The Politics of Performance Theater Licensing and the Origins of Movie Censorship in New York DANIEL CZITROM The movies were born in the city. While historians of early film have begun to pay more attention to special issues such as technology, patent wats, industrial practice, and the movies' aesthetic debt to earlier forms of cultural expression, there has been little analysis of the specifically urban world that made motion pictures the most popular form of commercial entertainment by World War I. The political, legal, and economic wrangles surrounding the nascent movie business in New York City established the template for the ownership and control of the mature industry, as well as the basic pattern for film censorship. In the first center of movie production and exhibition during the early part of the century, the especially knotty issues involving the licensing and censoring of movies— who could show them and what they could show—were fiercely contested. These battles over the regulation of representation need to be understood against the historical backdrop of urban cultural politics. Movies reinforced and reconfigured a set of controversies that, since the raid-nineteenth century, had been fought out largely over the licensing and 16 regulation of theatrical space. These issues included the alleged dangers commercial entertainments posed to children, disputes over Sunday blue laws, the licensing authority of the police department, and the connections between plebeian culture and the underworld. The process that determined which entertainments were licensed and which were licentious had always been fundamentally political and volatile. The continual controversies over commercial enterprises loosely described as "theatrical" involved complicated relations among entrepreneurs, the licensing authority of the state, the police power, and neighborhood audiences. By 1908 the movie business faced a crisis of exhibition: the older traditions of theater licensing proved inadequate for regulating the emergent new medium. Progressive reformers, movie exhibitors, and movie producers sought to split movies off from such live urban entertainments as vaudeville, burlesque, and concert saloons. Progressive social service agencies and activists embraced movies as an alternative to older entertainment traditions closely allied with machine politics and the urban vice economy. Movie entrepreneurs cultivated the new alliance with reformers as a way to shed the stigma of the street, attract a middle-class patronage, and increase their profits. For their part, reformers saw that alliance as a way to achieve what John Collier, the general secretary of the National Board of Censorship, called "the redemption of leisure." New York's movie wars—fought over theaters and screens, in the courts and the streets—illuminate a crucial transformation: the supplanting of locally based, municipally licensed cheap theater by the nationally organized, industrial oligopoly that came to dominate our popular culture. The whole question of what, precisely, constituted a "theatrical performance" had remained ambiguous ever since the New York state legislature passed the fitst comprehensive licensing act in 1839- That act, a response to intense lobbying by the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents (SRJD), had rested on the strongly held belief in a direct, causal relationship between the theater and delinquent or criminal behavior. It required any "theater, circus, or building, garden or grounds, for exhibiting theatrical or equestrian performances" in New York City to obtain a license from the mayor, with all collected fees to be forwarded to the SRJD. The law also set a penalty of $500 for every violation, and it authorized the society, as an agent of the state, to sue and collect on those penalties. During the Civil War the city experienced a boom in "concert saloons," and the explosive issue of separating prostitution and alcohol from entertainment spaces led the legislature in 1862 to pass a new act to "Regulate Places of Public Amusement." Its key features banned 17 DANIEL CZITROM alcoholic beverages on the premises of performance and made illegal the employment of females to wait on spectators.1 Over the next four decades, two kinds of regulation coexisted in the highly profitable yet unstable world of New York popular amusements. One was an internal supervision within the entertainment business itself, led by the trade press and certain entrepreneurs who sought to expand their audience by distancing their attractions from associations with alcohol and prostitution. The most influential figure in this process was Tony Pastor, often called the father of American vaudeville. While Pastor gained his first notoriety during the concert-saloon boom of the early 1860s, he soon moved to create a "high class variety" by freeing the entertainment from its earlier associations. By 1881 he had become the leading variety-theater manager in the city and moved into his Fourteenth Street Theater, on the ground floor of the new Tammany Hall. Pastor embodied the urge toward respectability and wider commercial success, and his theater is rightly viewed as the prototype for the mainstream vaudeville that dominated the American popular stage from the 1880s until the rise of radio. He regulated his theater with an eye toward increasing profit, makingspecial "efforts to attract a female clientele.2 Yet there were hundreds of other entertainment entrepreneurs who did not follow this path, retaining their ties to the concert-saloon traditions and struggling to survive within the competitive world of New York amusements. An uneasy alliance of the police department, the mayor's office, private moral reform societies, and neighborhood groups kept up a continuous cultural surveillance of entertainment spaces that included dime museums, concert saloons, and vaudeville and burlesque houses. Obtaining and keeping a license from the mayor's office proved a key not only to staying in business, but also for moving into a more profitable realm in the continuum of amusement respectability. To thrive, an entrepreneur had to negotiate a treacherous terrain held by autocratic police captains, ever-vigilant moral reformers, outraged clerics, and organized neighborhood citizens. No one, finally, could say with any certainty what constituted a theater, or what the difference was between a theater and a concert hall. Indeed, many entrepreneurs sought both theater and concert licenses since the city charter authorized the police department to permit the sale of liquor in concert