Motion Picture Herald (Jan-Mar 1954)

What About tylodieJ oh fftaiit Street? A plea for recognition of the small community theatre in the reshaping of the industry in its technigues and policies. ARLIE JONES hat about these small towns? . . . A lot of lip-service has been given to the small town and small theatre in the past few months by people who claim to be acting for the good of the little operator. Almost invariably, with the exception of an occasional outburst by a few more or less voluble souls, they laud, praise and recognize the importance of the small theatre and give with the promises that the minor revolution equipment-wise is going to be the salvation of these small theatres. Cutting through all the verbiage and double-talk, their stand is praiseworthy, for it can all be nut-shelled in one thought : The nations movie-going habit is formed in the small theatre. Cities are made up of a lot of small towners who outgrew their britches and were attracted to the lights. We’ve raised quite a swarm of kids in the past 40 years right here in Elma. But our population keeps right on dwindling at the rate of about 1% per year. It’s not that people are getting tired of fun, but rather the national tendency to urbanize. We are quite typical of most small towns throughout the country. Cities are growing. They are being filled with a generation that learned its movie-growing habit in the small town and the neighborhood theatres of the city, for kid attendance at the downtown firstrunners is so small that no habit-forming tendency could develop there. It would seem (that the long range policy in the movie industry should be to encourage and keep operating the small theatre as a spawning ground for its own Proprietor of the Dawn theatre in Elma, la., Charlie Jones has distinguished his name far beyond the limits of that small town I pop. 9 001 through Allied States activities, and as a regular writer in Better Theatres. future welfare. Let us have a chance with the elimination of the admissions tax, good small town product (we don’t demand many epics — we want family stuff), terms that we can live with and improve our theatres with — Then we’ll get by. That’s all most of us expect to do in these “breeding grounds” anyway. We don’t have dividends to pay, legal staffs to support, or mammoth exploitations to promote. We could make it quite happily under the above provisions. So far this seems to make sense. However, the belief among small town operators continues to grow that we are constantly becoming the poorest of the poor relations in this industry. It could be that we just constitute a hypersensitive group that is being devoured by its own self-pity. There may be an element of truth in that, but the record of closed theatres, lost savings, shattered investments would deny that that hypothesis can be proven. Orphans in a Storm It is indeed a crying shame that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people devoted to this industry, carrying all they own wrapped up in one pile of brick and mortar, should through changing economic conditions, competitive enterprises, oppressive taxation and shortsighted industry policy be compelled to lock the doors, lose their savings, and deprive their communities of the greatest entertainment medium the world has ever known. We have joined the industry in grasping at the proverbial straws that were going to snatch us from the myriad named and unnamed causes constituting the Charybdis that has been sucking the life blood from our veins since we started living off popcorn back in 1948. We had only gone down twice when, about a year ago, 3-D hit the market and scores of us, against better judgment, went off the deep end and plunged into over-priced equipment to play under-made product at over-inflated terms to unfair, unequal and un-Godly grosses. We soon discovered that the straw floating on the surface was a mirage. Gadgets to the Rescue Scarcely had we paid the first installment on the loan to buy gargantuan magazines and gears and connecting rods, et cetera, when late in the winter we grasped at the new straw that broke with dramatic front page notice about a new process which would give you depth without glasses. We felt that third-dimension should be a considerable aid to the presentation and enjoyment of pictures. Here was CinemaScope coming up with exactly what we’d dreamed of. It was probably our own fault for thinking that CinemaScope was going to be third-dimension without glasses. Of course it isn’t, even though it is so advertised by implication, by some theatres eager to get one more quick buck from a gimmick-conscious public. The fact that CinemaScope is a new, different and courageously in 16 MOTION PICTURE HERALD, JANUARY 9, 1954