News Release

Scholar seeking older people, especially
blacks, to share stories of going to movies

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Nowadays, despite still enjoying trips to the movies -- and complaining about high ticket, soft drink and popcorn prices -- most people give scant thought to the process of actually going.

Dr. Robert C. Allen, an expert on popular culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences, is an exception. He’s writing a history of movie-going in the South and is asking Southerners over age 60 to share memories of the silver screens of their youth.

"Movies were such a part of everyday life for most people that almost no one bothered to record their experiences," Allen said. "Except for political battles over Sunday closings and over desegregation in the early 1960s, the social experience of movie-going went largely unnoticed and unrecorded by local newspapers."

Anyone with a story to tell -- long or short -- can contact the American studies professor via email at rallen@email.unc.edu, by letter at Campus Box 3520 at UNC in Chapel Hill 27514 or by telephone at (919) 962-5165.

Allen said he works in part by scouring old city directories, fire insurance maps, photographs and newspaper ads to try to reconstruct the history of movie-going in the South, particularly in small towns.

"I'd like to add to these resources recollections of people who grew up in rural areas in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s as a way of trying to capture something of the character of life there as well as in the factory and mill towns that sprang up in the South around the turn of the century," he said. "I'd also be interested in hearing from people who never or seldom went to the movies to explore why that was, as well as from those for whom movies were an important part of their lives before television."

Allen especially hopes to hear from black Southerners about movie-going before the 1960s and how segregation affected their experiences.

"The history of the African American experience of movies in the South is even more difficult to reconstruct," he said. "Some towns had black theaters, but few records of their operation survive. Some white theaters simply refused to admit blacks, and in all that did, blacks were forced to sit in the balcony."

Recollections of those who lived through the Jim Crow era in the South are the best sources available for accounting for the role of movies in the lives of the vast majority of blacks in the first half of the last century, Allen said. When such theaters first opened in the U.S. around 1907, 90 percent of all blacks lived in the South, and 70 percent lived in the rural South.

Photographs related to theaters or watching movies in other places would be most welcome and promptly returned.

"We know many people in the South saw movies outside of theaters – in amusement parks, schools, tent shows, makeshift open-air ‘theaters,’ and even on the beach," he said. "Photos and recollections are the only records we have these encounters."

Dozens of local librarians in North Carolina have responded to the historian’s request for photos of movie theaters and audiences. The New Hanover County Public Library provided Allen with one of the most striking images of movie-going he has ever seen – a movie screen erected on the beach at Lumina Park in Wrightsville Beach, N.C. in 1918.

"Most research on the history of movie-going -- as distinct from the history of movies per se or of their production -- has centered on experiences in the largest U.S. cities, particularly New York and Chicago," Allen said. "There, early movie theaters have been described as being places where poor, newly-arrived immigrants flocked to theaters in converted store-fronts."

But as interesting as such accounts might be, they differ markedly for most people who lived in the United States in the early 20th century, he said. In 1910, two of three Americans lived in rural areas and in towns of fewer than 2,500 people.

"The way that movies became a part of the social fabric of communities in the South differs sharply from the picture of metropolitan movie-going," Allen said. "Even though the South was urbanizing at a furious pace around the turn of the century, it was still much more rural than the Northeast, and towns and cities were different in many respects from the older urban areas there."

In some towns, the theater was the only secular public meeting place, he said. Besides showing movies, some held high school graduations, local beauty pageants, religious services, talent shows and other events.

"However, social acceptance of movie theaters in the South was tempered by long-lasting religious qualms among conservative protestants and pentacostals," Allen said. "My grandfather was a staunch Baptist and wouldn’t have been caught dead inside a movie theater."

Now James Logan Godfrey professor of American studies, history and communication studies, Allen has taught at UNC since 1979. He is co-author with Douglas Gomery of Film History: Theory and Practice, which has encouraged film students worldwide to research the history of movie-going in their own communities.

The Gastonia, N.C. native has written about other aspects of American popular entertainment, including burlesque, vaudeville and radio and television soap operas.

His latest book, The Television Studies Reader, edited with Annette Hill, is a guide to the academic study of television around the world. The professor also is working with British and Australian co-editors on an anthology of research on the history of movie-going.

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Note: Allen can be reached at (919) 962-5165 or rallen@email.unc.edu.
News Services contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596