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High-Class Moving Pictures
Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920
By Charles Musser, Carol Nelson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04781-2
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
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As the nineteenth century neared its close, a phonograph exhibitor and motion picture entrepreneur toured northeastern Pennsylvania and New England boasting that he was "the Barnum of them all." Although he had enjoyed only a tentative, regional success over the previous fifteen years, wrapping himself in the mantle of Phineas T. Bamum's greatness would soon prove unnecessary, even inappropriate. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, Lyman H. Howe would marshall his own talents, create his own legend, and become America's foremost traveling motion picture exhibitor — a title he could credibly claim for the next twenty years. For Americans from Massachusetts to Kansas, he would bridge the gap between humbugger Barnum and movie mogul Adolph Zukor.
Howe belonged to the legions of traveling showmen who brought urban-based entertainments to the American heartland. He was part of a way of life soon undermined by mass entertainment — first the storefront motion picture houses or nickelodeons, and then the movie palaces with their balanced programs. Touring a miniature coal breaker, he entered the world of show business in 1883, exactly fifty years after Barnum and thirty years before Zukor. He gave phonograph concerts during the 1890s and added motion pictures to his programs in 1896. His last road shows ended in 1919, shortly after the end of World War I. In his heyday he toured new, technologically based entertainments with important prerecorded elements. Howe flourished in one era, when performers journeyed from town to town almost exclusively by railroad; he grew old in another, when an evening's fun could be shipped in a film can.
Howe remains one of many shadowy figures from the era of "silent" American film. His presence is briefly acknowledged by Terry Ramsaye and Robert Grau, two early chroniclers of motion picture history. Among more recent historians, Harry Geduld has discussed Howe's use of sound effects. Yet the nature, scope, and duration of his activities have never been addressed. One concrete goal of this investigation, then, is to provide a professional biography of an exhibitor who was involved in motion pictures from the outset. It is not, and cannot be, a study of the man's inner life. No personal correspondence survives. Interviews and accounts focus on his public persona, providing only the barest glimpse of his private life and thought. A wide assortment of scrapbooks, some professional correspondence, and a few films produced by Howe are available. These, in conjunction with extensive research in newspapers and trade periodicals, have made it possible to create a portrait of his business activities and to illuminate the practice of traveling exhibition throughout the silent era.
Howe's activities resonate with the concerns of recent scholarship. Social and cultural historians have increasingly explored the ways in which popular culture and leisure time activities shaped the lives of ordinary Americans as the United States emerged as an industrial nation and a world power. How did commercial amusement — particularly the movies — become integrated into these people's lives? How did these early films reflect and influence their system of values and beliefs? As Robert Sklar has pointed out, historians active in cinema studies explore similar questions. Although Roy Rosenzweig, for example, emphasizes the social organization of leisure and ideology and Douglas Gomery economic and business history, both have been concerned with the site of exhibition and the conditions of reception. In fact, a focus on exhibition lends itself to industrial history precisely because it must address the economic basis of the motion picture industry — the showman's ability to bring patrons through the front door. When historians have looked at the first fifteen years of motion picture exhibition, however, they have usually focused on vaudeville and the early nickelodeons. We are looking instead at the almost forgotten practice of traveling exhibition. How did enterprises such as Howe's come to flourish and what caused their decline?
Exhibition history can also investigate the relationship between the films that were shown — and often still exist — and the people who originally saw them. What meanings did audiences find in them? This question is normally asked of films only within the framework of a textual reading, but this need not be the case. At least with Howe, enough evidence survives to analyze the ways in which exhibition helped to structure the reception of these films. Since exhibitors such as Howe mediated between motion picture producers and Americans of diverse environments, their study enables us to better understand the transformation of American culture in the new industrial age. In this respect, Howe's musical counterpart may well have been composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa. Both helped to construct what Neil Harris has called a "culture of reassurance."
