinnati’s version was to star several prominent people, including representatives from the chamber of commerce and the Underwriters’ Salvage Corporation.⁵⁴

Unlike itinerant filmmakers, who were accustomed to location shooting and tight production schedules, the greenhorn producers of The Crossroads of Cincinnati were unprepared to meet the challenges of shooting local pictures.⁵⁵ As the headline reads in a Cincinnati Times-Star article on the film’s production problems, “We Learned about Movies from It”:

More terrible things—tragic things—happened than ever happened before to 1,000 feet of film. First the “soot” that, at a crucial moment, rained upon the hero and heroine—photographed white! Undaunted, the scenario writer wrote a line showing WHY soot is white in Cincinnati. Next the most comical bit of comedy performed by the chief comedians—failed to record itself in the celluloid.

“We ran out of film at that point,” explained the cameraman.

But worse than this was to come. Either as a result of the weather—or something else—came a day when the result of much “shooting” of scenes was nothing at all. The film melted.⁵⁶

Although the film was eventually produced, the difficulties of production suggest that many theater managers may have chosen not to make local films because of the possibility of failure. While a poorly filmed scene in a local view or a screen-test reel could easily be excised from the finished product, the demands for continuity in narrative films meant that the exhibitor would have to reshoot scenes that were under- or overexposed. Tying a local film to a nationally distributed one meant that exhibitors had to finish their local pictures on a deadline determined by booking schedules, adding to their challenges. While the Cincinnati film fulfilled its ambition to “mimic Sennett,” the trouble it gave its producers made it unlikely they would be hired to repeat their efforts.

After initial success in Louisville and Lexington, the news quickly turned for the worse for the Crossroads films. In July, a newspaper in Syracuse, New York, reported that their city “lacks comedy characters suitable for places in the movies from indications so far in the response to the call for amateur actors to be filmed for the ‘The Crossroads of Syracuse.’”⁵⁷ In Watertown, New York, the paper called its Crossroads film, produced in August 1922, “disappointing,” a view shared by former state senator George H. Cobb, who was then serving as the chairman of the New York State Motion Picture Commission. While Cobb did not object to the film’s content, he told the local people that “the pictures are poorly represented,” and that the “camera man did not make the best of his opportunities and many features that he should have presented were omitted and some of them were worthless.”⁵⁸ Curiously, the scrapbook kept by Mack Sennett does not mention any additional local Crossroads pictures, but other versions continued to be produced. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, a local Crossroads picture was exhibited in September 1922.⁵⁹ In Iowa, The Crossroads of Dubuque was produced in March 1923.⁶⁰

Trying out the Local Film

While the local films made for Crossroads exploitation received considerable attention in the trade press, it was not the only feature to be promoted with a local film in the early 1920s. In December 1922, the Regent Theatre in Paterson, New Jersey, held a “winking” contest in connection with the First National melodrama East Is West, which starred Constance Talmadge.⁶¹ The World described the contest, which likely only featured women winkers, as follows: “Seventy-three pretty winkers, ranging in age from three to forty, winked twice before the Paterson News’ special photographers, one a still photographer and the other a motion picture cameraman. . . . The special ‘Winkers’ reel was exposed Saturday, delivered Sunday afternoon, assembled Sunday night and shown for the first time at Monday’s matinee. Opening with a shot of the city, it went through a scholastic exercise of winks from 73 people with a slow motion picture camera finishing the reel to show what the wink did to Paterson.”⁶² By playing off an element in the feature itself—Talmadge’s winks—this exploitation competition tied the longstanding attraction of seeing oneself on screen to a specific publicity campaign. In January 1923, Jacob Fabian, the manager of the Regent Theater, published an essay in the World on the benefit of “welding exploitation into the program” and used his campaign for East Is West as an example. As Fabian, who pointed to his previous experience as the manager of a department store in order to demonstrate his familiarity with advertising practices, wrote, “Our own locally made wink reel, 1,000 feet long, got more laughs than the two-reel comedy. Nothing we have ever done attracted so many people to our theatre.” According to Fabian, 22,000 votes were cast in the contest, which also attracted extensive newspaper publicity. Fabian revealed that he placed a “portable moving picture studio” on a truck, which allowed his exploitation staff to film local scenes as well as travel to various parts of Paterson to seek out the “cutest, the wisest, and the most effective winks.”⁶³

