2

THE HOME TALENT FILM AND THE ORIGINS OF ITINERANCY

IN THE EARLY 1910S, LOCAL actors, scenario writers, and directors began making their own narrative fiction local films, encouraging them to think of the cinema as a participatory medium. Following common usage of the time, I label these pictures as “home talent,” a term that connotes the theatrical tradition of using local actors in traveling productions, as well as larger turn-of-the-century debates about the qualifications of native-born professionals in a country increasingly governed by national systems of training and assessment. In other words, “home talent” could be used as a positive term, when referring to the skill of a local actor, writer, or filmmaker, or as a pejorative, describing someone who did not have proper training. The home talent productions I discuss featured local actors and, in some cases, were also written and directed by a resident aspiring filmmaker.

Previously overlooked in histories of transitional-era cinema, the home talent film operated in a middle space, with neither the familiarity of the local view nor the national orientation of the municipal booster film. My focus here is on home talent pictures produced for exhibition in theaters in rural areas, which were particularly hospitable to artisanal modes of moviemaking or, at the very least, had residents who reported the local production of motion pictures in trade and hometown newspapers. In order to demonstrate the possibilities for home talent pictures in the mid-1910s, I have focused on a particularly prolific filmmaker from Corning, Iowa, a town of two thousand people. After producing more than a dozen original motion pictures in Corning between 1914 and 1916, Charles D. Tinsley turned to itinerant work, shooting the same scenario in towns throughout the Midwest for the next two decades. Several home talent directors became itinerant filmmakers by the end of this decade, which, ironically, dampened interest in locally written and directed films, as audiences proved to be content to see themselves act before the camera in standardized scripts. The home talent film, originally conceived as an alternative cinema practice that enabled the expression of local and regional identities, lost its uniqueness by the early 1920s and instead became a routine response to the mass entertainment culture that began to dominate small-town life.¹

This chapter is divided into two sections. In the first, I consider the origin of the term “home talent,” with a focus on its use in theatrical and rural contexts. In contrast to the term “amateur,” which implied nonprofessionalism, home talent was distinguished instead by a contrast between local and nonlocal practitioners.² In the 1910s and early 1920s, “home talent” was often used to describe theatrical or motion picture performances by local actors and only later became replaced by the term “amateur,” which filmmakers also claimed for their own in the late 1920s. In the second section, I document the emergence of home talent motion pictures in the transitional period of the American cinema. The consolidation and concentration of the film industry in Los Angeles ensured that motion picture production would primarily take place in an urban area far from where most rural Americans, who made up a majority of the population, lived.³ Home talent productions represented an earnest, if ultimately short-lived, attempt by theater managers and filmmakers to produce local movies that were the equals of those made by national, well-capitalized companies.

Very few of the films discussed in this chapter are known to have survived and just fragments of Tinsley’s films have been found, so my descriptions of them rely on titles, reviews, and plot summaries printed in trade and local newspapers. Unlike the booster films discussed in chapter 1, home talent pictures were not sponsored by business interests or, at least at first, produced by outsiders. But, like its more sophisticated and ambitious counterpart, the home talent movie was a short-lived phenomenon. While other forms of local culture, such as the folk drama or regional music, survived encounters with mass culture, home talent productions were quickly overwhelmed by commercial cinema. At the same time, they served as a transition between the local views of the early cinema period and later narrative fiction motion pictures that reflected popular national genres.

THE ORIGINS OF HOME TALENT

In the late 1800s, the colloquial term “home talent” began to be used as a way to set apart local actors, teachers, engineers, and other untrained and poorly trained professionals from the nonlocal educated professionals who had infiltrated rural and small-town life. As Robert Wiebe has argued in his study of American society between 1877 and 1920, residents of towns and small cities enjoyed social, cultural, and political autonomy in the late 1800s, only to see their way of life threatened at every turn in the early twentieth century.⁴ Corporations and social movements had perhaps the most significant impact on small-town life, as both sought to systematize laws and folkways in order to establish a unified nation. The same railroad lines that connected agricultural producers with urban markets enabled the development of regional and national networks of cultural production and dissemination.⁵ Likewise, the rise of national fraternal and civic organizations, city planning departments, and various Progressive-era movements to reform social activity led to an informal, if no less consequential, nationalization of everyday life.⁶ In these contexts, the term “home talent” was used to signify the exception to the general case that many local activities, from the performance of a play to the laying of a sewer line, were planned and conducted by outside professionals and experts.

In its broadest usage, “home talent” referred to local people who filled occupational roles that were increasingly held by trained professionals. For example, education journals of the late 1800s and early 1900s printed heated editorials defending the use of home talent teachers in opposition to reformers who believed that those teachers were inferior to their professionally trained counterparts.⁷ An article in a telephony journal published in 1910 noted that independent telephone companies “are not able to employ the best engineering talent, so they are managed and operated by home talent, which has been trained by previous home talent.”⁸ In 1916, the magazine The Western Architect noted that an “old adage about home talent being unappreciated by the citizens of a community” was particularly true in St. Louis, the focus of a feature article on that city’s architects.⁹ While many rural residents welcomed new systems of governance, the debates over home talent suggest that pockets of resistance still existed.

This denigration of home talent was informed by a larger anxiety about the effects that both immigration and rural-urban migration had on the nation’s small towns, which were, as Richard Lingeman argues, at their apotheosis at the turn of the century.¹⁰ Despite the prosperity of the country’s rural regions, which profited from the demand for agricultural products in the urban areas of the United States and Europe, the diversity of occupational opportunities in cities encouraged many people to leave family farms and small towns for fast-growing metropolitan centers.¹¹ In his history of small towns in the Midwest in this period, Lewis Atherton observed that by 1900, artists, writers, and members of the professional classes, like doctors and lawyers, were disproportionately likely to live in Chicago, while teachers and preachers were more likely to live in rural areas.¹² As the cultural historian Timothy Spears has argued, “Chicago dreaming” afflicted middle-class residents of small towns who, on moving to the city, shaped its culture.¹³ Writers such as Hamlin Garland, who left the rural Midwest for Boston in the mid-1880s, spent their careers trying to recover their rustic childhoods in their literary work, which only accelerated the tendency for rural life to be associated with the past.¹⁴

The rise of national mass media, including general interest magazines, cinema, and the news from afar that began to fill the pages of local newspapers, connected small towns with cities while reminding them how distant they were, culturally and socially, from the metropolitan centers.¹⁵ With regards to cinema, Richard Abel has written that female Midwestern movie fans, through reading the columns of Gertrude Prince from 1912 to 1914, inhabited female star roles as “projective sites of fantasy adventure” and, at the movies, vicariously took on “active, attractive worker or professional” occupations that were otherwise unavailable to them.¹⁶ As Abel argues, the growth of movie fan culture in the early 1910s was in part attributed to the connection that middle- and working-class people, particularly women, made between the movies and their own aspirations. By expressing pride in their own “home talent,” whether on film, on stage, or in the workplace, small-town residents could legitimate their own decisions to resist the charm, and greater opportunities, of the city.

While home talent was for many a colloquialism more than an ideological commitment, rural advocates in the Progressive movement became invested in the idea that local culture could be a salve to wounds caused by a rapacious capitalist economy. Even though Progressives promoted expert-driven scientific farming methods, in the cultural field they lent their support to rural promoters of home talent.¹⁷ Reformers found sympathizers in the hinterlands, mostly farmers and educators with shared concerns about the ills of modernity. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt formed the federal Country Life Commission, which spent the next year assessing the social, economic, and cultural status of rural areas.¹⁸ After the commission issued its report, many of its members formed the Country Life Movement, which sought to carry out the taskforce’s recommendations. Although President William Taft set aside the commission’s recommendations when he took office the next year, the movement received support from academics and preservationists who wanted to sustain agricultural folkways for future generations.¹⁹ The movement’s political platform is largely forgotten, but they achieved some success, such as the formation of the education-focused Extension Service of the US Department of Agriculture, which started in 1914.

That same year, Alfred Arvold, an English and oratory instructor at North Dakota Agricultural College, started the Little Country Theater, which produced regionally written and locally performed plays in rural areas. In making his case for the theater in The Drama, a quarterly magazine published by the Drama League of America, Arvold presented a view of small-town life that was familiar from popular novels and films about small towns, if not necessarily to the inhabitants themselves: “Social stagnancy is a characteristic trait of the small town and the country. Community spirit is at a low ebb. Because of the stupid monotony of the village and country existence, the tendency of the people, young and old, is to move to large cities.”²⁰

Arvold went on to argue that as long as rural areas lacked cultural opportunities, their residents would be no better off than those who lived in urban squalor. He suggested that the only way to stop rural-urban migration was to allow small town residents to “find their true expression in the community.”²¹ This argument was a familiar one in this period, echoing Chicagoan Jane Addams’s attempts to help working-class immigrants adjust to factory work by celebrating the cultural aspects of the nonmechanized and domestic labor they performed in the old country.²² What distinguished Arvold’s project was that he assumed that rural areas, unlike urban ones, lacked any local amusements, and that the pastoral ideal would survive only if rural people were able to meet demand for entertainment without outside help.²³

The Little Country Theater, which Arvold built on the campus of the agricultural college in Fargo, North Dakota, was based on the opera houses, schools, and churches already used as theaters in small towns. Although the model theater included a “place for a moving picture machine,” Arvold’s intent was to produce theatrical work that would “stimulate an interest for good clean drama and original entertainment among the people living in the open country and villages, in order to help them find themselves, and that they may become better satisfied with their surroundings.”²⁴ By conceiving of the theater as a “sociological force” that would allow for people to come together and celebrate their own lives, Arvold refuted not just the cinema but also other forms of popular entertainment, such as local performances of Shakespeare, which relied on the works of outsiders to draw audiences.²⁵ Arvold argued that the “home talent play,” where neighbors worked together to put on their own entertainment, “introduces a friendly feeling in a neighborhood.”²⁶

In the process of producing these plays, which often dealt with experiences shared by audience members and performers, town residents could discover their own talents as actors, musicians, writers, or directors. Although the theater was just a year old when Arvold wrote of its accomplishments in The Drama, he could already point to several successful plays, including the literally titled A Farm Home Scene in Iceland Thirty Years Ago, which featured twenty North Dakotans from Iceland reenacting the native customs of their home country.²⁷ The Moving Picture World commented on Arvold’s project, noting that the “photoplay could easily be fitted into this plan by the educators.”²⁸ Arvold’s success in producing “home talent plays” won him national fame, as other states started their own university theaters to foster the development of home talent. For example, in 1918, the University of North Carolina hired Frederick Koch, who had worked with Arvold in North Dakota, to start the Carolina Playmakers, which produced regional “folk drama” throughout the state. In cities, the Little Country Theater idea was mirrored by the Little Theatre movement, which started in 1912 to promote the performance of small-stage plays.²⁹

If the Progressive movement argued for the educational and social benefits of home talent productions, some critics noticed a crasser side as well. In 1922, the theater critic Walter Prichard Eaton observed in Scribner’s Magazine that “a totally new and different theatrical system is springing up,” one in which “the people themselves are producing drama, not professionally, not as commercialized entertainment, but as a means of community enjoyment and self-expression.”³⁰ While Eaton, the author of several books about the professional theater, mourned the decline of touring Broadway productions that had long provided live theater outside of urban centers, he found much to like about their local replacements.

