|
"The
[nickelodeon] halls and buildings are very dirty and poorly ventilated,
and the audiences are under no supervision or surveillance
as to age or character."
Public Education Association of Worcester, Mass., 1912
"The
five-cent theaters, in particular, should be closed. There are
far too many of them, and children on their way to Sunday school
are lured and dragged into them."
Rev. Charles Goodell, New York Times, Dec. 16, 1907
"[Theater
owners] want the pictures to be 'risqué'...they found their
patrons were more willing to pay money to see an off-color [movie]
than a decent one."
Carl Laemmle, President of Universal Films, 1916
"The
very darkness of the movie house is an added attraction to many
young people, for whom the place is filled with the glamour of
love making."
Jane Addams, reformer and social worker, 1914
"Motion
pictures are as harmful to the mind as alcohol is to the body...
Most pictures are melodramatic, stultifying and deadening all
tender emotions and injecting into the mind scenes of crime and
degradation."
Adele F. Woodard, Committee of Fifty of the Investigation of the
Liquor Problem, 1919
"If
the citizens of any community should assemble with the purpose
of laying plans and devising means whereby to teach immorality
, obscenity and crime, I can think of no better way...than the
use of the moving picture show as it is now conducted."
William A. McKeever, "The Moving Picture, A Primary School for
Criminals," Good Housekeeping, August 1910
"The
nickelodeons are merely an extension course in civilization, teaching
both its 'badness' and its 'goodness.' They have come in obedience
to the law of supply and demand; and they will stay as long as
the slums stay, for in the slums they are the fittest and must
survive."
Joseph Medill Patterson, "The Nickelodeons: The Poor Man's Elementary
Course in the Drama," The Saturday Evening Post, November
1907
"The
popularity of these cheap amusement-places with the new population
of New York in not to be wondered at. The newly arrived immigrant
from Transylvania can get as much enjoyment out of them as the
native. The imagination is appealed to directly and without any
circumlocution. The child whose intelligence has just awakened
and the doddering old man seem to be on an equal footing of enjoyment
in the stuffy little box-like theaters."
Barton W. Currie, "The Nickel Madness," Harper's Weekly,
August, 1907
|
