Kirjahaku

From the 1905 opening of the wildly popular, eponymous Nickelodeon in the city's downtown to the subsequent outgrowth of nickel theaters in nearly all of its neighborhoods, Pittsburgh proved to be perfect for the movies. Its urban industrial environment was a melting pot of ethnic, economic, and cultural forces—a \u201cwellspring\u201d for the development of movie culture—and nickelodeons offered citizens an inexpensive respite and handy escape from the harsh realities of the industrial world.Nickelodeon City provides a detailed view inside the city's early film trade, with insights into the politics and business dealings of the burgeoning industry. Drawing from the pages of the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, the first known regional trade journal for the movie business, Michael Aronson profiles the major promoters in Pittsburgh, as well as many lesser-known ordinary theater owners, suppliers, and patrons. He examines early film promotion, distribution, and exhibition, and reveals the earliest forms of state censorship and the ensuing political lobbying and manipulation attempted by members of the movie trade. Aronson also explores the emergence of local exhibitor-based cinema, in which the exhibitor assumed control of the content and production of film, blurring the lines between production, consumption, and local and mass media.Nickelodeon City offers a fascinating and intimate view of a city and the socioeconomic factors that allowed an infant film industry to blossom, as well as the unique cultural fabric and neighborhood ties that kept nickelodeons prospering even after Hollywood took the industry by storm.

John Hamrick's Blue Mouse Cinemas offers a unique, in-depth case study of regional independent film exhibition in the American Pacific Northwest. Focusing on the silent and early sound periods, this book provides important evidence of the ways an independent entrepreneur, John Hamrick—a charismatic if highly flawed theatre-owner and card-carrying Klansman—could influence Hollywood film culture, as well as exhibition and distribution patterns both within and beyond his region of operation. The Blue Mouse(s) were a set of charmingly same-named theatres that, beginning in 1920, Hamrick built, opened, and operated across the Pacific Northwest: in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, and Astoria. In addition to the Mouses, Hamrick would at various times own, in full or in partnership, dozens of other movie houses across Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. But the Mouses were always his marquee theatres, and ultimately those most closely associated with his theatrical persona, both regionally and within the wider industry. This book helps us understand the unexplored role and influence of American indie small-chain exhibitors as they continually balanced local and national interests in the name of profitably providing entertainment. The Blue Mouse theatres were part of a well-networked commercial web working across this previously unstudied region. By considering this phenomenon, we can begin to more fully grasp the limits and possibilities of independent exhibition at the height of the studio era, and how the multivalent forces of regionalism intersected with the wider film industry.