The January 27, 1939, issue of The Film Daily had the Boone Theatre in Columbia,Missouri, on its “Theatres Planned” list. The projected cost of the 400-seat house was only $10,000. Judging from that, and the photo we have, I suspect that this was an old building being converted into a theater on a low budget. It might even have been an old theater long closed being reopened under a new name. The item said that the architect for the project was named Dick O'Rear.
ArchitectDB says there is a “d” in the architect’s name: Heitschmidt. He worked on some pretty impressive projects, but usually as the associate of some better known lead architect.
The Strand must have been the Schine house listed in the “Theaters Planned” column of the January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily: “Oswego, West Second St.; Builder: Schine Theater Corp.; Architect: J. Eberson; Cost: $200,000.”
The January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily ran this somewhat belated item it its “Theater Openings” column:
“Baraboo — ‘The Juliar,’ 450 seats, 415 Broadway; Builder: Henry E. Ringling; Architect: J. J. Flad; Cost: $60,000; Operator: Henry Ringling; To be completed 12-31-38.”
John J. Flad & Associates, the architectural firm founded by J. J. Flad at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1927, is still in operation as Flad Architects, now headquartered in Atlanta and with branches in Madison and four other cities, though they don’t appear to be designing theaters these days.
ejellise: The brief item I quoted was all there was in the magazine. I found two other references to William Leucht, one from 1927 and one from 1929. The 1927 item said that he had recently bought the Cozy Theatre, and the 1929 item mentioned him briefly as operator of the Savoy.
Scans of some issues of Exhibitors' Trade Review and other trade publications are online, the largest collection being at The Internet Archive, which is a rather difficult site to search as their cataloging system is, well, a mess, but there are probably other references to Leucht in the trades. I’ll keep an eye out for them, as new items are occasionally added to the various digital archives. I’ll also see if I can discover who operated the Rialto in the late 1950s.
If The Grocery Boy was an entirely local project it would be unusual. Most “local talent” movies were actually made by itinerant production companies. One outfit in operation as early as 1920, Community Photoplay, sent crews from their Los Angeles studio to cities all over the country. Essentially these companies would make the same movies over and over in different places with different players.
They would make arrangements with a local theater owner, then advertise a casting call for the production in the local newspaper, select the most likely players at the call, scout locations for filming, then spend a few days shooting the movie from the pre-written scenario. After the film was developed it would be edited and then presented in the theater which had contracted for the movie. The whole process would be completed in about two months, and the crew would be on to the next town on their list.
Nobody knows how many “local talent” movies were made during the silent era, but there must have been hundreds, if not thousands. Still, even though the production company “owned” the movie, they usually didn’t keep a copy. The negatives would be discarded and the only print (or prints) would stay with the local theater operator, who could show it as often as he liked, in whatever theater he chose. This is one of the reasons so few of these movies survived. Local theater operators didn’t know enough about preserving the unstable nitrate film over a long time.
The “local talent” business declined rapidly when talking pictures came along, due mostly to the far greater cost and complexity of making sound movies. In any case, local actors who could learn lines quickly and deliver them convincingly would have been much harder to find than people who could mug and posture for the silent camera.
I don’t know of anyone who is researching local talent movies. I can’t even find the term mentioned on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s web site. Still, there are so many people researching silent movies that there must be a few who specialize in local talent productions. Again, I’ll keep an eye out for information about the subject.
As William Leucht originally would have had what might have been the only print of The Grocery Boy, the most likely place to search for information about what became of it would be among his descendants. There could still be a few living in St. Joseph, though Google searches on the name fetch mostly obituaries. Still, obituaries might reveal the married names of daughters, and in my experience women usually remember more family history than men do. The most recent Leucht connected with St. Joseph that I’ve seen is a Geralyn (Geri) Leucht, who is listed at Classmates.com as a 1971 graduate of Central High School.
Good luck tracking down the print of The Grocery Boy. If it still exists, and you can find it, it will be of great interest to fans of silent movies.
Dave Price is probably right. Work on E. J. Sparks' new theater on Las Olas Boulevard was “well under way” according to an item in the January 13, 1939, issue of The Film Daily. The Warnor and Colony were the downtown Fort Lauderdale theaters that opened in 1941. The Florida must have opened fairly early in 1939.
Boxoffice is moving its online archive to a new format. For the time being the old archive is still online, but it no longer has direct internal links from one page to the next, so here is a link to the second page of the article Tinseltoes linked to in the previous comment.
