The first public exhibition of projected motion pictures in the United States was at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall on 34th Street in New York City on April 23, 1896. However, the first “storefront theater” in the US dedicated exclusively to showing motion pictures was Vitascope Hall, established on Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana June 26, 1896—it was converted from a vacant store.
In the basement of the new Ellicott Square Building, Main Street, Buffalo, New York, Mitchell Mark (properly spelled Mitchel Mark) and his brother Moe Mark added what they called Edison’s Vitascope Theater (entered through Edisonia Hall), which they opened to the general public on October 19, 1896 in collaboration with Rudolf Wagner, who had moved to Buffalo after spending several years working at the Edison laboratories. This 72-seat plush theater was designed from scratch solely to show motion pictures.
1900-1919
The first permanent structure designed for screening of movies in the state of California was Tally’s Electric Theater, completed in 1902 in Los Angeles. Tally’s theater was a storefront within a larger building, but apparently purpose-built as a movie theater.
In 1905, Pittsburgh movie theater owners Harry Davis and John Harris also established the first of what would become a popular form of movie theaters spread throughout the country, which were five-cent nickelodeon movies.
The million dollar Mark Strand Theater at 47th Street and Broadway in New York City opened in 1914 by Mitchell Mark was the archetypical movie palace.
The ornate Al Ringling Theater was the very first “Movie Palace” it was built in Baraboo, WI by Al Ringling, one of the founders of the Ringling Bros. Circus for the then incredible sum of $100,000.00.
By 1915, feature films were so successful that the five cent ticket admission prices would expand to ten cents, hence ending the era of nickelodeon movie theaters.
Post 1920s : Modern Era
In the next ten years, as movie revenues exploded, independent promoters and movie studios (who owned their own proprietary chains until an antitrust ruling in 1948) raced to build the most lavish, elaborate, attractive theatres. These forms morphed into a unique architectural genre—the movie palace—a unique and extreme architectural genre which boasted a luxurious design, a giant screen, and, beginning in 1953, stereophonic sound.
Several movie studios achieved vertical integration by acquiring and constructing theatre chains. The so-called “Big Five” theatre chains of the 1920s and 1930s were all owned by studios: Paramount, Warner, Loews (which owned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Fox, and RKO. All were broken up as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. anti-trust case.
Many movie palace architects, like studio heads, were often first generation Americans, notably the Romanian-born John Eberson and Scottish Thomas W. Lamb. Other pioneers include the Chicago firm of Rapp and Rapp, which designed the Chicago, the Uptown, and the Oriental Theatres; the impresario S.L. “Roxy” Rothafel, originator of the deluxe presentation of films with themed stage shows; and Sid Grauman, who built the first movie palace on the West Coast, Los Angeles’ Million Dollar Theater, in 1918.
As their name implies, movie palaces, like other products of the age, were advertised to “make the average citizen feel like royalty.” While inscribed with democratic sayings and patriotic imagery, they consciously referenced the grandeur of aristocratic Europe and were often decorated in European fashion.
Eberson specialized in the subgenre of “atmospheric” theatres. The movie palace’s signature look was one of extravagant ornamentation. The theaters were often designed with an eclectic exoticism where a variety of referenced visual styles collided wildly with one another. French Baroque, High Gothic, Moroccan, Mediterranean, Spanish Gothic, Hindu, Babylonian, Aztec, Mayan, Orientalist, Italian Renaissance, and (after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922) Egyptian Revival, were all variously mixed and matched. This wealth of ornament was not merely for aesthetic effect. It was meant to create a fantasy environment to attract moviegoers and involved a type of social engineering, distraction, and traffic management, meant to work on human bodies and minds in a specific way.
Today, most of the surviving movie palaces operate as regular theaters, showcasing concerts, plays and operas.
For more information:
Cinema Treasures
Theatre Historical Society of America
The League of Historic American Theaters
For books and DVDs on these movie palaces:
http://www.historictheatres.org/
Michigan Movie Magazine 