Ink-Stained Hollywood

Front matter

Seven Day Pictures Preson

“Intrigue”

Paramount Pictures» @ È

Contents

List of Figures viii List of Tables x List of Boxes xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1. Remaking Film Journalism in the Mid-1910s 25 2. Trade Papers at War 52 3. The Independent Exhibitor's Pal: Localizing, Specializing, and Expanding the Exhibitor Paper 79 4. Coastlander Reading: The Cultures and Trade Papers of 1920s Los Angeles 109 5. Chicago Takes New York: The Consolidation of the Nationals 131 6. The Great Diffusion: Hollywood’s Reporters, Exhibitor Backlash, and Quigley’s Failed Monopoly 161 Epilogue 193 Notes 197 Bibliography 235

LIST OF FIGURES

Visualization of content distribution of Variety, 1906-40 9

Introduction

DELIVERING THE TRADES

This book contains many stories, some shared for the first time, almost all concerning people long gone. So, let me begin with a more recent story from my own life. Without this experience, I can say with confidence that the book you are reading would not exist.

Before I ever pursued academia—a career path that would lead me to teaching students, poking around archives, and digitizing millions of pages of old movie magazines—I pushed around a mail cart at 7 a.m. every day, delivering copies of Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter. It was 2005, and my first job out of college was working in the mailroom of a large Hollywood talent agency. There wasn't time to read the trades on my delivery runs. So, when most of the office cleared out for lunch, I would pull crumpled trade papers out of the recycling bins. I devoured them like the free donuts laid out every Friday morning.

I read the trades for news and information. As an agent trainee, I was expected to have a sense of “who's who” and where industry players fit within Hollywood’s hierarchy. But I also read the trade papers with a critical eye. I learned this practice from the people around me. Talent agents dismissed certain stories as puff, desperate attempts to put a positive spin on a string of flops. At the same time, however, those same agents invested a tremendous amount of meaning in the trades. A tirade ensued, for instance, when a young agent was omitted from a list of up-and-coming movers-and-shakers. As I came to understand, the trade papers communicated information, but they did much more, playing important gatekeeping and scorekeeping functions within the industry’s culture.

Fast-forward a decade. Now working at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, I was far from the talent agency mailroom in Beverly Hills. Yet I was more immersed than ever in Hollywood trade papers. Through a mixture of good timing, great collaborators, and a whole lot of grunt work, I was playing a leading role in the open access digitization of historic sources for film and broadcasting 1 history. As codirector of the Media History Digital Library (MHDL), I worked closely with the project's founder, David Pierce, on making millions of pages of out-of-copyright trade papers openly accessible online. To build this collection, we collaborated with a number of leading film heritage institutions, including the Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, and the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, as well as private collectors, such as Karl Thiede, Eileen Bowser, and Richard Koszarski. Thanks to their generosity and the support of sponsors, we were making decades of Film Daily, Motion Picture News, Moving Picture World, Motion Picture Herald, and Variety freely available for users all over the world to search, read, and download. We were also scanning many fascinating yet lesser-known publications, such as Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Cine-Mundial.'

All of these publications (and more) now pop up when researchers run keyword searches in Lantern—the search platform for the MHDL that my team and I developed. Much of my subsequent work became driven by a new question: how could I help users interpret and utilize these historic sources they were encountering online? How could I provide new contexts for the otherwise decontextualized snippets that they scrolled through on the Lantern results page? This line of inquiry led to the creation of publication descriptions within Lantern, experimentation with computational research methods, and the publication of several research articles.” I became part of a community of film and media historians curious about movie magazines and trade papers, a scholarly community that took the sources used by others in the field as our own objects of study.’ But this work also brought me back to memories of the talent agency—back to being twenty-two years old, dressed for work in a baggy, hand-me-down suit, reading the trade papers, and observing the ways that the people around me read them. The Hollywood trade papers actively participated in the creation and maintenance of industry cultures and communities, not merely as vehicles for disseminating the news. Interpreting the trade papers requires understanding the constituents of the industry and their norms, fears, and aspirations at particular moments in time.

