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Motion Picture News
Volume XXXIII
ALBANY, N. Y., AND NEW YORK CITY, March 6, 1926
No. 10
Theatres
IN 1916 Motion Picture News published a survey which indicated that over 8o% of all the theatres of the country were under 550 seats. This survey originated the phrase: "the eighty percenter," frequently used since then in referring to the average small house and its problems.
The figures were a good deal of a jolt to the industry. Everyone was thinking, at that time, in terms of the larger downtown houses then well under way all over the country. At least one prominent company — a distributor — held a board meeting and decided that it was wise to consider the interests of the great majority of small theatres.
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The downtown city house, however, continues, as pictures grow better, to wax in importance. It got the distinction of a "first run," and consequently it became a strategic booking point. It became, in fact, so powerful, that it just about moulded the industry this way and that to suit its own leadership.
These large theatres affected, of course, the attendance at the small city and suburban theatres. In New York and Chicago, for instance, the number of picture theatres very quickly declined to about half the number that existed in the "store show" days.
And a change was also going on outside the cities. In the smaller centres of population everywhere larger houses were building, and, along with the good roads movement and the general exodus of the young people to the larger towns, they prospered for the most part, and the surrounding little houses died out or became semi-active. This change is still steadily under way.
From our various trade viewpoints we regard the developments accordingly. If we are one of the doomed smaller houses we protest bitterly. But, after all, it is inexorable progress — the progress of the public. The public wants better roads, better pictures, better seats, better music — and someone is always ready to give the public what it wants and will pay for.
So the march of theatres is simply the march of the public - onward and upward. We are a more prosperous people today; the dollar is considerably cheaper; and because of better pictures and better theatres the motion picture audience is very much wider, embraces more classes of people.
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So the theatre map has changed basically as the public has changed and as picture makers and theatre builders have been wise enough to foresee and meet these changes. And, if motion picture entertainment is to help and improve its place in the sun, the changes will go right on.
The fact is that they are going right on and faster than ever.
We are in a new era right now. And that is the building of great neighborhood houses in the big cities. We used to consider a twentyfive hundred seat house a big one. Today, five thousand seats is nearer the mark. It is idle to say that these houses will overseat the cities. They will simply replace and add to the poorer seats affording not so good entertainment.
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