halls. An 1875 "List of Theatres, Halls, Concert Rooms" counted fifty-seven licensed places for that year, a figure which remained basically constant for the next two decades. These were about evenly divided between places presenting straight drama, opera, music concerts, and circuses and the newer concert saloons and variety theaters. They were clustered mainly in three entertainment 18 f Hb KULI 11W> Ur rcnruniviMi^c [-.crícts: the Bowery and Lower East Side; 14th Street and Union Square; and the Tenderloin," roughly from 23rd to 42nd Streets, between Sixth and ifchth Avenues. By this time several newer private groups, such as the Society ■>r the Suppression of Vice, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Chil-n n, and the Society for the Prevention of Crime, had joined the SRJD in naking active interventions in the licensing process.1 f onsider, for example, the Belvidere Variety Theatre at 23 Bowery, licensed iy t tie city since at least 1875. Its owner, John Schroeder, probably opened it ir»t as a saloon room, adding a small stage with rough scenery facing tables and h u TS. Upon orders of the local police captain in early 1879, Schroeder erected ■ >.t\en~foot-high wooden partition to separate the barroom from the stage area, Iili«. technically complying with the law requiring separation of theatrical performance from the serving of alcohol. In April 1879 two agents for the řečnily formed Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV), founded by Anthony "on istock, visited the Belvidere and filed depositions with the mayor's office, ■»rnrssting a renewal of license. One described the scene as follows: At the tables were seated about twelve girls and women with a number of men, engaged in drinking and conversation. . . . On entering the saloon deponent seated himself near the door and was soon approached by one of the women and asked what [he] would have to drink and if she could drink with liim. Seating herself at the table the drinks, lager beer and lemonade, were brought by a waiter. While drinking the woman asked deponent to go with her to one of the rooms on the side of the stage. Deponent consented and going to the room was again asked to treat which he did. In the course of the onversation which followed the woman urged deponent to take her into one •f the rooms up stairs, which was mote private and had better accommoda-lions, and where they could have a bottle of wine together and would only cost three dollars. Upon deponent's remarking that it cost pretty high and whether anything else was given for the money, the woman replied that they would have a good time, that she would give him a nice diddle, pulled up her dress, showed her leg above the knee, made use of every persuasion and said she would get one dollar of the money and the other two dollars would go to the proprietor—the whole of which offers the deponent declined.'1 In response, Schroeder vigorously denied the "false, malicious, and untrue" statements in the SSV depositions, claiming that "such practices are not permitted on the premises." He defended the arrangements in his place, stressing the makeshift wall separating barroom from theater as "similar to the front partitions used at Miner's Theatre, Volks Garden, and theatres of like charac- 19 DANIEL CZITROM ter on the Bowery." He admitted that "the greater portion of the upper part of the building is let out weekly to male lodgers and the balance thereof to transient lodgers of the same sex." Schroeder also submitted a supporting petition from eight neighboring businessmen. These clothing merchants, hatters, and picture framers all affirmed that the Belvidere was not disorderly, "nor is it the source of disturbance or annoyance to us during the day or night or in our Judgement the cause of annoyance or grievance to the travelling public." Like so many other places on the Bowery, in Union Square, and in the Tenderloin, the Belvidere continued to operate for years, a protean urban space defined and redefined by various elements of the metropolis, it qualified as a legitimate entertainment enterprise as long as John Schroeder coughed up regular tribute to the local police captain. He maintained the Belvidere as a legal and moderately successful business, catering to local working people and tourists, and providing employment for musicians and other variety performers. At least some of the women found there earned money by hustling drinks from customers and splitting the money with Schroeder. Whether they received a wage is unclear. Some of them may have also engaged in casual pros-"""titufioň with customers looking for that. But as both police and private investigators found, one had to agree to move through a series of coded encounters first: letting a woman sit with you, treating her, moving to a side room, treating again, allowing her onto your lap, moving upstairs to a private room. Even there, the real profit resulted from using sex to sell liquor rather than the reverse. For the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Belvidere was a low "dive," frequented only by thieves and prostitutes. It was "disorderly" precisely because it blurred the boundaries between respectable and unrespectable social behavior.5 During its infancy, roughly from 1896 to 1906, the motion picture established itself largely within venues more respectable than the Belvidere. Movies became the single most popular ace in American vaudeville, the latest in a long line of visual novelty acts-—"living picture" tableaux, lantern slides, shadow-graphy—that could be fit neatly into an established format organized around discrete, unrelated "turns." Vaudeville managers aggressively promoted brief travelogues, "local actualities," news films, and the occasional comedy or drama to gain an edge over their competitors. Hundreds of vaudeville theaters across the country provided the most important market for the fledgling, mostly undercapitalized moviemakers.6 Beginning around 1905 the rapid growth of "nickelodeon" theaters, devoted exclusively to exhibiting motion pictures, created the industry's first great boom. As Charles Musser has argued, "It is not too much to say that 20 THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE iioJirn cinema began with the nickelodeons." These were usually penny ar-jtlt ^. empty storerooms, or tenement lofts converted into rude theaters de-on -.1 to continuous shows of motion pictures. Film historians have identified event factors that contributed to the "nickel madness," including the devel-jnrnt nt of longer, more sophisticated "story films," a general expansion