First Movie Theater Opens in 1902

1902 : First movie theater opens

The first American theater devoted solely to movies opens in Los Angeles on this day in 1902. Housed in a circus tent, the venue was dubbed "The Electric Theater." Its earliest pictures included "New York in a Blizzard." Admission cost about 10 cents for a one-hour show.

Inventors in Europe and the United States, including Thomas Edison, had been developing film cameras since the late 1880s. Early films were shown in individual viewing devices called Kinetoscopes. By the late 1890s, audiences could attend public demonstrations of movies, and several movie "factories" (as the earliest production studios were called) had been formed. In 1896, the Edison Company inaugurated the era of commercial movies, showing a collection of moving images as a minor act in a vaudeville show that also included live acts, among which were a Russian clown, an "eccentric dancer," and a "gymnastic comedian." The film, shown at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, featured images of dancers, ocean waves, and gondolas.

Short films, usually less than a minute long, became a regular part of vaudeville shows at the turn of the century but were often shown at the very end of the performance, as "chasers," while the audience left the theater. A vaudeville performers' strike in 1901, however, left theaters scrambling for acts, and movies became the main event. In the earliest years, vaudeville theater owners had to purchase films from factories via mail order, rather than renting them, which made it expensive to change shows frequently. Starting in 1902, Henry Miles of San Francisco began renting films to theaters, forming the basis of today's distribution system. After the opening of the first movie theater, in Los Angeles in 1902, amusement arcades began opening small storefront theaters called Nickelodeans (so called because admission cost 5 cents), which showed short silent films, usually less than 15 minutes, accompanied by a live pianist. By 1907, some 2 million Americans had visited a Nickelodean.