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Article Excerpt
Exhibiting motion pictures as a commercial enterprise in North America dates from 23 April 1896, when Thomas Armat and C. Francis Jenkins introduced Thomas A. Edison's "latest marvel," the Vitascope, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, located at 6th Avenue and West 24th Street, New York City, where Macy's store stands today. (1) Admission to the popular music hall/beer garden ranged from 25 cents for seats in the balcony to $1.50 for reserved seats on the auditorium floor and in the boxes. The new entertainment--a selection of Edison motion pictures--was screened as part of that week's vaudeville program, which included a Russian clown, an "eccentric" dancer, two gymnasts, and a singer of "coster" songs. These films (each was under a minute in length) included The Umbrella Dance, Rough Sea at Dover, produced by Robert Paul in Great Britain, Burlesque Boxing, The Monroe Doctrine, and Serpentine Dance. (2) They had been spliced together to form a band, thus enabling the projectionist (Armat) to show the films without having to rewind them. According to The New York Times, an appreciative crowd of well-to-do customers (wearing silk hats) watched the films with great interest, marvelling at the movement of the life-like figures. (3) With this demonstration, Koster and Bial set the pattern for motion picture exhibition over the next ten years, i.e., combining movies and live entertainment. (4)
Vaudeville theatres thus served as the primary site for commercial movie exhibition between 1896 and 1906, when permanent sites (store-front theatres) began to appear across North America. Vaudeville managers valued movies because they helped satisfy the appetite of audiences for visual novelty, while movie producers valued vaudeville theatres because they enabled them to reach an enormous middle-class audience. Moreover, vaudeville provided the nascent film industry a measure of stability during a period of uncertainty, generated in part by the many patent infringement suits Thomas Edison launched against his rivals. (5) Movie producers benefited greatly from this arrangement since they did not have to risk spending huge sums of money on building exhibition facilities. Even more importantly, this arrangement provided them with a great opportunity to learn valuable lessons from vaudeville managers about conducting an amusement business, e.g., such basic business principles as effective marketing.
Vaudeville theatres offered movie entrepreneurs access to a huge audience during the early years of the commercialization of leisure-time activities in general and the movies in particular. The last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth witnessed the expansion of cheaply-priced public entertainment, including dime museums, penny arcades, roller skating rinks, and dance halls, thanks to the flow of people to cities, and the prosperity that filtered down to the working class. In this context, it soon became apparent that, to differentiate their product, what these early movie entrepreneurs needed was a permanent site of their own. They tried a variety of venues, including penny arcades and amusement parks. Located at the end of trolley lines in major cities, such parks offered the possibility of attracting large audiences; municipal railway companies promoted entertainment at these sites because they wanted people to travel on their systems. For exhibitors, however, this meant screening films during the summer months only. Another strategy was to bring movies to audiences.
Early Movie Exhibition in Canada
Exhibiting movies as a commercial enterprise in English-speaking Canada probably dates from 21 July 1896, when two well-known Ottawa businessmen, Andrew M. Holland and George C. Holland, in conjunction with Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper, managers of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, introduced the Edison Vitascope at West End Park, an amusement park located at the westerly terminus of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company. (6) As Peter Morris explains, Ahearn and Soper saw the motion picture show as another attraction that would lure citizens of Ottawa to West End Park (which they had developed on land once owned by the Holland family, the site spanning what is now Holland Avenue and extending from Ruskin Avenue to Queensway).
As in the United States, selling the new entertainment meant screening films as part of a vaudeville program. Admission prices were set at ten cents for adults and five cents for children. Round-trip tickets to the park "including car fares, admission, and reserved seat" could be obtained for twenty-five cents from Ahearn and Soper's offices at 56 Spark Street, Ottawa. (7) Between six and eight hundred customers attended the open-air show, which began at 8 pm. John C. Green, known professionally as "Belsaz, the Magician," introduced the short films (less than two minutes in length), which were projected onto a large canvas screen. They included The May Irwin Kiss (1896), the great hit of 1896; Watermelon Contest (1896); Shooting the Chutes (1896); Black Diamond Express (1896); and LaLoie Fuller's Serpentine Dance (n.d.). Interestingly, the Governor General's Foot Guards Band provided a musical accompaniment. The show was a great success. Thrilled by the Vitascope's life-like reproduction of movement, Ottawans flocked to West End Park, and the Holland brothers extended the engagement. Audiences enjoyed the sense of "being there," being part of the activities taking place on the screen. Within months, entrepreneurs were exhibiting motion pictures in urban centres across the country. (8)
Despite such successes, amusement parks provided only a temporary venue for exhibiting motion pictures, given the seasonal nature of these enterprises. (9)...
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