in pop-ilarlv priced entertainment forms between 1905 and 1908, and the aggressive iiiiiniercial exploitation of movies by urban immigrant exhibitors. Nick-[inV>ns attracted a tremendous rush of entrepreneurial energy. In 1907, the iut untypical Golden Rule Hall nickelodeon on the Lower East Side's Riving-on Street reported a weekly take of $1,800. Fixed expenses of about $500 left In proprietor with a net weekly profit of $1,300. In 1910, in Manhattan Imu. weekly movie attendance reached approximately 900,000 at about four niiiJred theaters.7 1 lie sudden explosion of storefront theaters in New York created a complex tnifiu-a! and cultural crisis, making plain the deep contradictions surrounding li i ■ ipularity and regulation of the movies. Subject to two very different H-í lining procedures, movies fell between the cracks of the ambiguous theater r*s Where motion pictures were coupled with vaudeville acts, exhibitors »11( required to take out a theater or concert license, issued by the police de- * in ment, at an annual fee of $500. Where entertainment consisted of motion -i u., es alone, with no stage performances, only a so-called common-show li-L l-t costing $25 and granted by the mayor, was needed. In addition, the in building code required that any space intended for public entertainment * nh ludiences over three hundred had to comply with certain very specific ľ • iringent regulations involving exits, fireproofing, size of stage, lighting, i - > on. Not surprisingly, therefore, the large majority of early movie houses ip nred under common-show licenses and kept their capacities below three mi -lied. In 1910, as a systematic study done for the mayor's office revealed, mi 450 movie houses operated under common show licenses, another 290 ľ I 1 heatrical or concert licenses, and around 600 had a seating capacity un-1' i three hundred.8 I li" strategy pursued by many of the ambitious, small-time, immigrant l"""inen, all trying to stake claims in the new amusement Klondike, seems ľ .i stay beneath the surveillance of the police and the reform agencies tradi-i" i lly interested in regulating the city's theatrical world. They kept their i ■ ^ small and short, with only a minimal investment in a hastily refur-" m »I penny arcade or storefront. They could obtain a common-show license •i ■* brief a period as three months and thought nothing of packing up and i • * i.ig to another part of the city as soon as business went bad. By late 1906 21 DANIEL CZITROM several established theatrical managers had protested to the police departmen because they were compelled to live up to expensive licensing requirements while the itinerant movie shows were not. At the same time, complaints fron clergymen and moral reformers against movies began to mount, centering 01 four issues: the running of Sunday shows, the large numbers of children in tfo audience, the screening of immoral films, and the threat of fire. But while th< tremendous popularity of the movies brought forth demands for stricter regu lation, these calls extended to a whole range of plebeian entertainments.9 Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham attempted to bring some order t< the situation by reasserting his department s authority over the realm of enter tainment licensing. An arrogant, tactless former army officer and federal bu reaucrat, with a violent temper, Bingham had been appointed to lead the po lice in 1906 by Mayor George B. McQelJan, Jr. He had little knowledge o New York City, and his three-year reign as commissioner would be marked bi constant bickering with the mayor and controversies occasioned by Bingham' anti-Semitic and nativist pronouncements on the causes of crime. In Apri .„J907 Bjngham.ordered police captains to furnish a descriptive list of all place of amusement in their precincts, especially noting penny arcades and cheaj theaters, and he promised to review every application for license renewal per sonally. This survey counted over four hundred "'penny arcades' and simila places where phonographs, moving pictures, and mechanical pianos furmst the entertainment." By July Bingham recommended that Mayor McCIellan re voke the licenses held by scores of penny arcades, nickelodeons, and chea| vaudeville houses because they admitted children unaccompanied by parents showed obscene pictures, or violated building and fire regulations,10 The Children's Aid Society, founded in 1853 by Charles Loring Brace, sup ported Bingham's efforts by charging that these places menaced the morals o children under sixteen. The society brought suits in 1907 against severa movie exhibitors. After being raided by society agents, George E. Watson, pro prietor of a nickel show on Third Avenue near 34th Street, was fined $100 n special sessions on a charge of imperiling the morals of young boys by showing a Lubin film called The Unwritten Law, based on the sensational Stanforc White-Harry Thaw murder case of the previous year. Judges viewing the filrr decided that two of its scenes, depicting the drugging of Evelyn Nesbit bj Stanford White and the shooting of White on the roof garden, were unfit foi children. In a similar case, William Short, who ran a movie house on Wesi llóch Street, was arrested for exhibiting a film portraying the interior of í Chinese opium den. The police magistrate hearing this case remarked, "If anj man should show that picture to my child I would kill him. The town is ful 22 THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE *«f these sort of places and they are doing incalculable harm. The police should doseděn í ne of them."11 The movie boom also galvanized a renewed campaign by elements of New York's Proustant clergy for stricter enforcement of the law banning Sunday j* „-e pirrinrmances. Since the early 1880s theatrical blue laws had been hon--; ijgj musí I v in the breach, as vaudeville and burlesque houses routinely offered "sacred ion* srts" on Sundays, consisting only of singing and monologues, and **" suPPPset"* 'ree or"a^ scene shifting, costumes, makeup, and acrobatic acts. Although thcie tamer Sunday performances had become a New York institution over the u 'rs, complaints about Sabbath-breaking occasionally brought a flurn or .trrists and threats to revoke licenses, usually against the smaller and poorer tin aiurs along the Bowery and around Union Square. In the fall of 1906 Rev Ľ. M ľoster, a Presbyterian minister, and Canon William S. Chase, a Brooklyn 1 piscopal minister, organized the Interdenominational Committee for cht' Suppression of Sunday Vaudeville. They wrote Mayor McCIellan chat "wh.uc\ir n quires a license on other days of the week is forbidden on the first dav of rht week" and warned him that "the public has a right to hold you responsible r»r the violation of the law."12 In i\ pit • 1 language, Rev. Percy S. Grant of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension tli1! »ed that those favoring Sunday shows were mostly "of a race who ;|p hive no i'v for our Sunday, and I don't know that they have any use for their own He >l* nounced the spread of Sunday entertainments, especially those he siwtltvdnping "along the lines open to us by the poorer class of vaudeville and othir sho» - It would not only degrade our religious nature, but our minds." In O'11 nib' r, responding to this campaign, police closed a number of Bowery and Iljrkin burlesque and vaudeville houses on Sunday, as well as a popularly prii i «I Ir ■!