Canadian Film Weekly Year Book of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry (1952)

street, where the Cathay Restaurant now stands, and another of the earlier movie theatres was located on the north side of Rideau street, near the corner of SusSex. T has been a long, long time since movie projectors were cranked by hand, with the film feeding through the apparatus into a clothes basket underneath. The average movie program consisted of five or six subjects running less than an hour, including breakdowns, songs with colored slides, local advertisements and time out for peanuts. Kingsized player pianos with built-in cymbals, playing the same giant roll over and over again, furnished the musical accompaniment. That is, until the movies went fancy and introduced a piano player and a drummer to supply the incidental music. The drummer, well equipped with gadgets, could provide any effect from a crying baby to the hoof beats of a cavalry regiment. Remember when the operator flashed a slide reading. Just a Minute, Piease, to Change Reels? Then he proceeded to add to the theatre’s income by pointing up a huge seidel of brew . .. The Biggest in Town... to be had next door for 5c. Fét John Bunny (sort of an early-day S. Z. Sakall) and skinny Flora Finch put the audiences into hysterics with their antics. The Keystone Kops set out to get their man, hampered on all sides by Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties. The wooden chairs were hard on the sitzenplatz but it was common for folks to take in at least three movie shows on the same night. Pictures were projected on a plain white sheet or whitewashed back wall. The owner or manager of the theatre hung the posters, delivered handbills from door to door, sold and collected the tickets (quite a trick in itself), swept out the shooting gallery and set the rattraps before locking up for the night. Neighborhood kids (we were one) felt it an honor to work for free around a “movin’ pitcher-theayter” so they could see all of the shows on the cuff. Bill Hartnett, local agent of the IATSE, please note! PRODUCER trademarks at the turn of the century were as familiar to Nickelodeon patrons as today’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia, RKO-Radio, 20th Century-Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., Universal-International, United Artists, J. Arthur Rank Organization, and Republic. They included Essanay, Imp, Thanhauser, Astra, Lubin, Majestic, Selig, Edison, Biograph, Gaumont, Mutual, Lasky, Mayer, Artcraft, Triangle, Pathe, Bison and Powers. And among the names to be found on the lithographs adorning Nickelodeon fronts (no marquee signs in neon lights, then) included G. M. (Broncho Billy) Anderson, Helen Holmes, Grace Cunard, Eddie Polo, Mary Pickford, Maurice Costello, King Baggott, Leah Baird, Helen Chadwick, Tom Owen and Matt Moore, Grace Darling, Priscilla Dean, Earle Williams and Cleo Madison. Many of the early favorites of shopfront movies went on from two-reelers to feature-length pictures and shared public affection with players who were in the spotlight when your film historian first started pounding the typewriter for this great family newspaper in 1916. ITH bigger and better movie theatres and bigger and better pictures came such greats of the silent screen as Conway Tearle, Elsie Ferguson, Pauline Frederick, Clara Kimball Young, Theda Bara, Robert Edeson, Cariyle Blackwell, Henry B. Walthall, William, Franklyn and Dustin Farnum, Dorothy Dalton, William S. Hart, Alice Joyce, Bryant Washburn, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, H. B. Warner, Eugene O’Brien, Betty Blythe, Mabel Normand, Bert Lytell, Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Taliaferro, Violet Heming, Harold Lloyd, Blanche Sweet and Madge Kennedy, to name a few. To these might be added the screen greats of the past quarter century, but they’re too well known to all. Sufficient to say that, thanks to these performers and their predecessors, escape, happiness and knowledge have been brought to moviegoing millions throughout the civilized world. We will now rise and sing, in chorus: “Hooray For the Good Old Movies .. . and the Good New Ones.” P.S.—Gosh, we almost forgot Norma Talmadge and Mary Miles Minter, those girls of our adolescent dreams!