One hundred years ago this month. Grace Kingsley had noticed a dreadful trend: fewer theaters in Los Angeles had been showing comedy shorts before feature films, replacing them with higher-brow offerings. However, exhibitors had recently started to bring them back to their bills. Therefore, the companies headed by Mack Sennett, Hal Roach and Jack White were all busier than ever, and the Christie organization even had plans to increase their output; they had “gradually been enlarging our organization to take care of this increased production” according to Charles H. Christie, general manager.
She was able to tell her readers that “those who have been worrying for fear there will be a dearth of short comedies this year from the Christie organization may now go about their business reassured,” and they could look forward to plenty of two-reelers starring Neal Burns, Bobby Vernon, Jimmy Adams, Dorothy Devore, Priscilla Bonner and Walter Hiers. She was only half-joking–a comedy fan like herself would have been very happy to hear this news. I wrote about the Christie Company earlier.
I was surprised to read that leaving comedies off of bills had even been a trend. Who doesn’t like them? So I did unscientific survey of the newspaper ads and ‘coming attractions’ articles in the Times for the first three months of 1924 and found out that she was right (I should have never doubted her!). At first glance it looked like the chief villain was none other than Sid Grauman. However, in July 1923 Grauman had announced plans to sell his three downtown theaters (the Rialto, the Million Dollar, and the Metropolitan) to Paramount Studios. He planned to remain in charge of them for six months. So this ghastly decision was the new management’s fault.
In the first week of January, none of the three movie palaces that Paramount controlled had comedy shorts on their bills. Instead they had two live acts: the Rialto featured a set with baritone George Dewey Washington along with Big Brother and the Metropolitan had the Three Little Maids dance act to accompany Woman to Woman. Meanwhile, at the Million Dollar, Norma Talmadge’s Ashes of Vengeance was such a strong draw (and long movie—120 minutes) that nothing else of the program was mentioned. The two theaters Grauman did still manage had live prologues: at the Egyptian “A Night in Pharaoh’s Palace” (100 artists on the stage!) playing with The Ten Commandments, and at the Criterion “The Bells of Notre Dame” appeared with The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
These five theaters weren’t the only ones contributing to this distressing trend; the competition at Lowe’s State Theater was running a ballet before Flaming Youth. Additionally, just like the Million Dollar, some of the smaller (under 1000 seat) theaters like the Alhambra, Talley’s Broadway, and Miller’s only listed the features they were running and didn’t mention if there was anything else on the bill.
However, three of the theaters in town did feature comedy shorts: Hal Roach’s Dippity-Do-Dad played with Flaming Passion at the California, Harry Langdon’s Picking Peaches appeared with The Virginian at the Mission and Stan Laurel in The Soilers could be found with Defying Destiny at Clune’s Broadway. However, that wasn’t nearly enough: a hard-working journalist like Kingsley needed her laughs!
The drought continued in the first week of February, with funny two-reelers starring Lloyd Hamilton, Will Rogers, and Bull Montana livening up the bills at only three theaters again. Four of the other big theaters had prologues and the fifth, the Metropolitan, featured “juvenile soloist” Anna Chang. The smaller theaters still only mentioned the features they were playing.
By the first week of March, Kingsley noticed that the situation had improved. She wrote, “not all the solemn trash of the melodramas, not all the high-brow music, can take the place of the laugh lurers, according to local exhibitors who are slowly coming back to the placing of comedies on their bills.” It wasn’t “exhibitors,” it was just the one–the new management at Grauman’s former theaters had come to their senses. They added two-reel comedies back onto their bills, along with live shows. At his Metropolitan, they ran Mack Sennett’s The Hollywood Kid along with a prologue called “Carnival Night in Venice” before the William S. Hart film Singer Jim McKee. At the Rialto they had another Sennett, One Spooky Night, with a musical program before Under the Red Robe. Meanwhile, at the Million Dollar, Clyde Cook in The Broncho Express played alongside a prologue called “The Wolves of Montmartre,” to go with Gloria Swanson’s Paris-set The Humming Bird.
However, Grauman himself didn’t mess with the successful bills at the two theaters he still managed—the comedy-free programs with The Ten Commandments (in its fifteenth week!) and Scarmouche (sixth week) stayed the same.
The Lowe’s State theater also brought back comedy, presenting a Mermaid Comedy along with a Fanchon and Marco prologue called “Society” before Colleen Moore’s Painted People. Meanwhile, the California continued not to run prologues and played an Our Gang short called Back Stage along with Douglas Maclean in The Yankee Consul. The Broadway, the Mission, and the smaller theaters still only mentioned their feature films.
It’s remarkable just how much entertainment the audience got in a night at the movies then. Short comedies stayed on most movie bills until the rise of double features in the 1930’s; Educational Films, Vitagraph and Hal Roach stopped making them in 1938 but Columbia and RKO continued producing them until the 1950’s.
Grace Kingsley really needed some funny two-reelers to help her get through the dire dramas she was sitting through this month. When she reviewed Lilies of the Field (a divorce melodrama) she wrote:
I’m beginning to think that we Americans are supreme comedy makers and rotten drama producers, at least on the screen. Our drama is timid, self-conscious, superficial. It seems to be always about the same old stuff, with neither depth nor sincerity, but with writers and directors trying to blind audiences with a wealth of detail, a complication of extraneous issues.
Being a film critic could really be a drag. Later in the month, Kingsley found another way to get through a turkey when she went to see Women Who Give: listening to Winifred Westover Hart snark about it. In her review Kingsley summed up the plot: “as soon as you see that fishing village, you know there are going to be a drowned only-son-of-a-widow, a wronged girl, and a terrific storm at sea,” then reported on what Hart exclaimed during the movie, like “Why did they let these cod play so big a part? They haven’t any experience! Let the poor fish stay in the ocean and do their stuff!” The actress also suggested taking Mother’s Seasick Pills, to deal with the mal-de-mer caused by so many tippy storm scenes in the ocean.
They made their own fun. I was happy to learn that after her dreadful marriage to William S. Hart, Winifred Westover Hart’s life wasn’t endless misery. She still got to go to the movies and complain about the bad bits.
Many thanks to Paul R. Spitzzeri at the Homestead Blog, who wrote about the Grauman Theater Magazine. I had no idea that Grauman had divested himself of his downtown theaters, and I would have made an embarassing mistake if I hadn’t read his post!
“Grauman Gives Options on Theaters to Paramount,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1923.
Grace Kingsley's Hollywood 