Abstract

Far from Hollywood: Regional Managers in the Transition from Vaudeville to Film

Moving pictures first appeared before American audiences in the 1890s. Taken on tour through the era’s Vaudeville circuits, they were initially viewed as the latest novelty in an industry full of them. Within two decades, however, cinema had seized the center stage. The new form—and the Hollywood firms behind it—displaced rival styles of entertainment, remaking both the industry and the broader cultural landscape. The transition from vaudeville to film is often understood as a technologically driven process of disruption, with cheap and replicable moving pictures inevitably undercutting older businesses. Such accounts fail to capture the continuities of practice that linked cinema to the Vaudeville circuits that proceeded it. At the top of the industry, the impresarios of Hollywood adopted the monopolistic tactics and industrial structures of Vaudeville’s legendary booking agencies. Locally, movie houses mimicked live theaters, copying their predecessors’ ability to fulfill audience desire while remaining within the limits of public respectability. To explore these dynamics, it is necessary to look towards the previously underexamined strata of regional managers who controlled much of the day-to-day operations of American entertainment during this transformative period. This paper seeks to explore the influence of this cohort through the history of Nathan Appell, a prominent Pennsylvania manager. Initially building firms in the era of live performance, businessmen like Appell confronted the challenges of mechanically-reproducible entertainment, fighting to adapt the structures of an older industry to a new media landscape. As they did so, they drew on their decades of entertainment experience to shape the social and business structures of U.S. cinema, defining the medium’s place in American society. Drawing on financial records, correspondence, publicity materials, newspaper accounts, this paper presents a new perspective on the reinvention of show business at the dawn of mass culture.