Abstract

"Challenging the “Obstinate, Indifferent and Cold-Blooded Exhibitor”: The American Legion Film Service as Hollywood Rival and Resource"

Mark Hauser, University of South Florida (markhauser@usf.edu)

During the 1920s, non-profit organizations developed marketing and exhibition strategies for motion pictures that differed from the commercial industry’s practices and reshaped the burgeoning marketplace. By using the American Legion’s film exhibition work as an examination of independent feature exhibition circuits frustrating Hollywood executives, this paper improves our understanding of American business history by focusing attention on the relationship between corporations and non-profit organizations and the military’s complex connections with the civilian consumer marketplace. Previous scholarship on the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America trade association has noted entrepreneurs’ frustrations with non-commercial networks during the era, but overlooked the unconventional techniques – particularly a willingness to promote film screenings through social and personal networks and an emphasis on cultural formation over profitability – that alienated managers, a perspective I foreground in discussing Legionaries’ entrance into the sector. Utilizing records of the American Legion Film Service, I examine how officials with the veterans’ organization worked both with and against established film exhibitors, utilizing a national structure and local chapters’ relationships with community businessmen to promote entertainment, developing perspectives that at points aligned with and other moments departed from prevailing corporate initiatives. Administrators cared about generating revenue, but listed it last after four other reasons they screened movies, preferring to see them as a post activity, a tool promoting Americanization, and an opportunity to expand membership and generate publicity. While some posts foundered, others contacted over two dozen community stakeholders including branches of the Boy Scouts, Grand Army of the Republic, Daughters of the American Revolution, and Chamber of Commerce, to generate consistent profits from novel, personal appeals. Although unconventional, these grassroots campaigns complemented the industry’s practices and predated analogous techniques used by contemporary faith-based and independent distributors to secu