But Eaton also observed another variation of the home talent play, one in which local people acted in plays written by outsiders. While these plays fostered community spirit, their stated purpose was to raise money for charity or school activities. Eaton argued that these plays, often produced by high school students, were “not done with any education end in view, with any sense of social services, above all with any faintest realizations of what dramatic art means. It is done solely to raise money for some school purpose (such as uniforms for the basket-ball team), and the cheapest sort of farce-comedy is chosen. Under the auspices of our education, the drama is commercialized as no Broadway manager ever dared to commercialize it. It is that idea of ‘home talent’ production which the new movement has got to fight, and to fight through the schools and colleges first of all.”³¹

These commercial home talent plays were produced with efficiency in mind, allowing local people to put on a theatrical production in a matter of weeks.³² The largest producer of home talent plays, the Universal Producing Company, was based in Fairfield, Iowa, and best known for Aunt Lucia (1925), a take on the English cross-dressing farce Charlie’s Aunt (1892), which proved to be immensely popular with rural audiences.³³ By the early 1930s, Universal was booking hundreds of shows every summer all over the United States and southern Canada, with the highest density in the Midwest.³⁴ Sponsored by fraternal and civic organizations, schools, and churches, home talent plays were among the most popular amateur productions of the 1920s and 1930s, supplanting older standbys, such as the minstrel show.³⁵

If rural reformers hoped that one day every town would produce a play of its own creation, the home talent craze of the first few decades of the twentieth century instead resulted in hundreds of towns producing the same play again and again. Home talent was most valorized in towns and small cities where live theater had become difficult to see, due in part to the success of motion pictures. According to one estimate, more than 95 percent of the professional theaters that operated in the United States in 1890 had closed by 1939.³⁶ The producers of home talent plays made work that reflected local or regional cultures but also allowed participants to take part in cultural forms that were increasingly associated with mass entertainment.

While the home talent play itself survives, as the enduring popularity of high school musicals and community theater attests, the disappearance of the term, and the rise of the term “amateur” in its stead, suggests a shifting set of cultural values. While “home talent” implies a spatial and geographic definition, with the centers of entertainment connected to the hinterlands through overlapping circuits, “amateur” instead posits that local performers are decisively disconnected from their professional counterparts. While local films are often read, retrospectively, as comprising “amateur” performances, the term “home talent” offers a more nuanced, and critical, way to understand how producers and audiences alike understood their goals in making their own movies.

THE HOME TALENT FILM

Even though home talent had particular meanings for disputes over professional qualifications, rural-urban quarrels, and theatrical productions, in the early 1910s the term also began to be used to describe local films. While motion pictures and the theater have been studied as competing entertainments with distinct histories, audiences and producers alike often saw them as alternate paths to a creative end.³⁷ As Charles Musser has noted in an article on the relationship between early race films and the New Negro Theater movement, many playwrights and directors did not draw sharp distinctions between film and theatrical work, and as a result, he argues that such works should be seen as “complementary theatrical experiences.”³⁸ While newsreels, scenics, advertising films, and industrials were also produced and exhibited in small towns in the early 1910s, the directors of home talent films emphasized the role scenario writers and actors played in creating narrative fiction shorts that resembled those released by the national producers of the period. Changes in the motion picture industry encouraged local producers to adapt their films to meet audience expectations, and home talent productions influenced other modes of local motion pictures.

In this section, I wish to consider the dual meaning of the home talent film, that is, films written and produced by locals, and motion pictures starring local actors. While other scholars have considered screenwriting and acting competitions in the mid-1910s, in which many aspired (and failed) to find their place in the cinema, these aspiring directors had the resources to experiment with local motion picture production.³⁹ I have chosen to focus on an individual filmmaker in a small town in Iowa because this example suggests the possibilities for motion picture exhibition and production that existed in the mid-1910s.⁴⁰ In contrast to the municipal booster films discussed in chapter 1, early home talent films did not seek to advertise a town to either the community or outsiders. Instead, local directors, screenwriters, and actors made work that could be appreciated by an audience composed of the people who contributed to the film’s production as well as their neighbors. As a result, home talent films had a dual address. Some in the audience were there to see themselves on screen, fitting Stephen Bottomore’s definition of a local film whereby there is a “significant overlap” between those on screen and those in audience.⁴¹ Others in the audience who were not in the film, however, instead recognized their neighbors and their community. Furthermore, all were encouraged to evaluate local motion pictures as the coevals of nationally distributed product. While some cinema historians have argued that the mid-1910s was distinguished by the rise of the feature film, Ben Singer has countered that one- and two-reelers remained popular until the late 1910s.⁴² Local directors, screenwriters, and actors made one- and two-reelers with the awareness that their movies would be compared with an industrialized cinema made for mass consumption.

Home Talent and Film Technology

Unlike well-capitalized industrial motion picture companies, producers of home talent films could not afford to make significant investments in camera equipment, particularly if they intended to shoot just a few reels of film. While camera operators could be hired to realize any project, and itinerant producers plied their trade in even small towns, many people desired to make their own films nonetheless. One of the earliest signs of new possibilities for local motion picture making came in 1911. Eberhard Schneider, who had been involved in the film industry since its inception, placed an advertisement in the Moving Picture World that spelled out the appeal of the local film: “Mr. Theater Manager and Exchange Man—why don’t you yourself buy the greatest Christmas present your town, your customer, your patron and your heart desires. Buy a local Motion Picture Making outfit and photograph your town occurrences; photograph the one who has a grouch against you, show him on the sheet and he will smile and be your friend. This local picture outfit has been reduced from $800 down to $395, for real professional work, guaranteed; no toy.”⁴³

Schneider’s entry into the semiprofessional camera market, made only after he was sued for copyright infringement by Thomas Edison and failed to get a motion picture license from the Motion Picture Patents Company, was a bit premature, as his camera kit was too expensive for the typical theater owner.⁴⁴ A second attempt at selling cameras to exhibitors came almost a year later, in September 1912, when the Chicago-based company Lavezzi Machine Works began advertising their motion picture camera kit in trade publications.⁴⁵ In the Moving Picture News, Lavezzi offered a booklet for sale for $2.50 with “100 POINTERS on big money-making stunts, repairing, operating and care of the Moving Picture Camera.”⁴⁶ Although Lavezzi’s camera kit likely cost under a hundred dollars, only exhibitors and amateurs with considerable technical skill would be able to assemble a camera from a kit.⁴⁷ Before 1913, few exhibitors would have been able to afford a camera and instead relied on contracts with industrial film companies and newsreel camera operators.

But starting in early 1913, more camera manufacturers began advertising amateur and semiprofessional cameras in the World.⁴⁸ In January, the Photo Records Company began advertised its Quiverless Picture Producing “Precision” Camera, which it claimed was modeled after the “best French types.”⁴⁹ In early February, the American Cinematograph Company advertised its new camera in the World, calling it “just the proper equipment for taking local, scenic and industrial views.”⁵⁰ Later that month, the World published an article on the Sept motion picture camera, which was being imported from France by Arthur G. Whyte of the Whyte-Whitman Company in New York.⁵¹ As the article stated, “there was need for some sort of a camera that could be rated somewhere between the professional and the amateur instruction; amateur in point of size, but professional in efficiency.” In the article, the Sept Camera was described as the first camera to meet this need, with the author noting that its ability to shoot local films made it uniquely suited for “providing many drawing cards for the theater that could not be otherwise obtained.”⁵² The article went on to suggest that the camera be used to record “local scenes such as employees leaving a factory, an Elks’ parade, the laying of a corner stone, a baby show, a fire, or comedy pictures using local characters.”⁵³ Whyte-Whitman began regularly advertising in the World, joining Schneider, who was now advertising his “Junior Professional” camera, as well as American Cinematograph, Lavezzi, and, in April, the Motion Picture Camera Company.⁵⁴ Industrial film producers also began renting or selling cameras, including the Special Event Film Manufacturing Company, which offered a “small moving picture camera” for ninety dollars.⁵⁵ Other models soon followed, which helped drive camera prices down below one hundred dollars.⁵⁶ By the end of 1913, anyone with the means to purchase a camera could quickly make back the investment by exhibiting pictures at a local theater. This point was not lost on camera sellers. In an advertisement for its $150 Williamson camera, which ran in the World in October 1914, the Whyte-Whitman Company claimed that “any exhibitor can pay for this outfit in four weeks. Write us and we will prove it to you.”⁵⁷

Exhibitors and the Home Talent Show

While inexpensive cameras bolstered the prospects for home talent pictures, producers also needed a paying audience and a place to exhibit their films. Small town theaters proved to be particularly welcoming sites for home talent pictures, perhaps because they already featured home talent on stage. Although the history of film exhibition has mostly been studied in isolation from the history of other popular entertainments, in small towns the cinema and live entertainments regularly shared the same theatrical space throughout the 1910s.⁵⁸ An earlier boom in traveling live entertainment encouraged many towns to construct a permanent venue for such acts, many of which were called “opera houses,” in a nod to the cultural aspirations of the period, and became multipurpose spaces for performances and gatherings of all sorts. When motion pictures were exhibited at the opera house, they supplemented or even replaced live entertainment that appeared in those spaces. By the end of the decade, many theaters and opera houses were under joint ownership, with the opera house being used primarily for live theater and special film events due to their greater seating capacity.⁵⁹

Even after opera houses and movie theaters began to be routinely used for film exhibition, live theater remained an integral part of an evening’s entertainment. When expensive Broadway shows started to cut their traveling units in the face of declining returns due to film competition, smaller theater groups picked up much of their business. In addition, movie theater managers used local talent to supplement film screenings to both increase box-office receipts and to build relationships with the communities. In 1913, David S. Hulfish, in one of the first handbooks for motion picture theater owners, proposed that theaters in small towns host a weekly “Amateur Night” where local patrons could compete with each other to win prizes.⁶⁰ While many theaters remained locally owned, out-of-town owners and managers became increasingly common in this decade, as did theater chains and houses affiliated with major producer-distributors. This often placed the interests of the feature film industry at odds with those of the theater manager, who pursued strategies to differentiate his or her theater from the competition.

