Today, the silent roadshow is a shadowy legend, vaguely associated with the beginnings of feature films, of showmanship at its razzle-dazzle best.
In the modern world of plex houses and VCRs, the roadshow attraction -with its two-a-day screenings in deluxe theaters, reserved seating, printed programs, and legit theater prices, not to mention live symphony orchestras, seems as elegant and remote as the Dusenberg roadster.
But it is a tribute to the flamboyant power of those original presentations that the films, which most Americans know only through remakes and hearsay, are still potent and evocative. The most famous roadshow titles can still reverberate: The Big Parade ... The Birth Of A Nation ... Ben-Hur ... The Hunchback Of Notre Dame ... The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse.
It was a brief era, as golden ages go. The roadshow had been swept in on a flood tide of splendor, exotic movie imports, historical epics, and a rush of ballyhoo. The heyday started just before World War I and was swept away (along with a lot of other things) by talkies and the Wall Street crash.
True the roadshow would be revived fitfully in the '30s, again in the '50s, and endure a long swansong in the mid-60s, presided over by Cinerama, Julie Andrews, and a cauldron of red ink. But only in the silent era was the roadshow an integral, on-going, and more or less profitable part of Hollywood.
The last great roadshow success, appropriately enough, was a restored French '20s silent, Abel Gance's Napoleon, which in 1981 toured 16 cities with a live orchestra after a knockout 2-week premiere at Radio City Music Hall.
It was entirely different, for instance, from the grandiose idea of pageants and stage spectacle that S.L. Rothafel made famous at the Capitol and Roxy; different, too, from the elaborate vaudeville policy at Loew's houses, which augmented the feature with live "name" attractions bolstered by a permanent orchestra and line of chorus girls. These were programs designed for grind palaces - Radio City Music Hall was the last survivor- huge shows for little ticket cost, films generally rotated weekly, admission anywhere from 50-90 cents.
The roadshow, on the other hand, was meant as a film showcase par excellence- unencumbered by vaudeville acts and revues, purged even of newsreels and comic shorts. Palace grinders like Roxy and Sid Grauman condensed and even altered feature films to accommodate their live house acts; for the roadshow promoter, on the other hand, the feature- and the feature alone- was the Big Deal.
And when, on occasion, live performers did accompany the roadshow engagement (the most famous example was the mammoth "Pioneer Days" number Tim McCoy cast for The Covered Wagon in 1923), it was invariably in the form of a prolog that climaxed with the unspooling of the film.
What the customer got for a stiff admission price (top admissions ranged from $1.50-2.20 depending on the city) was a program made to resemble, as nearly as possible, a legitimate stage performance reserve seats and all. In fact roadshows were originally the exclusive domain of legit houses; promoters advertised them exclusively in theater sections of newspapers and expected legit theater critics to review them.
That's where they started in April 1911, when the Shubert brothers booked an obscure Italian spectacle entitled Dante's Inferno into top Shubert playhouses to counter the increasingly expensive live stage roadshows touring the Frohman and Erlanger circuits.
Daniel Frohman responded with movie roadshows of his own (including young Adolph Zukor's import Sarah Bernhardt and Queen Elizabeth). Erlanger responded too, so forcefully that by the end of the war he and the Shuberts shared a virtual monopoly on movie roadshow exhibition.
But the public was paying for more than a chance to watch a movie in a ritzy theater. This was the one guaranteed place to see a 12 and 13 reel film at its full length, enhanced by state-of-the-art technology, with an orchestra expanded to symphonic proportions.
When Paramount's Wings played the Erlanger circuit in 1927, for instance, all 12 roadshow companies were supplied with special 70mm Magnascope projectors for the air fight sequences, while the 50 member symphony orchestra played over a special General Electric-supplied prerecorded sound effects track.
MGM set up a special 13-reel version of The Big Parade at Shubert houses with extended 2-strip Technicolor sequences and a huge sound effects unit requiring a half dozen stage hands.
Sam Goldwyn, the only producer willing to take a chance roadshowing foreign films, opened Fritz Lang's Siegfried in ultrahighbrow philharmonic halls, juicing the Wagnerian angle for all it was worth with live choristers.
Those who waited to see these movies in normal firstrun venues had to settle for whittled-down geldings, Wings minus the 70mm, The Big Parade minus 2-strip and a full reel, Siegfried minus the operatic chorus, cut down to nine reels. Second run houses usually found the films even shorter (DeMille's Ten Commandments, for instance, played 13 reels legit, 12 reels first-run, then 10 reels in general release).
Which brings us to the economics of the roadshow, relatively straightforward. At a time when a 3 tier exhibition platform was firmly in place, the roadshow represented a luxurious extra tier. The normal '20s film (like its talkie counterpart for the two decades that followed) moved briskly down a market ladder as though on an assembly line.