A new research question emerged from so much scanning, coding, reading, and thinking about the trades: why were there so many publications covering the same industry? The movie business was an outlier. Between 1915 and 1950, no American industry had more trade papers devoted to it than the movie business. During this period, the American film industry consistently had a dozen or more national trade papers reporting on and influencing its actions. Additionally, many more regional trade papers profiled film production, distribution, and exhibition. As I came to discover, many executives, workers, and publishers within the film industry a century ago were asking my same question—why so many trade papers? They viewed the number of papers, as well as the unruliness of some in particular, as industry problems. They wanted to find a solution. In 1930, Exhibitors Herald publisher Martin Quigley forged a collaboration with the Hollywood studios with the goal of eliminating all the competing trade papers. But the plan ultimately failed. Ink-Stained Hollywood is the story of why this and numerous other attempts at consolidation flopped.

Ink-Stained Hollywood examines the film industry trades’ most heterogeneous and tumultuous period—from the early feature film era in the mid-1910s to the vertically integrated studio system, strained by the Great Depression, of the mid- 19308. By chronicling the histories of well-known trade papers (such as Variety and Motion Picture Herald) alongside many important yet forgotten publications (such as Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!), my book challenges the established canon of film periodicals and offers new frames for interpreting them as sources. I explore the communities of exhibitors and creative workers that constituted key groups of subscribers, and I argue that a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to readers’ specific sensibilities, values, and fears. I also argue that we are best served by taking a broad view, analyzing the trade papers in relation to one another and to other players within the film industry's ecosystem rather than looking exclusively at individual trade papers in isolation. By taking this broad view, we can see how the trade papers were frequently in tension with the norms of industrial journalism, as well as in tension with one another and sectors of the film industry.

There is a great deal of ground to cover. But before this cart can leave the mailroom, there are more letters and parcels that need to be brought aboard. In the remainder of this introduction, I seek to accomplish this onboarding, surveying the fields and scholarly literature in which the book makes its contributions, the theoretical frameworks that inform my analysis, the sources and methods used to gather evidence, and some key background history about the entertainment trade press.

SCHOLARLY FIELDS, LITERATURE, AND CONTRIBUTIONS

Ink-Stained Hollywood draws on and contributes to two growing subfields and modes of cinema and media studies: new cinema history and media industry studies. Significantly, both of these subfields define themselves less in terms of periodization or national cinemas (though there is certainly a great deal of scholarship in both areas on American cinema during the period covered in this book) and more in terms of approaches to studying film and media and their relationships to the economy, society, and culture. New cinema history has emphasized the value of investigating cinema’s connection to society, as well as its meaning in the lives of the people who have participated in its exhibition, circulation, and reception.’ In the introduction to the edited collection Looking Past the Screen, film historian Eric Smoodin referred to this basic approach, with its emphasis on nonfilmic primary sources, as “film scholarship without films,’ a description that fits this book as well.* Similarly, media industry studies has sought to bring together aspects of political economy and cultural studies for a more nuanced understanding of how media institutions operate, how individuals exercise agency within larger systems, and what the consequences are for our larger culture.° Both new cinema history and media industry studies have embraced mixed-methods toolkits, including welding together techniques from the humanities and social sciences, an approach that animates my own research, with its blend of archival research and quantitative content analysis.

As this project draws from new cinema history and media industry studies, I also hope to contribute something to both fields by enriching our understanding of Hollywood trade papers. New cinema history scholars frequently footnote the trade papers as evidence without critically interrogating their editorial frameworks. Media industries scholars, in contrast, are more likely to analyze the trades’ discourse, but it is often at a general level that doesn't take into account the unique histories of particular papers or their specific functions. This book seeks to constructively address these gaps in a manner that will assist other researchers as they search and interpret the trades.

In writing this book, I am also pleased to be part of a community investigating the history of the Hollywood studio system from new vantage points. The history of Hollywood might seem well-worn owing to the foundational scholarship by Tino Balio, Douglas Gomery, Richard B. Jewell, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, among others.” But by asking new questions and utilizing previously ignored sources, a new generation of film historians, including Kia Afra, Erin Hill, Peter Labuza, Derek Long, Luci Marzola, Miriam Petty, Paul Monticone, and Chris Yogerst, have nuanced our knowledge of the Hollywood industry and deepened our understanding of its meanings for film workers and audiences.* Ink-Stained Hollywood joins this cohort of historical research into Hollywood, and I hope it will become a valuable secondary source for the next generation of researchers who reinvent the field yet again.

