Beyond Sex, Bond and Star Wars : Exhibition Data from the Southampton Odeon 1972-1980

This article uses the personal ledgers of a cinema manager to explore programming and film exhibition at the Southampton Odeon in the 1970s. The detailed accounts provide a rare insight into cinema exhibition and challenge the notion that 1970s cinema was all about sex, violence, horror and exploitation, suggesting instead that audiences at this cinema, favoured very different fare.

The Perils of Moviegoing in America, 1896-1950

The Perils of Moviegoing in America is a film history that examines the various physical and (perceived) moral dangers facing audiences during the first fifty years of film exhibition.

Chapter 1: “Conflagration”
As early as 1897, a major fire broke out at a film exhibition in San Francisco, with flames burning the projectionist and nearby audience members. From that point until the widespread adoption of safety stock in 1950, fires were a very common movie-going experience. Hundreds of audience members lost their lives in literally thousands of theatre fires, ranging from early nickelodeons to the movie palaces of the thirties and forties.

Chapter 2: “Thieves Among Us”
Bandits robbed movie theatres on hundreds of occasions from the early days of film exhibition through the end of the Great Depression. They held up ticket booths, and they dynamited theatre safes. They also shot theatre managers, ushers, and audience members, as a great many of the robberies occurred while movies were playing on the screens inside.

Chapter 3: “Bombs Away”
Bombings at movie theatres became common in small towns and large cities on literally hundreds of occasions from 1914 to the start of World War II. Some were incendiary bombs, and some were stench bombs; both could be fatal, whether due to explosions or to the trampling of panicked moviegoers

Chapter 4: “It’s Catching”
Widespread movie-going in the early 20th century provoked an outcry from numerous doctors and optometrists who believed that viewing films could do irreparable harm to the vision of audience members. Medical publications (including the Journal of the American Medical Association) published major studies on this perceived problem, which then filtered into popular-audience magazines and newspapers.

Chapter 5: “The Devil’s Apothecary Shops”
Sitting in the dark with complete strangers proved worrisome for many early filmgoers, who had good reason to be concerned. Darkness meant that prostitutes could easily work in the balconies of some movie theatres, as could “mashers” who molested female patrons (and sometimes children) after the lights were dimmed. That was all in addition to the various murderers who used the cover of darkness to commit their crimes at movie theatres.

Chapter 6: “Blue Sundays”
Blue laws were those regulations that prohibited businesses from operating on Sundays. Most communities across the US had such legislation on their books, which by the nickelodeon era were at odds with the thousands of filmgoers who went to the movies every Sunday. Theatre managers were often arrested, making newspaper headlines over and over again. Police sometimes even arrested entire film audiences as accomplices in the Blue Law violations.

Chapter 7: “Something for Nothing”
In an effort to bolster ticket sales, many movie theatres in the 1910s began to hold lotteries in which lucky audience members won cash prizes; by the time of the Great Depression, lotteries like “Bank Night” became a common aspect of the theatre-going enterprise. However, reception studies have generally overlooked the intense (and sometimes coordinated) efforts by police, politicians, and preachers to end this practice, which they viewed as illegal and immoral gambling.

“The Double Feature Evil”: Efforts to Eliminate the American Dual Bill

The essay discusses the actions and motivations of various groups that tried to end the practice of double feature film exhibition in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Used as a price-cutting strategy, double features were embraced by marginal exhibitors and low-budget producers, but attacked by most major studios and established theatre chains. Methods employed to control the double feature included voluntary bans, governmental legislation, and legal action. During the depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal opposed the double feature as a strategy likely to undermine established admission price levels. But the double feature proved resilient and survived all these efforts, as well as an additional series of assaults, based on conservation of energy and materiel, mounted during the Second World War.

Early Cinema and Oklahoma

This article provides the first history of early cinema in the territory and (from 1907) US state of Oklahoma. It covers the origins and proliferation of fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, paying particular attention to the various films produced at the 101 Ranch and the Pawnee Bill Ranch. It also covers the beginnings of newsreel footage in the state. The article also delves into the issues of film exhibition in Oklahoma, ranging from the earliest film screenings to the nickelodeon era, and also provides a history of efforts towards censorship in the pre-1915 era.

Cinema-going at the Southampton Odeon: Exhibition Data and Popular Taste

Cinemagoing data from the 1970s. A case study of the data from the Southampton Odeon

Truth at 24 frames a second? A working dialogue between a film-maker and a historical consultant about the making of The Enigma of Frank Ryan

We employ a practice-based methodology based on a ‘live’ film project to explore the different ways that film-makers and historians narrate the past. Through a case-study of the production and exhibition of a drama-documentary feature-film, The Enigma of Frank Ryan, on which both authors (film-maker Bell and historian McGarry) worked respectively as director and historical consultant, we explore a range of critical issues arising from our collaboration. Through a dialogue between a director and a historian, a model of good practice between historians and film-makers emerges.