Carroll Opera House
108-110 E. 5th Street,
Carroll,
IA
51401
108-110 E. 5th Street,
Carroll,
IA
51401
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I’m not sure when itinerant movie exhibitors began touring Iowa, but in California they started as early as 1896. After the Orpheum circuit’s exhibition of films at the former Grand Opera House in Los Angeles that year, the whole show went on tour through the hinterlands of Southern California before settling into a semi-permanent home in the back room of Thomas Tally’s Edison Phonograph and Vitascope Parlors on Spring Street.
Carroll might have gotten a few such visits from movie exhibitors before 1907, but notifications in theatrical trade journals indicate that the Opera House was thriving with live performances into the early 1910s and was still advertising for them as late as 1921. Even its tenure as a movie house in the mid-1910s was probably only seasonal, though by that time they might have installed a permanent projection booth and probably had their own movie screen.
That’s probably from about the first year they could have been showing movies, right? Sounds like they maybe had it set up on the floor or balcony, rather than in a booth.
I cane across an item in a 1907 issue of The Billboard about a moving picture film bursting into flames at the end of a show in the Carroll Opera House. The building apparently suffered no serious damage, and the audience evacuated safely, but it cost the owner of the projector and films $150.00.