• ,i opera concert. Significantly, though, when the Interdenominational i "ľiinittee, with the support of Bingham and the city's Corporation Gum- I in de plans to bring a test case to court on the Sunday law, they chose noc d" ft Hie lesser Bowery or Harlem theaters, but William Hammerstein's Vurcin i 'In -ter, a big-time vaudeville house at Broadway and 42nd Street, in tlu hi ■ i u' rhe emerging Times Square theater district.15 i\f nubile, the movie exhibitors looked for ways to defend themselves Itc.'lh m ! i olitically. In June 1907 a group of about sixty formed the Moving Picture 1 Ji bitors Association (MPEA). These were mostly Jewish and Italian sh.iftn. n hi [ding common-show licenses and ready to exploit their close ties in tlít I i. lany Hall machine. The MPEA succeeded in getting a New York *iii] : -n- ( .'urt justice to grant an injunction preventing the mayor and his Bill' 11 i.r I senses from revoking their licenses. Significantly, their counsel was DANIEL CZITROM Florence Sullivan, who was not a lawyer, but a Tammany district leader on the Lower East Side and a cousin of Timothy D. "Big Tim" Sullivan, the most powerful Democratic politician in Manhattan. It is important to note, too, that the MPEA's first president, Nicola Seraphine, defended the movie business with domestic imagery that would echo throughout film history. "A great majority of the moving pictures," he told an interviewer, "retain something connected with the home. The human heart goes out to these pictures because they recall scenes that are dear to the poorest patron of these shows. . . . The moving picture exhibitions are rapidly multiplying and are so easy of access and reasonable in price of admission that they are really a part of the home life of Greater New York."14 Amidst all this contention a legal bombshell landed on December 3, 1907, shaking the foundations of New York show business. Ruling on the Sunday test case, Supreme Court Justice James A. O'Gorman revoked the license of the Victoria theater for violating an old I860 state ban on Sabbath entertainment. ^Ignoring the enormous changes in the city's population and leisure patterns over the past five decades, O'Gorman asserted that "the Christian Sabbath is one of the civil institutions of the state and that for the purpose of protecting the moral and physical well-being of the people and preserving the peace, quiet, and good order of society the Legislature has authority to regulate its observance." Police Commissioner Bingham welcomed this clear, definite order. "Everything in the way of Sunday theater is to be closed," he announced. "That covers Carnegie Hall as well as the one and five cent vaudeville and moving picture shows." Few decisions in the history of New York courts touched so many people. The prohibition would affect twenty-seven vaudeville and burlesque theaters; numerous opera houses, symphonies, and other concert halls; and Sunday-night plays given in German, Yiddish, and French. The combined audience for these events ran to perhaps 150,000 on an average Sunday, and if the summer seaside resort shows were included, to over half a million.15 For two "blue Sundays" in a row the police enforced O'Gorman's ruling, creating an eerie stillness in the city's theaters, while large throngs moved through Broadway, the Bowery, Union Square, Times Square, and other main avenues in "crowds that reached almost election night proportions." A very vocal, large, and diverse opposition immediately put pressure on the Board of Aldermen to exercise its power to give the city its own Sunday amusement law. The city's press largely opposed the blue law, invoking cosmopolitan diversity as their own standard and class bias as that of their enemies. The World argued that with three-quarters of all New Yorkers of foreign parentage, "re- THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE P il or non-enforcement is its inevitable fate, hastened by every attempt to re-\ne its outworn and outgrown severity. . . . The people's Sunday belongs to iln people." A mass meeting of 2,500 members of the United German friiLieties, representing roughly 300,000 people, called for bringing the laws of tin. state "into harmony with the present conditions and wants of the people." Delegates to the city's Central Federated Union, representing 250,000 mem-b is of organized labor, attacked the ruling for creating "a class distinction by y rmitting a certain few to follow their particular pursuit of happiness while denying the same rights to a large majority." The Tammany-dominated Board oř Aldermen responded to ail this pressure by quickly passing an ambiguously worded ordinance relaxing the Sunday law. It allowed for "sacred or edu-Litional, vocal or instrumental concerts," provided that these entertainments "shall be given in such a manner as not to disturb the public peace or imount to a serious interruption of the repose and religious liberty of the toi nmunity."16 For the motion picture industry, the 1907 uproar over Sunday theater pn ved a turning point. Since movie exhibition was not part of the nineteenth-n ntury entertainment equation, it had never been subject to blue laws. A reut ilized Moving Picture Exhibitors Association took advantage of the legal i h los to mark out its own space, separate from the older theatrical interests, nil I to flex its growing political muscle. The MPEA was now led by William 1 ik, an intense, twenty-nine-year-old Hungarian Jewish immigrant who had m* ested the profits from his small cloth-inspecting company in the entertainment business. Fox had successfully converted several Brooklyn penny arcades in [ burlesque theaters into movie houses, and by 1907 he had opened a film distribution business and gained control of more theaters in Manhattan. He I ii-T