Chinatown Film Culture

The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco's Chinese Neighborhood

Kim K. Fahlstedt

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978804425
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Chinatown Film Culture provides the first comprehensive account of the emergence of film and moviegoing in the transpacific hub of San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Working with materials previously left in the margins of grand narratives of history, Kim K. Fahlstedt uncovers the complexity of a local entertainment culture that offered spaces where marginalized Chinese Americans experienced and participated in local iterations of modernity. At the same time, this space also fostered a powerful Orientalist aesthetic that would eventually be exported to Hollywood by San Francisco showmen such as Sid Grauman. Instead of primarily focusing on the screen-spectator relationship, Fahlstedt suggests that immigrant audiences' role in the proliferation of cinema as public entertainment in the United States saturated the whole moviegoing experience, from outside on the street to inside the movie theater. By highlighting San Francisco and Chinatown as featured participants rather than bit players, Chinatown Film Culture provides an historical account from the margins, alternative to the more dominant narratives of U.S. film history.

Part I

Early Film in San Francisco

1

Bold Visions and Frontier Conditions

The Emergence of Film in San Francisco

Historical scholarship on the early film culture in San Francisco is, lamentably, scarce. Geoffrey Bell’s The Golden Gate and the Silver Screen, published in 1984, provided a historical introduction to film production in the Bay Area.¹ Jack Tillmany’s mapping of San Francisco movie theaters focuses on developments of neighborhoods and cinema architecture from a century-long perspective.² Although significant in their own right, these studies provide us with little insight into local film culture during the nickelodeon boom and the transitional era. Therefore, the first part of this book provides a discursive mapping of San Francisco moving image culture between the years 1879 and 1917. The first period, between 1879 and 1906, will be awarded less consideration than the second, from after the earthquake and fire up until late 1917.

The two chapters in part I are bound by two seminal events that “happened” to the city in the early twentieth century: the 1906 earthquake and fire and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE). San Francisco historians, such as Gray Brechin and Sarah J. Moore, have foregrounded the razing and rebuilding of the city as essential to the experience of modernity.³ The destruction was vast and devastating, but it also offered an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild the city virtually from scratch. While many of the ideas of raising a Paris of the West from the ruins of old San Francisco eventually proved too impractical, the spirit of renewal and sophistication resided in visions of the city throughout the early 1910s. For the modern vision of San Francisco, the earthquake provided a distinct point of departure, while the PPIE offered a rare and eventually tangible horizon for modern life. These two events, more than any other, conditioned the development of film culture in San Francisco during the nickelodeon and transitional eras.

While part I provides an unprecedented exploration of the emergence of cinema in San Francisco, the chapters are both written to inform the investigation of Chinatown that follows. In other words, this account of San Francisco film culture slants toward Chinatown. The focus makes the historical hierarchization of people and places of exhibition appear different than would a more holistic account of the city’s early film culture. As a consequence, figures of established importance to U.S. film history, like Eugene Roth, the Miles Brothers, and Gilbert “Broncho Billy” Anderson, are not given extensive consideration beyond a mere mention, since their involvement in Chinatown film history was negligible. Some well-known characters of the early film industry, like Sid Grauman, are cast in a different light, given their considerable involvement in the Chinatown exhibition scene. It is also necessary to bring people previously obscure in U.S. film history to the forefront, given their prominence in the Chinatown film scene. Because this chapter focuses on the importance of these people’s respective involvement in the San Francisco film scene at large, it does not discuss Chinatown and the adjacent North Beach area in depth. Instead, these two areas function as a destination toward which we detour, through the city, in space and time.

Before we consider the first decades of film culture in San Francisco, it may be useful to revisit the notion of “film culture” briefly. The employment of the term is to enable a perspective on film history that includes consideration of film exhibition, distribution, and production and how they functioned in local contexts and public discourses. These interrelated strands are commonly referred to in U.S. film history as the three areas of control and power interest during the establishment of the U.S. film industry on the West Coast in the 1910s. This chapter considers how these three intertwined strands of film industry connect to the local setting of San Francisco in general, and Chinatown in particular, during a period of significant upheaval.

Finally, in studies on early film culture, the experience of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is intrinsically linked to the technological and perceptual developments of cinema in the early 1900s.⁴ This link runs like a current through these chapters’ cartographic endeavor to locate movies against the dynamism of modern post-quake city life. By investigating a range of institutions that continually shaped the flux of film culture, from the meeting rooms of city planners to the street corners of nighttime entertainment, I seek answers to a set of fundamental questions about the emergence of cinema in San Francisco. How did the grand visions of the post-quake city impact the development of film culture? Why were some theaters more popular than others? Why were some theaters visited more frequently on a weekday, and where did people go on the weekend, and why? For whom was going to the movies a recurring part of the daily routine, and for whom was it an unusual event? Let us begin.