Additionally, Ink-Stained Hollywood draws from the history of American journalism. Books and manuals from the 1910s and 1920s on the field of “industrial journalism” were important sources for my understanding of the norms and aspirations for this larger field. Histories of American journalism by Carolyn Marvin, Michael Schudson, and Gerald J. Baldasty provided helpful models for my investigation of changes in journalism over time and for analyzing the assumptions of editors, writers, and readers.’ And studies of cinema’s relationship to newspapers by Richard Abel, Anna Everett, Paul Moore, and Jan Olsson were especially valuable as models for bringing together these scholarly domains. Because trade papers are less frequently studied in histories of journalism than are newspapers and magazines, I hope that Ink-Stained Hollywood provides a useful model for future research in this space. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, the extent to which the motion picture industry adhered to or defied the wider norms of industrial journalism became a source of conflict and debate.

This book also seeks to contribute more specifically to our knowledge of entertainment industry periodicals. Whereas Hollywood fan magazines have received a significant amount of attention over the last two decades, Hollywood's trade press remains underscrutinized.'' Moreover, the scholarship that does exist tends to focus on individual trade papers rather than analyzing them in relation to one another. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Richard L. Stromgren, and Gregory A. Waller, for example, have all published high-caliber essays that focus on specific writers or sections of a trade paper. The 1985 reference guide International Film, Radio, and Television Journals, edited by Anthony Slide, also made a valuable contribution by offering brief descriptions of dozens of film periodicals, including some of the trade papers discussed in this book.” I am pleased to build on these earlier works and put the various trade papers into conversation with one another and the broader industry they participated in and served.

Variety is, by far, the entertainment trade paper that has received the most attention from scholars and nonacademic writers alike. Dayton Stoddart’s Lord Broadway: Variety’s Sime (1941) and Peter Besas’s Inside “Variety” (2000) are two books devoted exclusively to Variety's history. Both books contain valuable details about the paper’s operations (and some very amusing anecdotes). But they also have their blind spots, especially in tracking Variety’s changing relationship with the film industry. By using quantitative research methods, I present evidence that challenges Stoddart’s and Besas’s claim that Variety’s film reporting increased following a growth in film advertising. In fact, the inverse was true. Only after devoting substantial resources to covering the film industry did Variety reap the benefits of increases in film advertising.

In reviewing the available literature, it should also be noted that the sons of two important trade paper editors have published biographies of their fathers. Martin S. Quigley’s Martin J. Quigley and the Glory Days of American Film, 1915-1965 discusses Quigley’s career as the editor of Motion Picture Herald and an author of the Production Code.'* More recently, W. R. Wilkerson III published Hollywood Godfather: The Life and Crimes of Billy Wilkerson (2018), a biography of his father, the founder of the Hollywood Reporter. Both authors provide valuable biographical details about their fathers’ early lives. My research questions, analytical framework, and use of sources are all quite different from Quigley’s and Wilkerson’s, resulting in different emphases and interpretations.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS

The most important theoretical framework at play in this book comes from the fields of communication studies and journalism. In his landmark “Cultural Approach to Communication,’ James W. Carey contrasts two frameworks for understanding communication: the transmission view and the ritual view. “If one examines a newspaper under a transmission view of communication, one sees the medium as an instrument for disseminating news and knowledge,” writes Carey. In contrast, a ritual view of communication will understand “newspaper reading less as sending or gaining information and more as attending mass, a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed.’ As Carey points out, “a ritual view does not exclude the processes of information transmission or attitude change,” but it insists that these occur within a broader cultural framework. 6

The ritual view of communication captures what I observed at the talent agency: the trade papers delivered news, yes, but it was always embedded and interpreted within a particular community and culture (in this case, show business). Carey's model also fits the arguments and debates at play within early 1920s trade papers claiming to represent the interests of independent exhibitors, such as Harrisons Reports and Exhibitors Herald. The expansiveness and flexibility of Carey’s model make it well suited for studying trade papers and the show business community. In conceptualizing communication, Carey defines communication as “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed?” What is remarkable is how consistent this view is with the entertainment industry’s own thinking. “Perception is reality” has become a commonplace adage in today’s Hollywood, and many of the historic trade papers’ best customers were companies and individual workers attempting to mold and elevate their perceptions within the industry.