emerged as the prototypical movie mogul, a pioneer, along with Adolph Ztikor, tn vertically integrating movie exhibition, distribution, and produc-ii"ii. In his early New York days Fox was unique for his shrewd and effective u i of Tammany Hall connections in building both his economic base and his inrluence with other movie men. His attorney and partner, and the new council for the MPEA, was Gustavus Rogers, a Jewish, City College-educated I '*yer. Rogers had made himself useful to the Sullivan machine, and by 1903, u ige twenty-seven, he had served as both legal counsel and corresponding • retary for Tammany Hall.17 fhe only theaters open in the city during the two December blue Sundays " e nine Fox nickelodeons. Rogers had obtained a court injunction prevent- n ' police from closing them, successfully arguing that the phrase "or any "' I er entertainment of the stage" (contained in the charter provision) did not DANIEL CZITROM apply to moving picture shows "because they do not require the use of a stage as that word is understood." Newspapers noted that, amidst the Sunday amusement drought, Fox's Harlem Comedy Theatre did an enormous business, giving performances every fifteen minutes, all day, to three hundred eager patrons, each paying a nickel. Motion pictures were not mentioned in the new city ordinance, but the corporation counsel claimed they were illegal.18 Moving quickly to protect all 110 members of the MPEA, controlling some five hundred movie houses, Rogers argued that movies could not be prosecuted under the new city statute because it did not mention them; nor could an older state law forbidding Sunday "public sports, exercises, or shows" be invoked because movies were not presented out-of-doors. On December 28,1907, he won a temporary blanket injunction, later upheld, from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Greenbaum, restraining police from harassing any Sunday movie shows. As the trade paper Moving Picture World noted, "Nearly all the promoters of moving picture entertainments availed themselves of the injunction privilege and their houses were packed.. . . The real sufferers were the vaudeville managers. They were forced to make up their bills of singing, talking and instrumental acts in which the performers wore street clothes. In most cases the attendance was light and it was a lucky house which did not lose a substantial sum."19 Motion picture exhibition, now on a more secure legal footing with the court victories of 1907, became an even more inviting business opportunity. Theater managers worried about the legal ambiguities surrounding Sunday performances began subsrituting movies for live acts. The economic downturn of 1907-8 also encouraged vaudeville and burlesque houses to convert to movies as their main attraction. In the summer of 1908, for example, William Fox startled the city's show business community by leasing two popular, centrally located theaters, the Dewey on 14th Street and the Gotham on 125th Street, and converting them to motion pictures. Since the 1890s these theaters had been controlled by Big Tim Sullivan, offering risque vaudeville and burlesque shows that regularly attracted protests from Sullivan's political enemies. After Fox paid one year's rent of $ 100,000, in advance, for the two theaters, he proceeded to make tremendous profits by offering a show with five reels of film, interspersed with several live vaudeville acrs, all for ten cents. The Dewey, with its fifty employees, red-uniformed ushers, and daily changes of films, was now, according to Variety, "the best run and most profitable moving picture place in New York." On Thanksgiving Day, 1908, the 1,200-seat Dewey sold 12,000 tickets, a record attendance for a movie theater. More vaudeville and burlesque theaters, many of them old bastions in the 26 THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE tv ,, entertainment districts, made the transition to movies at this time, including Tony Pastor's, the Unique, and the Union Square, all on 14th Street, and two big Keith and Proctor houses on 23rd and 125th Streets.20 The policy oi adding live variety acts to the show, pioneered by Fox and Marcus Loew, cre-ittd what became known as "small-time vaudeville," an jmportanr transitional oh »se in movie exhibition. Combining the nickelodeon's cheap admission price and film program with the live acts and trappings of the more comfort-ihk middle-class vaudeville house, these theaters put many of the cramped, dmuy storefront theaters out of business. The "small-time" format would rro\e ideal for the multireel "feature films," which began to appear after 1912, and they also provided the foundation for several of the largest movie house Lirtuits, a crucial part of the vertical monopolies that later dominated Holly-woe d production.21 As the movie boom accelerated, the desire to inspect and regulate this new tniertainment phenomenon intensified in several quarters. Two parallel inves-nii Ltions of New York's movie business, one public, one private, took place in t.u'y 1908, and together they set the agenda for movie regulation for the next dn.ade. Mayor McClellan ordered the city police to visit and make a complete li-i of all the places with penny arcades or moving picture shows. Part of the impetus here came from a disastrous nickelodeon fire in Boyertown, Pennsyl-\.irtia, which killed 169 people and drew cries for tighter safety codes. But the mayor also found himself inundated with complaints from clergy warning a,; linst the moral dangers posed by movies and, between the lines, afraid of the competition that this new entertainment posed. "A number of us," wrote Rev. Michael J. Lavelle, vicar general of the Roman ( itholic Archbishopric, "are very much worried by the moving picture shows, ni í only on Sunday but every day in the week. We are being constantly urged n« do something to have them stopped. From the reports I get, brought by sen-«. ble men, in no way fanatic, they are bad and demoralizing to the youth in this city. In fact, it is commonly believed that they cannot be made to pay unit »s they introduce salacious pictures." Yet in summarizing the reports of in-ustigators who toured 320 movie shows, Police Commissioner Bingham, cer-[ 'inly no friend of these shows or their managers, reported, "Some of the 1 -ctures bordered on the vulgar, but in no place were pictures found which lould be termed lewd or salacious." The worst that could be observed were numerous pictures showing "railroad hold-ups, shootings of persons, duels, .