Early motion picture exhibition, however, was ecletic. Carnivals often carried a motion picture blacktop or electric theater, and dramatic repertory companies frequently showed films between acts of their plays. As Calvin Pryluck has remarked, wherever commercial entertainment existed, there were Likely to be moving pictures. Even among specialized exhibitors who used films as their principal or exclusive drawing card, it would be naive to suggest that Howe or any other individual was "typical." Some traveling exhibitors had several companies touring the United States at one time, others only one. Some appealed to religious groups, others to lovers of urban, commercial amusement. If Howe is not and cannot be "typical," he proves useful for understanding not only traveling exhibition but larger issues involving tum-of-the-century entertainment. His uniqueness had definite limits. Wrestling with the problem of another unusual individual's typicality, Carlo Ginzburg remarks that "culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities — a flexible and invisible cage in which he can exercise his own conditional liberty." Certainly this was true for Howe, who pushed against some limits even as he happily conformed to others.
Film practice in turn-of-the-century America occurred within parameters that allowed for significant though limited variation. To better explore the parameters of traveling exhibition, we will examine exhibitors other than Howe. Some were Howe's associates — people like Stewart Maxwell Walkinshaw, who became Howe's partner, and Edwin Hadley, who eventually went into business for himself. Others were direct competitors like John P. Dibble, prominent between 1897 and 1904; Archie Shepard, a successful traveling showman who became an owner of storefront motion picture theaters; and the Kinemacolor Company of America, which presented nonfiction subjects with its system of color cinematography from 1910 to 1915. Still others appealed to different audiences with different subject matter and formats. Among the illustrated lecturers using moving pictures were E. Burton Holmes, who was active from 1891 into the 1950s, the photographer and filmmaker Edward Curtis, and even President Theodore Roosevelt. Establishing similarities and differences among Howe and his fellow exhibitors, as well as tracing their interaction, defines the horizon of possibilities within the practice of traveling exhibition.
As even a brief glimpse at Howe's contemporaries makes clear, an exhibitor's prosperity was far from assured. He had to keep a repertoire of films that were novel and good enough to please patrons. He had to know how to present these pictures in the best possible light. This meant not only having up-to-date projection technology but also knowing how to solve a wide range of technical problems continually encountered on the road. An exhibitor's ability to promote his show was also crucial. Howe's achievement of these goals at any particular moment was not as unusual as his ability to sustain a high level of success over several decades.
Although traveling exhibition was a widespread phenomenon — more widespread than generally acknowledged — it might not merit such extensive study if these showmen did not often play a crucial creative role. Particularly in the early years, exhibitors were responsible for what is called "postproduction" in modern filmmaking. They routinely assumed an editorial function, often by structuring their short films into longer narratives. They were also responsible for the sound accompaniment, not simply music but sound effects, synchronous dialogue, and live narration. In all of these areas, Howe generally represented the state of the art.
Approaching Howe as a subject for biographical inquiry highlights contemporary concerns about both authorship and an author's "biographical legend." In the first years of cinema and in earlier years of screen practice involving magic lantern shows, the predecessor of today's slide shows, the exhibitor was viewed as the author of the work, of the exhibition. The film director, whom we now usually consider the author, either did not exist as such or went unacknowledged. A history of this era of film practice thus requires us, as Michel Foucault has urged, "to study not only the expressive value and formal transformations of discourse, but its mode of existence: the modifications and variations, within any culture of modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation." Howe is particularly interesting in this regard because he continued to appropriate the role of author long after most exhibitors had deferred, first to the claims of production companies, and later to those of leading actors, directors, and writers.
"Lyman H. Howe," moreover, was often a construct, a commercial fiction. After 1899, the man no longer traveled with his show. After 1907, most decisions for the Howe enterprise were made by Howe's partner and general manager, Max Walkinshaw. Lyman H. Howe's Hodge Podge, a series of short subjects made in the 1920s and early 1930s, was initiated by a Howe associate when Howe was already seriously ill. It continued for ten years after his death. The relationship between the man and the authorial construct is an important one that is clarified over the course of our narrative. Inevitably, and purposefully on Howe's part, the man and the commercial construct merged; where one ended and the other began is difficult and sometimes impossible for us to tell. Although Howe's name is used in both senses in this study, we have sought to provide contexts in which the referent is clear.
