Motion Pictures in the 1920′s.. Youth Oriented.

The Granada Theatre in Montreal, this pic belongs to Heritage Montreal.

Growing up I couldn’t legally attend a movie until 16, but I must have seen a couple before that age. I recall thinking how weird the opulent movie houses were. Especially the faux balconies.

Well, as I write my play Milk and Water,, about Montreal in 1927,  using my grandfather and my husband’s grandfather as characters, I find myself delving deeper into the motion picture question.

My play takes place two days after a certain Juge Boyer concludes, after an inquiry where over 400 gave testimony, that no one was responsible for the deaths in the Laurier Palace theatre fire, where 78 children and one adult died.

And then he recommends that children under 16 be banned from cinemas. Not that the cinema itself is immoral. Just too dangerous, that is, for kids only. Adults can’t die in a crush, apparently.

His ruling made no sense, except in the context of protecting Quebec from the influx of America-style media, radio and film.

Anyway, I did some Internet sleuthing and saw that  United Amusements of Montreal, with 16 theatres, didn’t suffer too much from this ban, with their profits rising a bit in the next few years.

The Talkies!

Also, that was the time the motion picture people built many of those opulent movie palaces, encouraging a better class of client. It cost 150.000 to build the Monkland Theatre in 1930. (Well, that was the projected cost.)

I imagine that attendance rose even more at American Motion Picture houses in the 20′s.. as adults could still accompany kids to theatres…Well, yes, during that decade movie attendance rose from 50,ooo,000 to 90,000,000.

In the nickelodeon era, children made up the bulk of the movie audience, I have read. 60 percent. Mostly boys, some unattended. (Girls couldn’t play hookey from school as they didn’t go to school…My idea.)

(In the silent era, many adults needed the accompaniment of a kid as they could not read at all or just couldn’t read English as they were immigrants.

Now, I spend  lot of time watching Turner Classic Movies and old movies seem rather adult to me.

So, this morning, I asked my husband, rhetorically “Did Hollywood even make movies for kids in the 20′s?”

Well, yes and no, I found out, it’s complicated.

According to a book “Hollywood Goes Shopping” the twenties was when Hollywood aimed its sights squarely at the youth market (just like today.)

There were ‘family movies’ but Hollywood didn’t focus on them.

(There weren’t any movies aimed strictly at kids, until Disney. Kids weren’t supposed to go to movies alone.)

But they did go alone. In the 10′s as I wrote, mostly boys, and in the twenties, boys and girls.

The problem here exists in defining “youth”.. It can mean adolescent or college kid.

Hollywood Goes Shopping indicates that in the 20th, youths starting going to movies in packs, some of these youths, though  13 or so. But Hollywood actively went after college age kids.

There is a big difference, at least I think, between a 13 old and 18 year old. (It might be arbitrary. In Quebec 16 year old was considered adult (there were no youths, although children as “youths” as such as 12 and 14 could marry. Nutty… That’s because youth culture came out of public high schools and the ensuing distinct consumer culture for this new category, who spent more time with peers than their parents.

The answer to my question: the movies were made for youths… censors in the US made sure the material wasn’t too immoral. But it wasn’t kid stuff either.

Apparently, too, Prohibition was good for the movies: it gave writers interesting topics and interesting characters like gangsters and their molls.

Anyway, it appears that Radio is what provided Americans with wholesome family entertainment. (A little too sugar coated, some say. Conjuring up a fantasy world.)

French Canada’s government  was concerned with American radio, as it was broadcast here. A bill was passed in the era to start a State Radio Station. I guess CFCF was around, Canada’s First, Canada’s Finest. Marconi.

But it’s  hard for a French person to listen to English radio,  but a talking movie is another  animal all together. So the Tachereau government pounced on the Laurier Palace Fire Tragedy to made a politically strategic move.

Anyway, I have to figure out what my French Canadian grandfather thought about all this: My husband’s Anglo grandfather didn’t hate American culture: he was married to an American. But then my grandfather’s family spent their summer vacations in the US, in the mid twenties in Atlantic City. Where the real life gangsters hung out.

My grandfather was also in tight with the movie people: his brother was VP of United Theatre Amusements.

Richmond’s King of Comedy

Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett in An Arcadian Maid, 1910. Both Pickford and Sennett are Canadian. Sennett is from Richmond, Quebec, or thereabouts, depending on who tells the story. He had changed his name from Sinnott and I have documents showing that Norman Nicholson did business with Sennett’s father. I also have a document fromm 1900 that shows that Sinnott was a Conservative voter. The family moved away in 1902.

In 1909, Marion,who is working as a teacher in the city of Montreal, goes to see Man in the Box at the Nickelodeon. Possibly with Edith, her older sister. Margaret remarks upon it in a letter. I have no idea which one. It likely wasn’t the Ouimetoscope, Montreal’s largest and most prestigious motion picture house, with 1200 seats and made to look respectable like a theatre.

They didn’t use the term ‘movie’ back then: in fact, I have a 1917 letter where Flora’s sister Edith writes that she went to the ‘movies’ and she puts the word in parantheses which indicates it is a new term.

Man in the Box was a silent short that happened to star Mack Sennett. Whether Marion (or Edith) recognized Sennett as a boy she had seen around town (he would have been a contemporary) is unknown.

I did read somewhere that it wasn’t until the 1960′s that Richmondites realized Mack Sennett was that Sinnott boy. Sennett, who went on to become the King of Comedy in Hollywood, wrote an autobiography in 1954 and he talks about his early life in Richmond, about how he spent most of his time going to funerals and how he felt closer to French Quebeckers than English Quebeckers, because they were Catholic, like he was.

There were hundreds of Nickelodeons or Nickels in Canada…. They were considered rather seedy places, if not downright dangerous. That didn’t stop most middle class citizens, including the very proper Nicholson women, from attending. Here’s an article from the Ladies’ Home Journal 1909 with a negative take on the motion picture shows. Remember, this was a day and age when many -if not most- children around 10 to 16 worked, sometimes in factories, so this argument seems a little lame. I imagine parents sent their kids to the Nickel to get them both out of the house and ‘off the street’.

Are some parents asleep that they allow their children to go to the prevalent five-cent moving-picture shows in our cities or ‘nickelodeons’ as they are called? Have they any conception of what their children see at these places? Immoral pictures? someone asks. No, not immoral in the sense we generally mean it, but just as bad, if not worse. Here is the program of one show: a beautiful lady, with dress of lace, bedecked with jewels, comes in an opening picture, then men with swords and long, waving plumes in their hats, swords flash out, a duel ensues, the hero kills his rival! So we have murder for a beginning. Next comes a haunted house with beds sliding down inclined floors. This is followed by the Devil jumping out of the moon! Next is a series of pictures of the plates, pots, the oven, the bread and pies and the stove, all of which was so exhiliarating on one occasion recently a little girl in the audience went into hysterics and ever since cannot be persuaded by her mother to go into the kitchen. The Next treat was a huge frog in a fountain, which suddenly stuck out a large red tongue at the audience, frightening almost out of their senses no fewer than a dozen little girls present. So reposeful for delicate nervous systems of children, is it not? Then came the final prize series: a man-monkey steals a woman out of a house and keeps her a year: the succeeding pictures show their love and affection for each other, and when in the last picture the husband finds his wife, she refuses to go back because she has fallen in love with the monkey! Hundreds of parents actually furnish their children with money to go to these pictures….”They should be illegal” some say. But why the law? Isn’t it more to the point that we should not furnish our children with the money to go to these places. They would close soon enough.”