One of the concepts that I found interesting about Fuller’s preface and first chapter of “At The Picture Show…” was the culture clash between what urban audiences wanted to and were seeing and what people of the rural small town wanted to and were actually seeing.  Today I can see the same film here in Middlebury, Vermont than I can in New York city, and while I am sure there are probably still small towns in the United States that may ban “inappropriate” films, it seems that this was a culture clash that only existed in the early stages of film audiences.  It sounds like how this happened is something that will be addressed in much more detail later in Fuller’s book.

It seemed as if the wants of the small town audience that Fuller described made a quick and almost contradictory shift during the period she describes in Chapter 1.  At first, she describes a small town audience that was used to local entertainment by local performers, and a population of people who were somewhat afraid of the rapid growth of urban cities and of the films that came out of them.  The phrase “approved by the clergy” was very necessary on an advertisement for a traveling moving picture show company that came to town.  Companies like Cook and Harris had a decent market going.  To me the idea of the Nickelodeon contradicts these ideals and shows a shift in the market, in that now the audiences were looking for the same films that were being played in the urban cities.  The films were changing all the time allowing the mass-produced urban culture to continually flow through the small town.  Fuller makes the point that it was people like Cook and Fuller coming to the small town and changing audiences, but then audiences changing the way in which the films were presented.