One Cent Vaudeville 

Motion pictures started to lose their appeal with theatre audiences as the Gay 90s drew to a close. These short films had become increasingly boring and repetitious. 

 

Penny Vaudeville in 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 America 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 as the Battleships Iowa and Massachusetts.   
Movies also supposedly gained special prominence during the Wtie 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.   

Reputedly in some vaudeville houses motion pictures had become the "chaser"; the final act so bad that it would help clear the theatre. Another claim awaiting additional research.
It was out of the amusement parlors that motion pictures finally evolved as a separate form of entertainment.
Starting with kinetoscopes in what was termed "penny vaudeville", arcade owners eventually began to set aside a space to  project films on a screen or wall. 





Marcus Loew's arcade, New York City 




Adolph Zukor's "One cent vaudeville" in New York City 

The  rise in 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 and  independent theatre.
A movie house in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lent its name  to this first wave of cinemas with their five cent admission-the nickelodeon.