Movies & Memphis The 100-year rise of Malco Theatres traces the turbulent history of the film industry.
ILLUSTRATION BY KUCO | DREAMSTIME.COM; PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF MALCO THEATRES
The Malco Theatre (now The Orpheum) in 1972; M.A. Lightman Sr. holding Stephen Lightman with M.A. Jr.
COVER STORY by
Chris McCoy
Friday nights are a movie theater’s bread and butter, but on Friday, January 9, 2015, the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill theater was closed to the public. The lobby was still bustling, but on this night it was with a crowd of dressedup VIPs sipping champagne, munching on movie-themed hors d’oeuvres, and talking about the old days. Malco Theatres has been welcoming Friday-night moviegoers for 100 years, and it was time for celebration.
Naturally, Malco treated its extended family to a movie. There were four to choose from, tracing the century-long evolution of films that had brightened Malco’s screens and drawn patrons through the doors of dozens of theaters: from Hollywood’s miracle year, 1939, The Wizard of Oz; from the post-studio system 1960s, The Sound of Music; from the auteurist 1970s, The Godfather; and from the dawn of computer-generated imagery, 1994’s Forrest Gump. (For the record, The Godfather was the most popular choice among the partygoers.) “We as a species are biologically driven to go to the movies,” says Jeff Kaufman, Malco’s senior vice president of film and marketing. “We spent 25,000 years living in caves, being told stories by firelight. That’s how our species evolved. You can see cave drawings all over the world that are thousands of years old. That communal experience that our forefathers had translates into what we do today in the movie theater.” Experiments with moving pictures date back to the mid-19th century, soon after the invention of photography. In the 1880s, watching a movie was a personal
affair. You put a coin in a Kinetoscope machine and peered into the eyepiece to see short films of vaudeville acts or scantily clad women dancing. The first public exhibition of a projected film in America was in New York City in 1898. The 1903 film The Great Train Robbery caused a sensation with a startling innovation: a plot. “The first theater in Memphis was opened in 1905 by Charles Dinstuhl, next to his candy store on the corner of Washington and Main. It was called the Theatorium Theatre,” says Vincent Astor, historian and author of the 2013 book Memphis Movie Theatres. “It was an actual nickelodeon with a large number of seats in front of a screen. It was a storefront, but it was the first storefront converted to show movies.” Soon, theaters like the Optic and the Majestic dotted downtown. “Memphis has always been a big theater town,” says Astor. “There were a handful of [vaudeville] theaters in the 19th century. Several of them ended up being used for films when it was profitable to do that.” Short subjects still ruled during the first decade of the 20th century, but films gradually became longer. The first to reach what we now consider feature length was the 1906 Australian crime epic The Story of the Kelly Gang. European cinema led the way until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, which coincided with a flowering of film production in a formerly sleepy California town called Hollywood. In 1915, Nashville native and Vanderbilt University graduate M.A. Lightman rented a storefront in Sheffield, Alabama, and opened a movie theater called the Liberty Theater. By then, the modern movie theater business was taking shape. First, theater owners from the informal vaudeville circuits banded together into multistate chains, then the movie studios themselves, like Warner Brothers and Paramount, got into the business in what’s called today a move toward vertical integration. But there was no shortage of independently owned movie theaters in America. “The theaters came and went. There were different circuits that owned different theaters, CONTINUED ON PAGE 18
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