10 - The Celluloid Stage: Nickelodeon Audiences

Summary

A decade after their first commercial exhibition, millions of people made movies a weekly habit. But who went to the movies in the early days and what was the character of the early movie theaters were matters of debate. Multiple images of movie theaters and audiences vied for acceptance. Reformers and flaneurs described movies as immigrant entertainment, yet small-town entrepreneurs promoted it as an entertainment for the middle class. The working-class nickelodeon was described on the one hand as community center and conqueror of the saloon, and on the other as a school for scandal teaching adolescent boys to steal and girls to be promiscuous. The latter image of endangered children represented a shift from the nineteenth-century concern about women's respectability to a twentieth- century fixation on children's welfare, and from the place to the performance as the cause of the problem. This would give rise in the 1920s to research on the effects on children and the beginnings of a mass communication research tradition. In this chapter I will explore how some characterizations were contradicted by the growth of middle-class attendance, but nevertheless continued to fuel popular worries about and eventual research interest in the effects of the media on children.