What’s Doing at the Movies?— Introduction
Here we are, looking south on George Street between Charlotte and Simcoe, in the mid-1950s. The Centre Theatre is on the left, beside Neill’s Shoes. Further down on the left, south of the Clock Tower and Charlotte Street, if you look ever so closely, are the Capitol, Odeon, and Paramount: a true “Theatre Row.” In its time, Bradburn’s Opera House was in the impressive-looking building just south of the Centre Theatre and beside the Market Hall. Parks Studio photo, courtesy Peterborough Museum and Archives (PMA).
Examiner, Dec. 16, 1955, p.9. Roger Whittaker’s review column appeared regularly in the paper from autumn 1955 to spring 1956.
“ . . . the attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were . . . the proverbs and idioms of everyday language.” — Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations (1969).
[And, I might add, what could be more “everyday language” than the “scraps” — in our case, the movie ads and notices — of historic newspapers?]
Examiner, Oct. 20, 1938, p.11.
So — if you are intrepid enough to follow these blogs (for that is what they are apparently called), you will see a tiny sampling of motion picture events, advertising, publicity, and notices from pre-cinema days to the twenty-first century, plus a quick survey of the theatres that did all the work.
I am thankful for the constant stream of newspaper advertising through the decades. Now, in the twenty-first century, the local newspaper does not, as a rule, carry movie theatre ads — a state of affairs that may well prove frustrating for future historians who seek to find out “what’s playing” on a particular date.
From the earliest days, from long before there was such a thing as moving pictures, the local newspapers carried ads and notices of the various “amusements” coming to town. From beginning to end they are fascinating in what they reveal about the immense human appetite for diverting “amusements” and spectacles, from standard pleasing fare to sensational to exotic. For me there is also a fascination in how commercial entertainments became integrated into people’s lives, and what they say about prevailing values and beliefs.
When the first moving pictures came to town in January 1897, the event was considered something of a novelty, a technological and perhaps passing fad. After that, for about ten years scattered short silent pictures arrived in bits and pieces, brought in by itinerant exhibitors and shown in various different venues. Peterborough even had its very own travelling motion picture “showman,” James Stubbs, who covered Southern Ontario beginning around the turn of the century. It wasn’t until 1907 that motion picture theatres were set up in storefronts. The local papers (for a while there were three of them) carried advertisements and notices paid for and placed by the exhibitors, thus helping to encourage and shape readers’ responses. The newspapers proved to be the ally of the new film exhibitors — in accepting their ads, providing the necessary publicity, and in the process helping to create a mass audience, especially by ensuring readers that the venues provided wholesome and even educational experiences – in general, as Canadian cinema historian Paul Moore points out, ensuring that “movie theatres became a familiar part of the cultural landscape.”
Examiner, Jan. 2, 1909, p.1.
At first, people didn’t know quite what to call the new phenomenon. A house that showed motion pictures was said to be “an amusement place.” Or (especially in the United States) a nickelodeon, because at first the houses that sprang up overnight in vacant storefronts tended to charge only a nickel for the entertainment. Sometimes they were simply called “five cent shows.” Another variation was “nickelette.” Early on they were called theatoriums, photoplay or photo-drama houses, electric theatres, picture theatres, and moving (or motion) picture houses. When the Crystal theatre opened in September 1907, the Daily Review referred to it with the seldom-used term “theatrette.” (Boston had an “amusement palace” open in April 1907.)
Motion picture theatres came and went in Peterborough: from the earliest — the Colloseum, Wonderland, and Crystal — through the Royal, Princess, Empire, Regent, Capitol, Odeon, Paramount, and others more short-lived, to the present-day Galaxy. The city has had its drive-ins and repertory theatres. Pictures were screened in other places, too: churches, schools (I saw countless films at Queen Mary Public School and P.C.V.S.), parks, community halls — all sorts of places, even a few times in a downtown garage, Duffus Motors. You could have some fun and learn about cars at the same time.
In the twenty-first century, although Peterborough has just one large downtown multi-screen theatre, movies are more accessible than ever before: in airplanes and hotel rooms, on cell phones, iPads, or laptops wherever we go, on desktops or large-screen TVs in our homes — pushing and pulling us, leading us astray, focusing our minds, diverting our attention. They are seemingly everywhere, except in newspaper ads.
From the start, advertising and notices told the public about when something was appearing in town or city, but perhaps didn’t exactly tell the truth about what the attraction really entailed. All along the ads delivered, with great gusto, enormous and highly questionable claims – which readers would have learned to take with a grain of salt: “By far the Largest and most Perfect Establishment that will be Exhibited in Canada this Season” (1856, speaking of a circus); “REAL Cowboys and Indians, Bronchos, Stage Coach” (1907); “Never in the history of motion pictures has a better programme been secured . . .” (1912); “The Mightiest Dramatic Spectacle of All the Ages” (1924); “Most Stupendous Spectacle Mortal Mind Has Ever Conceived” (1923); “The Picture the Whole Country Is Talking About!” (1932); “The West’s Mightiest Epic of Adventure!” (1943); “The most revealing films you’ll ever see” (1965). The list is endless.
Examiner, Sept. 26, 1925, p.11.
It was such a constant trait that one time a theatre manager even issued quite a fascinating ad with an apology for a statement made on the occasion of Lillian Gish’s previous film — although you could say that he only added to the problem.
The Examiner’s movie reviewer, Cathleen McCarthy (writing as “Jeanette”) agreed with the hype, calling Romola “one of those artistic productions that have no jarring notes and appear to move on oiled wheels . . . a keyhole picture of forgotten days and ways.” The promo may have worked, too. The Examiner reported that “a large audience came, saw, and was conquered.” (This was no doubt, though, a case of the theatre manager’s press release rather than objective opinion.)
A Note: The ads and notices I’ve placed in these pages, arranged for the most part chronologically, are an ultra-tiny fraction of the material that ran over the years — after all, from 1907 or so, until recent times, advertisements appeared almost every day in the paper. I’m still missing some key moments (or data, as they say) in the post-1940s period. I find myself bereft of ads for 3-D movies in the early 1950s, for instance. I began these pages around March 25, 2020, in the isolation period of the Covid-19 Pandemic; I could no longer go to the Archives to collect material related to movie-going. I decided simply to make do, for now, with what I have already collected of recent times. I hope to add more later. We live in hope.
Selected Sources: Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, ed., Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2008); Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (London: British Film Institute, 1992); Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1990), p.191; Paul S. Moore, Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008; Paul S. Moore, “Subscribing to Publicity: Syndicated Newspaper Features for Moviegoing in North America, 1911–15,” Early Popular Visual Culture, 12:2 (2014), 260–73, quotation p.263; Charles Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), and many others. See also, for instance, Moving Picture World, Aug. 7, 1909, p.188; MPW, April 13, 1907, p.88. An email from Ken Brown, April 12, 2020, also helped with its encouragement of my interest in the “immense appetite [exhibited locally] for any kind of show or spectacle, whether routine performance or something more esoteric.”