Carey’s ritual view of communication also resonates with the work of media industries studies scholar John Thornton Caldwell. “Perception is reality” is an example of what Caldwell calls “industry self-theorizing’—the way that film and television workers make sense of their culture and world.'* In his influential book Production Cultures, Caldwell argues that film and television “do not simply produce mass or popular culture . . . but rather film/TV production communities themselves are cultural expressions and entities involving all of the symbolic processes and collective practices that other cultures use: to forge consensus and order, to perpetuate themselves and their interests, and to interpret the media as audience members?” As will become clear in the chapters that follow, the history of the film industry’s trade press includes attempts to forge consensus and order, as well as pushback from communities that define themselves in opposition to other players within the industry.

In its emphasis on mass communication and community formation, Carey’s theoretical framework also evokes Benedict Anderson's better-known conceptualization of “imagined communities.” In his analysis of nineteenth-century newspapers and the rise of nationalism, Anderson argues that “the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation.” Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign?” In applying this concept to trade papers and the film industry, we can substitute an

“imagined business community” for “imagined political community.” If, however, we consider political less as referring to governance and more as method (i.e., to “play politics”), then the motion picture industry was certainly both an imagined business and political community.

The theories of Carey, Caldwell, and Anderson inform my conception of film industry trade papers and the functions they fulfill within the culture of show business. Even so, I have chosen not to fill the rest of the book with lengthy quotations from these authors. This is partly for the sake of readability. It’s also a deliberate decision; I want my uses of quotation marks to, as much as possible, elevate the voices of historical actors and lesser-known contemporary scholars. Yet it’s a reflection of something else, too: none of the theories of communication and culture can effectively explain historical change. Carey’s ritual view of communication can help us understand why, at particular moments in time, various constituencies within the industry supported certain publications—the papers that, for instance, affirmed their worldviews as independent exhibitors or screenwriters within the studio system. But the theories don't explain why so many trade papers sprang into being between the mid-1910s and early 1920s and why particular publications transformed considerably over time (e.g., Variety, Exhibitors Herald, Reel Journal) while others remained relatively consistent (e.g., Harrisons Reports). Addressing these changes and continuities requires the historiographic work of identifying and weighing of causal factors. And the identifying of causal factors, in turn, depends on the selection and interpretation of sources.

SOURCES AND METHODS

Film scholars have long utilized trade papers as historical sources, and, unsurprisingly, the trades remain important sources for my own project investigating their history. But there are many different ways of going about reading and analyzing these texts, especially after they are digitized. There are also many other primary sources—such as circulation auditing records, archival lawsuits, and individual manuscript collections—that can shed light on aspects of the trade papers, including details that the editors were not keen to share about themselves in print. Identifying, locating, and integrating these sources have been among the major tasks of this project.

My most important sources in writing this book have been Motion Picture News, Moving Picture World, Variety, and the film industry’s dozens of other trade publications. Although I discuss some trade papers that have not been scanned (and some that are not known to be physically available anywhere), most of the publications that I analyze are freely available—either in part or in their entirety—through the Media History Digital Library. Because they exist as digital files, I have been able to embed hyperlinks in my notes. Readers of the online edition can click through to see the relevant pages I am quoting or citing as evidence. But digital access meant much more for my research process. Early on, I applied computational methods, such as topic modeling and scaled entity search, to the periodicals as a way to look at them in new ways and see what patterns the computer might notice that I did not. The experience helped me get to know these publications better (especially calling my attention to sections that I tended to skip over), though, for the sake of readability, I have left the lengthy descriptions of the processes and results out of the historical narrative that follows. I also became a super-user of Lantern, the search engine I developed for the MHDLs collections, as a way to quickly test out hunches, chase new leads, and then follow more new leads from there (a process that film historian Gregory Waller usefully refers to as “search and re-search” and that many readers have no doubt undertaken themselves, possibly even leading them to the discovery of this very book).”!

