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

344 C6e C&eatre first-grade playhouses to become converted into veritable gold mines. Besides owning outright a dozen or more palatial and modernly constructed theatres, this trio of showmen control as many more in the vicinity of Chicago and also have recently added McVicker's, The Colonial, The Studebaker and La Salle Theatres, at the same time vastly improving the theatrical situation, in that Chicago during the season of 1913-14 recorded the most prosperous amusement season in fifteen years. Klaw and Erlanger and the Messrs. Shubert have Jones, Linick and Schaefer to thank for the solution of their difficult problems in Chicago, but the effect of the big triumvirate's operations on the one-time vaudeville monopoly possessed by Kohl Middleton and Castle has not been so favorable. The so-called "big-time" houses, such as the Majestic and the Palace, no longer attract the overwhelming patronage of other days. The programs at McVicker's and the Colonial are not perceptibly of less merit than in the Kohl houses, where the scale of prices is about three times as high. In Chicago there are no less than thirty theatres, seating in excess of 1,000 persons, where no seat costs more than 25 cents, not one of which was in existence as recently as five years ago. In some of these houses one m.ay not pay more than 10 cents for the best seat, and it was in one of these that the writer saw in one program such high-salaried performers as : The Four Mortons and Victor Moore. Practically all of these theatres are now devoted to feature films exclusively. The growth of the popular-priced movement in Chicago was primarily due to the industry of a group of vaudeville agents, who ventured to establish booking bureaus in that city at a time when the existing bu