Hollywood in the Neighborhood

Hollywood in the Neighborhood presents a vivid new picture of how movies entered the American heartland—the thousands of smaller cities, towns, and villages far from the East and West Coast film centers. Using a broad range of research sources, essays from scholars including Richard Abel, Robert Allen, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Terry Lindvall, and Greg Waller examine in detail the social and cultural changes this new form of entertainment brought to towns from Gastonia, North Carolina to Placerville, California, and from Norfolk, Virginia to rural Ontario and beyond. Emphasizing the roles of local exhibitors, neighborhood audiences, regional cultures, and the growing national mass media, their essays chart how motion pictures so quickly and successfully moved into old opera houses and glittering new picture palaces on Main Streets across America.

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Communication Department at Georgia State University. She is author of At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture among other books.

PART I: INTRODUCTION-SETTING THE CONTEXTS
1. Introduction: Researching and Writing the History of Local Moviegoing
Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley and George Potamianos
2. Decentering Historical Audience Studies: A Modest Proposal
Robert C. Allen

PART II: ORIGINS-CASE STUDIES
3. The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry
Calvin Pryluck
4. Early Film Exhibition in Wilmington, North Carolina
Anne Morey
5. Building Movie Audiences in Placerville, California, 1908-1915
George Potamianos
6. Cinema Virtue, Cinema Vice: Race, Religion, and Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1908-1922
Terry Lindvall

PART III: INTEGRATION AND VARIATIONS-CASE STUDIES
7. The Movies in a “Not So Visible Place”: Des Moines, Iowa, 1911-1914
Richard Abel
8. Digging the Finest Potatoes from Their Acre: Government Film Exhibition in Rural Ontario, 1917-1934
Charles Tepperman
9. At the Movies in the “Biggest Little City in Wisconsin”
Leslie Midkiff DeBauche

PART IV: MATURITY AND CRISIS IN THE 1930S-CASE STUDIES
10. Imagining and Promoting the Small-Town Theater
Gregory A. Waller
11. “What the Picture Did for Me”: Small-Town Exhibitors' Strategies for Surviving the Great Depression
Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
12. “Something for Nothing”: Bank Night and the Refashioning of the American Dream
Paige Reynolds

PART V: LOOKING BACKWARD, LOOKING FORWARD
13. Bad Sound and Sticky Floors: An Ethnographic Look at the Symbolic Value of Historic Small-Town Movie Theaters
Kevin Corbett
14. Conclusion: When Theory Hits the Road
Ronald G. Walters

Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index