Here, then, the question of authorship is tied to the concept of biographical legend offered by the Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevsky, and more recently applied to film by neo-Formalist David Bordwell. Tomashevsky claims that "the biography that is useful to the literary historian is not the author's curriculum vitae or the investigator's account of his life. What the literary historian really needs is the biographical legend created by the author himself. Only such a legend is a literary fact." Bordwell argues that "we can situate a filmmaker's work in film history by studying the persona created by the artist in his public pronouncements, in his writings, and in his dealings with the film industry."' In the case of author Howe, public statements and newspaper puff were plentiful, colorful, often fictional, and sometimes contradictory. Some people accepted these pronouncements at face value. A few even elaborated on the myth he had initiated. Undoubtedly others who attended his shows were uninterested or even unaware of the Howe legend. But many retained a healthy skepticism towards the master showman's promotional schemes and myth building. As Neil Harris makes clear, such skepticism had been cultivated by Barnum in his prewar audiences and was never entirely absent in response to the showman's ballyhoo.' As with the meaning of a film, when we consider the notion of a biographical legend, we must take into account the audience's reception.
Although reconstruction of the author's biographical legend, too often ignored by historians interested simply in the film, can be progressive, it is not possible to recreate the moment of the legend. History changes our experience of a film; to deny that is to retreat into nostalgia. We do not sit in a period theater watching a period print on a period projector. Even if we could, we could not duplicate the period spectator's knowledge. What we know and how we know it are different. One of the historian's strengths is the ability to establish a biography of the author beyond the legend. Tomashevsky may be unhappy with biographers who "have been determined to learn at any cost the identity of the woman whom Pushkin so hopelessly loved (or pretended to love),"' but the biographer who establishes that Pushkin's lover was a respectable society woman does not destroy the legend; he provides the reader with a new and valuable perspective. We would argue that the historian must establish not only the legend (or its absence) but also an accurate account of the author's life and its conditions. The dialectical examination of one in light of the other will yield a new, richer understanding of the work.
Certainly the legend should not be dismissed and Bordwell has laudably drawn attention to some of its functions within an industrial system. Yet a biography of any public figure must be concerned with the individual's legend precisely because it often strategically obscures uncomfortable truths. Awareness of both legend and historical reality often leads to insight into a particular individual or a larger historical issue. For instance, in 1904 and 1905 Howe claimed to have produced certain films that we now know were made by the Edison and Biograph companies. What can be supposed from such assertions? It would not be enough simply to accept them as part of the Howe legend without concern for their factuaL basis, but it seems unproductive simply to treat them as embarrassing falsehoods, either to gloss over them or to condemn their perpetuator as a huckster. They should be situated within the framework of contemporary motion picture practice and analyzed. First, similar claims to authorship were made by many rival exhibitors and reflected the increased competition of this period. Second, as the creative role of the exhibitor was being reduced and the production companies asserted stronger control over the narrative, exhibitors tried to maintain their traditional claims of authorship by insisting that they had produced films that they had actually purchased. Contradictory claims must have made many film patrons skeptical and led to a new era in which the production company was acknowledged as the author.
Bordwell correctly asserts that "our task is ... to analyze the legend's historical and aesthetic functions." But to produce more accurate, less self-serving biography, the historian must also "puncture the legend," replacing it not with some "easy truth" but with a more acute perception of the historical moment. No understanding should be considered final; this text will inevitably be revised — by us as well as others — in the future. But to say that we have not attained or exhausted Truth, that new evidence will require refinement of our arguments, and that there will always be gaps in our knowledge does not make the undertaking any less fruitful or worthwhile. To distinguish between historical fact and fiction is a crucial labor, often difficult and frustrating, and therefore humbling.
In its examination of one figure and one aspect of the motion picture industry, this study usually does not bring its theoretical model to the fore. In terms that are materialist and dialectical we have sought to situate the cinema within social and cultural practice, and where appropriate, we have explored the ideological implications of Howe's programs and his relations with his contemporaries. We understand changing motion picture practices to involve the dynamic interaction between cinema's production methods (including not only film production but exhibition and audience reception) and its methods of representation. We have here inevitably concentrated on exhibition methods and their impact on representation and are also concerned with the commercial strategies of various showmen. Rapidly changing methods of production and representation not only open up new commercial opportunities but eliminate others and alter the rest. Correspondingly, commercial innovations transform these methods. The business side of cinema is likewise an integral part of motion picture practice.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from High-Class Moving Pictures by Charles Musser, Carol Nelson. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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