I hate when people talk during movies. But this is a nuisance that has been going on since cinema’s infancy.  Theater managers, studios, producers have no way of controlling this, let alone me.

During the Nickelodeon era (1905-1915), audiences conversed not only with each other, but also with the screen. Historians have accounts of moviegoers eating lunch, suckling babies, and viewers translating out loud subtitles for those who could not read, children cheering, and hawkers along the aisles (Fuller: 75). Although there is nothing deviant about these activities, the theater is not the ideal place for them. Essentially this description illustrates a social event similar to a concert or festival.

Indeed watching a film is not a passive activity. However, a degree of cordiality is necessary so that the film is internalized.

Studios and producers capitalized on this audience energy. Moviegoers attacked studios by sending scripts and photoplay scenarios in hoards. Studios retaliated with screenwriting contests in which the winner’s work was used in a movie.

The idea was to establish social control. Because the cinema was still a new phenomenon, a way of movie going needed to be instituted. Similarly, when the television set was introduced, people were unsure where to place this bulky apparatus in their homes. With the coming of nickelodeons, a set movie going etiquette did not exist. The relationship between theaters and moviegoers shifted with the coming of feature length narrative films that required more concentration. In addition, elegant theaters were erected to attract the higher classes (Fuller: 83). The industry, essentially dictated how films were viewed, but breaking the rules has and will always be fun.

It is 1905. You leave work and grab a newspaper on the way home. You skim through the headlines: an earthquake in Iowa, cigarettes barred in Wisconsin, Virginia University gets a gift from Rockefeller. And then on the left hand side of the page, reads an ad “Cook & Harris High Class Moving Picture Company. Thursday Evening, April 20^th.” The ad illustrates this upcoming night; a ship appears on the big screen, the opera house is full of viewers. So you go home, mark the date on the calendar; surely nothing like this has come to small-town New York yet. Big cities have seen them and now, the moving pictures are finally coming to us.

Now jump to 2010, there are cinemas everywhere, we can go whenever we want, see billboards in the most unlikely places of upcoming movies, easily look up showtimes on the Internet and pay only a small fee of $10.50. The convenience has caused us to take for granted how readily we have access to the cinema.

During cinemas infancy, the pictures came to you. Traveling companies such as Cook and Harris went to small towns with a two-hour “performance” that featured twenty to twenty five brief film scenes. During intervals, Bert Cook would sing songs while his wife Fannie played the piano (Fuller: 10-12). The local fire department, high school seniors or even the Pentecostal church, making this traveling theatre a part of the community, endorsed these shows. These sponsors than took up to half the proceeds for their causes (14). Traveling shows were virtually put out of business for nickelodeons, a stable, ever present cinema, were established. Any vacant room could be turned into a five-cent, ever present theater (24). And this is how the cinema we see today was transformed.