Straight from the Impressario’s Mouth

The Ouimetoscope. 1000 people at the cinema. Full house so its probably Sunday. Oh my!

In my continuing quest to see if there exists any silent film footage of 1910 Montreal, I stumbled upon a gem of a resourse, an 1965 interview (on the Radio Canada archives) with Earnest Ouimet!

You see, on another site, Silent Film Quebec, it is mentioned that this Mr. Ouimet, who I ‘ve blogged about before in my essays on early film in Montreal, not only owned the fanciest motion picture house in town, he also made films!!

He started shooting in 1908 and first filmed his own family, then his surroundings and then special events like the 1908 Quebec Tercentenary and the 1910 Eucharist Congress. (The only YouTube footage of early Montreal is a Gaumont Newsreel clip of the Congress parade.)Illness kept him from filming between 1912 and 1915, but then he continued. (That’s just as more films were being made for the War effort.)

Was some of his footage around, I wondered.

Well, no. That interview of Radio Canada starts out by showing some footage from the thirties or forties of Ouimet’s family and says that that’s the earliest surviving footage.

Well, at least the interview is illuminating. As he sits in his chair, an 88 year old man, Ouimet talks about how he spent his first earnings: on a car, (but of course) and a new kitchen set (for the legs slid on the floor) and on making the large Vaudeville stage at the Ouimetiscope (the first smaller one) smaller. They didn’t need a large one. He showed three films a night and had a singer between the films.

Prices. 35 cents for the loge. 25 for the orchestra and cheaper for the poulerie or something, cheap seats. (More expensive than the Nickel, which cost “a nickel.”)
What kind of people came to your theatre? asks the reporter. Oh, nice ones. Convent girls very Thursday afternoon…With the nuns, asks the reporter. No, school was out, Ouimet replies.

How many seats in the new theatre, built 1906, on Ste. Catherine?
1000
Always filled.
Well, certainly on Sunday. Standing room only. (OOO) (They discuss the Lord Day’s Law a bit.)

Did you have couples kissing in the theatre, like today?

No… We had ushers patroling the place and no man arriving alone was allowed to sit near a woman.. (Editor: That doesn’t answer the question, really, does it.)

Great interview….Now, I tracked down a book written in 1999 about the Quebec Tercentary (which I have blogged about) and the author claims he did track down a few newsreels of the events at that celebration. This book, The Art of Nation Building, which I will have to track down, describes how grand the celebration was and how it has been erased from the history books. My point exactly, in Flo in the City, my book about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/
)

The Nickelodeon Era in Montreal

A scene from A Corner in Wheat 1909, by D.W. Griffith. The sign says Owing to the Price of Flour, the 5 cent loaf of bread is now 10 cents. This film is relevant to my story, Flo in the City, a novel in progress, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ in more ways that one. In 1909, Marion and Edith go to the “Nickel” to see Man in the Box. I know this from the letters. Which Nickel? Well, there were dozens in Montreal, so I have my pick. Marion and her party weren’t the only people going to motion pictures in Montreal, or any other big city.

Man in the Box was a D.W. Griffith Film, about a bank robbery, that featured Richmond born Mack Sennet as a robber. It has not been preserved. A Corner in Wheat, Griffith’s first social realism film, has been preserved. It’s available on archive.org and I will try to embed it here.

Of course, the 1910 era was the Wheat Boom Era in Canada. Western Canada is opening up, and Flora’s brother Herb, along with many other Nicholson friends and relations, will head out there and describe the goings-on in letters. Yet, still, flour costs a fortune. Almost 5 dollars a barrel! So I have decided, in the my next installment of Flo in the City, Marion will go to a Nickelodeon, with sister Edith and her friends, the Clevelands, and see Man in the Box and a Corner in Wheat! A Biograph Double Bill. I’ve done my research, so I can put words in her mouth, even if I don’t have the letter where she talks about going to see the film.

Here’s A Corner in Wheat
at archive.org. I tried to embed it, but it kept messing u.

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.”