Formenting Rebellion

I am buoyed by the deep success of "Super Mario Brothers". Give the audience what it wants and they show up in droves. It also provides hints of a drawing on the success of combining videogames and the movies. A marketing alliance which could alter both business verticals. At some point questioning where does gaming stop and the business begin. This is significant. Video gaming could be the lifeline movies have been looking for.

I saw a quote today that could be applied to this exhibition business. John Lydon, a former member of the British punk band The Sex Pistols, said, ;I do not think there is Rock and Roll anymore. There is just an amalgamation of business interests. This quote stopped me because it resonates accurately with the business of movies.

The business of movies has moved away from the company of artistic creation and is now the business of packaging. Some form of rebellion has driven growth since the beginning of the movies.

?In 1908, the motion picture inventors and industry leaders organized the first great movie trust called the Motion Picture Patents Company, designed to bring stability to the wild west show that was a movie exhibition. The Edison Movie Manufacturing Company, the Biograph company, and the other Motion Picture Patents members created a cooperative system that put a lock on the competition. The monopoly demanded licensing fees from all movie producers, distributors, and exhibitors. A January deadline was set for all companies to comply with the license. Independent rose to challenge the monopoly. Soon the trust was confiscating unlicensed equipment and cutting off theaters that showed unlicensed movies. They bought out all the movie exchanges except one owned by William Fox, the founder of 20 th Century Fox, who defied the monopoly. The monopoly squeezed hard, so Carl Laemmle, Harry Aitken, and Adolph Zukor started making their movies, laying the foundation of the studio systems and the modern movie economy. The independents moved west to California, and the Hollywood mystic was born. Finally, the government hit the monopoly with an anti-trust suit and subsequently collapsed.

Independent moviemakers have been around since the inception of movies. Probably one of the most iconic rebels was Afro-American moviemaker Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux tried his hand at several vocations before starting a movie career. Originally from rural Illinois, Micheaux moved to Chicago, where he shined shoes and worked in meatpacking and steel before getting a job as a railway porter. His career as a port allowed him exposure to money and placed within him the need for a better life.

In 1904, Micheaux moved to South Dakota and became a prosperous farmer in almost a white community. Micheaux decided that he should put his exploits into book form. In 1913 his first novel, The Conquest: The Story of A Negro Pioneer, was published. A Los Angeles-based production company offered to make the book into a movie. When negotiations broke down, Michaeaux decided to make the movie himself. Micheaux released The Homesteader in 1919. The silent black-and-white movie features a Black man who enters a rocky marriage with a Black woman, played by the emerging African American actress Evelyn Preer, despite being in love with a white woman. The movie was a financial and critical success. His second movie, “Within Our Gates” (1920), challenged the bigoted stereotypes exhibited in D.W. Griffith';s movie The Birth of a Nation.

?Micheaux's movies were also shown in whites-only movie theaters and dealt with issues like racial injustice exploring topics such as lynching, job discrimination, and mob violence. Given the social tone of the time, Micheaux's and his movies were nothing short of groundbreaking.

Modern movie marketing (when they properly advertised a picture) can be traced back to a hustler who emerged from the wilds of Ohio. Howard W. Kroger Babb was an American movie huckster. He touted himself as America's Fearless Young Showman, Babb was involved in marketing many movies, including the groundbreaking piece of cinematic titillation, Mom and Dad When confronted by some accusing press, Babb cried out “It is no sin to make a profit,” At the time, he was distributing an evangelical-bent motion picture, and he was reminded of his past prurient efforts.?Babb reportedly made a great deal of money from these movies. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, per Wikipedia, Babb’s “Mom and Dad” movie grossed anywhere from $40 million to $100 million in todays dollars. Also, he received the first annual Sid Grauman Showmanship Award” in 1951, presented by the Hollywood Rotary Club. Never one to miss a trick, Babb was the producer of The Erin Westmore Hollywood Glamour Show, which may have been the first televised makeover reality show, in 1953.

In the past have referred to Robert Lippert, a theater owner who was fed up with the machinations of the studios and decided to make his movies. As a young man, Lippert worked odd jobs in the local movie house, soon working his way into the projection room. By the mid-40s, Lippert owned 128 theaters in California and Oregon. Around 1948 he decided to begin making his pictures to show in his theaters. His initial movie was Last of the Wild Horses (1948). He released hundreds of movies from the late 1940s through the mid-50s. Moviegoers began to know that they were in for something different when the Lippert Pictures hit the screen. During this period, some real classics were put out by Lippert: Rocketship X-M (1950), Little Big Horn (1951), The Steel Helmet (1951), and The Tall Texan (1953), among others. He helped finance more than 300 plus movies, including debuts of?Samuel Fuller, James Clavell, and Burt Kennedy. He soon became known as King of the Bs. In speaking about himself, Lippert said, the word around Hollywood is: Lippert makes a lot of cheap pictures, but he never made a stinker.

Following in the rebellious mold of Robert Lippert, Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson founded the American Releasing Corporation, late re-titled American International Pictures/ Together produced 125 movies before the company’s collapse in the early 1980s. These movies were often made in a brief period and for little or no money. AIP is created for inventing the beach movie and the outlaw motorcycle gang movie. This company also resurrected the horror genre with movies like Blacula, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and The Thing with Two Heads. Many actors, such as Don Johnson, Nick Nolte, Diane Ladd, and Jack Nicholson, began their careers with AIP. Many other actors, Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, and Vincent Price, ended their careers with AIP.

There are many more, but what they all had in common was a need to rebel against the current production and distribution system. This past rebellion should an inspiration for the present day exhibitors. Things are changing rapidly and you have to be part of the change or be over run by the change.