Hollywood in the neighborhood : historical case studies of local moviegoing / edited by Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Fuller-Seeley, Kathryn.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--United States--History.

Motion pictures.

Motion picture theaters.

History.

Motion picture audiences.

United States.

Motion picture audiences--United States--History.

Motion picture theaters--United States--History.

Physical Description:

276 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2008]

Summary:

Hollywood in the Neighborhood presents a vivid new picture of how movies entered the American heartland-the thousands of smaller cities, towns, and villages far from the East and West Coast film centers. Drawing on a broad range of research sources, essays from scholars including Richard Abel, Robert Allen, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Terry Lindvall, and Greg Waller examine in detail the social and cultural changes this new form of entertainment brought to towns from Gastonia, North Carolina to Placerville, California, and from Norfolk, Virginia to rural Ontario, and beyond. Emphasizing the roles of local exhibitors, neighborhood audiences, regional cultures, and the growing national mass media, these essays demonstrate how motion pictures so quickly and successfully moved into old opera houses and glittering new picture palaces on Main streets across America.

Contents:

Setting the Contexts

1 Introduction: Researching and Writing the History of Local Moviegoing / Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, George Potamianos 3

2 Decentering Historical Audience Studies: A Modest Proposal / Robert C. Allen 20

Part II Origins

3 The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry / Calvin Pryluck 37

4 Early Film Exhibition in Wilmington, North Carolina / Anne Morey 53

5 Building Movie Audiences in Placerville, California, 1908-1915 / George Potamianos 75

6 Cinema Virtue, Cinema Vice: Race, Religion, and Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1908-1922 / Terry Lindvall 91

Part III Integration and Variations

7 The Movies in a "Not So Visible Place": Des Moines, Iowa, 1911-1914 / Richard Abel 107

8 Digging the Finest Potatoes from Their Acre: Government Film Exhibition in Rural Ontario, 1917-1934 / Charles Tepperman 130

9 At the Movies in the "Biggest Little City in Wisconsin" / Leslie Midkiff DeBauche 149

Part IV Maturity and Crisis in the 1930s

10 Imagining and Promoting the Small-Town Theater / Gregory A. Waller 169

11 "What the Picture Did for Me": Small-Town Exhibitors' Strategies for Surviving the Great Depression / Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley 186

12 "Something for Nothing": Bank Night and the Refashioning of the American Dream / Paige Reynolds 208

Part V Looking Backward, Looking Forward

13 Bad Sound and Sticky Floors: An Ethnographic Look at the Symbolic Value of Historic Small-Town Movie Theaters / Kevin Corbett 233

14 Conclusion: When Theory Hits the Road / Ronald G. Walters 250.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-269) and index.

ISBN:

9780520230675

0520230671

9780520249738

0520249739

OCLC:

123539423