One useful method for studying periodicals in comparison to one another and individually, as a particular publication changes over time, is quantitative content analysis. By randomly sampling issues from a given year and assigning every page to a category (e.g., advertisement, editorial, news, etc.), a researcher can identify large-scale patterns that might be missed through close reading alone. As a method, quantitative content analysis does not require digital access; it can be done using microfilm or print originals. But the process is vastly accelerated in the digital realm thanks to the speed at which issues can be accessed and analyzed. With the help of outstanding research assistants, I was able to generate quantitative content analyses for eight trade papers: Variety, Motion Picture News, Moving Picture World, Motography, Exhibitors Trade Review, Film Daily, Motion Picture Daily, and Exhibitors Herald / Motion Picture Herald. In all eight cases, we used a random number generator to select six issues per year—advancing every year for some publications, every two years for others—to analyze for their content.

The most in-depth and detailed content analysis was performed on Variety. Derek Long, Kit Hughes, Tony Tran, and I tracked the number of pages dedicated to various entertainment forms (e.g., vaudeville, burlesque, legitimate theater, motion pictures), both in news/editorial coverage and paid advertisements.” The results were illuminating and surprising (see fig. 1). Through our content analysis, we discovered that the importance of the film industry to Variety did not grow linearly over the paper’s first four decades. Instead, this was a relationship of fits and starts—the contribution of film to Variety's financial health declined during the period of 1908 to 1912, rose during the period of 1914 to 1918, fell again during the period of 1920 to 1922, grew once more and peaked during the years of 1929 and 1930, then declined again in the early 1930s. As these results show, the increasing importance of film to Variety cannot be understood as simply the reflection of the industry’s growth. Fully explaining Variety’s transformations requires scrutinizing the paper’s internal strategies alongside external shifts taking place within the media industries.

MNonfilm Ads Other Coverage Music

Radio

Legit Burlesque FVaudeville +]Film Ads KAFilm Coverage

Median Number of Pages

FIGURE 1. Visualization of content distribution of Variety, 1906-40. Source: Six trade paper issues analyzed per year, selected using a random number generator. Graphic by Lesley Stevenson.

For the other seven trade papers (which all primarily addressed themselves to motion picture exhibitors), we used a more simplified version of content analysis. For each sampled issue, we categorized pages as either (A) news/editorial or (B) advertising, counted the pages in each category, and generated averages and medians for purposes of comparison and change over time. Here, too, the results were revealing. The tremendous growth of advertising in Motion Picture News in the mid-1910s, and the equally clear decline in the 1920s, points toward important developments in the history of the US film industry and its press, as discussed in chapters 1, 2, and 5 (fig. 2). Similarly, the results of the content analyses of Moving Picture World, Motography, Exhibitors Trade Review, and Exhibitors Herald / Motion Picture Herald help to contextualize my discussions of those trade papers.

For all my uses of computational methods, keyword searches, and quantitative content analysis, though, much of what fills this book comes from closely reading the trade papers and other primary sources that shed light on them. The editorial temperaments and distinguishing styles of the trades most fully come to life from closely reading them, issue after issue. I hope that when readers encounter the voices of Franchon Royer, Tamar Lane, and Welford Beaton in chapter 4, they come across as a welcome change of tone from the earlier perspectives, just as they proved to be during the course of my own research.

160 140 120 100

Number of Pages

FIGURE 2. Median pages per issue by type in Motion Picture News, 1912-30. Source: Six trade paper issues analyzed per year, selected using a random number generator. Graphic by Lesley Stevenson.

I also benefited a great deal from being able to access and closely read unpublished archival manuscript collections. Georgetown University Library possesses the papers of Motion Picture Herald’s publisher and editor in chief, Martin Quigley, and editor Terry Ramsaye. The Quigley papers provided key sources for understanding the publisher’s perspectives and attempts at consolidating the industry’s trade press, even as the majority of the archived materials—focused on his role in the Production Code and his relationships with Catholic leaders and organizations—suggest what Quigley and his family came to see as his greatest legacy. While no other trade paper publishers left their papers to an archive or collecting institution, I was able to find traces of their activities in the manuscript collections of other prominent figures within the film industry during this period, including Harry Aitken, Irving Thalberg, Edwin Loeb, and Joseph Kennedy.

