The Red Rooster Scare (book, Richard Abel)

Preface

In the years just after WWI, "American films so dominated the market in France that they determined, in part, what consistuted a "French" cinema." But prior to 1910, the converse was true in the United States, where the French production company Pathe-Freres was the leading supplier of moving pictures."Pathe led the way in industrializing the cinema worldwide, pioneering a system of mass production and mass distribution (with dozens of agencies selling its products across the globe), all instituted between 1904 and 1906. This country rapidly became Pathé's largest market for the products that, in both quantity and quality, would prove crucial to the nickelodeon's emergence, a new venue of exhibition devoted exclusively to moving pictures (and songs) that soon claimed a mass audience of weekly 'moviegoers.' [...] The nickelodeon especially attracted the disenfranchised, chief among them recent immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, whose record numbers coincided with, and included many Jews who would become so active in, the cinema's transformation. As these diverse peoples came to be seen as a major target audience for cheap amusements, some feared (and others hoped) the nickelodeon would turn into an oppositional or alternative public sphere at odds with the industrial-commercial public sphere of mass consumer culture and its assimilationist operations."Chapter One, 1900-1903

Before 1900, "the [cinematic] apparatus itself did the performing, through its uncanny power to animate pictures as a new kind of attraction." By 1897, "the locus of authority for moving pictures was shifting to traveling exhibitors, many of whom already had made a name for themselves as illustrated lecturers, using magic lantern slides and phonographs." By 1900, exhibition services "could furnish a projector and projectionist, along with a series of moving pictures (renewed each week, often by means of railway transport), to a vaudeville house not just for special occasions but throughout its annual season."

"Over the next three years, the growing market for moving pictures was closely tied to the expansion of vaudeville." One of the developments that helped vaudeville houses expand was the emergence of "cheap" vaudeville. "These theaters tended to be smaller and ran shorter programs of just five or six acts, and their lower ticket costs also made them more accessible to working-class and, perhaps more significant, white-collar audiences."

In 1903, the films of Georges Melies came to dominate the American market, buoyed by the success of "A Trip to the Moon" in late 1902. By the Spring of 1903, "at least half the films [major exhibitor Vitagraph] featured as "spectaculars" or headliners came from Méliès and Pathé."

"Much like packaged cereals, soups, and soaps... moving pictures had to be promoted as a new "product category" worthy of being accepted as a regularly repeated cultural experience in cheap amusements everywhere." One of the ways early filmmakers created distinguishable brands for their companies was to mark their films with a visible trademark. "Because of its high visibility, the Pathé red rooster traveled as a kind of supersalesman, promoting the excellence and dependability of the company's films to audiences anywhere in the world. Pathé became perhaps the first film manufacturer to use the trademark much like the American companies selling packaged soaps or cereals: it forged a direct link to consumers. The red rooster gave the French company a singular, fixed identity, distinguishing it from most other companies."Chapter Two: French Films Create a Market for the Nickelodeon, 1903–1906

Together with "the development of story films and rental exchanges," and "the development of a type of inexpensive vaudeville," the "quantity and quality of Pathe films on the American market" were crucial to the rise of the nickelodeon era.

Although they didn't get as much mention in the newspapers as they might have, French films, especially the films of Pathe Freres, dominated the American film market in this period, largely because the French companies were able to produce enough films on a weekly basis to keep the nickelodeons stocked. They were so consistent in their production, in fact, that the nickelodeon owners felt secure enough to expand.

In that sense, the French production companies helped the American industry establish itself as a viable source for regular entertainment and permanent exhibition spaces.

Chapter Three: The French Rooster Rules the Roost, 1905-1908

In late 1907, the success of experimental dedicated movie houses in New York spurred an explosion of movie theaters throughout the city and then across the country. "Despite their significance, however, these large houses represented only a fraction of the venues for moving pictures in the United States, which the nickelodeons would continue to dominate for another several years."

"By 1908, Pathé had achieved the remarkable feat not only of mass marketing the largest number and greatest variety of film subjects for an ever-expanding exhibition market but also of producing the one subject, the Passion Play, with the longest "shelf life.""