■"id pictures illustrating thefts, and the consequences thereof to the thieves rhemselves."22 On the other hand, for critics of movies, the pictures rhemselves were only 27 DANIEL CZITROM part of a troubling exhibition milieu associated with cheap commercial entertainment: big crowds of unsupervised children, darkened spaces, gaudy advertisements, the large immigrant presence both in the audience and in the ticket office, and the overall fact that movies inhabited the physical and psychic space of cheap commercial urban entertainment.23 It was precisely this larger, disturbing context that gave focus to the influential report, Cheap Amusement Shows in Manhattan, produced jointly in early 1908 by two Progressive civic groups, the Women's Municipal League and the People's Institute. This sympathetic analysis stressed the sudden emergence of movies as the most popular yet least regulated of the city's commercial entertainments. Movies needed to be separated from desultory penny arcades, "as a rule the gathering place of idlers," whose slot machines showed pictures tending toward "the indecent or the violent." Compared to both penny arcades and cheap vaudeville and burlesque houses, movie audiences evinced order, enthusiasm, and "the leavening salt of family patronage. "2i The author of this report was John Collier, a twenty-four-year-old social worker; who played a central role in movie censorship over the next decade. Born and raised in a wealthy Atlanta family, Collier had joined the staff at the People's Institute in 1907, bringing a passionate interest in the problem of commercialized leisure in the industrial age. In Collier's eyes, the movies offered an unprecedented opportunity for reformers. "All the settlements and churches combined do not reach daily a tithe of the simple and impressionable folk that the nickelodeons reach and vitally impress every day. Here is a new social force, perhaps the beginning of a true theater of the people, and an instrument whose power can only be realized when social workers begin to use it." Collier described the earliest movie shows as "often a carnival of vulgarity, suggestiveness and violence, the fit subject for police regulation." But over the last five years the moving picture already had "purified itself automatically, or has been purified by the demand of the public; it has become the resort of families and children." Movies were already the best form of cheap entertainment because they were "rarely, almost never, indecent." On the other hand, the fast-paced shows "over-excited" and fatigued children; sanitary and safety conditions were abysmal; and the often vulgar live vaudeville acts "put a common show into the rank of a theatre," according to Collier, who wanted them eliminated. He looked forward to the People's Insritute establishing an as yet unspecified cooperative plan with the movie business, "giving endorsement to the best of the shows and receiving in return the right to regulate their programs."25 Collier's evaluation came at a critical moment in the evolution of both film OQ THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE coniuit and the movie business. The Progressive impulse to directly shape not onli theater regulation but also what appeared on the screen reflected the de-s1rt r« separate movie exhibition from its association with the city's plebeian rht.itrical world and to purge film narrative of its more sensational representa-aons of urban life. For their subjects, early "story films" borrowed heavily from .ill snrts of entertainment sources, including melodrama, vaudeville and burlesque sketches, cartoons, comics, and news stories. A substantial body of popular films had drawn from and extended the commercial exploiration of urban suiMnonalism. Analysis of the relatively small fraction of surviving films, and their ittendant publicity, reveals at least four genres in this category that must h ive troubled Progressive reformers the most: erotic street scenes emphasizing public displays of sexuality, depictions of New York nightlife, "slumming" comedies, and films about urban crime. All of these movies centered on voyeuristic representations of the city's underside, offering cinematic versions of Police Gazette cartoons, popular stage acts, and news stories about urban low life.26 Films about the erotic possibilities and fantasies of city street life, from a male point of view, were common in the early years. For example, two typical i irly Edison films, Soubrette's Troubles on a Fifth Avenue Stage (1901) and What Happened on Twenty-third Street (1902), are about breezes exposing women's bodies. In the latter, a man and woman are shown walking along a busy city sireet, toward a stationary camera. The film ends after a gust of air from a sidewalk grate billows the woman's skirt, reveals her underclothes, and causes her tii laugh as she and her companion continue walking. By the time this short movie, described by the Edison Catalog as "a winner and sure to please," was made, that situation—indeed, the 23rd Street grate in particular—had already 1 -en illustrared in the city's more sensational newspapers.27 In It's a Shame to Take the Money (Biograph, 1905), a bootblack and policeman collude. While the boy attends a well-dressed lady, a policeman ieeringly * atches over a wall as she hikes her dress for the shine. The boy refuses pay-Tent and gleefully shakes hands with the cop.28 In Street Car Chivalry (Edison, i )03), men in a crowded street car fall all over each other to give a seat to a pretty young woman while ignoring a stout, older matron who climbs aboard. I he camera opens on a couple necking passionately in Central Park after Dark 'lliograph, 1903). When a cop walks by, shining a light in their face, they quickly rearrange their clothing and become more circumspect. One of the most popular films of the early period was Personal (Biograph, 1904), about a man who takes out a personal ad for a wife and gets surrounded by ten screaming women at Grant's Tomb, who then spend the rest of the movie frantically chasing him around the city.29 on DANIEL CZITROM The physically expressive dancing and sexual styles of working-class youths had been filmed and marketed as exotic "actualities" since the 1890s in movies such as Bowery Waltz (Biograph, 1897), The Bowery Kiss (Edison, 1901), and A "Tough" Dance (Biograph, 1902). But a more sophisticated and narratively complex group of films portrayed the theaters, dance halls, and saloons of the Bowery and Tenderloin entertainment districts, often taking the viewer backstage in the course of their narratives. Many of these assumed viewer familiarity with contemporary news accounts and scandals