Back in 2010 I linked to a Boxoffice article about theater renovations which included a photo of the Denis Theatre in Mount Lebanon. That link is dead. The bad news is that Boxoffice is reconfiguring its digital archive and will be moving everything to a new format. The good news is that, for now at least, the old archive is still online, though somewhat altered, and I don’t know for how long.
In any case, while it lasts, here is the page with the photos of the Denis, from the issue of October 15, 1938. You can’t navigate directly from one page to the next anymore, so here is a direct link to the second page of the article with the text about the Denis.
The March 24, 1939, issue of The Film Daily announced the start of construction on this theater:
“Santa Fe, N. M. — Construction
has begun on the new theater being erected by Col. Nathan Salmon and Col. E. John Greer of the Lensic and Paris Theaters, on West San Francisco St., opposite the Lensic. S. L. Kirk, is the contractor. The new theater will be known as the "Burro Alley Theater” and will have a seating capacity of 750, and will be of Spanish architecture.“
A photo of the Alley Theatre appears on page 107 of Santa Fe: A Walk Through Time, by Kingsley Hammett (Google Books preview.) The building, directly across San Francisco Street from the Lensic Theatre, currently houses two retail shops.
The April 10, 1935, issue of Film Daily reported that the Rialto Theatre in North St. Paul had installed 400 new seats. The April 30 issue said that the Rialto had been reopened with new seats and improved sound.
I’m glad to help. If a print of the movie was still around in the late 1950s, and in condition to be screened, someone must have been taking care of it. The nitrate film stock that was used in the 1920s was very unstable, and had to be carefully preserved. If somebody was looking after it for more than thirty years, chances are they continued to do so. The Grocery Boy might still exist in someone’s private collection.
An item in the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had information about the Ashland Theatre:
“Ashland to Seat 2,000.
“R. Stedman, manager of the Ashland theater, 24th and Elmwood, Kansas City, is remodeling his theater from a seating capacity of 1,000 to one that will hold 2,000 people. When this is completed, Mr. Stedman will have practically the largest capacity of any of the residence district theaters. The Apollo, when its new balcony is done, will also be among the largest, but the seating capacity will not quite equal that of the Ashland.”
The McDonald’s that occupies one side of the Sugg Theatre’s site is at 2027 S. 4th Street, so the Sugg’s address was probably 2027 or 2029.
The January 2, 1940, issue of The Film Daily ran this brief item about the destruction of the theater:
“Chichasha Theater Burns
“Chickasha, Okla. — This city’s largest theater, the Washita, owned by Consolidated Theaters, Inc., Griffith subsidiary, was destroyed by a $50,000 fire.”
The June 7, 1913, issue of Exhibitors' Times ran this one-page item about the Theatre Edouard VII, then under construction, with a rendering of the auditorium.
ejellise: The only reference I can find in the trade publications to a movie made by William Leucht is this item from the March 21, 1925, issue of Exhibitor’s Trade Review:
“Exhibitor Becomes Producer
“St. Joseph, Mo., March 11.— Having made a 3-reel home talent comedy last year, which played to S. R. O. business, William Leucht, manager of the Savoy Theatre, is now building a small plant for the developing, printing and finishing of motion pictures. ‘It’s a good business getter,’ he says.”
I don’t know what became of Mr. Leucht’s movie production business, but he was still operating the Savoy Theatre as late as 1929. The “home talent comedy” mentioned in the item might have been The Grocery Boy, which would mean the year of its production was 1924. If he made additional movies later, it might have been one of them, of course. A movie of that title is not listed in any of the online databases, nor in any of the trade publications of the 1920s that are available online, so it is likely among the more than 80% of silent movies that have been lost.
Does anyone know of a theater operating in this neighborhood before the construction of the World Trade Center? The theater would have opened in 1927 at the southwest corner of Cortlandt and West Streets. The project was mentioned in the July 13, 1927, issue of The Film Daily. If it did get built it might not have operated for very long.
The Belmont was a very early neighborhood house, dating back to around 1915. In 1925, there were plans afoot to remodel and expand it, but I don’t know if the project was carried out or not. In Google’s satellite views the building doesn’t look large enough to have accommodated the 1,800 seats that this item from the February 7, 1925, issue of The Reel Journal said it was to have:
“$60,000 Remodeling for K. C. Belmont
“Owners Will Increase Capacity of House to 1,800.
“Plans have been announced for the complete remodeling of the Belmont Theatre, St. John and Oakley Avenues, this city, by the owner, Ed Grogger. The cost of the improvement will be approximately $60,000.
