This website is the culmination of a long process, some of it not very well thought out. My original idea was rather limited: to write a book documenting Seattle’s film history during the silent era, extending through 1930. The basic information was out there, hiding in various Northwest libraries, archives and local histories. A few articles and essays on the subject had been written over the years, but honestly, I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t already been done. Seattle’s been a film town for decades, it’s home to one of the country’s premier international film festivals and is the birthplace of Scarecrow Video, one of the most impressive collections of physical media you’ll ever find. My interest in early film was a bit narrow, but nonetheless, if no one was going to step up to write Seattle’s screen story, then at least I’d tackle part of it.
Silent movies are, for some, a bit of a Hollywood afterthought, but they’ve always been fascinating to me. Over a relatively short span, beginning in the mid-1890s, moving pictures went from a curious novelty to a dominant form of popular entertainment. Audiences in the Northwest and elsewhere watched as early demonstrations of film technology gave way to traveling picture shows, then morphed into small nickelodeon theatres and, finally, to permanent movie houses. In 1890 the idea that pictures could move was a concept that many Americans would have found difficult to believe. By 1920 American movies (and American culture) were being exported across the globe.
My initial research began in the late 1990s, when I was working on an altogether different project. I needed to pull some articles from Moving Picture World, and I was fortunate that the University of Washington (UW) library system not only had the series on microfilm, but also complete runs of two other period trade papers, Motion Picture News and Nickelodeon, later known as Motography. Trade papers (the movie industry had quite a few) are key resources for film historians, but not every library carried them – and yet here were three important titles, right at my fingertips. Given my research interest, I’d be an idiot not to take advantage of that. Considering what I already knew about local picture resources, access to these trade papers allowed me to tell a broader story and incorporate details I probably wouldn’t find elsewhere – not just about Seattle, but about all of Washington. And getting that information was a straightforward process: all I had to do was go down to the UW, look through the microfilm and pull out every article with news from around Washington state. From three trade papers published on a weekly basis. For decades. With single issues that ran 100 pages or more. (And yes, today all three publications, and many others, are available free of charge, in digitized versions on the internet, which I can even access from my phone. But I didn’t foresee that at the time, and it’s now a sore subject, so DON’T remind me.)
Ignorance is bliss, and I felt pretty damn good about this new project. Or I did, until it became clear that I should have spent more time reviewing the source materials. I was familiar with the general format of these trade papers, and knew it wasn’t a small undertaking. But with ample time and a lot of caffeine (I did live in the Northwest, after all), it was achievable. I started with Nickelodeon because it was the shortest of the three and ran into problems almost immediately. The paper had the kind of articles I expected to find, of course – the ones describing Northwest theatres, business issues or industry gatherings. But more frequently it printed short bits of information that were sometimes only a sentence or two in length – for example, something about a new picture venue under construction in Wenatchee. But what theatre was this? The notice didn’t say. Who was building it and what was the street address? The notice didn’t provide those details either. Often, I could only piece things together after looking at multiple issues and multiple notices, on those occasions when multiple notices were even published. And even then, there might be so much missing information that the only way I could research that theatre, if that’s what I chose to do, would be to cross-reference that information against period newspapers from Wenatchee, a separate labor unto itself.
On top of this, all three trade papers changed over time, so their coverage of local and regional film issues evolved.[1] In this case all three (launched in the 1907-1909 timeframe) more or less grew in similar ways. Targeted at America’s motion picture exhibitors, the bulk of each issue was promotional material (ads and articles) for the various releasing companies, touting their roster of stars and films. A good deal of additional space (mostly advertising space) was devoted to associated businesses, including companies that sold projectors, opera seats or the latest motion picture gadgetry, among other things. Each paper had their own editorial content, in which staff writers offered their thoughts on the industry or discussed the latest topics and trends. These were augmented with weekly columns aimed at specific constituencies – discussions on projection matters or advertising, for example, or shorter-lived departments on screenwriting or musical accompaniment. But something common across all three trade papers, in all time periods, was content that dealt with purely local news from around the country. The earliest issues these notices, often just a sentence or two, were used as filler material, so they might appear anywhere, on any page, with no headline. This meant I had to scan every frame of microfilm, top to bottom, looking for random dispatches from Washington state. Over time, however, these local news pieces tended to migrate toward the back of each paper, eventually encompassing almost one-third of each issue. At first these were organized by region, but as the motion picture business continued to grow this information was eventually split out by state and, finally, by a handful of key cities, which tended to report news from throughout a particular area. Not all places were represented, but Seattle (and for a brief time, Spokane) had a seat at the table, with these weekly features being the news repository for most of Washington. Each trade paper had a correspondent based in the name city who contributed a weekly dispatch, usually sourced through visits to local film exchanges, which served as hubs for distribution as well as for information and gossip. Occasionally these city reports were standalone articles on a particular subject, but more often they were a collection of short pieces from around Washington, with news that was typically slanted toward the larger film markets of Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane. By the 1920s, however, these half- to full-page reports contained multiple paragraphs, each a separate topic, sometimes just few sentences in length, in miniscule typeface, covering an unrelated set of people, locations and events. In this later format, the city reports were a hodge-podge of whatever was going on that week – a random set of bulleted items related only by geography.
As such my progress on this research was measured in inches, and because the work was being done manually, I no doubt missed a few things while perusing 60-plus years of weekly content. Caffeine only gets a person so far. On top of that, my problem became very obvious, very quickly: how was I going to remember all this? There was no way I could keep it all straight, and the fact that my canvass was an entire state wasn’t making things any easier. But I was determined not to throw in the towel, so I took what was already an absurdly large project and doubled (quadrupled?) down by indexing every article I copied by name, place, date and subject. All told this trade paper research took me about six years to finish, and today I can say, confidently, that I’ll never, ever do anything like that again. (In the spirit of transparency, I never finished indexing the last portion, content from Motion Picture News published between mid-1927 and the end of 1930. And I don’t feel guilty in the slightest.)
