The Moving Picture World (October 1907)

THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD. 487 arc two places in operation here now, besides the pictures that are ,hown at Silver Spring' Forest by the trolley company. ■ There hasn't been a craze in years that has become so wide- l read as moving pictures. As a whole, these pictures are enter- taining and instructive and the cheapness with which they are xhibited is responsible for their popularity. There never has xen a time when a person could get so much entertainment for nickel, which is the prevailing price of admission to most moving )icture theaters. Many enterprising men who got into the business early have -nade a lot of money out of these cheap shows. It is less than year since a Trenton concern opened a place in Easton and I'm told that the owners have already made some six or eight housand dollars. Now there are four of these places in Easton nd each is doing a big business,-with no indications of a slump n patronage. Changes of pictures are given three times a week, the films >eing rented from the makers. The rental of films, with changes hree times a week, is a costly item, the rental charges being n the neighborhood of $50 a week. Yet the demand all over the rountry is so great that the makers of the films cannot begin to. neet the demands. The original moving picture house in Easton is owned and jperated by a Trenton company. This company is the same one hat has just opened up the Bijou in Washington. It has 28 of hesc small theaters in operation throughout New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania. Some of them are big paying ventures. A 'ittsburg man has one place which is said to bring him a profit f a thousand dollars a day. This is a good deal of money to net >ut of a five-cent admission fee. ". Yet the business is a venturesome one. ( The same company hat opened the moving picture show in the opera house building n Easton tried to do business in Reading and failed. This is a nuch larger city than Easton, but the people didn't take hold as night be expected. A similar failure is also reported at- Allen- own. A place in Morristown, population 12,000, also had to lose. On the other hand, a big business is being- done by men who ipened places at Dover, Stroudsburg and Bangor, much smaller owns. The question is: Can the business be run with profit in iVashington? Also, can the town support two places? There is one.strong drawback. There is no day business here nd the money has to be taken in between the hours of seven nd ten in the evening. It takes a good many hve-cent pieces 0 run into much money and our town picture men find it difficult 0 accommodate many people within the short period of three iours. So far there has been no report from any quarter that moving ictures are unclean or unelevating. * * * In Washington, D. C, Capt G. H. Williams, of the First pre- inct, in a letter to Maj. Sylvester, calls attention to the character f Sunday entertainments given under the title of "sacred con- erts" at several of the local theaters. "There appears," said he, to be an effort to add vaudeville features to these attractions, here before the programme consisted only of motion pictures nd stereopticon pictures and illustrated songs. Unfavorable omraent is thus caused on the part of those who desire a strict abbath observance, and evidently something should be done to heck the growing tendency to extend the character of the Sun- lay offerings referred to." As the regulations relating to Sunday performances are direct- d entirely to indecent language, songs, or actions in the coiti- on acceptance of the term, the corporation counsel has been di- ected, upon recommendation of Commissioner West, to define he extent of the Commissioners' authority in the premises. * * * Robert Bonine, son of photographer R. A. Bonine of 1611 leventeenth avenue, Altoona, Pa., left on his fourth tour of the rorld. He is employed by the government in making moving icture photographs of different countries. From San Francisco e will sail for Jamaica and thence to China, completing his rip around the world at the Panama Canal. Several weeks ago e gave an exhibition of the pictures he had taken some time go of the Panama canal at different stages of its construction. he exhibition was given in Washington and was witnessed y government officials. * * * The Brooklyn, N. Y., Picture Machine Operators, Vaudeville Actors and Musicians' Protective and Benevolent Association eld their regular meeting Monday at Triangle Hall, Halsey street nd Broadway, and after the routine business was disposed of, ave a vaudeville entertainment Refreshments wer also servd. Among those who appeared were Charles Tobias, the character npersonator and impromptu poet; Miss Powers, vocalist; the Warren Brothers, sketch artists; Roberts, the magician; Miss Lillian Burke, operatic vocalist; Robert Monds, monologist; Robinson and Rawson, songs and dances; Allen Warren, songs; Bertram Warren, in Shakespearean delineations; Lou Kubelzka and William Dierlam, in comedy. Music was furnished by the Cedar Cliff Band, under the direction of R. C George. FIVE CENT MOVING PICTURE THEATERS PROVE EXCEEDINGLY POPULAR. Nickel madness is a term applied to the amazing popularity at- tained during the last year or so by the five-cent moving picture theater. Tried as an experiment, this new form of entertainment is making a fortune for its projectors. Crusades have been or- ganized against them, and they have been denounced as vicious and demoralizing, yet they have flourished wonderfully and are continually increasing. New York is no exception to the rule. They are to be found with pretentious fronts in Broadway. In the Bowery and through the East Side they are almost omnipresent. Dozens of them are exceedingly popular in Brooklyn. They are springing up in the shady places of Queens, and down on Staten Island they are to be found in the niost unexpected bosky dells, or rising in little rakish shacks on the mosquito flats. They have even invaded nearby Jersey cities. In the last year two hundred licenses have been granted by the city authorities for these amusement re- sorts in the Borough of Manhattan alone, and it is said that 200,000 people a day contribute to their support through the city. The popularity of these cheap amusement places, even with the foreign born population," says Barton W. Currie in a recent number of "Harper s Weekly," "is not to be wondered at. The newly arrived immigrant is appealed to directly without any cir- cumlocution. The child whose intelligence is just awakening and the doddering old man seem to be on an equal footing of enjoy- ment in the stuffy little box-like theaters." One reason for the popularity of the moving pictures shows is their cheapness. There is nothing singularly novel in the idea, but for a modest outlay the outfit can be housed in a narrow store, or in a shack, and even in the rear yard of a tenement, provided there-is an available hallway that can be turned into a front on a well-used street. These shacks and shops are crowded with as many chairs as they will hold and the populace is wel- comed or, rather, hailed, by a huge megaphone horn and lurid placards. The price of admission for a fifteen or twenty-minute show is only five cents. In one street in Harlem the writer counted as many as five to a block, and each one of them was capable of showing to one thousand people an hour. That is, they have a seating capacity of about two hundred and fifty, and give four shows an hour. Others are so small that only fifty at a time can be jammed into the narrow area. They run from early morning until midnight, and their megaphones are barking before the milkman has made his rounds. In some neighborhoods nickelet theater parties are in vogue. A party will set out on what might be called a moving picture de- bauch, making the round of all the tawdry little show places in the district between the hours of 8 and II o'clock at night, at a total cost of, say, 30 cents each. They will tell you afterward that they were not bored for a minute during the entire evening. Everything they saw had plenty of action in it. Melodrama is served hot, and at a pace the Bowery theaters can never follow. The makers of the pictures employ great troupes of actors. Men with vivid imaginations are employed to ' think up new acts. Their minds must be as fertile as the mental soil of the dime novelist, for the sets of pictures have to be changed every other day. "The French seem to be masters in this new field," asserts Mr. Currie. "The writers of feuilletons have evidently branched into the business, for the continued story moving picture has come into existence. You get the same characters again and again, battling on the edges of precipitous cliffs, struggling in a light- house tower, sleuthing criminals in Parisian suburbs, tracking kidnapped children through dense forests, and pouncing upon would-be assassins with the dagger poised. Also you are intro- duced to the grotesque and the comique. Thousands of dwellers along the Bowery are learning to roar at French buffoonery, and the gendarme is growing as familiar to them as the 'copper on the beat.'"— N. Y. Tribune. UNADULTERATED FAKES. Does any intelligent person who has visited the picturesque regions of the Bavarian Alps and who, traversing the country road from Oberau to the little village of Ober-Ammergau, has