The Electric Theatre: first motion picture theater

Intolerance, 1916

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On April 2, 1902, the first motion picture theater announced its entrance into the world. The Electric Theatre, 262 South Main Street, Los Angeles, told the citizens of that city, which later was to become the motion picture capital of the world, that for the price of ten cents it would be glad to provide an hour's amusement in "a vaudeville of moving pictures" including "Capture of the Biddle Brothers" and "New York in a Blizzard." Business was so good on the opening night that matinées started the next day. In less than twenty-five years, there were to be more than 20,000 motion picture theatres in this country.

"The Electric" was the project of Thomas L. Tally of Los Angeles, the showman who many and many a year later was to figure again in screen history as one of the founders of First National Exhibitor's Circuit, now the world famous First National Pictures, Inc.

There were other tentative beginnings of a screen theater. So far, the career of the motion picture had been as a component of the bills of the variety theaters which were becoming more elegantly "vaudeville." One of the earlier theaters was opened in 1903 in Newcastle, Pa., by the Warner Brothers, due subsequently to figure conspicuously in the motion picture story.

Meanwhile the peep show motion picture continued to flourish in the penny arcades, of the sort that linger still in the congested regions of the greater cities. These arcades, trivial as they seemed, were to prove mighty agencies of the future, drawing to the picture a personnel that was one day Photos by C. P. Cushing, from Ewing Galloway Two studio scenes in the early days of motion pictures.

Thanksgiving week in 1905, Harry Davis, then a real estate operator in Pittsburgh, decided to put a movie projector, a piano and some film into a vacant storeroom, along with ninety-nine seats, and see what he could do as a showman, with a five-cent admission. The show was The Great Train Robbery. The experiment was a world-shaking success. The admissions poured through as fast as the one-reel show could be ground out. The East caught fire with the idea and five-cent motion picture theaters swept the country. Every week saw hundreds of new "nickelodeons" opened. By 1907 there were five thousand of them, all new customers for motion pictures, and making for the pictures a new public. Among the newcomers on this wave was Carl Laemmle, now president of Universal Pictures Corporation and a leader in the industry. He opened the White Front Theater on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago's West Side and there employed a bright messenger boy by the name of Sam Katz to play the piano.