Tweet Great Photo 1920 Theater Lobby and Posters

http://www.shorpy.com/node/12832?size=_original

The latest movie theater exterior from the silent era.

I post these Shorpy photos to Nitrateville because some of the posters
in them may not survive (not to mention the films themselves).

Shorpy.com, the website that posts very high resolution vintage photos, has put up a 1920 night-time photo of a small Washington DC theater festooned with different movie posters for each night of the week.

Lots of interesting details to study and enjoy.

http://www.shorpy.com/node/12832?size=_original

Check it out!

John

http://silentlocations.wordpress.com/

[silentfilm]

This theater is mostly showing old stuff, except for Excuse My Dust, Go As You Please and Sinners. Obviously, they changed their program every day. The Christie comedy A Home-Made Hero isn't listed in the IMDB.

What a great array of delights and for only 20 cents too.

The girl in the box office aint bad either!

One commenter at that site cropped out the admission price card showing the 10% war tax and posted the image.

war tax.jpg (8.17 KiB) Viewed 252 times

That tax, for a war over in 1920, reminded me of a 1953 short TCM sometimes shows arguing for a repeal of the 20% movie admission tax still in force in 1953. By 1953, the damage from that tax had done its work, wiping out many small town movie theaters. TV stations paid no tax to show movies to viewers. As U.S. Supreme Court Chief John Marshall wrote in McCulloch v. Maryland : "An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy." By 1953, when the Hollywood studios made the short to present their side of the story to Congress, the admission tax damage was done. For another example on how a targeted tax can be really damaging, look to the situation in Greece, where the government is taxing the middle class indirectly by unilaterally making large deductions in government pensions, raising property taxes and kowtowing in every way possible to the banksters who made unwise gigantic loans to Greece (whose government spent a lot of that loan money on drunken sailor type spending to buy U.S.A. made military hardware).

The Case Against the 20% Federal Admissions Tax on Motion Picture Theatres (1953)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129815/" target="_blank" target="_blank

I think this picture is fascinating for a lot of reasons.
Check out the Halloween decorations. The black cats, witches, & goofy skull cut outs along with the accordion streamers are still in use to this day! Wow!
I see a poster for a Motoy film. A stop motion short film. Also, might be a poster for a Prizma color film. If so, I bet those two shorts wowed the crowd back in those days.
This theater sure does show a lot of Realart stuff!
Do I see another Constance Binney poster poking through that Alice Brady poster?
Never heard of this Milburn Moranti guy. Wonder what his films were like.
I've got Excuse my Dust and Hell's Hinges on video. Other than those two, along with The Pawnshop ans His Picture in the Papers, are any of these films on video?