A month after Fabian reported on his success in Paterson, an exhibitor in Memphis, Tennessee, set up a studio in the foyer of the Loew’s Palace Theater and filmed “winkers” after they paid admission to see East Is West. As the World noted, this variation was particularly clever due to the possibilities for multiple ticket sales:

The urge to see oneself on the screen was just as potent as would be the winning of a prize, so nothing is lost and much is gained.

And a lot of the posers came first to see Connie wink and absorb her technique so they could do it better—and that made a third admission.⁶⁴

In contrast to earlier screen contests, the unnamed Memphis exhibitor did not feel the need to tie the screen test to the promise of a trip to Hollywood. Seeing oneself on screen proved to be a sufficient draw.

With the success of the East Is West campaigns duly noted in the trade press, other exhibitors continued to experiment with new modes of incorporating the local into national film publicity campaigns. In Atlanta, exhibitor Howard Price Kingsmore produced his own “home made trailer.” Casting a local woman as the “Paramount Girl,” Kingsmore filmed her presenting a card to Atlanta’s mayor at city hall. After this shot, the viewer saw a close-up of the card itself, which announced the film, A Gentleman of Leisure.⁶⁵ According to the World, Kingsmore planned to create a series of trailers using the same concept. Other exhibitors used local films to promote the Goldwyn film Souls for Sale, including exhibitors in White Plains, New York; Butler, Pennsylvania; and Madison, Wisconsin.⁶⁶ In Indianapolis, Ace Berry used a local screen test to promote Ashes of Vengeance, starring Norma Talmadge, with the winner “put into the ‘original’ costume worn by Miss Talmadge and permitted to do some of the scenes in which the star appears alone.”⁶⁷

While the exploitation staff of First National appears to have been particularly fond of the local film as a publicity tool for their films, other studios also encouraged exhibitors to use the same technique. As mentioned above, Paramount and Goldywn supported the use of local pictures in publicity campaigns. Famous Players-Lasky suggested in the pressbook for the 1924 picture Merton of the Movies that it “might even be possible to take a picture of audiences as they enter your theater a couple of days before ‘Merton’ opens. Then ‘See yourself on the screen here. . . . See how ‘Merton’ must have felt when he first saw himself in pictures.’”⁶⁸ The dozens of ideas listed in the typical pressbook indicated that local films were often suggested as a stunt. At the same time, the local film appeared to have been more viable in the mid-1920s, when a spike of interest in Hollywood stardom and a cycle of films about Hollywood encouraged their production.⁶⁹ While the screen-test competition continued to be used as a promotional technique in the late 1920s and 1930s, exploitation crews produced fewer films after the mid-1920s.⁷⁰ Jane Gaines suggests that by 1927 exploitation had fallen out of favor, as producers began to prefer national advertising campaigns.⁷¹

THE TROUBLE WITH MAKING LOCAL FILMS

While Hollywood studios could have used screen tests and other modes of local films more effectively in this period, several widely publicized scandals probably convinced studio executives that they should keep film fans far from Hollywoodland.⁷² Unable to play their strongest card, exhibitors did their best to associate local films with Hollywood but could never deliver what at least some of their patrons really wanted—a chance to show off their acting skills in the movies. Hollywood’s arms-length relationship with local film production reveals an uneasiness about the use of the means of production, so to speak, in the hometowns of their fans. When stunt publicity moved from the margins to the center of accepted promotional practices in the late 1910s, the tried-and-true trick of the “see yourself” movie was brought out as a cure for box office woes. And yet, the local film was never used systematically by any of the publicity and exploitation departments. As the case of the Crossroads local movies shows, even in the rare instance in which the publicity stunt was successful enough to get studio backing, exhibitors still had difficulty making it work in their towns. In many ways, the local film was like any other elaborate, hard-to-pull-off exploitation: spectacularly successful when it worked but an expensive, potentially damaging failure when it did not.