By 1913, trade publications began stepping up their efforts to promote the benefits of what they called “exhibitor cameras.” While this chapter focuses on the production of fictional films, many camera owners also shot local news events, obviating the need to hire cinematographers to shoot local views and newsreels, with the result of making such local films so ordinary that they were rarely noted in the trade press. At its annual international exhibition for exhibitors in July 1913, the Moving Picture World commented on the trend: “Cameras for exhibitors are commanding unusual attention. It will not be long before many exhibitors will have their own camera and outfit and add the always interesting local attractions to the run of photoplays. A freight wreck just at the edge of town, with only a few box cars in the ditch and no one hurt, is a bigger money getter than a thousand feet of some smash-up with a loss of life sufficiently serious to command national attention.”⁶¹

The World regularly reported on innovative uses of exhibitor cameras, both in the United States and elsewhere. For example, in September 1913, the World reported that “a new kind of local picture—not a topical—is coming into vogue” in Britain, and went on to describe a fictional film starring members of the Reading Thespian Society in which “a local dude persistently follows a charming local lady.”⁶² That same month, a semi-fictional film starring members of the local fire and police departments was produced in Youngstown, Illinois, with the proceeds going toward the Policeman’s Pension Fund.⁶³ By October, the production of local films had grown to such an extent that Epes Winthrop Sargent, whose “Advertising for Exhibitors” column in the World kept a close eye on developments in the field, warned exhibitors to “be careful of locals,” noting that “few local companies or camera men are yet competent to turn out really good work, and to book a feature of this sort for the sake of the local pull without having seen it in advance is to take a pretty long chance.”⁶⁴ He advised exhibitors take a railroad trip, if necessary, to see the film in advance, which suggests that most filmmakers processed and edited their films in large cities. Sargent’s warning is also a reminder that even local filmmakers relied on regional networks of distribution and production in order to show their work.

In 1913, regional reporters for the Moving Picture World expanded their coverage of local picture production. In addition to noting local views or booster films, reporters detailed the production of dozens of fictional and semi-fictional local motion pictures, ranging from a series of “home film society dramas” produced by Elite Production Company of Waukegan, Illinois, to a comedy in Princeton, Indiana, in which “a perfectly good flank roast was dragged through the streets attached to an automobile. The bloodhounds got the scent and followed it with drooling chops—all in focus.”⁶⁵ By August 1915, the home talent phenomena had become so widespread that one Illinois reporter just listed the towns where home talent productions had been shown the previous week:

Illinois managers are doing some “sharpshooting” at possible patrons to keep the houses comfortably filled in a gloomy season. . . . Playing local pictures is one method that helped bring out crowds as people like to see themselves as others see them. Home made films were found in the week’s programs at the Criterion Skydome, in East St. Louis; the Apollo, at Peoria; the Empire, at Morris; the Washington Skydome, at Belleville; the Gaiety, at Springfield, which had “The Mine Owner’s Daughter,” a mediocre home-talent reel, and the Knights of Pythias opera house, at Pittsfield, which ran the films of its sister city, Barry.⁶⁶

Although these news items rarely ran for more than a few lines and were mixed in with more mundane reports of theater openings and changes in management, the fact that national trade papers noted the production of local films at all underlines just how visible this mode of production was in the mid-1910s.

Exhibitor manuals also supported featuring home talent in the cinema, both off-screen and on. In 1915, less than two years after warning about the possible pitfalls of exhibiting local films, Sargent published a manual for exhibitors in which he supported the production of local films, particularly those that featured home talent:

With the spread of the topical film and the news weeklies, the locally owned motion picture camera is getting more common. Try making your own production. It has been done and with success. Offer ten dollars for the best script. Put the local players in and use as many as you can. Get a script with a couple of scenes showing a crowd. Advertise that at a certain house Saturday you will make these scenes in some convenient place. There will be a mob there. They cannot act, but all who get in the picture will come and bring their friends. In cutting the film let the mob run well down instead of flashing. Give the volunteer players plenty of time (say 30 feet) to look at themselves.⁶⁷

By 1915, Sargent was familiar with a wide variety of home talent productions. In the previous year alone, the World had run items on dozens of local pictures. In Evanston, Illinois, local theater owners Alpha Bodkin and John Keane had produced Love against Wealth, one of many “home pictures” starring students at Northwestern University, in September 1914.⁶⁸ The previous month, a South Dakota filmmaker shot It Happened in Joyland, which the World reported was the first scenario ever written and produced in that state.⁶⁹ With exhibitor support, home talent productions blossomed in the mid-1910s, with the Moving Picture World reporting on several pictures a week made all over the country.

The First Step to Fame Begins in the “Local Field”

The third factor that contributed to the increased production of home talent pictures in the mid-1910s was the growth of the motion picture industry itself. What Ben Singer has called the two cinema “revolutions”—the nickelodeon boom and the advent of the feature film—created new opportunities for producers.⁷⁰ An industry that had been based in the New York and Chicago metropolitan areas faced new competition from companies in Jacksonville and Los Angeles.⁷¹ Smaller cities like New Orleans, Denver, Omaha, and Kansas City were not left out of the boom in production either.⁷² While many of these companies aspired to make one- and two-reelers for the national market, others announced their intentions to target local, state, and regional markets. These companies offered a range of motion picture services, from developing film to renting cameras, and also produced newsreels, industrials, and advertising films. They even offered to shoot what would later be known as home movies. Studio photographers similarly took up filmmaking in the 1910s to make extra income. When these filmmakers found it difficult to obtain regional or national distribution for their films, they turned to the production of local films to work on their technique. As Ernest A. Dench wrote in 1915, “The curse of the [motion picture] industry is over-production of commonplace material, so the photographer in a small way would be well advised to confine himself to the local field until he feels confident that his product can compete with that turned out by the standard producers.”⁷³

Of course, home talent producers benefited from the emerging movie fan culture. Producers and theater managers interested in securing regular patrons boosted local participation in the movies. In the early part of the decade, fledgling producers, eager to win fans for their films, engaged audiences as potential partners in the production of films. For example, the Balboa Amusement Producing Company launched a scenario contest, with cash prizes for the best scripts.⁷⁴ In the early 1910s, small ads requesting original scenarios ran in trade publications, which resulted in a flurry of submissions and the development of a cottage industry of scenario-writing manuals. Aspiring camera operators and directors were not as numerous, perhaps due to the fact that even the least expensive camera cost more than the pen and paper (or typewriter) one needed to write scenarios, but they too were encouraged to try out their talents by making local films. For example, in 1916, a writer for a photography publication in California advised aspiring filmmakers to engage local talent:

The local photoplay idea is quite popular in most localities. By getting in touch with those who write scenarios, and almost everybody is a scenario writer now, one can find people desirous of producing photoplays using home talent, and thereby create a camera job for himself. To those who fear their own particular community is free from scenario fans and photoplay actors and actresses, I would suggest a want advertisement calling for scenarios and talent. Unless you have a private secretary, give only your telephone number, otherwise the one advertising will be kept mighty busy handling the result of a quite modest announcement.⁷⁵

Mail-order camera storesv also encouraged the production of home talent films. The David Stern Company, a camera exchange based in Chicago, placed an advertisement in Moving Picture World in the summer of 1916 telling the paper’s readers that “big money” could be made by taking moving pictures for “news, advertising and home talent.”⁷⁶ While local news films were likely indistinguishable from earlier local views and advertising films, Stern’s identification of home talent as the third important local film genre suggests its viability for even the casual filmmaker.⁷⁷

Many home talent film producers appealed to theater groups who were already interested in acting. In 1916, Chicago resident Richard E. Norman, who later moved to Florida and became a producer of race films, published a brochure provocatively titled, “Have You Talent? If So Give It the Acid Test of the Screen.” In the brochure he reprinted a letter from one satisfied client, the Illini Photoplayers, who, with Norman’s help, produced the home talent drama Pro Patria in August 1916. The club’s business manager described Norman’s camerawork as follows: “Sharp, clear, steady photography with judicious close ups, cut backs and fades combined with excellent directing in both the dramatic and comedy parts, contribute to make our first attempt a success.”⁷⁸ Norman’s proposal for local photoplayers clubs suggested one possible future for the local film:

People everywhere are always anxious to see their friends or local people in moving pictures, especially if the picture has a real plot, is properly directed and photographed and each member of the cast playing a role best suited to him or her. Such pictures have never failed to play to capacity business when shown at the local theatre, and have created a demand for more good pictures. The reason this demand has never been satisfied is because there was no local organization to further the local picture and much good talent has not had a chance to express itself on the screen.⁷⁹

The rest of the booklet resembled the guidebooks on scenario-writing that were published in the same period. As Torey Liepa has argued, in the early 1910s, film studios responded to their need for new film scenarios by “engaging and stimulating the public interest in film writing through advertising, contests, screenwriting schools and other enticements.”⁸⁰ While this experiment in motion picture democracy was short-lived, its codification of screenplay and filmmaking techniques influenced the producers of local motion pictures.

Scenario guidebooks, in particular, tended to express faith in formulas for movie scripts, with authors contributing original ideas, preferably based on their own experiences. As one guidebook stated, if “your characters are taken from every day life of the present and your story is familiar to the great majority of Americans, your success is almost certain,” provided scenario writers follow the book’s recommendations for the formatting and narrative structure of their photoplays.⁸¹ Even if actual opportunities for scenario writing were limited, guidebooks suggested otherwise. As William R. Kane wrote in a guide to the writer’s markets in 1915, “Unless a motion picture manufacturer makes only local views or advertising pictures he offers some sort of opportunity to writers for the screen.”⁸²

In his “Have You Talent?” brochure, Norman played to the acting aspirations of movie fans. He assured audiences that “the market is not over-supplied with desirable photoplayers,” and that it would be possible to determine if an actor had a “screen personality” without filming them. Several pages were devoted to Pro Patria, which suggests that the film may have been the only one Norman made in cooperation with a photoplayers club. All of the other testimonials appear to refer to the home talent pictures produced by the Superior Film Company, including The Man at the Throttle (1915), which I discuss later. Norman closed the brochure with instructions on how one could form his or her own club and asked his readers to consider the following: “Maybe you have a special scenario you wish produced, a big local idea filmed, a pageant or other big local occurrence that a story can be woven around. Let us hear from you.”

