Case Study: Labor History & Exhibition - nonmodernist/magic-lantern GitHub Wiki

Case Study: "Our Issue Is With the Companies": Uncovering Exhibition Labor History With Magic Lantern

How Magic Lantern's Search Profile Strategy Revealed a Hidden History of Theater Rebellion 🎬⚡

The Setup 🔍

When I started testing Magic Lantern's labor history profile—whipped up as an experiment to make sure the tool could work for different research questions-I expected to find the usual suspects: studio strikes, union negotiations, maybe some Munchkin actor disputes from The Wizard of Oz. What I didn't expect was to uncover an entire parallel labor movement where independent theater owners basically said "screw it, we're going on strike too!"

The magic search term? "Picketed" 🪧

The Timeline: A Movement Builds 📅

This wasn't just one random protest. It was a movement that built over years:

Act 1: The MGM Rebellion (1936) 🎭

It all started with MGM getting too greedy. From Film Bulletin (December 9, 1936):

"I. T. O. members in meeting today expressed dissatisfaction with Al Lichtman's speech of the previous day defending the current M-G-M sales policy... They further oppose payments of excessive salaries and bonuses to executives who are not directly occupied in production, believing these excessive salaries are partly responsible for excessive film rentals."

They literally called out executive bonuses as the reason for high film prices, and planned to picket other area theatres who didn't refrain from booking MGM films. From the same issue:

"A fund of $5,000 is to be set up to make effective the punitive action of picketing, which will be resorted to in the cases of all theatres showing M-G-M pictures while the strike is on."

A strike fund! We love to see it.

Act 2: The Paramount Showdown (1937) 🥊

In 1937, Paramount tried to pull a fast one with six films:

'The Count of Luxembourg'
'Artists and Models'
'High, Wide and Handsome'
'Spawn of the North'
'Souls at Sea'
Plus a Marlene Dietrich film directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Paramount wanted to move these from the 1936-37 contracts (where exhibitors had already paid for them) to the NEW 1937-38 contracts. But fresh off their MGM action, exhibitors were strike ready:

"The Philadelphia United Motion Picture Theatre Owners voted to continue indefinitely to refrain from dating Paramount pictures under contract..."

And they didn't just boycott quietly. Court testimony revealed they'd planned to use airplanes and sound trucks to shame any theater that dared show Paramount films! ✈️📢

The scale was huge:

4,000 independent owners nationwide
3,000+ actively joined the movement
400 owners in Philadelphia alone were "enraged" 😡

Meanwhile, Everyone Else Was Striking Too 🎪

The Magic Lantern labor search strategy revealed this was happening everywhere:

Musicians vs. Theaters, 1947:

"The [Cox] theatre is being picketed by members of Local No. 1, American Federation of Musicians..."

Projectionists vs. Fox, 1939:

"The Fox theatre and six neighborhood and suburban houses in St. Louis are being picketed by Local 143, projectionists."

Tokyo Gets Creative, 1946 🇯🇵:

When the bosses told 5,000 Toho employees that they weren't giving out cost-of-living adjustments,

"The workers didn't strike. They merely threw open the doors of four of Tokyo's largest film houses and gave free shows at the expense of the boss in his own theaters to win public sympathy."

FREE MOVIES as a strike tactic! 🎟️✨

Labor as Content Police 👮‍♀️

They even organized boycotts of anti-union films! From 1939:

"'Our Leading Citizen' has been condemned as unfair to labor unions by the executive board of the local central labor council, representing 40 unions."

40 unions told theaters: "Don't you DARE show this anti-labor propaganda!" 🚫

The Civil Rights Evolution 🌟

By 1961, these tactics had evolved for civil rights, as college students picketed movie theatres that tried to remain segregated in a post-Brown v. Board world:

"Details of the integration arrangement for the Carolina [a theatre in Chapel Hill, NC] were worked out by the Chapel Hill Human Relations Committee in conferences with W. G. Enloe, Raleigh, N.C. district manager for the ABC-Paramount chain which operates the Chapel Hill theatres. The chain owns other theatres in nearby Durham, Raleigh, and Greensboro which also have been picketed, but there was no announcement concerning a policy change for the other movie houses. Both [movie] houses in Chapel Hill were picketed last spring by a group which called itself the Chapel Hill Committee For Open Movies. The picketing began in January when an effort to integrate the Carolina for a showing of “Porgy and Bess” failed."

Why This Discovery Blew My Mind 🤯

Exhibition was the REAL labor battleground - Forget studio gates, the theaters were in revolt!
They talked like unions! - "Date strike," "buying combine," "strike funds" - this was explicit class warfare.
They called out the real villains - Executive bonuses! In 1936!
Federal courts as strike-breakers - Paramount ran straight to federal court for injunctions (classic boss move).
DoJ Spies - The Justice Department reportedly had people secretly observing what was going on in these theatres and exchanges—TEN YEARS before U.S. v. Paramount Pictures made it to the Supreme Court.

The Research Magic ✨

What made this search work:

"Picketed" bridges labor AND exhibition contexts
The labor profile boosted regional papers (where the REAL tea was spilled ☕)
Date range flexibility caught the multi-year build-up
Consolidating search results for different studios and eras revealed cross-sector patterns

Your Turn! 🎯

What other hidden labor stories are waiting in the archives?

Try terms that cross contexts ("walkout," "boycott," "organize")
Regional publications = where the drama lives
Look for business disputes using labor language
Check multiple years - movements build slowly!

The Bottom Line 💫

Magic Lantern didn't just find labor disputes - it revealed that independent theater owners were basically running their own union movement, complete with:

Strike funds 💰
Picketing campaigns 🪧
Executive salary critiques 📊
International solidarity 🌍

And Paramount's president claiming the boycott would only cost "$10,000"? Sure, bud. That's why you ran to federal court for emergency injunctions! 😂

Ready to discover your own forgotten revolution? Fire up Magic Lantern and let's see what labor stories you can uncover in the archives! 🚀

P.S. Those "boring" business disputes in the trades? They might be full-scale labor rebellions in disguise! The exhibitors of 1936 walked so MoviePass could run 😜