A study of how the film industry came to flourish in Detroit in the early years as locals were lured into the new picture theaters. Motor City Movie Culture, 1916â1925 is a broad textured look at Hollywood coming of age in a city with a burgeoning population and complex demographics. Richard Abel investigates the role of local Detroit organizations in producing, distributing, exhibiting, and publicizing films in an effort to make moviegoing part of everyday life. Tapping a wealth of primary source materialâfrom newspapers, spatiotemporal maps, and city directories to rare trade journals, theater programs, and local newsreelsâAbel shows how entrepreneurs worked to lure moviegoers from Detroit's diverse ethnic neighborhoods into the theaters. Covering topics such as distribution, programming practices, nonfiction film, and movie coverage in local newspapers, with entr'actes that dive deeper into the roles of key individuals and organizations, this book examines how efforts in regional metropolitan cities like Detroit worked alongside California studios and New York head offices to bolster a mass culture of moviegoing in the United States.
THE MICHIGAN FILM REVIEW, ONE OF PERHAPS FEWER than ten regional trade journals in the country during the silent cinema period, first appeared in early November 1916 and ran at least through the 1920s. Fortunately, nearly all of the second volume, dated from November 6, 1917, to October 22, 1918, survives in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. The Reviewâs publisher and editor was Jacob Smith,1 who also contributed a few articles on the city to Moving Picture World at the time, and his initial office was located in the Free Press Building, suggesting the trade paper may have had links with that newspaper. âPublished Weekly in the Interests of the Moving Picture Exhibitors and Exchanges of Michiganâ (as the official organ of the American Exhibitorsâ Association in the state),2 the Reviewâs sixteen pages offered not only a wealth of publicity but also a forum for exchanging information between the regionâs rental exchanges and its exhibitors as well as among exhibitors in this metropolis of nearly one million people.3
The Michigan Film Review advertised occasionally in Variety in the early 1920s,4 and it celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1926 with a large ad in Film Daily, claiming that weekly issues were âmailed to 100 per cent of the exhibitors in Michigan.â5 A year later, it became one of seven regional trade journals that the publisher of The Reel Journal integrated into a single group, with an overall circulation of nine thousand, through Associated Publications in Kansas City.6 In the 1930s, the seven combined journals became the basis for Box Office Magazine.
Notes
1. In 1929, Jacob Smith died at the young age of 45ââIllness Fatal to Publisher,â DFP (September 23, 1929): 11.
2. Founded in July 1917, the American Exhibitorsâ Association (AEA) initially sought, without success, to become a member of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), which had been founded a year earlier, Within a month of gaining NAMPI membership, the AEA had hundreds of members in thirty-six states. By December 1917, it had 2,786 members in forty-six states and briefly coordinated its legislative activity with the NAMPI; negotiations between the two trade organizations broke down the following year, and the AEA aligned with the older Motion Picture Exhibitorsâ League of America (MPELA). See Kia Afra, The Hollywood Trust: Trade Associations and the Rise of the Studio System (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016), 53, 90â91, 95â96, 113.
3. âThe Michigan Film Review is now the official trade paper of the Michigan and Detroit branches of the A.E.A.,â MFR (December 11, 1917): 11.
4. Michigan Film Review ads, V (March 4, 1921): 54, and (September 3, 1924): 25.
September Is Go-To-Theatre Month, with the Leading Motion Picture Theatres
Detroit Sunday Free Press (September 3, 1922)
Neighborhood theatres in Detroit have become almost as numerous as neighborhood groceries. People must have recreation and amusement just as they require food and drink.
Reciprocally, imagine you are an exchange man, that same year, mapping the territory of the city in order to circulate your companyâs films efficiently and profitably. Your branch office would have an inventory of the areaâs picture theaters and a record of past rentalsâbut those apparently no longer survive. That inventory probably paralleled the listings in the Detroit City Directories, which totaled 125â130 theaters by late 1917.2 Of those, fewer than ten advertised on a regular basis in the Sunday Free Press, and even fewer in the Sunday News-Tribune.
But five major theaters would have been the prime venues for first-run bookings. Nearly all were owned by one of three entrepreneurs, were located either in the downtown center just below Grand Circus Park or to the north along Woodward Avenue, and had seating capacities of 1,000 or more: John Kunskyâs Washington (1,862 seats) and Madison (1,965 seats);3 Phil Gleichmanâs Broadway Strand (1,488 seats); and C. H. Milesâs vaudeville houses, the Majestic (1,760 seats) and Regent (2,150â3,600 seats), in the New Center and North Woodward areas, respectively.4
The next tier of theaters included Kunskyâs downtown Liberty (720 seats), Garden (950 seats), and Alhambra (1,475 seats),5 plus the smaller Drury Lane (600 seats), Fine Arts (582 seats), and Forest (592 seats) also ranged north along Woodward; Kunskyâs Strand (1,384 seats) on Grand River, the Ferry Field (1,325 seats) on West Grand Boulevard, and the Stratford (1,025 seats) on Dix, to the northwest and west, respectively; and the Rialto (1,334 seats) on Gratiot, the Duplex (1,250 seats) on East Grand Boulevard, and the Del-The (1,076 seats) on Mack, to the east.
Among the third group of theaters, the Garden and the Forest (reportedly a âsocial centerâ for a Jewish community)6 alone seemed close to ethnic neighborhoods, and the only others with 900 to 1,000 seats were the Farnum and the Russell, both of which opened in or near Hamtramck in 19177âbut neither of which initially advertised in newspapers.
Exchange managers likely gave very low priority to the smaller ethnic neighborhood theaters, but these theaters do become visible when one compares city directories, maps of neighborhood locations, and later studies and directories.8 In Lower Poletown, for instance, the A...