The home talent phenomenon of the 1910s was not limited to film itself. In many spheres of cultural production—theater, music, art, photography, dance—individuals became aware of the transformative possibilities of mass culture and the potential for their own efforts to be rewarded with fortune and fame. While the boosters that backed industrial romances expected their films to reach millions, the participants in home talent production instead wanted to witness their own performances on screen. The popularity of the home talent film in the 1910s was driven by a belief, quickly proved to be a fantasy, that anyone had a shot at success.

THE CAREER OF C. D. TINSLEY

To date, no home talent films from the 1910s that were directed, written, and acted in by locals are known to survive. In the absence of actual films, I instead consider the work of C. D. Tinsley, a portrait studio photographer and filmmaker unknown to cinema historians despite his long and prolific career. Tinsley produced almost two dozen movies in his hometown of Corning, Iowa, between 1914 and 1919; worked as an itinerant director of home talent productions from 1915 to 1933; and produced industrial and news films from the late 1910s to 1941, including work for the US government.⁸³ Although Tinsley was not the typical theater owner or studio photographer, his ambition as a filmmaker demonstrates the possibilities for home talent films in even small towns. To my knowledge, Tinsley’s movies contained no advertising, and he did not intend for them to be seen by regional or national audiences. Neither did he claim to be affiliated with the larger picture industry nor did he make any attempts to enter the national industry. Instead, Tinsley, like a number of producers of local films, worked regionally and never lived outside his home state. Tinsley was a “home talent” filmmaker in more ways than one.

From Photography to Motion Pictures

Charlie David Tinsley was born in 1873 on a farm in eastern Iowa to a German mother and a native Iowan father who served on the Union side in the Civil War.⁸⁴ Later, one writer remembered Tinsley as being “always anxious and ambitious to learn all there was to know about everything in general.”⁸⁵ Sometime in the 1890s, he entered the field of photography, first working in nearby Batavia, Iowa, a town of just three hundred people.⁸⁶ In 1898, he moved to Corning, in western Iowa, and started a photography studio.⁸⁷ Corning was a small town, which struggled to maintain a population of more than two thousand people, and Tinsley became intensely loyal to it, starting traditions like an annual Christmas brunch that he maintained even when his itinerant work kept him on the road for much of the year.⁸⁸ The town’s two weekly newspapers were keenly interested in Tinsley’s work, regularly reporting on his business trips, vacations, and the motion pictures he made.

In 1908, when he was still running his photography studio, Tinsley was described by one of the local papers as “one of our up-to-date photographers,” someone who “never lets anything new pass him by,” so it was not surprising that Tinsley was captivated by the movies.⁸⁹ In October 1912, he purchased an interest in the Lyric Theater, Corning’s first purpose-built movie theater.⁹⁰ A few months later, the newspaper proudly printed a letter the Lyric had received from the Motion Picture Patents Company–controlled General Film Company’s distribution office in Omaha, Nebraska, that praised the theater’s “Anniversary Jubilee program,” which included local entertainment.⁹¹ In February 1913, Tinsley arranged for a “moving picture man” to come to Corning “for the purpose of taking everything and everybody in the city and all the people from the country that can be present when the machine is in operation.”⁹² Given the exuberant tone of the long article that announced its production, this picture was likely the first made in Corning. Although the film, which was expected to depict local businesses, schools, and civic clubs, was sponsored by the town’s commercial club, the article was careful to emphasize that neither the newspaper nor the theater would profit from the picture’s production. Instead, the article noted that the “filmmakers are striving for something good, something that will be a big advertisement for our town and that may be preserved as one of the special occasions in our history—something to be remembered for years.”⁹³ While the movie that resulted was never reviewed in the paper, it had a weeklong engagement at the Lyric starting on March 3, 1913.⁹⁴

Tinsley did not enter the moving picture business until May 1914. In late April of that year, his photography studio burned down, resulting in a loss of $1,200 worth of equipment.⁹⁵ One of the local newspapers reported that Tinsley had $650 in insurance on his possessions, so his decision to start his film career a few weeks after the fire suggests that he used part of the insurance money to purchase a motion picture camera.⁹⁶ His first film, a military drama called Saved by the Stars and Stripes, engaged the militias of Corning and nearby Villisca, with a cast of one hundred people.⁹⁷ When the film was exhibited almost two months after its mid-May filming, the newspaper praised the photoplay for the quality of the pictures and its setting, noting that “the play will be much appreciated and doubly interesting because of the local color added in having home people and home scenes.”⁹⁸

After the success of this initial film, Tinsley found himself in high demand. As one Corning newspaper reported, “since staging the local picture play Saved by the Stars and Stripes, Mr. Tinsley has had a number of calls from surrounding towns for the use of the film when completed and also offers to make other home talent plays at different places.”⁹⁹ On July 29 of the same year, a few weeks after the debut of his first film, one of the local newspapers reported that Tinsley, who now identified himself as a representative of the Tinsley Film Company, “had his moving picture machine working overtime” for the past few weeks.¹⁰⁰ One paper noted that Tinsley took pictures of an automobile parade in Corning as well as automobile stunts at the fairgrounds on a Wednesday afternoon and exhibited them the very next evening at the Lyric Theater. As the same paper noted in August, “Mr. Tinsley takes pride in getting out his films on very short notice after the acting of the drama has been accomplished.”¹⁰¹ Tinsley worked at the breakneck pace typical of the period, producing at least eight films in the second half of 1914 and another half-dozen in 1915. His films quickly became part of the regular moviegoing experience in Corning, not the special events promised by itinerant filmmakers. Tinsley even hosted his own night of movies in November 1914, competing that week with Francis X. Bushman, John Bunny, the serial Million Dollar Mystery, and a Paramount program.¹⁰²

Unlike itinerant filmmakers, who either filmed permanent structures, such as government buildings and schools, or asked sponsors to stage events for the benefit of their camera, Tinsley, who also worked as a local newsreel camera operator, incorporated news event footage into his home talent pictures.¹⁰³ In November 1914, the newspaper reported that Tinsley turned footage of a major fire in Corning that was taken the past summer into the centerpiece for a new narrative, Between Two Fires.¹⁰⁴ The same article alluded to another picture made by Tinsley, Last Drill of the Boys of ’61, taken at a reunion of Civil War veterans, and mentioned that his next project, Chariton’s Heroes, would be made in the town of Chariton, eighty miles to the east. In February 1915, Clyde A. Glougie captured a wolf on his ranch outside of town for Tinsley’s next film, The Wolf Hunt, which cast two hundred people and up to fifty dogs for a film that climaxed with a wolf slaughter.¹⁰⁵ The paper also printed the rather simple plot of the film: One of Glougie’s sheep is killed, and Glougie responds by accusing his neighbor’s dog of committing the crime. Just before Glougie is about to shoot the dog, he realizes that his daughter is missing and goes to find her. When he finds her, she tells him that she saw a wolf on the property, after which the wolf hunt begins. Calling Tinsley “the man who ‘knows how,’” the newspaper expressed confidence in his abilities to turn out a motion picture. In late May 1915, Tinsley left Corning for Des Moines, where he went to work as a camera operator for the Superior Film Company, which, as the Corning newspaper noted, “puts on local home talent stories and stunts, similar to those Mr. Tinsley has given in this city and nearby communities.”¹⁰⁶

Figure 2.1. Photograph of the Superior Film Manufacturing Company making a film in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1913. Courtesy of the Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University, Bloomington

With the Superior Film Manufacturing Company

The newspaper’s description of the Superior Film Manufacturing Company was not fully accurate, as the company specialized in newsreels and booster pictures and had moved into home talent productions only recently. In November 1913, a Des Moines newspaper reported that the company had won a contract to “present pictures of all interesting local and state events” at the Orpheum Theater.¹⁰⁷ A few months earlier, the company was paid $500 by the Iowa Department of Agriculture for a 1,530-foot film of the Iowa State Fair, which took place in late August.¹⁰⁸ In late 1913, the company expanded its sights, running a quarter-page advertisement in the December 6 issue of Moving Picture World announcing that the company would shoot “Local Pictures at half the cost.”¹⁰⁹ The company’s low costs made them competitive with more established firms. For example, railway officials and business owners in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, selected the company to produce a four-thousand-foot film for seven hundred dollars after rejecting a higher offer from the Philadelphia-based H.B.B. Motion Picture Company.¹¹⁰ In May 1914, the World reported that the company had made films in Trenton, Missouri, with the intention of showing them at the Missouri building of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.¹¹¹ Newspaper accounts of the company suggest that they employed several camera operators, and the 1913 city directory in Des Moines lists four employees.¹¹² One employee, Richard E. Norman, produced home talent films, including Sleepy Sam the Sleuth, which he copyrighted in 1915, and filmed in a number of cities for several years before turning to the filming of race movies in the early 1920s.¹¹³

An undated brochure for the company, produced after 1914, boasted that it produced industrial, feature, advertising, and special films, and offered developing and printing services from its new studio in Des Moines. The company also provided cameramen for all occasions, including “Parades, Festivals, special events, celebrations, civic pictures, etc.”¹¹⁴ Sponsors were charged fifteen dollars a day, plus hotel and traveling expenses, for the camera operator and an additional five cents a foot for the developed film, with additional charges for titles. A typical thousand-foot film would cost a theater exhibitor at least eighty dollars, assuming that the camera operator was in town for two days. The exhibitor would have to sell eight hundred ten-cent tickets to break even.¹¹⁵

When Tinsley joined the Superior Film Company in May 1915, he discontinued his practice of writing original scripts and instead shot two scenarios, The Man at the Throttle and, later, Two Troublesome Tramps, again and again. The newspaper articles about Superior’s films rarely mentioned the director, so it is difficult to know just how many films Tinsley made for the company and how many were made by other directors, like Norman, who similarly filmed The Man at the Throttle in 1915 and later the same film under a different title, The Green-Eyed Monster, which he also remade as a race film.¹¹⁶ Although these films were called “home talent” productions, Norman’s sales pitch to exhibitors emphasized just how little original film needed to be shot for each production. In an undated flyer for Sleepy Sam, now under his eponymous company name, Norman spelled out the appeal of his home talent films to skeptical exhibitors: “R. E. Norman of the Norman Film Manufacturing company was convinced that the Home Talent motion picture was a winner—not merely a novelty, but a steady winner, provided the heavy expense could be reduced to a minimum and the time consumed in making the Home Talent motion picture to not more than one day for each City.”¹¹⁷

The flyer goes on to reveal the secret to Norman’s success—he would film no more than two hundred of the thousand-foot motion picture in each town, splicing in footage that, Norman assured exhibitors, appeared to be also shot in the community. Like the producers of booster films, home talent directors were drawn to more efficient models of production, even if such tactics undermined the original lure of local footage.