In terms of this project, however, my insanity is your gain. Indexing was the only way to get a handle on this information, but it was also critical in telling the full story of early film exhibition in Washington state. The process revealed patterns and connections that weren’t always visible on the surface; moreover, indexing helped ensure I was sourcing information from around the state instead of a handful of select places. (That said, the San Juan Islands are beautiful but woefully under-represented here. If only you were more interesting to the local trade correspondents.)
It should be noted, however, that these trade papers came with their own set of issues. With respect to the city reports, in particular, Gregory Waller of Indiana University has warned researchers to tread carefully, for while they captured news items of local and regional importance, “the information in these columns is also anecdotal, fragmentary, usually unverifiable, self-selected, and often self-promoting.”[2] He’s not wrong. As you’ll see, certain exhibitors and exchanges turn up more often than others. Many trade articles appear informational in nature, but that’s only on the surface. One detailing a promotional campaign in Everett, for example, might be used by other readers to help guide their own marketing efforts. But it’s also true that the theatre in question could have been feeding these glowing reports to the local correspondent to boost the house’s (or the promotion man’s) profile. On top of that, it’s important to remember that each correspondent decided what local news made the weekly dispatch – and what news did not.
So, a little caution is warranted. On some level the city reports shared characteristics with the industry they supported, motion pictures, which has always thrived on stories, rumors and endless (and sometimes unwarranted) promotion. The reports from around Washington contain fabulous tales of business success, both real and imagined. In any film market, the exhibitor opening a new theatre was the leading man in his latest, and greatest, motion picture triumph. In different ways the exhibitor, the exchange man, and the supply company rep who made cameos in these reports were playing their respective parts, working in unison to give the public the kind of moviegoing experience they expected.
But while the motion picture trade papers have drawbacks, they also contain a treasure trove of information you’d never find in other sources. For my purposes, the trades regularly told me who was up, who was down, what worked and what didn’t, who changed exhibition policies, who installed the latest equipment, and who bought into this market while abandoning that one. They detailed exhibitor histories and sometimes showed the lighter side of the business – the entertaining part of the local entertainment industry. “[B]ig schemes, mundane plans, personal information, public debate – there’s room for all of these in the weekly trade news columns,” Waller observed. “Indeed, this roominess is one reason why the columns are so interesting as a discursive site and historical resource.”[3]
So, with that in mind, I set out to document the history of early movie exhibition across Washington state. The content found in local resources, for the most part, told an external story – film history seen through the eyes of the audience. There’s merit in that approach, and you’ll see it here, but the trade papers (as well as archival materials) help tell the inside story, through the lens of someone working in the business.
All told Northwest Picture Show demonstrates how, on the one hand, the film business in Washington state grew in tandem with developments occurring nationally. The timeline isn’t always the same (picture trends in the Northwest tended to lag those in the East, where the early picture world was originally centered), but the findings often mirror what was going on elsewhere. And yet, at the same time, because the movies were a relatively new form of entertainment, with practices that were still being developed, it also shows that Northwest exhibitors frequently put their own stamp on how business got done. That, to me, is what makes this research so interesting. If you used a similar approach but did it for Arizona, Wisconsin or Georgia, you’d end up with an entirely different set of stories. Some things would be very similar, of course, but others would not, simply because each of those states had a different set of people, places and things. Movie exhibition in the silent era differed by geographical location, with a diverse set of business challenges, audiences and approaches when it came to exhibiting films. Going to the movies today can be a uniform experience – each of the major theatre chains tends to deliver a variation of the same basic concept. But that wasn’t true in the silent era at all. A century ago, the movie experience could be quite different by region, state, city and even neighborhood. Told from an operational viewpoint, Northwest Picture Show takes the reader behind the scenes to highlight these differences and demonstrate how early motion pictures were presented across all of Washington, both in its largest cities and smallest towns.
As I began writing, my book project came together in ways that I never envisioned – including, to cite one example, the fact that it’s no longer a book. The structure is still (loosely) chronological, but the chapter styles are varied so the material is presented in different ways. Some are surveys that carry the reader through a certain time period. Others are story chapters that take a deeper dive into a single subject. Still others are a combination of stories on related topics. And some chapters don’t fit any of those formats – film exchanges, for example, operated from the early nickelodeon days all the way through the silent era and beyond, so they’re difficult to plot on a timeline. But I dropped that chapter into a spot that coincides with their emergence as an important method of film distribution. So I ask the reader for some leeway in telling each story, as the subject matter frequently dictated the approach, so the “timeline” has to remain somewhat flexible. Which is a nice way of saying that I did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, in a style and manner of my own choosing.
Northwest Picture Show is divided into three “verticals” based on time periods. I’m launching the site with the first of these, which ends in 1915, but will be expanding to include the other two. There’s much more of Washington’s silent film history to tell: deeper dives into things like censorship, music, newsreels, rural exhibition and the introduction of sound, to name a few. There are stories of personal triumphs, a few tragedies, crime, death, bombs, fistfights, shipwrecks, nudity and plot points all along the spectrum. Sort of like the movies themselves. Stay tuned…
Eric L. Flom – November 23, 2024
Notes:
[1] See Eric Hoyt, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press – 2022), for a historical discussion on the motion picture industry’s various trade papers.
[2] Gregory A. Waller, “Mapping the moving picture world: distribution in the United States circa 1915,” in Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff (editors), Networks of Distribution: Early Film Distribution, 1895-1915 (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Publishing – 2007), Page 94.
[3] Ibid., Page 95.