Hollywood in the Neighborhood Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing

Hollywood in the Neighborhood presents a vivid new picture of how movies entered the American heartlandand#151;the thousands of smaller cities, towns, and villages far from the East and West Coast film centers. Using 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, their essays chart how motion pictures so quickly and successfully moved into old opera houses and glittering new picture palaces on Main Streets across America.

and#8220;Virtually every essay is empirical, detailed, and fully documented. . . . This volume is a rarity--fully, sometimes stolidly, fact based: film theory with its feet planted firmly on the ground.and#8221;

and#8220;This is a valuable contribution to current debates . . . about film exhibition . . . [and] film history as a whole.and#8221;

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Communication Department at Georgia State University. She is author of At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture among other books.

PART I: INTRODUCTION-SETTING THE CONTEXTS

1. Introduction: Researching and Writing the History of Local Moviegoing

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley and George Potamianos

2. Decentering Historical Audience Studies: A Modest Proposal

Robert C. Allen

PART II: ORIGINS-CASE STUDIES

3. The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry

Calvin Pryluck

4. Early Film Exhibition in Wilmington, North Carolina

Anne Morey

5. Building Movie Audiences in Placerville, California, 1908-1915

George Potamianos

6. Cinema Virtue, Cinema Vice: Race, Religion, and Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1908-1922

Terry Lindvall

PART III: INTEGRATION AND VARIATIONS-CASE STUDIES

7. The Movies in a and#147;Not So Visible Placeand#8221;: Des Moines, Iowa, 1911-1914

Richard Abel

8. Digging the Finest Potatoes from Their Acre: Government Film Exhibition in Rural Ontario, 1917-1934

Charles Tepperman

9. At the Movies in the and#147;Biggest Little City in Wisconsinand#8221;

Leslie Midkiff DeBauche

PART IV: MATURITY AND CRISIS IN THE 1930S-CASE STUDIES

10. Imagining and Promoting the Small-Town Theater

Gregory A. Waller

11. and#147;What the Picture Did for Meand#8221;: Small-Town Exhibitors' Strategies for Surviving the Great Depression

Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley

12. and#147;Something for Nothingand#8221;: Bank Night and the Refashioning of the American Dream

Paige Reynolds

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

14. Conclusion: When Theory Hits the Road

Ronald G. Walters

Contributors

Selected Bibliography

Index