Exhibition

THE FILM PROGRAM

What the exhibitor delivers to paying customers is more than a film, it is the experience of a film program, which has varied significantly since the first public screening of moving pictures in 1896. Three key variables are involved here: (1) the exhibitor's degree of control over the program; (2) the range of films available; and (3) the actual composition of the program, including the variety of screened material (slides as well as motion pictures) and the role, if any, of live performance.

The exhibitors who introduced moving pictures in 1896–1898 had considerable creative control over the programs they offered to a curious public. While they very rarely shot the footage they screened, these traveling exhibitors did acquire and arrange a series of short films, which meant that they could juxtapose actualités (such as the Lumière films of everyday life that were shot outdoors on location) with filmed vaudeville acts or staged scenes. Depending on the venue and the intended audience, the array of short films was, in turn, combined in different ways with a wide range of other entertainment options: magic lantern slides or phonograph recordings, vocal or instrumental performances, novelty acts or educational lectures. In such cases, the program was typically designed to offer a variety of distinct attractions, though it soon became possible for exhibitors to create more unified shows in which the screened material and the live performances were arranged around a particular theme, such as the Spanish American War.

By 1900, moving pictures had become a regular feature on certain vaudeville circuits, where they served as one self-enclosed part of a program that might include six or more separate attractions, each occupying the stage for ten to twenty minutes. In this type of program, film was merely another interchangeable component, comparable to an acrobatic act or an ethnic comedy routine. In a similar fashion, moving pictures also served as novelty entertainment screened between the acts of touring melodramas and as part of the midway attractions offered by traveling carnivals and circuses.

When permanent movie theaters emerged during the nickelodeon era, the program changed significantly. Nickelodeons typically ran a continuous show in which a forty-five-or sixty-minute program was repeated throughout the day, then changed daily or at least several times each week. Using films rented from film exchanges, the nickelodeon operator offered several split or full reel films, each running from approximately five to fifteen minutes, combined in almost all cases with live entertainment: musical accompaniment for the screenings (on piano or some sort of mechanical musical device) as well as illustrated songs. Illustrated songs featured a singer whose vocal rendition of a popular song accompanied the projection of a series of colorful slides indicating the lyrics and, more ingeniously, "illustrating" the song with staged tableaux and sometimes extraordinary visual effects. Other slides offered information about the show or instructions on movie-theater etiquette (for example, "Don't Spit on the Floor").

Within the standard programming format of short films and illustrated songs, the nickelodeon operator in fact had a great deal of latitude in tailoring the show for a specific audience. Exhibitors might hire performers to add sound effects to the silent films or even have off-stage actors voice the on-screen dialogue. A speaker, called a "lecturer," sometimes provided a continuous spoken plot synopsis and description, especially for films based on Biblical, literary, or high cultural sources. Magicians, vocal trios, and other vaudeville-style acts might appear on the same bill as moving pictures.

With the consolidation of the American film industry in the 1910s and the growing prominence of the serial and the multi-reel "feature" film, one common programming strategy was the "balanced" program offering a full evening's worth of entertainment. Until the end of the silent film era in the late 1920s, the feature film was usually accompanied, if not always preceded, by two or more shorts: a one or two-reel comedy or western, newsreel installment, serial episode, "scenic" (a travelogue or other nonfiction short), or animated cartoon. Advertising slides, too, continued to figure as part of the program—pitching nationally available products, local stores and services, and coming attractions.

As larger and more grandiose picture palaces began to appear, as well as more modest neighborhood and small-town theaters, programming could be quite varied, not only in terms of the quality and length of the feature film, but also in the number of shorts and, more importantly,

in the live components of the program. For instance, in 1918, a major big-city theater, like the Strand in New York City, presented its program four times daily, beginning with an overture from the house orchestra, followed by a newsreel and scenic, two numbers from a female singer, a feature film, two numbers from a male singer, a comic short, and an organ solo. Organists like Paul Ash and Jesse Crawford became major drawing cards in their own right. During the 1920s, picture palaces added even more spectacular live performances to the show, including elaborate Broadway-styled production numbers, which sometimes took the form of a "prologue" that was connected thematically to that day's featured film.

Smaller venues continued to provide some form of musical performance, if only by a pianist or a mechanical music machine. But such theaters might also add, on occasion, a special attraction: a pared-down prologue, a band performing Hawaiian music, or, by the mid-1920s, jazz; traveling musical comedy troupes, minstrel shows, and magic acts; or participants in a local talent contest. Indeed, film exhibitors' widespread reliance on all manner of live music meant that by the end of the silent era, more musicians worked in movie theaters than in concert halls, hotels, and nightclubs combined.

The coming of sound fundamentally altered the film program, at least in terms of its live component. Short sound films of vaudeville acts and famous orchestras were intended to replace certain live performers on the bill. More significantly, Hollywood's rapid transformation to sound put countless musicians and theater organists out of work, leading the Musicians Union to undertake a futile public relations campaign against "canned" music. Live performance did, however, remain a special attraction for a great many movie theaters well into the 1940s, which booked touring variety shows, radio performers, amateur contests, magicians and midnight "spook" shows, and, by the late 1930s, the film industry's own singing cowboys, like Gene Autry (1907–1998).

Newsreels, cartoons, serial episodes, and a range of other shorts continued to accompany the feature film in programming during the 1930s (and, indeed, into the 1960s). But the Depression also saw the widespread use of another exhibition strategy, the double feature, which paired selected shorts with two feature films, sometimes each of less than an hour in length. This popular programming strategy went hand-in-hand with the increased production of low-budget, sixty-minute, series films (frequently westerns) and other B movies, which were designed to fit the requirements of the double feature. About 300 different films were needed annually by a theater that offered three changes of double-feature programs each week. For the independent theater owner, the demand for more feature films allowed for somewhat more control over the program. Highly vocal opposition to the double feature came especially from concerned parents and teachers, who worried about the effect on children. Yet by the end of the 1930s, more than half of the theaters in the United States were regularly offering double features, with some even resorting to triple features or to continuous programs of low-budget "action" films. The double feature also allowed for a regularly scheduled intermission, which boosted concession sales.

The double (or triple) feature with intermission breaks also became the standard program at drive-in theaters during the 1950s, while some form of the balanced program (combining shorts with a feature film) survived well into the 1960s. Overall, from 1950 on, there was increased attention given to coming attraction trailers as part of the show and less to comic and dramatic short films. But even as the industry focused increasingly during the 1980s on the high-budget blockbuster designed to be the sole drawing card in a multiplex or megaplex cinema, the program continued to involve more than simply or solely a feature film. Trivia games, innocuous recorded music, advertising slides, filmed commercials, public service announcements, instructions on correct audience behavior, and, most notably, flashy trailers for coming attractions—all these elements served as components of the film program in the late twentieth century, though there was little opportunity for the individual theater to customize its offerings.