Penny vaudeville New Orleans

The patriotic fervor surrounding the Spanish-American war helped to rekindle some of the interest.

Concluding with images of Uncle Sam and the American flag, The Biograph Illustrating the Battleship Maine created a sensation in theatres a few weeks after the explosion in Havana Harbor.

Apparently no one noticed that the film had been released a few months earlier asBattleships Iowa and Massachusetts.

Movies also supposedly gained special prominence during the White Rats vaudeville strike of 1901.

Debated and argued, this claim still awaits extensive research.

The American motion picture industry was experiencing various difficulties at this time. In addition to audience indifference, there were problems with technological standardization, patents and copyrights.

Adolph Zukor's " One Cent Vaudeville", New York City

In some vaudeville theatres motion pictures had been reduced to the "chaser"; the final act so bad that it would help clear the theatre.

However movies still had a small devoted following. It was out of the amusement parlors that motion pictures finally evolved as a separate form of entertainment.

Arcade owners found that, of all the novelties offered, movies were the most popular. Starting with kinetoscopes in what was termed " penny vaudeville", they eventually began to set aside a space to project films on a screen or wall.

Marcus Loew's arcade, New York City

The rise of popularity of story films, in 1903, renewed public interest in movies.

One-reel films, like " The Great Train Robbery ", told stories in a fresh exciting way. Motion picture equipment became more readily available and a rental system of film exchanges started to open.

Nickel Madness swept across America, in 1906, as film production reached a point where it could support an independent theater.

A movie house in Mckeesport, Pennsylvania lent its name to this first wave of cinemas with their five cent admission, "the nickelodeon".