Motor City Movie Culture, 1916-1925

"Richard Abel takes us into the unexplored and unexpectedly rich terrain of Detroit at the beginning of the twentieth century. We learn that the teeming, multicultural metropolis was famous for its cigars as well as its cars, and that moviegoing and even some fledgling movie production were thriving. With his distinctive literary voice, Abel talks us through volumes of rare documents and ephemera, revealing for the first time the trove that exists in numerous archives and private collections, sharing his infectious curiosity, and inviting us on his personal journey through the Motor City's movies."—Donald Crafton, University of Notre Dame

"Motor City Movie Culture is a sharp continuation of the thrust of Abel's last few books into the Hollywood era. Narrowing the focus onto a major city—Detroit—Abel tackles a full decade when daily newspaper publicity made fandom for movie stars habitual. Motor City Movie Culture explains how metropolitan newspapers became essential channels for Hollywood publicity—not just conduits but partners with first-run theater chains, anchoring the studio system regionally. One of 30 regional hubs for film distribution across the US, Detroit's showmen built their city a theatre district of lavish movie palaces at Grand Circus Park, surrounded by a dozen neighborhood zones each with their own palaces. Previous scholarship on film exhibition in the 1920s has emphasized the end of local control and the loss of regional distinctions. Abel confirms how studio-controlled first-run theaters were reliant on local networks to add regional twists."—Paul S. Moore, Ryerson University, Toronto

"Offering the same extraordinary attention to detail and richly ambitious scope that have characterized Richard Abel's justly acclaimed studies of American silent cinema in the 1900s and 1910s, Motor City Movie Culture unearths and makes sense of a wealth of new information about Detroit, providing an important perspective on film exhibition and film production in metropolitan America during the late 'teens and 1920s."—Greg Waller, editor of Film History, Indiana University

"Motor City Movie Culture reveals how Detroit made Hollywood its own. Master researcher Richard Abel details how the distribution and exhibition practices of Michigan's multiethnic boomtown gave local life to a global film industry. The volume is choc-a-bloc with insights about film programs that usually included live acts, sometimes featured locally produced newsreels, and differed significantly across the city's well over one-hundred theaters—from the 1,771 seat Adams to the 385 seat Zellah."—Mark Cooper, Faculty Senate Chair, Professor Film & Media Studies, University of South Carolina

"Perhaps foremost among these insights is the book's powerful reminder that movie theatres during this period were environments for a rich multimedia and intermedial experience where performers on stage were just as important as those on the screen. This work will be of great value to students and scholars of silent cinema history, theatre history, urban history and Detroit history, and also has much to offer those interested in the history of newspapers, advertising and promotion."—Jeffrey Klenotic, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

"No historian better understands the importance of newspapers to the formation of American movie culture than Richard Abel, and none has put newspaper research to better effect."—Mark Lynn Anderson, Michigan Historical Review