Osage Theatre

Shidler was an oil boom town founded in December 1921 by businessman Eugene S. Shidler. Within a year some 5,000 folks stormed the town which didn’t have paved roads but would soon have two movie theaters. The first was the 500-seat Osage Theatre on Main Street. Technically, it was launched by C.E. Tullock and A.C. Whitaker in the nearby town of Pershing, Oklahoma. But the oil was closer to Whizbang/DeNoya and Shidler. So the pair moved the equipment and name to downtown Shidler beginning operation on March 18, 1922.

The Osage’s opening timed nicely with the nearby fire that had destroyed the Whizbang Theatre in Whizbang, Oklahoma (aka DeNoya) on January 17, 1922. In 1923, the Empire Theatre was built and appears to have been renamed the Senate Theatre. Whizbang had the Liberty Theatre. The Osage’s operator, E.V. Weaver and wife, Thelma, wired their theatre for sound. About that time, the oil wells in Whizbang were drying up and that city would become a ghost town along with Pershing, the original home of the Osage.

The Weavers then made national news by refusing to accept Publix / Paramount’s entirety of block booked features and short subjects in 1931. Few operators were so public in their refusal of the block booking practices which would finally be part of the Paramount Decree some 15 wars later. For the Weavers, it must have been bad karma because the theatre burned to the ground in 1931.

The defiant Weavers built their New Osage Theatre, another 500-seat venue, in the same spot as the previous Osage Theatre launching in 1932. The theatre was refreshed in 1937 and would drop the “New.” In 1957, E.V. Weaver died and Thelma ran it by herself until Sunday, August 18, 1963. Just after showing “The Birds” by Alfred Hitchcock, the theatre exploded with Weaver just barely escaping with her life. The building was a total loss and was not rebuilt.

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