In the early 1920s, theater managers, often under the influence of the exploitation divisions of major film producers, saw the local film as one of many tactics that could help them publicize national releases. Ironically, their focus on tying local films to specific releases prevented them from embracing the most obvious appeal of being in a motion picture—the opportunity to see for oneself how movies were made and what it took to be a star. The people who gave motion picture audiences an inside view of the industry were not exhibitors, exploitation agents, or producers of films about the industry. Rather, it was itinerant filmmakers who claimed industry experience and demonstrated their ability to make a “Hollywood” film regardless of the resources at hand that brought Klieg lights and special effects to the masses.

NOTES

1. “Boston Police on Trail of Self-Style ‘Movie Scouts,’” MPW, October 6, 1922, 464.

2. “M.P.T.O.A. Tells Exhibitors to Beware Traveling Operators,” Exhibitors Herald, September 17, 1921, 43.

3. Accounts of the bad effects of local films were not uncommon in this period. For one cautionary tale of a woman who ran away from home with an itinerant filmmaker, see Reeves and Trott, “Itinerant Filmmaking in Knoxville in the 1920s.” In 1926, an individual came to Rushville, Indiana, to make a film, and absconded with $150 before production began. See “Decamps with $150 He Collected in Advance,” Daily Republican (Rushville, Ind.), December 18, 1926, 1.

4. “Universal to Start Beauty Contest,” MPW, April 10, 1915, 215.

5. “Home Talent Picture Gained Record Houses,” MPW, August 5, 1922, 438.

6. See Janet Staiger, “The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930,” in Bordwell et al., eds., The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 94.

7. See Zunz, Making America Corporate, 8.

8. As Olivier Zunz writes of turn-of-the-century US business culture, “The silent corporate revolution that was taking place led the new generation of town elites to participate in the development of new knowledge, new professions, and new associations.” Zunz, Making America Corporate, 33. Although he does not address the motion picture industry specifically, Moving Picture World and other trade publications, exhibitor conventions, and similar groups all fostered a sense of community among exhibitors that supplemented civic bonds. On the importance of fraternal and civic organizations in this period, see Kaufman, For the Common Good?

9. Louis Reeves Harrison, “Taken on Trust,” MPW, June 16, 1917, 1758.

10. Louis Reeves Harrison, “Exhibitors in the Lead,” MPW, February 9, 1918, 790.

11. On the subject of the cinema and live theater, see Pearson, “The Menace of the Movies.”

12. As Ross Melnick and Andreas Fuchs note, the so-called picture palace era of the 1920s was also a period in which many independent exhibitors “feared for their very survival” against the competition from well-financed studio-owned theaters. See Melnick and Fuchs, Cinema Treasures, 46. For more on the small-town exhibitor, see Kathryn H. Fuller, “‘You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town’: The Struggle between Urban and Small-Town Exhibition in the Picture Palace Era,” in Waller, ed., Moviegoing in America, 88–99.

13. Hulfish, Motion-Picture Work; Sargent, Picture Theatre Advertising.

14. One overarching issue was the declining economic value of the independent theater to major producers, as the studio system that evolved in this period allowed film producers to draw most of their profits from big-city theaters that they owned or controlled. Douglas Gomery estimates that by 1926, half of all moviegoers in the United States attended 2,000 key theaters located in just 79 cities with populations over 100,000. The other half of moviegoers, attending one of an estimated 18,000 smaller theaters in suburban and rural areas, were often neglected as a result. See Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 57–66, and “The Picture Palace,” 26.

