The Romance Promoter with A Deadline at 11: Rural Exhibitors, Urban Exchanges, and The Emerging Culture of Film Distribution in The United States, 1918–1925

Abstract

One of the many reasons distribution has retained its status as the least understood aspect of commercial film culture has been the absence of records, particularly from the late 1910s and early 1920s, when the studio system was formed in the United States. While historians have persuasively argued that exhibitors helped develop moviegoing culture in the early 20th century, these studies have been limited by their reliance on other forms of public media, including local newspapers, trade magazines, and studio house organs. In this article, I use exhibition and distribution records from two small-town movie theater operations, the Adele Theater in Eatonton, Georgia, a town of just 2,500 people in 1920, and the Low Moor Iron Company’s theaters in its company-owned villages of Low Moor, Virginia, and Kaymoor, West Virginia, in order to reconstruct the emergence of distribution as a standardized, and programmatic, practice.