Tinsley, whose relationship with Norman is unclear, may have made his first Throttle film in Oelwein, Iowa, in early June, soon after joining Superior. The local paper in Oelwein summarized the film’s scenario: “Jack Manning and Joe Hilton are rivals for the hand of Helen Powers, daughter of the Superintendent of the Railroad. Bernard Powers, Superintendent, promises Jack Manning the hand of Helen Powers in marriage and a promotion to Assistant Superintendent if he wins the mail race between the railroad and a rival road. Joe Hilton throws a switch which wrecks two passenger trains and delays the mail train for three hours. In spite of the delay Jack Manning brings the mail train on time and wins the race. He wins the bride, the race and his promotion.”¹¹⁸

Like the municipal booster films discussed in the previous chapter, a wedding serves as the film’s dénouement, an easily staged event that resolves any narrative conflicts in the plot and allows for the crowd scenes that were an important element of local films. As Lynne Kirby has noted, the railroad romance was popular in the mid-1910s, although most of the plots of nationally distributed serials centered on female characters.¹¹⁹ While for Kirby the railroad film is a “medium of condensation” that finds its meaning by alternating different times and spaces, The Man at the Throttle appealed to local audiences who instead saw railroad operators as unaccountable and dangerous. Reporting on a train wreck near Corning in 1913, a local newspaper noted, “Might as well try to get Milwaukee water out of a Corning cistern as to get particulars of a railroad wreck from railroad people.”¹²⁰ While the producers of early municipal booster films may have been reluctant to use a train wreck as the spectacle for a booster film, producers of home talent films could be assured that such scenes, even if they were not filmed locally, would be of interest to audiences.

Figure 2.2. Playbill for The Man at the Throttle (n.d.). Courtesy of the Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University, Bloomington

The railroad plot was also appealing to communities because it offered a diversity of acting opportunities to the members of local society. Unlike municipal booster producers, home talent producers appealed to their sponsors’ desire to be in a motion picture, rather than to advertise their towns in cinemas throughout the country. While Superior’s business plan was not evident from the newspaper stories about their films, all imply that the local theater manager presented the film, which suggests that the company and the theater shared proceeds from the box office. The producers of home talents appeared to be satisfied with a single revenue stream and did not charge entry fees to vie for a spot in their films, sell advertising screen space to local businesses, or ask booster groups to sponsor the films, all practices that were widely used by other producers of local pictures.

At the same time, home talent pictures often shared with municipal booster productions a tendency to cast the town’s elite in their productions. A 1916 film produced by Superior in Des Moines titled Unto the Least of These and sponsored by the women and children’s hospital was described by the company as a “society film,” a term that held true for most of the films made by Superior.¹²¹ For example, in April 1915, the Throttle film in Cedar Rapids starred the superintendent of the Northwestern Railroad, the managing editor of the local paper, and the cashier of the Boone National Bank.¹²² Tinsley used a similar casting strategy in his Corning films, but the number of films he made in town increased the likelihood that most residents would eventually have their turn on screen.

The directors associated with the Superior Film Company did not claim that their films were unique. As the paper in Waterloo, Iowa, put it, Superior was “a Des Moines concern which goes from town to town and films [The Man at the Throttle] with local characters.”¹²³ Instead of emphasizing its unique product, Superior focused on the quality of the films themselves, even if it meant that such films contained nonlocal scenes. For example, one of the two collisions in The Man at the Throttle, the train wreck, was not filmed locally but instead near Creston, Iowa, in early 1915.¹²⁴ Although the Moving Picture World editorial quoted above assumed that audiences would be more interested in an ordinary, locally filmed accident than a spectacular one filmed far away, Tinsley and other Superior directors offered audiences local scenes alternated with spectacles. In Iowa City, the railroad wreck was described as a “scenic effect of thrilling type” but a head-on car collision, which Tinsley staged locally, attracted “hundreds of interested spectators” who wanted to see themselves in the film.¹²⁵ When the film was presented in Iowa City, its combination of the local and the spectacular proved to be the “delight of the pulse-stirred, heart-throbbing onlookers,” an observation that may well have come from a Superior press release.¹²⁶ For Richard Norman, Sleepy Sam’s use of stock scenes proved to be an asset to convince skeptical theater owners to participate in the scheme. As one exhibitor noted in the brochure, “It took us about 15 minutes to get the cast of characters and all told about an hour to make the film,” suggesting how limited Norman’s ambitions were for local filmmaking.¹²⁷

Figure 2.3. Advertisement for The Mexican Raid. From the Adams County (Corning, Iowa) Union-Republican, May 10, 1916, 4

The War at Home

While Tinsley worked as a representative of the Superior Film Company for the next several years, he continued to make motion pictures in Corning. However, he shifted his filmmaking practice from making fictional films that used local events as their central attraction to more politically salient works. Tinsley’s The Mexican Raid, a home talent production made in Corning, Iowa, in the spring of 1916, is a particularly compelling example of this kind of local moving picture. Like other home talent productions, this picture relied on audience recognition of local people and places. But The Mexican Raid also depended on a politically sophisticated audience that could understand the implications of the depicted event—a recreation of Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s attack on the small border town of Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916—for the town’s volunteer militia.

By the time Tinsley made The Mexican Raid, he was already well known in Corning for his motion pictures. The event depicted in the film precipitated President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to send US troops into Mexico to capture Villa. In early May, two months after the raid, an article ran in the local paper describing the plot of Tinsley’s film and his production plans:

The title of the picture is The Mexican Raid and will be up-to-the-minute stuff, since it will picture Mexicans making a raid on Americans. The principal scenes of the film will be taken on the above date at the Mose Straughan farm, south of town. Co. K will take a leading part in the battle scene and the management of the picture wants the services of 150 men and boys on horse back to act as Mexicans and make the raid. The log cabin, a landmark on the Straughan farm, will be used in the picture and the cabin will be burned.¹²⁸

Tinsley’s use of the Corning-based Company K of the Third Infantry of the Iowa National Guard to participate in the reenactment is interesting for three reasons. First, Wilson’s commitment of troops to the conflict led many to suspect that the National Guard would be called into action for the first time since the Spanish-American War (1898), meaning that the actions of Company K soldiers in the film anticipated prospective real-life military service. Second, by casting other Corning residents as Mexicans, Tinsley was asking his audiences to imagine those not in the militia, which was made up of volunteers, as a potential enemy force, one marked as an “ethnic” other. And third, by planning to burn a log cabin that the newspaper considered a “landmark” in the community, Tinsley was calling attention to the importance of the events depicted in the film by destroying something that was part of local history. In this way, The Mexican Raid asked audiences to recognize the place of the film—the Mose Straughan farm—as both a familiar site and a landscape that could stand in for the US-Mexico border. In The Mexican Raid, which was first shown in Corning on June 9 and 10, real soldiers reenacted a real military conflict on a real farm that had been reimagined by Tinsley as a battlefield.¹²⁹

Figure 2.4. Advertisement for The Mexican Raid. From the Adams County (Corning, Iowa) Free Press, June 3, 1916, 4

Figure 2.5. Advertisement for The Mexican Raid. From the Adams County (Corning, Iowa) Union Republican, July 12, 1916, 1

On June 18, Wilson called all members of the National Guard into service to protect the Mexican border, including 4,500 troops from Iowa, 78 of whom were from Corning.¹³⁰ Tinsley went to Camp Dodge, a training base twelve miles northwest of Des Moines, to film another thousand feet of film to add to The Mexican Raid. In an advertisement published on July 13, 1916, Tinsley listed the new scenes in the film: “Gov. Clarke signing call for National Guard, pathetic scenes at station as Company K leaves for Mexican war. Company K in service at Camp Dodge, aeroplane scouts dropping bombs, sharp shooters bringing down air craft.” In Tinsley’s description of this new reel, which appears to feature footage of training activities, he also added that the viewer might “see yourself in the crowd at the train station.”¹³¹ While the appeal of the first reel of The Mexican Raid was seeing a farm near Corning transformed into a battlefield, the second attracted audiences because it showed scenes featuring local people training for an actual battle. In the first reel, the soldiers in Company K were merely actors. In the second, the soldiers were the subjects of a newsreel assembled by Tinsley to show the real-world military response to the fictional scenes he had created a month earlier.

As Richard Abel has noted, World War I inspired the production of many “feature-length non-fiction films” on the war between 1914 and 1916, which were produced or distributed by small companies who saw a market opening for motion pictures about a war the United States had not yet officially entered but was nonetheless following very closely. Abel notes that the pictures often took an editorial stance on the war itself, making them more like propaganda for one side or another, in contrast to the neutral stance that newsreels claimed. Tinsley’s early, semi-fictional pictures were different from the war pictures because they focused on an incident closer to home but likely played on audience interest in representations of war, which had before only been depicted in newsreels and short reenactments and actualities.¹³² Tinsley made at least four more films about Corning’s involvement in military conflicts of the 1910s, including On the Mexican Border, which was made in Brownsville, Texas, on behalf of the Iowa YMCA in early 1917, and several World War I films.