15. Robert Sklar, Introduction, in Putnam, Silent Screens, 7–8. By the 1920s, Sklar notes, the average small-town theater demanded 150 films per year, while the urban picture palace could make do with just 25.

16. Harold B. Franklin, whose Motion Picture Theatre Management is often cited as a guide to exhibitor norms of the classical era, argued that exhibitors should distinguish themselves by their personality. In 1918, he wrote in the World, “A theater sells two things—entertainment and service. Give them choice entertainment and generous service. Make your theater wear a smile.” See Franklin, “The Personality of a Theater as an Advertising Factor,“ MPW, July 20, 1918, 354.

17. Dwight S. Perrin, “What Can Advertising Accomplish?” MPW, July 20, 1918, 335.

18. MPW, September 7, 1918, 1401.

19. Gaines, “From Elephants to Lux Soap,” 31.

20. Ibid. In his history of exploitation films, which focuses on sexually or otherwise salacious motion pictures, Eric Schaefer notes that “exploitation” as Gaines defines it was rarely used but the equivalent term “ballyhoo” was common. See Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” 117–135.

21. For more on exploitation departments, albeit from a different era in studio history, see Miller, “Promoting Movies in the Late 1930s.”

22. MPW, October 19, 1918, 320.

23. MPW, March 1, 1919, 1179.

24. “Make an Audience for Every Picture,” MPW, April 5, 1919, 79.

25. Edward L. Hyman, “Must Inject Personality into Your Theatre to Be Really Successful,” MPW, February 14, 1920, 1102.

26. In the early 1910s, Sargent’s column focused on print advertising and theater displays, which the theater manager had to prepare or assemble. Once producer-distributors began supplying predesigned newspaper display advertisements, Sargent turned to discussing other forms of advertising and publicity.

27. Fabrice Lybcza has argued that “ballyhoo” continued to be a viable term in the 1920s, but the practices he describes are very familiar to those discussed here. See Lybcza, “Fictions incarnées.”

28. Epes Winthrop Sargent, “Why Exploitation Is a Necessity in Promotion Motion Pictures Properly,” MPW, August 14, 1920, 907.

29. In late 1923, the World started another column, “With the Advertising Brains,” written by Ben H. Grimm, which aspired to keep exhibitors “in intimate touch with ‘the men at headquarters.’” MPW, September 22, 1923, 340.

30. Most estimates published in the 1920s assumed that there were twenty thousand theaters in the United States. See Halsey, Stuart & Co., “The Motion Picture Industry as a Basis for Bond Financing” (1927), reprinted in Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, 196.

31. “Meet Claud Saunders: He’s Worth Knowing,” MPW, August 14, 1920, 909.

32. MPW, January 3, 1920, 92.

33. MPW, January 10, 1920, 270.

34. MPW, June 19, 1920, 1614.

35. For more on Lovely, see Jeannette Delamoir’s dissertation, “Louise Lovely.”

36. MPW, July 23, 1921, 401.

37. Ibid.

38. See Orgeron, “‘You Are Invited to Participate.’”

39. For a plot description of Crossroads, see American Film Institute Catalog, 156.

40. A fragment of The Crossroads of New York was found in 2010 at the Deutsche Kinemathek, which posted stills from the film as part of their “Lost Fragments” project. See https://www.lost-films.eu/identify/show/id/4402. Variety reported on the changes made to the film on May 26, 1922. See “Scrapbook: Crossroads of New York,” MSC. For a full production history, see Sherk, The Films of Mack Sennett, 39. Many trade papers noted the film failed to match up against A Small Town Idol, which MPW called a “reviewers’ paradise.” June 3, 1922, 500. Fan magazines also criticized the film, with Motion Picture Magazine calling Crossroad’s plot “unadulterated nonsense.” September 1922, 116.

41. MPW, July 15, 1922, 219.

42. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 18–19.

43. “Ran Local Film to Exploit ‘Crossroads of New York’” MPW, July 29, 1922, 349. This article ran not in “Selling the Pictures to the Public,” Sargent’s exhibitor-focused column, but in the front news section, perhaps because the First National exploitation staff was involved in the film’s production.