“The remodeled structure will be of terra-cotta facing St. John Avenue on a 75-foot frontage, 125 feet deep. A balcony is to be built in to seat 600, which enlarges the capacity of the house from 1,100 to 1,800. A large and elaborately equipped stage is to be added. Construction work is to start immediately.
“The new building will transcribe a story of Oklahoma oil, according to the owners. Just lately their interests have brought in three producing wells in Wagner County, Okla., and all are big producers.
“Ed Grogger built the Belmont Theatre ten years ago and has been in the same location continuously since that date.”
I don’t seen any evidence of a “large and elaborately equipped stage” (there’s only a modest structure that looks almost like a lean-to) nor the high roof and emergency exits that a 600-seat balcony would require, so maybe Mr. Grogger’s Oklahoma oil wells didn’t produce as well as he had expected them to, and he couldn’t afford to carry out his ambitious expansion plans.
There is a page for Edward Leodore Mayberry Jr., at the Pacific Coast Architecture Database, and it has an interesting bit of information. It lists the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara among his works. Mayberry was the engineer on that 1924 project designed by architect George Washington Smith.
The Lobero was (and is) a live theater, but the movie theater trade publication Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World was so impressed by the house that it ran an illustrated article about it in the “Better Theatres” section of its issue of September 1, 1928, suggesting that the Lobero be used as a model for suburban movie theaters.
A brief biography of Mayberry’s partner, Llewellyn Adelbert Parker, can be seen on this web page, and it says that their firm (which operated from 1907 to 1918) engineered the Majestic Theatre (presumably Hamburger’s Majestic on Broadway) and the Panorama Theatre. The Panorama was the Main Street building that Adolph Ramish converted into the Adolphus Theatre, later renamed the Hippodrome.
Wes till need to change the street name to Whittier Boulevard.
The Euclid Theatre was built in 1912-1913 by L. A. Flower. The November 16, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer said that Flower had received a permit to build a two-story brick moving picture theater and lodge building, 36x100 feet, at 3029 Stephenson Avenue (the address given for the Euclid Theatre in the 1914 city directory.)
The December 12, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer confirms the site of the theater designed by Train & Williams as the northwest corner of 47th Place and Moneta Avenue (South Broadway.)
The December 14, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer said that a brick moving picture theater and garage was to be built on the south side of 7th Street between Garland and Hartford Streets. As the L.A. County Assessor’s office says that he Playhouse building was built in 1913, it must have been this project. The building was designed by the firm of Mayberry & Parker, architectural engineers, with offices in the Pacific Electric Building.
This house was built in 1913. The December 2, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer had an item saying that a permit had been issued for construction of a one-story brick theater at 6010 Moneta Street. The plans were by architects Miller & Hart, presumably not a major firm, given their address on West 28th Street.
I believe that George B. Campbell, designer of the Starland Theatre, was an in-house architect for the Huntington Land & Improvement Company. Campbell’s office address was 744 Pacific Electric Building, and I’ve found that the seventh floor of the PE Building was also the location of the Huntington Land & Improvement Company’s offices.
Alterations were to be made to the Garrick Theatre in 1913, according to the March 15 issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer. Lawrence A. Valk was the architect for the project, the extent of which was not specified.
Barman and Robinson were listed as the owners of the theater, and their address was given as 5th and Los Angeles Streets. It’s likely that they were also the owners of the Globe Theatre, which was at that intersection.
The January 27, 1939, issue of The Film Daily had the Boone Theatre in Columbia,Missouri, on its “Theatres Planned” list. The projected cost of the 400-seat house was only $10,000. Judging from that, and the photo we have, I suspect that this was an old building being converted into a theater on a low budget. It might even have been an old theater long closed being reopened under a new name. The item said that the architect for the project was named Dick O'Rear.
ArchitectDB says there is a “d” in the architect’s name: Heitschmidt. He worked on some pretty impressive projects, but usually as the associate of some better known lead architect.
The Park Theatre was on the “Theaters Planned” list in the January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily:
I can’t find anything about Joe Rosette on the Internet. Rosette is a real surname, or I’d be inclined to think the magazine had made a mistake.The Strand must have been the Schine house listed in the “Theaters Planned” column of the January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily: “Oswego, West Second St.; Builder: Schine Theater Corp.; Architect: J. Eberson; Cost: $200,000.”
The January 16, 1939, issue of The Film Daily ran this somewhat belated item it its “Theater Openings” column:
John J. Flad & Associates, the architectural firm founded by J. J. Flad at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1927, is still in operation as Flad Architects, now headquartered in Atlanta and with branches in Madison and four other cities, though they don’t appear to be designing theaters these days.ejellise: The brief item I quoted was all there was in the magazine. I found two other references to William Leucht, one from 1927 and one from 1929. The 1927 item said that he had recently bought the Cozy Theatre, and the 1929 item mentioned him briefly as operator of the Savoy.