about these places. Bio-graph advertised A Night at the Haymarket (1903) as a "very stunning picture tho' somewhat risque," emphasizing that "the much talked of resort is reproduced exactly." If the narrative makes little logical sense, the successive scenes are meant to communicate "six lively hours at New York City's famous Tenderloin dance hail." These include the milling crowd on the sidewalk; the latest dances (including a boisterous can-can); a right in the "wine room" that continues on the street; and, finally, a police raid in which everybody is led out, as the women hide their faces.30 A comic version of an archetypal vision of the ._city_forms the center of How They Do Things on the Bôwery (Edison, 1902). A country rube carrying a cheap valise picks up a kerchief dropped by a woman walking the opposite way. She takes him into a nearby saloon, immediately lights a cigarette, orders drinks, and drugs him as he pays the waiter. As he falls unconscious she robs him and leaves, and the last scene shows him thrown out into the street by the waiter.31 The Gerry Society's Mistake (Biograph, 1903) burlesques the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, much in the news for its raids on theaters. Four young actresses are shown undressing backstage when a severe-looking man and a policeman enter, shoving papers in front of the youngest woman. She produces a wedding ring from a costume trunk, presumably proving that she is not underage. The women plead with the policeman, finally removing all their jewelry and giving it to him, as they laughingly push the SPCC agent out the door.'2 A cognate genre, the slumming comedy, gained wide popularity, combining scenes of famous New York sights with a burlesque of the tourists who hired native "guides" to New York low life. In Lifting the Lid (Biograph, 1905), rhe action begins with a group of respectable out-of-towners who travel from their midtown hotel in a large touring car advertising "Chinatown Trips." They visit a low Bowery dive and a Chinese restaurant, sample opium in a den filled with white women and Chinese men, and get drunk at a boisterous concert saloon, where they get thrown out for joining the dancers on stage. The last shot shows rhem returning safely to their hotel, an appropriate ending for a movie marketed by the studio as "somewhat spicy, but unobjectionable in every way." 30 THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE llinore «rJonic version of this subject, The Deceived Slumming Party (Biograph, llfôOS) levctN the fraud behind expeditions that played upon the desire "to in-PsaLtiP-itt tnt mysteries ofthat famous section of our great metropolis—the &howerv \ plainclothes cop, in cahoots with the guide and some "Chinese" - friend* bľukmails the tourists by threatening to arrest them after a fake sui-''ci£t in J rht'ity opium den; the Chinese restaurant serves ground-up cats and d ert Western Wheel," Variety, July 11,1908, 7; "Trade Notes," Moving Picture U 'Id, February 1, 1908, 76, May 9, 1908,4, and June 20, 1908, 527. 39 DANIEL CZITROM 21. See Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 310-34, for a good summary of the importance of "small time." For an illustration of the workings of two such theaters, see Charles F. Morris, "A Pair of New York's Picture Theaters," Nickelodeon, March 15,1910, 141-42: 22. Lavelle quoted in Theodore Bingham to George B. McClellan, Jr., June 25, 1908, MP, MGB-52. 23. For an analysis that sees the conflict over exhibition practices as "testifying to the potential of the cinema as an alternative public sphere," see Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 90-125. 24. 0ohn Collier], "Cheap Amusement Shows in Manhattan: Preliminary Report of Investigation," January 31, 1908, in Subjects Papers, Records of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library (hereafter cited as NBR Papers), 2, 3. 25. Ibid. See also John Collier, "Cheap Amusements," Survey 20 (April 11, 1908): 75-76, and "Woman's League Investigates," Moving Picture World, February 22, 1908, 137; and New York Tribune, February 10, 1908. For background on Collier, who went on to become the controversial architect of Indian policy during the New Deal, see ~His měmbířrPTOW Every Zenith (Denver, 1963); and Kenneth R. Vh'tlp,John Collier's Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954 (Tucson, 1977), 4-19. 26. All the films discussed in this section were viewed at the Paper Print Collection, Library of Congress. For background on the sources of early story film form and content, see Tom Gunning, "The Non-Continuous Style of Early Film," and John Hagan, "Erotic Tendencies in Film, 1900-1906," both in Cinema 190011906: An Analytical Study, comp. Roger Holman (Brussels, 1982), 219-29, 231-38; John L. Fell, "Motive, Mischief, and Melodrama: The State of Film Narrative in 1907," in Fell, Film before Griffith, 272-83; John L. Fell, "Dissolves by Gaslight: Antecedents to the Motion Picture in Nineteenth-Century Melodrama," Film Quarterly 23 (spring 1970): 22-34; and Jeanne Thomas Allen, "Copyright and Early Theater, Vaudeville, and Film Competition," in Fell, Film before Griffith, 176-87. 27. See, for example, "The Open Grating," in Tenderloin, November 19, 1898; and "Playful Pranks of March Breezes," the Police Gazette, reprinted in Edward Van Every, ed., Sins of New York (New York, 1930), 130; Edison Films, September 1902, 36. For a feminist reading of What Happened on Twenty-third Street ("a story whose punchline is the sight of the female body caught unaware"), see Judith Mayne, "Uncovering the Female Body," in Leyda and Musser, Before Hollywood, 63-67. 28. For a variant on this theme from the 1880s, see "Golly, Missey, Biz is Gettin' Good," Police Gazette, in Van Every, Sins of New York, 292. 29. Two virtual duplicates of this film were also produced in 1904: How a French Nobleman Got a Wife through the New York Herald Personal Column (Edison) and Meet Me at the Fountain (Lubin). 30. For the advertising of this film, which remained popular for several years, see Biograph Bulletin 9 (August 29, 1903) and 55 (November 27, 1905). These are reprinted in Kemp R. Niver, comp., Biograph Bulletins, 1896-1908 (Los Angeles, 1971). 