Pre-quake Film Culture

Although Los Angeles holds the central position as the transformative power of U.S. film history, the history of film culture in San Francisco predates that of its southern cousin to a considerable degree. While the invention and first public exhibitions of film are most commonly dated to around 1895, a historicization of San Francisco’s film culture has to take into account the photographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1870s, conducted under the auspices of San Francisco tycoon Leland Stanford. Muybridge made his most famous efforts to capture and reproduce real-life movement on photographic plates in the Palo Alto area, today recognized as the fountainhead of technological development in the twenty-first century. Muybridge’s revolutionary inventions made it possible to study real-life movement in a progressive state of arrest. Albeit not the first invention that anticipated the coming of the film medium, it was one of the most conspicuous. In the words of Rebecca Solnit, it was as though Muybridge “had grasped time, made it stand still, and then made it run again, over and over.”⁵ The now iconic strip of images of a horse midstride made its public debut at the San Francisco Art Association in 1880, on Pine Street, just a couple of blocks away from Chinatown. Up until the 1906 disaster, San Francisco’s main entertainment area started around Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square and ran with the streetcar along Kearny Street, all the way down to Market Street. It was at the junction of these two streets that the first public showing of film occurred some fifteen years later.

In 1894, Peter Bacigalupi, a phonograph salesman and penny arcade proprietor, bought five Edison kinetoscopes from the Holland Brothers for $2,500.⁶ San Francisco–born Bacigalupi had spent the past decade building a small entertainment emporium in Peru. In the early 1890s, he was involved in several scandals, among them the death of the young wife of a well-known San Francisco steamship captain.⁷ The events forced him to leave South America and go back to his native city. Upon his return, Bacigalupi went back into the entertainment business. He set up a storefront operation in the San Francisco Chronicle building on the corner of Market and Kearny Streets. From there, he continued with entertainment parlors on Market and Stockton Streets and in the old Bella Union Theater on Kearny, on the border between the Barbary Coast and Chinatown. While Bacigalupi briefly attempted to expand his business to Los Angeles, San Francisco remained his home base.⁸ The headquarters of this little emporium lay on Mission Street, between Third and Fourth Streets.⁹

Although others had taken over the torch from Muybridge, the city still remembered his remarkable moving pictures. With the coming of Edison’s kinetoscope, the Chronicle evoked Muybridge’s exhibit at the Art Association: “The invention will be greatly developed, and it is not impossible that it will prove an invaluable aid to chemists, who, with its assistance, can watch processes too rapid for the human eye to note.”¹⁰ News about the novel and improved variety of moving pictures traveled quickly, and soon people lined up outside to pay ten cents to catch a glimpse of the visual wonder.¹¹

In 1897, Adolphus W. Furst, a middle-aged former auctioneer, opened a motion picture theater on Market Street, across from the east end of Grant Avenue.¹² Furst named the place after its Lubin Cineograph, a combined camera/projector. During the next few years, the Cineograph became a staple in San Francisco’s nightlife.¹³ Historians regard Furst’s movie house as one of the first in the whole nation to show films exclusively.¹⁴ According to an article in the Moving Picture World, the two-story building started as a vaudeville and moving picture theater. Films were shown on the ground floor, where there was no seating. Tickets for the stage show and the films were sold separately, the five-cent price of admission for films being the cheaper. After some time, Furst scrapped the vaudeville, and the theater continued as a film-only establishment.¹⁵ Just like Bacigalupi’s entertainment parlor, Furst’s moving-picture theater attracted spectators from all over the San Francisco area, most of them drawn to the novelty of the medium.¹⁶ In 1902, Furst branched out and opened another Cineograph theater in Los Angeles, before moving there permanently in 1906.¹⁷

In 1898, former vaudeville actor David “D.J.” Grauman and his son, Sid, opened the Unique Theater on Market Street, close to the corner of Mason Street. The young Grauman was inspired to work in moving pictures after working as a janitor at Furst’s theater for a time.¹⁸ According to Grauman’s biographer Charles Beardsley, the building in which the family business started was known as the Hoodoo Store, “because everybody who set up there had bad luck.”¹⁹ However, the luck was turning for the Graumans, whose initial business model was to buy and screen foreign films from companies like Pathé and Gaumont, distributed by Bacigalupi, among others. D. J. Grauman, in an interview with Moving Picture World, recalled that Edison’s material was of low quality compared with the foreign films. He also related that the greatest pre-quake sensation at the Unique Theater had been Georges Méliès’s film A Trip to the Moon.²⁰ The Graumans soon opened another theater, the Lyceum, on 310 O’Farrell. Both theaters ran vaudeville and films, using a Bioscope projector. Despite Beardsley’s claim that the Graumans’ theater was an instant and long-lasting success, local newspaper reports on the family’s pre-quake dealings suggest that the initial years included considerable struggles and that D. J. Grauman had to make a financial settlement with another local showman as late as January 30, 1906, in order not to lose the Unique Theater.²¹

The year 1902 was when America’s first film exchange came into existence, originated by three brothers from Cincinnati, Ohio, with the family name of Miles. The Miles Brothers’ road to San Francisco film culture took a long, but not uncommon, detour through Alaska, where they shot films of the gold rush in 1900. It was Harry, the eldest, who came up with the idea of the film exchange as a way of maximizing the profits for screenings of their films. He started renting out films to the local vaudeville houses from a storefront located in the Tenderloin neighborhood, on 116 Turk Street, conveniently located just a block away from Market Street.

Al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Early Film in San Francisco
• Part II: Chinatown Exhibition and Movie Theaters
• Part III: Chinese American Audiences
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author