Scans of some issues of Exhibitors' Trade Review and other trade publications are online, the largest collection being at The Internet Archive, which is a rather difficult site to search as their cataloging system is, well, a mess, but there are probably other references to Leucht in the trades. I’ll keep an eye out for them, as new items are occasionally added to the various digital archives. I’ll also see if I can discover who operated the Rialto in the late 1950s.
If The Grocery Boy was an entirely local project it would be unusual. Most “local talent” movies were actually made by itinerant production companies. One outfit in operation as early as 1920, Community Photoplay, sent crews from their Los Angeles studio to cities all over the country. Essentially these companies would make the same movies over and over in different places with different players.
They would make arrangements with a local theater owner, then advertise a casting call for the production in the local newspaper, select the most likely players at the call, scout locations for filming, then spend a few days shooting the movie from the pre-written scenario. After the film was developed it would be edited and then presented in the theater which had contracted for the movie. The whole process would be completed in about two months, and the crew would be on to the next town on their list.
Nobody knows how many “local talent” movies were made during the silent era, but there must have been hundreds, if not thousands. Still, even though the production company “owned” the movie, they usually didn’t keep a copy. The negatives would be discarded and the only print (or prints) would stay with the local theater operator, who could show it as often as he liked, in whatever theater he chose. This is one of the reasons so few of these movies survived. Local theater operators didn’t know enough about preserving the unstable nitrate film over a long time.
The “local talent” business declined rapidly when talking pictures came along, due mostly to the far greater cost and complexity of making sound movies. In any case, local actors who could learn lines quickly and deliver them convincingly would have been much harder to find than people who could mug and posture for the silent camera.
I don’t know of anyone who is researching local talent movies. I can’t even find the term mentioned on the National Film Preservation Foundation’s web site. Still, there are so many people researching silent movies that there must be a few who specialize in local talent productions. Again, I’ll keep an eye out for information about the subject.
As William Leucht originally would have had what might have been the only print of The Grocery Boy, the most likely place to search for information about what became of it would be among his descendants. There could still be a few living in St. Joseph, though Google searches on the name fetch mostly obituaries. Still, obituaries might reveal the married names of daughters, and in my experience women usually remember more family history than men do. The most recent Leucht connected with St. Joseph that I’ve seen is a Geralyn (Geri) Leucht, who is listed at Classmates.com as a 1971 graduate of Central High School.
Good luck tracking down the print of The Grocery Boy. If it still exists, and you can find it, it will be of great interest to fans of silent movies.
Dave Price is probably right. Work on E. J. Sparks' new theater on Las Olas Boulevard was “well under way” according to an item in the January 13, 1939, issue of The Film Daily. The Warnor and Colony were the downtown Fort Lauderdale theaters that opened in 1941. The Florida must have opened fairly early in 1939.
Boxoffice is moving its online archive to a new format. For the time being the old archive is still online, but it no longer has direct internal links from one page to the next, so here is a link to the second page of the article Tinseltoes linked to in the previous comment.
Back in 2010 I linked to a Boxoffice article about theater renovations which included a photo of the Denis Theatre in Mount Lebanon. That link is dead. The bad news is that Boxoffice is reconfiguring its digital archive and will be moving everything to a new format. The good news is that, for now at least, the old archive is still online, though somewhat altered, and I don’t know for how long.
In any case, while it lasts, here is the page with the photos of the Denis, from the issue of October 15, 1938. You can’t navigate directly from one page to the next anymore, so here is a direct link to the second page of the article with the text about the Denis.
The March 24, 1939, issue of The Film Daily announced the start of construction on this theater:
A photo of the Alley Theatre appears on page 107 of Santa Fe: A Walk Through Time, by Kingsley Hammett (Google Books preview.) The building, directly across San Francisco Street from the Lensic Theatre, currently houses two retail shops.The April 10, 1935, issue of Film Daily reported that the Rialto Theatre in North St. Paul had installed 400 new seats. The April 30 issue said that the Rialto had been reopened with new seats and improved sound.
I’m glad to help. If a print of the movie was still around in the late 1950s, and in condition to be screened, someone must have been taking care of it. The nitrate film stock that was used in the 1920s was very unstable, and had to be carefully preserved. If somebody was looking after it for more than thirty years, chances are they continued to do so. The Grocery Boy might still exist in someone’s private collection.