In October 1917, Tinsley turned the basement of his house into a film manufacturing plant and officially started the Tinsley Film Company. As the Adams County Free Press noted, Tinsley no longer had to travel to Des Moines, one hundred miles northeast of Corning, to process and edit his films. The newspaper also reported that it was printing intertitles for Tinsley, which helps explain its close coverage of Tinsley’s films.¹³³ In December 1917, eight months after the United States entered World War I, Tinsley traveled to Washington, DC, to obtain permission to film soldiers from Corning in training at Camp Cody, located in Deming, New Mexico.¹³⁴ From Washington, Tinsley and his wife left for New Mexico, first stopping in several towns in Texas to make other films, likely home talent productions. The Adams County Union-Republican justified Tinsley’s trip by noting that “a motion picture of Washington’s army or Grant or Lee’s Army would today be valuable and these pictures will be just as valuable in time to come.”¹³⁵ In mid-February 1918, the Tinsleys returned from New Mexico to edit the film.¹³⁶ When the film was finished in mid-March, Tinsley sent it to the Committee on Public Information in Washington, DC, for approval. According to the Corning newspaper, “only two scenes in the entire six reels were ordered cut out by the authorities,” and with the government’s approval, Tinsley went back to New Mexico to show the film.¹³⁷ At the end of March, Tinsley returned to Corning for the film’s local premiere and brought back “Woodrow,” an eagle, as an added attraction.¹³⁸ A few months later, the paper reported the Tinsley had screened the film throughout Nebraska and South Dakota, carrying a different animal attraction from New Mexico—two horned toads—from town to town.¹³⁹ At the end of 1918, Tinsley produced another war film, Over There, a moving image illustrated song described as such: “Corporal Archie Ammon, and seven other boys from the Rainbow division, from overseas, put on a trench scene especially for this production. They went into the trenches at Camp Dodge and reproduced the scenes really produced in the great world war ‘over there.’”¹⁴⁰

For the film’s exhibition, a local Corning resident sang the popular World War I song from which it took its name, while Corrie Peregrine, the wife of Tinsley’s former business partner, played the piano.¹⁴¹ In June 1919, Tinsley made his final war film, Our Rainbow Boys, so called because National Guard troops from three regiments in Iowa had joined National Guard troops in other states to form a “rainbow division.” Tinsley traveled to New York in early 1919 to film the arrival of the Leviathan, a large military ship with Iowa’s infantry regiments on board. Unlike Tinsley’s previous war films, this one was commissioned by the Iowa Historical Society to “make a permanent record” of the event so that “the coming generations may see and be proud of the way we received our heroes of the World War.” Unfortunately for those coming generations, the motion pictures are not known to survive.¹⁴²

Tinsley left Superior in either late 1917 or early 1918 but did not stop making films. Instead, he began an itinerant practice, producing one home talent film, Two Troublesome Tramps, throughout Iowa and nearby states for at least fifteen more years. Tinsley may have written the scenario himself. A newspaper article on a screening of Tinsley’s films in Clearfield, Iowa, referenced a Two Troublesome Tramps produced in nearby Afton before Tinsley joined Superior.¹⁴³ The Malvern (Iowa) Leader summarized the film’s comic narrative when the film was produced there in March 1916:

The play is entitled, Two Troublesome Tramps, and they certainly prove troublesome to numerous Malvern people as they go their happy go lucky way, from the time they strike the town from a Wabash box car until they land behind the bars, placed there by the firm hand of the law as administered by Chief of Police Jones.

They first apply for a “hand out” at the back door of the Baton Tenant home where Mrs. Tenant chases them off with a broom. This was done so vigorously that they tumbled over each other in their haste breaking Hixson’s nose, which wasn’t figured on in the original play. But it goes in the movies just the same, now. Next they appear at the back door of the D. R. Martin home but Mrs. Martin sets the dog on them to such effect that they beat a hasty retreat. Down at the livery barn they unexpectedly find some money and at once resolve to dress up and try another tack—Break into society. They go to Kneeland’s and purchase a complete new outfit and start out as dudes. They make a break at the lady in the case and get into a fight to liven things up a bit. They later overturn a couple of men busily reading the war news and afterward break up a party when they are nabbed by the eagle eyed minion of the law, J. W. Jones, who lands them safely behind the bars in the last scene.¹⁴⁴

As with his previous home talent pictures, Tinsley incorporated scenes taken elsewhere into the Tramp movies, inserting a “snake scene” and a scene where a Ford automobile is driven off a bridge.¹⁴⁵ Although Two Troublesome Tramps had very few named roles, the “tramps,” who were played by locals, interacted with their neighbors in various circumstances, allowing for a large cast of unnamed bit players to appear in the film. In Anita, Iowa, an advertisement placed in the newspaper noted the film depicted “more than 100 of our home people you all know” and called the film a “Feast of Fun!”¹⁴⁶

Tinsley continued producing Two Troublesome Tramps throughout the Midwest and beyond, shooting films in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Arkansas, and possibly Oklahoma and Texas in the 1920s and early 1930s. Although the picture’s basic storyline and attractions remained unchanged, the descriptions of the films became more detailed, and Tinsley appears to have experimented with the mode. In Jefferson City, Missouri, Tinsley brought a blackface comedian from Chicago, Charles Weiss, to play the “mammy” role, which was not mentioned in the descriptions of the film in the 1910s but became an increasingly central character in the film in the 1920s and 1930s. Blackface was popular in small towns in the early part of the twentieth century, particularly in amateur theatrical productions, making Tinsley’s use of the practice not unusual.¹⁴⁷ In 1933, Tinsley added another attraction to the film, “an attack by a monster reptile,” an inserted scene possibly filmed in the Southwest, where Tinsley and his wife visited frequently.¹⁴⁸

Tinsley turned sixty in April 1933. He produced only a handful of films after that date, though he lived another thirty-two years. In 1937, his house was foreclosed upon, and afterward he may have moved away from Corning.¹⁴⁹ In 1941, the Corning paper reported that Tinsley had returned to town to film Watch Your Speed, a traffic safety film sponsored by the National Safety Council, but there are no records of the picture’s production.¹⁵⁰ By 1948, Tinsley had moved back to Corning and lived there until his death in 1965.¹⁵¹ His obituary made just a brief mention of his movie career and did not comment on what happened to the many films he made in Corning and elsewhere.¹⁵²

ITINERANCY BEGINS AT HOME

The prevalence of home talent production in the mid- and late-1910s was but one example of the difficulties small-town residents had in accepting the movie industry’s plans for their local theaters. Although traveling theater troupes, circuses, vaudeville acts, medicine shows, itinerant preachers, and live performers of all stripes refused to cede their careers in the face of the Hollywood behemoth, the industry had little interest in sharing their theaters with these two-bit acts. The seasonal rhythms of live performance were replaced by the daily onslaught of new films, with stars and genres designed for mass appeal. As Barbara Wilinsky has noted, in the 1910s movie producers, newspapers, and other large media outlets “selected and transformed different pieces of US subcultures not only to attract but also to construct and shape the mass audience.”¹⁵³ Small-town audiences may have been a comparatively neglected group but were nevertheless swept up in this social and cultural transformation. From this perspective, the producers of home talent productions were attempting, and mostly failing, to gain a toehold on the screen of their local theater.

A few home talent filmmakers followed Tinsley’s path and turned their success as directors of local films into a career. For example, Hugh V. Jamieson produced the home talent film Won from the Flames before starting his eponymous industrial film company in 1916, which remained in business for more than sixty years. Born in Kansas in 1889, Jamieson ran a movie theater in Baldwin City, Kansas, in the early 1910s while he was studying at Baker University. After graduating, Jamieson moved to Kansas City and around 1913 signed on as a traveling salesman for Edison’s Home Projecting Kinetoscope.¹⁵⁴ Jamieson quickly sold twelve projectors, but a fire destroyed Edison’s studio in December 1914, ending Edison’s early foray into the amateur market.¹⁵⁵ Around that time, Jamieson purchased a Williamson Camera for seventy-five dollars and, according to a company history published in 1974, “started touring, making pictures, processing them in the hotel bathtub and showing them in the respective town where they had been shot.”¹⁵⁶ With a script featuring a love story, a fire, and crowd scenes, Jamieson produced Won from the Flames in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas in 1915 and 1916.¹⁵⁷ In December 1915, Jamieson, looking to break ground in yet another aspect of production, contracted with a sign company to produce advertising trailers for use in Texas movie theaters, which would have been among the earliest film trailers. In 1916, Jamieson started the Jamieson Film Company, which became a leading regional producer of industrial films for decades.¹⁵⁸

In other cases, home talent film producers had backgrounds in traveling entertainment and returned to those fields once they had exhausted their interest in filmmaking. For example, Basil McHenry, a circus promoter, worked as an itinerant film producer in the mid-1910s, producing a melodrama titled The Man Haters in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, New York, and likely other states. The ten-minute version McHenry produced in Muncie, Indiana, in the fall of 1915 is extant.¹⁵⁹ McHenry did not direct the pictures himself but instead hired cinematographers to shoot the films. Like the Paragon films discussed in the first chapter, The Man Haters was a wedding picture, only in this case the lead actress had to first be persuaded to leave her club of “man haters,” an allusion to feminist groups who rejected men.¹⁶⁰ The films were made with the cooperation, and likely sponsorship, of local newspapers, which held a “Who Will Be Ruth?” casting competition in the weeks leading up to the film’s production. McHenry quit making films by the late 1910s and became a longtime traveling publicity agent for Hollywood films.¹⁶¹

It was far more common, however, for home talent filmmakers to announce their entry into the movie industry with great aplomb but never complete a production. The home talent field was marked with a series of false starts and unfulfilled promises. In trade newspapers like Moving Picture News and Moving Picture World, bold schemes for local picture productions would receive ample publicity, but the company or filmmaker discussed would never be mentioned again. For example, in early 1915, Moving Picture World printed a notice about a studio founded in Waterloo, Iowa, by Arthur L. Runyan for the production of advertising pictures: “Local talent will be engaged to enact the parts of the ‘lover,’ ‘hero’ and ‘villain,’ and a big studio will soon be in course of construction in Waterloo. As to outdoor scenery, the company will draw upon the natural resources of the immediate vicinity of Waterloo.”¹⁶²

There is no evidence that Runyan ever produced a film in Waterloo, which had a population of almost thirty thousand people in 1910, but the town still had its opportunity to appear in a number of home talent, industrial romance, and other local films made over the course of the next few decades.¹⁶³ Even if not every town had a filmmaker as ambitious as Tinsley, most towns saw a number of home talent productions made in the first decades of the cinema.

While producing home talent films could be a profitable enterprise, an overcrowded marketplace made it difficult for many producers to succeed. One bad experience could sour an exhibitor’s openness to home talent productions, and poorly made pictures and scams were also reported in local papers and the trade press. In October 1915, a Moving Picture World correspondent in Illinois asked, “Do Local Films Pay?” offering several examples of films that were so bad that they hurt business for the three or four days they were booked at the theater.¹⁶⁴ While the producers of local views promised—and delivered—just the chance to see oneself on screen, the additional assurances made by home talent producers were often more difficult to fulfill.

Ironically, the difficulty any individual or company had staying in the business long term increased the variety and longevity of the practice. While a few producers were able to stay in business for a decade or more, it was far more typical for someone like Jamieson or Norman to shoot local films for a few years and then move on to make other types of motion pictures or quit the business altogether. If a town had a resident like Tinsley who owned a movie camera and used it to photograph local events or even produce home talents, it was difficult for an itinerant to come to town and do the same.

