The theatre of science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry (1914)

0 f ^ c i e n c e 291 chestra at the Strand Theatre over which the dean of musical critics, Mr. Meltzer, raved, in the columns of the New York "American," is the result of the Rothapfel experience in the West and more recently at the Regent Theatre in Harlem. If any local management "rehearsed the films" with full orchestral and organ accompaniment before Rothapfel did, my attention was never directed toward the innovation. I recall in Minneapolis, the latter was uncompromising in demanding that the same rules that prevail for grand opera (in seating the audience and in forbidding an exodus while the curtain is up) must be observed. It was the influence of Rothapfel that inaugurated the exclusively motion picture theatre movement, that is to say in theatres of large capacity erected expressly for the silent drama and adopting a scale of admission prices far higher than the usual photoplayhouse requires to this day. Frank T. Montgomery, known to fame as "Montgomery, the moving picture man," is perhaps the most successful operator of high grade photoplay houses in the entire country, achieving national celebrity though his territory has been confined to the South, with Dayton, Ohio, as the extreme northern point of his activities. A Montgomery theatre is always devoted exclusively to moving pictures and, as he himself once expressed it, "The patron is always aware that he is in a Montgomery playhouse because it is just different." Early in life Montgomery chose the amusement business as his road to fortune. For years he travelled with a circus in the summer and with theatrical companies in the winter, frequently conducting vaudeville