44. “Promotion Division Formed,” MPW, May 20, 1922, 314.

45. “First National Exploitation Division Formed to Serve Exhibitors Everywhere,” MPW, May 20, 1922, 313.

46. Ibid.

47. Advertisement, MPW, August 5, 1922, 403.

48. “Home Talent Picture Gained Record Houses,” MPW, August 5, 1922, 438.

49. Ibid.

50. Gregory A. Waller also documents the production of The Crossroads of Lexington. See Waller, Main Street Amusements, 267–268.

51. “Work in ‘Crossroads of Lexington’ May Win Places with Mack Sennett’s Company for Lexington Actor,” Lexington (Ky.) Herald, June 30, 1922, MSC.

52. Advertisement, MPW, August 5, 1922, 402–403.

53. “The Crossroads of Cincinnati,” Reel Facts (Cincinnati), July 19, 1922, MSC.

54. Ibid.

55. The article does not name the producers of the local picture, but they may have been representatives from First National rather than newsreel camera operators.

56. “We Learned about Movies from it,” Cincinnati Times-Star, July 12, 1922, MSC.

57. “Movie Company Seek Comedy Players in Film,” Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald, July 13, 1922, MSC.

58. “Crossroads of Watertown Disappointing,” Watertown (N.Y.) Standard, August 16, 1922, MSC.

59. Advertisement, News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Ind.), September 2, 1922, 9.

60. “Crossroads of New York at Grand,” Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph-Herald, March 7, 1923, 5.

61. A print of East Is West was recently restored by Nederlands Filmmuseum. Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, personal correspondence with the author, February 3, 2009.

62. “Unique Exploitation on ‘East Is West,’” MPW, December 2, 1922, 428.

63. Jacob Fabian, “Wants Others to Profit by Plan That He Found Helpful,” MPW, January 20, 1923, 224.

64. “Took Wink Contest Inside the Theatre,” MPW, February 24, 1923, 784.

65. “Home Made Trailer Sells the Howard,” MPW, September 8, 1923, 151.

66. In Madison, the film was publicized using a local screen test, which was particularly fitting given the film’s star, Eleanor Boardman, had herself recently been “discovered” in a similar competition. In a full-page advertisement, which included ads from several department stores and a tire store, the theater noted that the theater would be visited by “Walter D. Nealand, director for the Goldwyn Pictures [who] is seeking ‘new faces’ and ‘talent’ for the movies.” See Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), May 10, 1923, 7. In White Plains, manager C. A. Schauple produced a local film in association with Souls for Sale and, according to the World, made plans to start a local newsreel. See MPW, June 9, 1923, 470. In Butler, manager John C. Graham placed a camera on a truck and filmed in between heats of races at the county fair. See MPW, November 3, 1923, 135.

67. “Resemblance Contest Used Motion Picture,” MPW, November 23, 1923, 395.

68. Merton of the Movies pressbook, September 9, 1924, Famous Players-Lasky, L 20550, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

69. Between 1922 and 1924, film studios produced at least six feature films about Hollywood, including Night Life in Hollywood (1922), Hollywood (1923), Souls for Sale (1923), The Extra Girl (1923), Mary of the Movies (1923), and Merton of the Movies (1924).

70. For example, in 1932, Paramount launched a screen-test competition to find an actress to play the role of the “Panther Woman” in The Island of the Lost Souls. See “Film Company Seeks Movie Star in Southeastern Ohio,” Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio), July 11, 1932, 1. See also Dan Streible’s discussion of local Our Gang films in the late 1920s, in “Itinerant Filmmakers and Amateur Casts.”

71. Gaines, “From Elephants to Lux Soap,” 40.

72. See Stamp, “‘It’s a Long Way to Filmland.’” For more on the impact of the star scandals of the early 1920s on the industry and its fans, see Anderson, Twilight of the Idols.