While Tinsley approached Alfred Arvold’s goal for home talent productions to tell local stories, most directors found producing the same script again and again to be more economically viable. Many of the startup studios that opened in the far-flung corners of the United States had gone out of the business by the late 1910s or moved into the production of educational and industrial film. While itinerant filmmakers continued to produce narrative fiction films in the coming decades, these directors were no longer seen as autonomous agents within the world of motion pictures. Instead, they claimed to be representatives of the movie industry that everyone now called Hollywood.

NOTES

1. For more on the infiltration of mass culture on rural life, see Barron, Mixed Harvest, 193–241. Barron argues that rural areas participated in cultural markets before they became part of mass culture around 1920.

2. See Zimmermann, Reel Families, 1–11. As Zimmermann argues of the contrast between amateurs and professionals, “Despite the propagation of an idea that amateurism protected equality through artistic, economic, or inventive opportunity, on a less-abstract level there remained a hierarchy of those who performed a task for a living and those who engaged in it for the self” (10). In contrast, home talent was often a remunerative activity, even if the work was temporary or if one could easily be replaced by a professional.

3. See US Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, vol. 2, Number and Distribution of Inhabitants (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 50.

4. Wiebe, The Search for Order.

5. On the spread of consumer goods, the leading indicator of the general trend toward a national culture, see Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, 124–161.

6. See Kaufman, For the Common Good? 56–82, and Reps, The Making of Urban America, 497–525.

7. See “Home Talent.” School administration was a particularly contentious issue in rural communities, who resisted the consolidation of schools and the requirement that schools hire professional educators. For more on this issue, see Barron, Mixed Harvest, 43–77. For more on the new professional classes, see also Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism, 80–128.

8. Cousins, “Combination for Better Engineering.”

9. C. F. Johnson, “A Tribute to St. Louis,” The Western Architect, June 1916, 62.

10. Lingeman. Small Town America, 258–320.

11. Danbom, Born in the Country, 163.

12. Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border, 119–121.

13. Spears. Chicago Dreaming.

14. Ibid., 58–59. Spears notes that nostalgia for one’s hometown was a common affliction for writers in this period (126–127).

15. See Abel, “Film Discourse in the Heartlands.”

16. Ibid., 146.

17. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties, 293–330. As Kett notes, “The twin goals of Progressive-style popular education—the enhancement of the public’s receptivity to scientific solutions and the intensification of feelings of community—frequently overlapped” (314).

18. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 24–27. See Report of the Country Life Commission.

19. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 94–95.

20. Arvold, “The Little Country Theatre,” 88.

21. Ibid., 89.

22. Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy, 146. Liberty Hyde Bailey, chair of the Country Life Commission, himself echoed similar sentiments, instead proposing that rural people produce drama that depicts “the end of the planting, the harvest, the seasons, the leading crops, the dairy, the woods, the history and traditions of the neighborhood or the region.” See Bailey, The Country-Life Movement in the United States, 213.

23. Of course, Arvold’s assumptions depended on a narrowed, even elitist sense for what counted as culture, as evidenced by the popularity of rural music in the 1920s and 1930s.

24. Arvold, “The Little Country Theatre,” 90.

25. See Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow.

26. Arvold, “The Little Country Theatre,” 91.

27. Ibid., 92–93.

28. MPW, April 4, 1914, 92.

29. See Chansky, Composing Ourselves, 64–66. The Little Cinema movement of the 1920s likely took its name from these earlier theatrical movements, but its supporters were not interested in using the cinema to establish local or regional identity. See Morey, “Early Art Cinema in the U.S.”

30. Eaton, “The Real Revolt in Our Theatre,” 598.

31. Ibid., 601–602.

32. See Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 345.

33. Senelick, The Changing Room, 328.

34. Eckey et al., 1,001 Broadways, 32–33. Universal’s most successful booker was Lauren Kenyon Woods, who went on to found the Boston Amateur Theatre Guild, a prominent producer of local motion pictures in the 1930s. See chapter 5.

35. The noted theater historian Brooks McNamara defines home talent plays merely as shows that were “sponsored by companies that provided directors—often young women with a college drama department background—. . . with a playscript suitable for amateurs.” McNamara, “Popular Entertainment,” 398. For a more complete history of the home talent play, see Eckey et al., 1,001 Broadways.

36. In theater producer Norris Houghton’s 1941 survey of American theater, Advance from Broadway, he noted that the number of professional theaters in the United States dropped from 5,000 in 1890 to 192 in 1939, 44 of which were in Times Square (14).

37. For more on the relationship between theater and film, see Jacobs and Brewster. Theatre to Cinema.

38. Musser, “Towards a History of Theatrical Culture,” 12.

39. Liepa, “Figures of Silent Speech,” 204–294; Luckett, Cinema and Community, 117–125.

40. As Robert C. Allen notes in the so-called Manhattan debates, which were published over a series of Cinema Journal issues in the mid-1990s, “if we were forced to choose only one locality to represent the way the movies became a part of most communities in America, we would have more reason to choose Anamosa, Iowa, than New York, New York.” Allen, “Manhattan Myopia,” 96.

41. Bottomore, “From the Factory Gate to the ‘Home Talent’ Drama,” 33.

42. Singer, “Feature Films, Variety Programs, and the Crisis of the Small Exhibitor.”

43. MPW, December 23, 1911, 1019.

44. MPW, September 16, 1911, 814. Schneider also ran an advertisement for his camera in Popular Mechanics, September 1912, 20. In order to make a return on his or her investment, an owner of Schneider’s camera would have to sell more than four thousand ten-cent tickets for a single film.

45. MPW, September 14, 1912, 1130.

46. Moving Picture News. October 26, 1912, 33.

47. Lavezzi Machine Works, which was founded in Chicago in 1908, sold its camera kit for fifty dollars by 1913, although a company representative told the World in September 1913 that the camera was intended for home use. The lens and tripod were sold separately, for fifteen and ten dollars respectively. See MPW, September 13, 1913, 1162.

48. As Ben Singer has noted, in 1912 and 1913, a number of amateur motion picture cameras and projectors were released, some of which used 35mm film. See Singer, “Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope.”

49. MPW, January 18, 1913, 287. The quotes around “Precision” are in the advertisement.

50. MPW, February 8, 1913, 613.

51. “An Exhibitor’s Camera: A Mechanically Perfect Instrument on a Small Scale Which Should Help Exhibitors to Fill Their Houses,” MPW, February 22, 1913, 765. Before importing the Sept camera, Whyte-Whitman sold another import, the Williamson camera from Britain. See Moving Picture News, October 12, 1912, 5.

52. MPW, February 22, 1913, 765. Because these camera manufacturers targeted a semiprofessional market, the cameras they produced have not been studied as extensively as those produced for either the professional or amateur markets. For example, Alan Kattelle’s Home Movies, an authoritative source on the history of amateur film equipment, only mentions the Sept 35mm semiprofessional camera in passing and suggests that it was not introduced into the United States until the 1920s (58). In James R. Cameron’s history of amateur and semiprofessional cameras, published in 1927, he suggested that the Sept camera was the first “moderately priced camera” that used 35mm film, followed by the Victor Cine Camera, the De Vry Automatic Camera, and the Eyemo. See Cameron, The Taking and Showing of Motion Pictures for the Amateur, 14–15. Barry Salt suggests that many of the cameras described here were modeled after the Williamson camera, first sold in 1904 and later copied by other companies. See Salt, Film Style and Technology, 70.

53. MPW, February 22, 1913, 765.

54. The Motion Picture Camera Company sold the Ideal Motion Picture Camera. MPW, April 26, 1913, 408.

55. MPW, April 12, 1913, 225. In December 1912, Special Event Film Manufacturing Company, discussed in chapter 1, sold its camera, lens, and tripod for one hundred dollars, with two hundred feet of film included as a bonus. See Moving Picture News, December 7, 1912, 31.

56. By January 1914, cameras were selling for seventy-five dollars in the Motion Picture World. See MPW, January 24, 1914, 462.

57. MPW, October 4, 1914, 81.

58. Notable exceptions include Allen, Vaudeville and Film, and Jacobs and Brewster, Theatre to Cinema.

59. A discussion of the relationship between movie theaters and opera houses in small towns can be found in William Faricy Condee’s Coal and Culture. While Condee’s argument is specific to opera houses in the southern Appalachian region, my research suggests that the pattern he identifies held true in towns throughout the United States.

60. Hulfish, Motion-Picture Work, 37.

61. MPW, July 26, 1913, 324.

62. MPW, September 13, 1913, 1164–1165. This example is also cited in Bottomore, “From the Factory Gate to the ‘Home Talent’ Drama,” 40.

63. MPW, September 13, 1913, 1194. According to the World, the film “showed the rescue of a young woman from a burning building and the department was given an opportunity to display the workings of its apparatus.”

64. MPW, October 4, 1913, 40–41.

65. MPW, September 5, 1914, 1394; February 21, 1914, 980.

66. MPW, August 21, 1915, 1341. The Mine Owner’s Daughter was produced by Paragon, discussed in chapter 1.

67. Sargent, Picture Theater Advertising, 248.

68. MPW, September 26, 1914, 1796.

69. MPW, August 8, 1914, 850.

70. Singer, “Feature Films, Variety Programs, and the Crisis of the Small Exhibitor,” 76.

71. For an account of Jacksonville’s importance in the transitional era, see Bean, The First Hollywood, and Nelson, Florida and the American Motion Picture Industry.

72. With the exception of a few case studies, scholars have not written about small studios in far-flung cities in the transitional era. For a sampling of those studios that could be studied, see Karr, “Hooray for Providence.”

73. Dench, “Openings for the Free Lance Cinematographer.”

74. MPW, January 17, 1914, 305.

75. Hill, “Will the Moving Picture Camera Pay?”

76. MPW, June 10, 1916, 1949. In 1917, Camera Craft noted that David Stern was selling the Davsco Camera for use by directors of “news film and home talent pictures.” See Camera Craft, January 1917, 39.

77. As Michael Aronson has noted, in the spring of 1916, Motion Picture News launched an advice column (“The Camera”) for exhibitor-camera operators but encouraged them to stick to local newsreels. See Aronson, Nickelodeon City, 223–228. For more on local newsreels, see Abel, Menus for Movieland, 64–71.