31. A very similar story was told in The Tenderloin at Night (Edison, 1899)- 32. For similar burlesques of clerical and police authority, but with less logical THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE n if rative lines, see, for example, In a Raines Law Hotel (Biograph, 1905) and Soubrettes . Bachelor's Flat (Biograph, 1903). ,3. Biograph Bulletin 55 (November 27, 1905) and 157 (July 31, 1908). See also, 1'or example, Rube Brown in Tow« (Biograph, 1907) and The Heathen Chinese and the ^ day School Teachers (Biograph, 1904). ,4 On the Bureau of Licenses scandal, see Office of the Commissioners of Ac-. i unts, "Charges of Incompetency and Misconduct," November 4, 1908, MP, MGB-] 'i i, and Affidavit of Roger DiPasca, May 25,1908, MP, MGB-41; New York Times, i > cober 13, 1908; and Motion Picture World, October 10, 1908. For background on Mt Clellan's career and his split with Tammany, see Syrett, Gentleman, 9-39, I '-243; and Theodore J. Lowi, At the Pleasure of the Mayor. Patronage and Power in S i York City, 1898-1958 (Glencoe, III., 1964), 88-92. •i5. The connection between McClellan's Princeton aspirations and his policy to-w.ird movies is related by Frank Moss in the Executive Committee Minutes, May 17, ; V>9, Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers, Columbia University. On the anti-[i "Vie activities of the Interdenominational Committee for the Suppression of Sunday Vaudeville, see Nť!H> York Times, December 1,3,21,1908. "6 Foster quoted in New York Times, December 24, 1908; all other quotes from Ti mscripr of Hearing in Mayor's Office (fragment), December 23, 1908, MP, MCrB-51. i.7. New York Times, December 25, 1908. 8. Francis Oppenheimer, "New York City's Censorship of Plays," The Theatre 8 • M y 1908): 135. The printed evaluation forms filled out by institute theater censors bsely resembled those later used for movies. On the MPEA request of the People's I i-'itute, see John Collier to Gustavus Rogers, March 1,1909, Subjects Papers, NBR ľ i ers 9. Circular letter, John Collier to Manufacturers of Motion Pictures, March 15, I')ii9, Document File, Motion Pictures, Edison Archives, Edison Historic National ■Ňu«, West Orange, N.J. (hereafter cited as Edison Archives). On the first day of the Hi ird of Censorship, see New York World, March 26, 1909; and New York Times, M;irch 26, 1909. 40. Frank L. Dyer to John Collier, May 7,1909, Edison Archives. See also "Passed by the National Board of Censorship," Review of Reviews 50 (December 1914): ; '-31; and John Collier, "Censorship and the National Board," Survey 3 5 (October -■ '915): 9, 73- On the Motion Picture Patents Company, see Robert Jack Anderson, "1'fie Motion Picture Patents Company" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, ľ s3); and Ralph Cassady, Jr., "Monopoly in Motion Picture Production and Distri-I ii ion- 1908-1915," Southern California Law Review 32 (summer 1959): 325-90. ■íl. Nancy J. Rosenbloom, "Between Reform and Regulation: The Struggle over Film Censorship in Progressive America, 1909-1922," Film History 1 (1987): 308; / Standards of the National Board of Censorship (New York, 1914), 3, 5; Motion Pic-Mit Patents Company (H. N. M.) to National Board of Censorship, November 16, ľ'U, box 6, Correspondence with Film Companies, NBR Papers. Rosenbloom offers tlie best account of the NBC, with especially good material on its relationship to Pro- n. sive politics. See also Daniel Czkrom, "The Redemption of Leisure: The National H rd of Censorship and the Rise of Motion Pictures in New York City, 1900-1920," \- Itesm Visual Communication 10 (fall 1984): 2-6; and Robert J. Fisher, "Film DANIEL CZITROM Censorship and Progressive Reform: The National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, 1909-1922 "Journal of Popular Film 4 (1975): 143-56. On the day-to-day work of the NBC, see Charles W. Tevis, "Censoring the Five Cent Drama, World Today 19 (October 1910): 1132-39; and National Board of Censorship Reports, 1909-11, in Document File, Edison Archives. 42. John Collier to Robert B. Adams, May 6,1909, Document File, Edison Archives. 43. Thomas D. Walsh, superintendent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, quoted in New York Times, August 2, 1911. See also New York Times, March 14,16,1911, and March 30,1913- Between 1909 and 1913 the SPCC prosecuted 114 people in the courts for alleged crimes against children in movie houses. 44. Gaynor quoted in New York Times, January 1, 1913. On the political battle over reforming the city's movie theater regulations, see New York Times, August 2, 1911; November 8, 29,1911; and December 17,18, 31,1912. See also W. Stephen Bush, "Mayor Gaynor on Censorship," Moving Picture World, January 11, 1913, 134-36; and Rosenbloom, "Between Reform and Regulation," 313-14. 45. National Board of Censorship, Suggestions for a Model Ordinance for Regulating Motion Picture Theatres (New York, 1915), 6. See also Sonya Levien, "New York's Motion Picture Law," American City 9 (October 1913): 319-21; and John Collier, "'Movies' and the Law," Survey 27 (January 20, 1912): 1628-29. For an account of a nickelodeon fire on Houston Street that killed two and injured twenty, see New York Times, February 3, 1913. The new law's provisions were first laid out in Fosdick, "Report on Moving Picture Shows." 46. Rosenbloom, "Between Reform and Regulation," 315-22, documents the NBC's fight against legal censorship and the decline of its influence. On the NBR's persistent but losing effort to maintain its influence within the Hollywood film community, see the correspondence of W. D. McGuire, executive secretary of the National Board of Review, 1916-1923, in Correspondence with Film Companies, boxes 6, 7, NBR Papers. 42 Passions and the Passion Play Theater, Film, and Religion in America, 1880-1900 CHARLES MUSSER I n September 1880 theatrical impre-Isario Henry E. Abbey announced I plans to produce a passion play at Booth's Theater in New York City. Abbey soon faced organized protests by (•Mtraged clergy, opposition from influential members of the theatrical community itself, and a threat by city officials to close down his playhouse. On Sat-inday, November 27, after more than two months of controversy and less than two weeks before its scheduled premiere, Abbey canceled the production.1 Yet s«. ircely a few days after this reputed sacrilege was to have opened, lecturer J"hn L. Stoddard gave a lantern-slide exhibition entitled Oberammergau's Pas-'!• n Play, including fifty slides of the famed passion play, which had been produced in Bavaria that summer. Clergy attended in substantial numbers, and che evening's program, repeated often in other cities, helped to make Stoddard the foremost travel lecturer of his day. This paradoxical juxtaposition was only '»ne of several twists in the history of the passion play as presenred in the I 'rated States between approximately 1880 and 1900. The very intensity with u hich Protestant clergy and established arbiters of American culture favored 43