First it played the key firstrun presentation houses, among them the world-famous movie palaces; then the neighborhood (i.e. regional) theaters; finally the nickel and dime backwaters. It was a system ruled by the clock, with playoff intervals separated by fixed clearances of 14 days, 28 days, 42 days, and so on between successive playoff periods.
As the prestige run that came before the normal exhibition cycle, the roadshow's chief benefit was vastly increased circulation for the picture and sky-high visibility. A successful roadshow would play for a year and more before starting down the regular exhibition ladder.
The Covered Wagon (1923) played 59 weeks at the New York Criterion, 34 weeks at the Hollywood, 23 weeks at Chicago's Woods before starting its "normal" runs at the Roxy and Grauman Million Dollar. Fairbanks' The Thief Of Bagdad (1924) stayed in New York for over six months at the Liberty and averaged two months RS stands in other keys before beginning its palace dates.
The two monster hits of the era: Griffith's The Birth Of A Nation (1915) and Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) - threatened to ossify at their roadshow posts. Parade didn't start its normal firstrun release until it had 22 months of roadshowing, including an unprecedented 96 weeks at New York's Astor.
Birth, an extremely odd case because of the way the states rights sales were handled, was roadshown off and on for 10 years (its career as a roadshow did not end until 1924 with two months at Erlanger's Illinois), while simultaneously barnstorming across the country in both firstrun and secondrun houses. It remains the roadshow champ, grossing an estimated $10,000,000 in domestic rentals.
As for the regular exhibitor, thanks to the tremendous advance publicity and his lower admission prices, he could count on substantially longer play periods than with the normal release, despite the previous engagements. Even when the roadshow flopped, there was still a chance of recovering the costs on subsequent runs.
Even so, the roadshow was a high risk proposition. Most films that started as roadshows lasted for only two or three cities and then fled for the conventional exhibition circuits. Even in their heyday, the classic roadshow - features that stayed on the road beyond New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles - were an infinitesimal part of the overall industry, accounting for about half of one percent of Hollywood's annual output.
For the producer, the overhead was horrendous- in 1928, Variety estimated opening N.Y. publicity campaigns cost $15,000, pegged house rentals and expenses at $9-14,000 per week, and figured overhead for each roadshow unit an additional weekly $4,500. With the producer assuming all expenses, it seemed practically impossible to come out ahead.
Only one out of every four roadshows broke even; fewer than 20% showed a profit. But when they connected, the profits made history.
The $5,000,000 The Big Parade grossed domestic represented one-third of the industry's entire 1925 earnings. The $4,000,000 Griffith grossed worldwide on Way Down East (1920) was able to carry his Mamaroneck studio through five years of losses, while the three DeMille silent roadshows - Joan The Woman (1915), The Ten Commandments (1923), and The King Of Kings (1927) - garnered a combined $7,000,000 gross worldwide, roughly one-third of what all 52 DeMille silents earned.
It was a form of exhibition that appealed to high rollers; and unsurprisingly the independents predominated. Griffith, contracting the services of master stage promoters J.J. McCarthy and Morris Gest, provided the blueprint for marketing strategies, exhibition format, and the colossal advertising campaigns with Birth, Intolerance and Hearts Of The World.
In the '20s, Goldwyn and Fairbanks carried on with even more lavish displays. The burgeoning majors, building theater chains of their own, were less inclined to take chances with shows that feathered legit houses.
William Fox was the exception, taking the plunge with no fewer than four RS productions in 1921, losing money on all four. Not until 1923, with the runaway success of Paramount's The Covered Wagon, did the majors relent; by the end of the decade every studio except First National had been to the roadshow races.
Today, the roadshow looks as dead as the corset. Even classics like Gone With The Wind and Snow White, when they are revived for 50th anniversary screenings, are routed through the plexes with nary a hint of grand openings.
Nor do the pros see immediate prospects for the roadshow's return. Morton Lippee, recently retired vice president and head film buyer for Metropolitan Theaters, says that "to revive them in the context of today's market would be cruel and misses the point. The genteel world of the 2-a-days is completely out of touch with the demands of today's moviegoer."
Bob Selig, head of the Theater Assn. of California, agrees. "Even as a specialty market for revivals, the roadshow is impractical. Product availability has been too diluted, and the pace of the industry too accelerated."
The lessons they draw from the roadshow pioneers is not how to revive the old exhibition forms, but how to fashion new ones.
Russell Merritt, "Roadshows Put On The Ritz," Variety, January 20, 1988, pages 93, 95.
© 1988, Russell Merritt.
Return to the Silent Film Bookshelf Home Page