My best archival sources came from the courts. Nearly all of the trade paper publishers, including Quigley, were repeatedly sued and also sued others. This litigation generated documents that are now stored in county court record centers in Los Angeles and New York, as well as National Archives repositories in San Francisco and Washington, DC. Courtroom transcripts were available in some cases, along with contracts, letters, memos, and other documents that were gathered during the proceedings and submitted to the courts as evidence. Archival court documents contain evidence and insights about the publishers’ internal operations that one cannot glean simply from reading the magazines or the existing secondary literature about them. They also inherently center on conflicts, allowing us to observe tensions at play within the film industry and its press. The conflicts, involving libel, plagiarism, and tax evasion, also make for interesting stories.

One final group of primary sources has been invaluable for my research: the manuals, guidebooks, and auditing records generated by the larger field of industrial journalism. As chapter 1 discusses at length, industrial journalism underwent a period of transformation and expansion in the early twentieth century. With the field’s emphases on integrity and “quality circulation, the top trade papers in most industries employed the services of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) to verify their subscription lists to advertisers. The total circulation number for each publication was generally reported in annual directories, such as N. W. Ayer & Sons (see fig. 8 in the next chapter for a graph of early trade paper circulations). But more granular information about the categories of subscribers, as well as the regions in which they lived, was also generated in the audits and saved by the ABC (now the Alliance for Audited Media, headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois). The audit reports were an outgrowth of the new standards that had developed within industrial journalism, standards that were articulated in lectures, manuals, and guidebooks. As we will see, the turn-of-the-century entertainment industry did not fit neatly within this journalistic field’s categories, nor did most of its papers play by the rules.

HISTORICAL SCOPE AND BACKGROUND

This book focuses on the American film industry’s trade press across the twodecade period of 1915 to 1935. Nonspecialist readers may read that line and wonder, “That’s all?” Meanwhile, historians of silent feature and early sound film eras may wonder how I can possibly do justice to all the developments, transitions, and tumult during this period. I sympathize with both viewpoints, especially that of the silent film historians. Trying to describe and contextualize the institutions, changes, and complexities of the film industry during this period has been one of the biggest challenges of writing this book.

As I hope to make clear, there is a rationale for this particular structure and periodization. The book starts with a transformation within the film industry’s trade press, along with the increase of trade papers becoming identified as an industry problem. The story moves forward with the introduction of yet more voices within the trade press, the construction of new industry communities, and the demarcation of new battle lines. The book ends in the mid-1930s following the unsuccessful takeover and concentration of the industry press. By that point, the marketplace was shared by several different publications that would continue to compete and stay in business for decades to follow.

To be sure, the history of entertainment trade papers did not begin in the year 1915. And while it’s beyond the scope of this book to fully fill in that history (dissertation project, anyone?), some background history is important for understanding the developments and debates that took place in the mid-1910s and beyond. Moreover, it’s productive to defamiliarize ourselves a bit with the very term trade paper.

By the rubric of early twentieth-century industrial journalism, the two trades, Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, that I delivered to desks around the talent agency would have been considered “class journals” and not trade papers at all.

In the 1923 textbook Industrial Publishing, Horace M. Swetland wrote that “the basic purpose of Industrial Journalism is to assist in the production and distribution of commodities.” Swetland and other proponents of industrial journalism generally distinguished between three types of industrial periodicals: technical, class, and trade.” Technical journals, according to Swetland, were “those serving production?” The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers and American Cinematographer, for instance, exemplified technical journals that centered on motion picture production. These journals emerged from craft and technical organizations that formed within the film industry. Publishing a journal was a means of disseminating technical knowledge, legitimizing the organization, and policing the boundaries between insiders and outsiders.” They are not covered in this book because they did not compete against the class journals and trades to become part of the perceived industry problem of too many trade papers. The film industry’s technical journals remain valuable sources for film history, however, and they can tell much about technological innovations within the industry and the communities that participated in them.