An item in the February 19, 1916, issue of The Moving Picture World had information about the Ashland Theatre:
The McDonald’s that occupies one side of the Sugg Theatre’s site is at 2027 S. 4th Street, so the Sugg’s address was probably 2027 or 2029.
The January 2, 1940, issue of The Film Daily ran this brief item about the destruction of the theater:
The June 7, 1913, issue of Exhibitors' Times ran this one-page item about the Theatre Edouard VII, then under construction, with a rendering of the auditorium.
ejellise: The only reference I can find in the trade publications to a movie made by William Leucht is this item from the March 21, 1925, issue of Exhibitor’s Trade Review:
I don’t know what became of Mr. Leucht’s movie production business, but he was still operating the Savoy Theatre as late as 1929. The “home talent comedy” mentioned in the item might have been The Grocery Boy, which would mean the year of its production was 1924. If he made additional movies later, it might have been one of them, of course. A movie of that title is not listed in any of the online databases, nor in any of the trade publications of the 1920s that are available online, so it is likely among the more than 80% of silent movies that have been lost.Does anyone know of a theater operating in this neighborhood before the construction of the World Trade Center? The theater would have opened in 1927 at the southwest corner of Cortlandt and West Streets. The project was mentioned in the July 13, 1927, issue of The Film Daily. If it did get built it might not have operated for very long.
The Belmont was a very early neighborhood house, dating back to around 1915. In 1925, there were plans afoot to remodel and expand it, but I don’t know if the project was carried out or not. In Google’s satellite views the building doesn’t look large enough to have accommodated the 1,800 seats that this item from the February 7, 1925, issue of The Reel Journal said it was to have:
I don’t seen any evidence of a “large and elaborately equipped stage” (there’s only a modest structure that looks almost like a lean-to) nor the high roof and emergency exits that a 600-seat balcony would require, so maybe Mr. Grogger’s Oklahoma oil wells didn’t produce as well as he had expected them to, and he couldn’t afford to carry out his ambitious expansion plans.There is a page for Edward Leodore Mayberry Jr., at the Pacific Coast Architecture Database, and it has an interesting bit of information. It lists the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara among his works. Mayberry was the engineer on that 1924 project designed by architect George Washington Smith.
The Lobero was (and is) a live theater, but the movie theater trade publication Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World was so impressed by the house that it ran an illustrated article about it in the “Better Theatres” section of its issue of September 1, 1928, suggesting that the Lobero be used as a model for suburban movie theaters.
A brief biography of Mayberry’s partner, Llewellyn Adelbert Parker, can be seen on this web page, and it says that their firm (which operated from 1907 to 1918) engineered the Majestic Theatre (presumably Hamburger’s Majestic on Broadway) and the Panorama Theatre. The Panorama was the Main Street building that Adolph Ramish converted into the Adolphus Theatre, later renamed the Hippodrome.
Wes till need to change the street name to Whittier Boulevard.
The Euclid Theatre was built in 1912-1913 by L. A. Flower. The November 16, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer said that Flower had received a permit to build a two-story brick moving picture theater and lodge building, 36x100 feet, at 3029 Stephenson Avenue (the address given for the Euclid Theatre in the 1914 city directory.)
The December 12, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer confirms the site of the theater designed by Train & Williams as the northwest corner of 47th Place and Moneta Avenue (South Broadway.)
The December 14, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer said that a brick moving picture theater and garage was to be built on the south side of 7th Street between Garland and Hartford Streets. As the L.A. County Assessor’s office says that he Playhouse building was built in 1913, it must have been this project. The building was designed by the firm of Mayberry & Parker, architectural engineers, with offices in the Pacific Electric Building.
This house was built in 1913. The December 2, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer had an item saying that a permit had been issued for construction of a one-story brick theater at 6010 Moneta Street. The plans were by architects Miller & Hart, presumably not a major firm, given their address on West 28th Street.
I believe that George B. Campbell, designer of the Starland Theatre, was an in-house architect for the Huntington Land & Improvement Company. Campbell’s office address was 744 Pacific Electric Building, and I’ve found that the seventh floor of the PE Building was also the location of the Huntington Land & Improvement Company’s offices.
Alterations were to be made to the Garrick Theatre in 1913, according to the March 15 issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer. Lawrence A. Valk was the architect for the project, the extent of which was not specified.
Barman and Robinson were listed as the owners of the theater, and their address was given as 5th and Los Angeles Streets. It’s likely that they were also the owners of the Globe Theatre, which was at that intersection.