78. “Have You Talent?” brochure, RNC, box 4, folder 75. In a herald for the film, Norman described it as a “lavish production” featuring “university notables” and “college studios” in a “story of University life with a plot of national interest.” The “Have You Talent?” brochure lists the scenes in the film, including “the blowing up of a house, a big ball room scene, showing a number of people dancing, registration, rushing and pledging scenes, a big fight scene in which a laboratory of chemical apparatus was broken up, also a scene showing the villain breaking a flask of chemical on the hero, disabling him and being blinded by an accidental explosion, finally falling downstairs, breaking his neck.” According to the brochure, two of the actors in the film were cast in the Chicago-based film company Essanay’s The Prince of Graustark (1916) as a result of their performances. Herald, RNC, box 4, folder 75. Moving Picture World also reported on Pro Patria in its September 2, 1915, issue, almost a month after its local exhibition (1577).

79. “Have You Talent?” brochure.

80. Liepa, “Entertaining the Public Option,” 12.

81. Stoddard, The Photo-Play, [10–11].

82. Kane, 1,001 Places to Sell Manuscripts, 230.

83. After contacting the state archives in Iowa for more information on Tinsley, I received a clipping file from Paula Mohr, an architectural historian who now works for the Iowa Historic Preservation Office in Des Moines. The file was assembled by Mary Jones, a historian in Iowa.

84. ACFP, February 18, 1965, 20. In the 1880 federal census, Tinsley was identified as living on a farm in Locust Grove, Iowa, where his father, David, was a merchant. Ancestry Library Edition, www.ancestry.com. More information about the family appears in the obituary for Tinsley’s mother, Mary, in the Corning newspaper. See ACFP, July 9, 1931, 4.

85. Anita (Iowa) Record, October 25, 1917, 1.

86. ACFP, October 6, 1898, 6. Batavia’s population is from the 1890 federal census. Ancestry Library Edition, www.ancestry.com.

87. ACFP, February 18, 1965, 20.

88. “Xmas Dinner,” ACFP, December 28, 1933, 5. Tinsley regularly filmed these dinners and exhibited the results in the host’s home in subsequent years.

89. “Of Local Interest,” ACFP, March 25, 1908, 5.

90. “Business Change,” ACUR, October 30, 1912, 12.

91. “Tribute to Enterprise,” ACUR, January 1, 1913, 2.

92. “Corning to Be Taken,” ACUR, February 14, 1913, 3.

93. Ibid.

94. “Additional Locals,” ACFP, March 1, 1913, 4.

95. “Tinsley Studio Burned,” ACFP, April 29, 1914, 1.

96. “Photo Play Is Staged,” ACUR, May 20, 1914, 8.

97. Ibid.

98. “Pictures Are Fine,” ACUR, July 1, 1914, 4.

99. ACFP, June 6, 1914, 7.

100. “Mighty Quick Word,” ACUR, July 29, 1914, 1.

101. “Home Talent Films,” ACUR, August 12, 1914, 4.

102. ACFP, November 7, 1914, 10.

103. In addition to the home talent films described here, Tinsley, like many local home talent filmmakers, also shot footage of important local events.

104. “Between Two Fires,” ACUR, November 4, 1914, 2.

105. “The Wolf Hunt,” ACUR, February 17, 1915, 2. Two weeks earlier, Moving Picture World published an account of a home talent film with the same plot that was shot in Tekamah, Nebraska, by the Hartman Brothers of Omaha, another producer of local motion pictures. It is not clear if Tinsley was inspired by this account or if he had connections with the company in Omaha, which is eighty miles west of Corning. See MPW, January 30, 1915, 701.

106. “Good Situation,” ACUR, May 26, 1915, 7.

107. National Democrat (Des Moines), November 6, 1913, 3.

108. Iowa Department of Agriculture, The Iowa Year Book of Agriculture, 182.

109. MPW, December 6, 1913, 1226.

110. “Will Advertise Town With Film,” Adams County (Gettysburg, Penn.) News, May 30, 1914, 1.

111. MPW, May 9, 1914, 840.

112. Des Moines City Directory, Polk’s Real Estate Register. Richard E. Norman, Clarence Kramer, Morgan Howells, and Charles Vogman were also listed as working for the company.

113. See Bernstein and White. “‘Scratching Around’ in a ‘Fit of Insanity’”; Lupack, Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking.

114. Superior brochure, RNC, box 4, folder 75. Because Norman quit working for the company by 1920, it seems likely that this brochure dates from the mid-1910s.

115. Ibid. In some cases, theater managers charged higher admission prices to see home talent films or ran them for up to a week. In almost all cases, these films were part of a two- or three-film program, which was changed two or three times a week.

116. See RNC, box 4, folder 72. Norman also appears to have produced the same film under another title, The Wrecker. See Lupack, Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking, 39–45, 324–325n38.

117. “Money Making Motion Picture Proposition” flyer, RNC, box LL-4, folder 75.

118. “The Man at the Throttle at the Gem,” Oelwein (Iowa) Daily Register, June 2, 1915, 4. A herald for the same film is in RNC. The plot summary is the same, but the herald’s writing is more vivid: “The steel monsters crash together and a fearful catastrophe is revealed to your view (the scenes are of an actual wreck and at the time the pictures were taken, the fireman of one of the engines lies buried beneath it).” Herald, RNC, box 4, folder 72.

119. Kirby, Parallel Tracks, 111.

120. ACFP, July 5, 1913, 5.

121. “Society Folk Take Part in Hospital Movie,” Des Moines News, September 29, 1916, 2.

122. “Prominent Men to Be in Movie,” Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Daily Republican, April 22, 1915, 5.

123. “At the Crystal,” WECR, June 25, 1915, 3.

124. Ibid.

125. “Real Life Vs. Reel Life Now,” Iowa City (Iowa) Daily Press, August 13, 1915, 1.

126. Ibid.

127. “Money Making Motion Picture Proposition” flyer.

128. ACFP, May 6, 1916, 5.

129. ACFP, June 3, 1916, 4. The attractions of the film are described in this ad as follows: “See train No. 6 hit the Reese Chalmers Six and the hero and heroine buried in the wreck. See the heroine rescued by the rival of the hero. See the Mexicans raid and burn the log cabin. See Company K route the bandits and rescue the American women and children.”

130. Dick Dreyer, “Iowa Troops in Mexican Border Service: 1916–1917,” Iowa National Guard Museum, http://www.iowanationalguard.com/museum/ia_history/1900%20Mexican%20Border.pdf.

131. ACUR, July 12, 1916, 1.

132. Abel, “Charge and Countercharge,” 366–367, 370, 379.

133. ACFP, October 6, 1917, 4.

134. “Movies of the Soldiers,” ACUR, December 12, 1917, 8.

135. ACUR, December 15, 1917, 8.

136. ACFP, February 16, 1918, 4.

137. ACFP, March 16, 1918, 9.

138. ACFP, March 30, 1918, 4. Just over a year later, the Corning paper reported that the eagle was donated to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. See “To Zoo,” ACFP, April 16, 1919, 5.

139. ACFP, July 6, 1918, 8.

140. “Tinsley’s Latest Production,” ACUR, December 11, 1918, 7.

141. Ibid.

142. “Our Rainbow Boys,” ACFP, June 7, 1919, 2.

143. “New Week, Friday, April 16,” Clearfield (Iowa) Enterprise, April 8, 1915, 6.

144. “A Malvern Movie Play,” Malvern (Iowa) Leader, March 9, 1916, 1.

145. “Griswold American,” ACFP, November 3, 1917, 1.

146. Anita (Iowa) Record, October 18, 1917, 4.

147. None of the other itinerant filmmakers discussed in this book made blackface films, with the slight exception of Don O. Newland, whose 1927 film Janesville’s Hero includes a scene in which a character lights a trick cigar, turning his face black. Two filmmakers discussed in this book, Richard E. Norman and Salvatore Cudia, produced race films in the 1920s and 1930s.

148. Humboldt (Iowa) Independent, January 3, 1933, 2.

149. “Foreclosure Notice,” ACFP, April 29, 1937, 20.

150. “To Film Safety Picture Here,” ACFP, November 13, 1941, 13. According to Alaina Kolosh at the National Safety Council Library, Itasca, Illinois, no records of this film exist. Personal correspondence with the author, January 17, 2011.

151. “Locals,” ACFP, September 16, 1948, 3.

152. “Charlie D. Tinsley,” ACFP, February 18, 1965, 20.

153. Wilinsky, “Flirting with Kathlyn,” 52.

154. For more on the projectors, see Singer, “Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope.” Singer observes that Edison saw schools as an important secondary market for his projectors. By 1913, Edison had decided that the educational film market was the primary one for his projector and distributed a catalogue to sixteen thousand school superintendents (51–54, 61). Based on Singer’s research, it seems likely that Jamieson did not start work as a traveling salesperson for Edison until 1912 or 1913. For more on Jamieson’s experience with Edison, see Kuehn, “Jamieson Leaves the Scene,” 913.

155. Singer, “Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,” 61.

156. Kuehn, “Jamieson Leaves the Scene,” 913.

157. “Hugh V. Jamieson Interview at KERA [TV—Dallas, Texas],” Texas Archive of the Moving Image, http://www.texasarchive.org/library/index.php?title=Hugh_V._Jamieson_Interview_at_KERA&gsearch=jamieson. According to Bruce Jamieson, Hugh’s son, the family disposed of the films in 1958, when they decided that they were too dangerous to keep. Personal correspondence with the author, January 21, 2010. In the 1930s and 1940s, Jamieson processed many of the films shot by the itinerant filmmaker Melton Barker.

158. Kuehn, “Jamieson Leaves the Scene,” 913.

159. See The Man Haters Film Collection, Ball State University, http://libx.bsu.edu/cdm4/collection.php?CISOROOT=%2Fmnhtrs.

160. The film’s title may have been inspired by Clyde Fitch’s 1908 play Girls, which features a club of “man haters” infiltrated by male suitors. In 1919, a film of the play, also entitled Girls, was produced by Paramount.

161. Turner, Having Fun with It, 14.

162. “New Moving Picture Company Formed,” MPW, January 9, 1915, 200.

163. These films include the Romance of Waterloo, made in 1920, an industrial film made by the Tisdale Film Company in 1921, and Things You Ought to Know about Waterloo, produced in 1933 by Pacific Film Productions. WEC, October 1, 1920, 1; WECR, May 25, 1921, 4; Waterloo Daily Courier, November 1, 1933, 3.

164. Frank H. Madison, “Do Local Films Pay?” MPW, October 23, 1915, 485.