‘Thrills Sweep Like Electric Currents through Multitudes’: Spectacle, Sociality, and Media Competition in Mid-Century America

Abstract

This article analyses contemporaneous debates over the competing screen formats, venues, and technological platforms designed to deliver moving images to domestic and public audiences in mid-twentieth century America. The postwar crisis in the American theatrical box office witnessed changes in film gauges, aspect ratios, and theater sound as well as in the architectural design of motion picture theaters, and the article examines the failed innovation of theater television and the explosive growth of the drive-in theater in the 1950s as responses to rising competition from advertising-supported domestic television. Drawing upon the rich technical, trade, and popular press literature of the period, the author argues for the relevance of the postwar debates over moving image reception for contemporary controversies over the viability of theatrical exhibition in the era of streaming video and global pandemic.