Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1919 - Feb 1920)

27 "East Side, West Side, All Around the Town" Aunt Elizabeth learned that New York has some strange movie theaters, the likes of which she had never heard of back in Ohio By Agnes Smith SKETCHES BY OSCAR FREDERICK HOWARD According to these burning advertisements, no heroine ever boards a train naturally. MY, my," said Aunt Elizabeth, who had come on to New York to visit me, "you folks in the East are 'way behind the times in your motion-picture theaters. Why, you have theaters here that we haven't seen out in Ohio for years and years. I'm surprised, really surprised." Somehow or other Aunt Elizabeth's criticism seemed, a little unjust and I asked her what she meant. "Well, I just stepped around the corner to see a movie show and what do you think I found? One of those penny-in-the-slot contraptions— a place where you can buy movies just as you buy chewing gum. It was a queer place, sort of like a circus side show. You ought to see our Cozy Theater at home, and the Bijou Dream and the Idle Hour. We have the best mechanical pianos and soloists and all the newest pictures." "Did you go in the penny arcade?" I asked her. "Well, no. I just stepped in and looked around, and I can't say that it appeared a very proper place* All the pictures seemed to be about boarding-school girl at play and the froiics or the midnight -mids, there were a lot of young men "iooKmg down the little slides. I am surprised at New York." To clear the name of the metropolis, I explained to Aunt Elizabeth that she had stumbled on the movie in its most primitive form and that, whereas in Ohio, there are movies and movies only, in New York there are penny arcades, plain movies, and cinema palaces. Of all places to .hunt for her film entertainment, Aunt Elizabeth had chosen Fourteenth Street for her first excursion ! Rightly enough, Fourteenth Street boasts of "stone age" motion pictures. Fourteenth Street was the first home of the art. It embraced the movies long before Broadway would have anything to do with it. In those And The penny arcade pictures are disappointing. happy days, Broadway didn't think that there was "any money in it." The old Biograph studio ruled by D. W. Griffith, was at No. n East Fourteenth Street and there Blanche Sweet and Mary Pickford first faced the lens. The first Paramount exchange was opened there when Adolph Zukor and W. W. Hodkingson were merely optimists and not millionaires. William Fox, tired of keeping a shop on the East Side, started the Greater New York Film Rental Company there, and now his two Fourteenth Street theaters are merely molecules in his organization. So Fourteenth Street still boasts of the penny arcades that had shocked Aunt Elizabeth. They are, however, only lobby adjuncts to the show inside. They are the original "tumbling tin types." For one cent — the "tenth part of a dime," as the side-show barkers might say — you may see penny versions of the Mack Sennett beauties. These arcades, too, are reminiscent of the days when music and the movies were not yet wedded. If you want music and pictures you must take them separately. You must walk to the row of machines on the other side of the hall and spend another penny to get the jazz accompaniment that logically should go with the antics of the beautiful pink, blue, and yellow midnight frolickers. On one machine you may hear the sextet from "Lucia" which is more expensive because it combines the vocal energy of six persons. The penny-arcade pictures are mild. If Aunt Elizabeth had waited she would have seen the young men lift disappointed faces from the little slides. Back of the penny arcade is the real show. Fourteenth Street is the home of the "thrill-less thriller," the home of the hectic poster. According to these burning advertisements, no heroine ever boards a train naturally. She leaps onto the engine. No hero ever leaves a room without clubbing all the other occupants into insensibility and escaping through a broken window. From the posters, you might be