Silent Screens

The Decline and Transformation of the American Movie Theater

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by Michael Putnam,

Introduction by Robert Sklar

Johns Hopkins University Press

Due/Published June 2000, 120 pages, cloth

ISBN 0801863295

Do you miss those old movie theaters? Here, then, is a great little treasure of a book. Not just photos either. Read on.

The single-screen movie theaters that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighborhoods since the 1920s are all but gone. In Silent Screens, photographer Michael Putnam captures these once prominent cinemas in decline and transformation. His photographs of abandoned movie houses and forlorn marquees are an elegy to this disappearing cultural icon. 

In the early 1980s, Putnam began photographing closed theaters, theaters that had been converted to other uses (a church, a swimming pool), theaters on the verge of collapse, theaters being demolished, and even vacant lots where theaters once stood. The result is an archive of images, large in quantity and geographically diffuse. Here is what has become of the Odeons, Strands, and Arcadias that existed as velvet and marble outposts of Hollywood drama next to barbershops, hardware stores, and five-and-dimes.

Introduced by Robert Sklar, the photographs are accompanied by original reminiscences on moviegoing by Peter Bogdanovich, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and Chester H. Liebs as well as excerpts from the works of poet John Hollander and writers Larry McMurtry and John Updike. Sklar begins by mapping the rise and fall of the local movie house, tracing the demise of small-town theaters to their role as bit players in the grand spectacle of Hollywood film distribution. "Under standard distribution practice," he writes, "a new film took from six months to a year to wend its way from picture palace to Podunk (the prints getting more and more frayed and scratched along the route). Even though the small-town theaters and their urban neighborhood counterparts made up the majority of the nation's movie houses, their significance, in terms of revenue returned to the major motion-picture companies that produced and distributed films, was paltry."

In his essay, "Old Dreams," Last Picture Show director Peter Bogdanovich recalls the closing of New York City's great movie palaces--the Roxy, the old Paramount near Times Square, the Capitol, and the Mayfair--and the more innocent time in which they existed "when a quarter often bought you two features, a newsreel, a comedy short, a travelogue, a cartoon, a serial, and coming attractions."

While the images in Putnam's book can be read as a metaphor for the death of many downtowns in America, Silent Screens goes beyond nostalgia to tell the important story of the disappearance of the single-screen theater, exploring the layers of cultural and economic significance that still surround it.

"These photographs and the loss of which they speak signal the passing of a way of being together." --Molly Haskell