20 Old Movie Theater Traditions You Forgot Existed

During the 1920s, America’s fancy new “movie palaces” prohibited the sale of popcorn on the premises, concerned that the sticky mess would soil their plush carpets and upholstery. Vendors set up stands outside, and moviegoers occasionally smuggled in their own. When the Great Depression caused a sharp decline in ticket sales, movie theater owners started installing popcorn vending machines in their lobbies, allowing them to charge a markup of more than 80%. The one snack they tried to prohibit ended up keeping them afloat.

In an attempt to hold on to its audience during the years from late 1952 through mid-1954, Hollywood made several 3-D films that were shown on twin synchronized projectors using polarized light. One of the greatest successes of the 3-D craze was Warner Bros.’ 1953 “House of Wax,” starring the ever-distinguished Vincent Price. The audiences saw the films while wearing cardboard glasses with gray polarized lenses. Problems with projection equipment, along with viewer fatigue, ended the fad in about two years.

During the Great Depression, when the unemployment rate was 25% or more, theaters struggled for ways to attract moviegoers on a sluggish weeknight. In order to encourage attendance, theater owners started collaborating with ceramics companies like Salem China of Ohio to offer “dish nights,” when each female ticket buyer received a complimentary china piece. If a woman continued her weekly trips to the movies, she would eventually receive enough chinaware to build an entire dinnerware set of 32 to 52 pieces. That free plate kept audiences coming back.

By the end of the 1930s, there were only a few dozen drive-in theaters, a mere few years after the format was invented. But early drive-ins had large speaker towers that were set up outdoors and often annoyed their neighbors with loud speakers. In 1941, electronics company RCA announced a weatherized speaker box that the driver could unhook from a post and clamp onto the side of the car’s window and crank the volume himself or herself. This solved the noise problem for neighbors and drove the drive-in to become commonplace across the suburbs of America. By 1958, there were more than 4,000 drive-in theaters in existence.

In 1931, Charles U. Yeager, a theater manager from Colorado, created Bank Night to attract Depression-fatigued audiences into movie theaters during the week. Patrons would sign a ledger in the lobby, then a name was drawn onstage. If that person was present, they would win a jackpot that initially amounted to about $25. The jackpot would roll over if no one won it. At its peak, more than 5,000 theaters were participating in Bank Night by 1936, though several state courts later challenged it under gambling laws.

Before the advent of synchronized sound in 1927, many “movie palaces” were equipped with large organs built to replace a 50-piece orchestra. The “Mighty Wurlitzer,” a famous example, could produce such sounds as a train whistle and galloping horses using its array of built-in mechanical effects. A lone organist rose out of the orchestra pit to play it via a hydraulic lift. Even as the new “talkies” rendered the accompaniment of the organ obsolete, recitals were still performed in movie houses well into the 1950s.

Back in the ’40s and ’50s, when there was a baby boom in the U.S., theaters started installing “crying rooms,” usually in the back of the auditorium or underneath a balcony, to reduce the noise of bawling babies. A crying room had a glass window and was soundproofed so that parents could watch a performance while calming a howling child without disturbing anyone else.

Cigarettes were ubiquitous in American life during the 1950s, and movie houses reflected this habit. The great movie palaces of the 1920s featured basement smoking lounges with leather armchairs and fireplace mantels, and often had “smoking loge” areas in the balcony, where a good proportion of the seat backs contained metal flip-out ashtrays. They did not allow patrons to smoke on the main floor, since haze in the air would blur the image on the screen.

Most movie houses for many decades operated on continuous performance, so you never had to be there for showtime. You could walk in the door at any time, walk past the usher, go down the hall, find a seat, and begin watching the film. When the film came around to the scene you walked in on, you would say, “This is where we came in,” and leave. It took a long time for the idea of showtime to gain momentum. That began to change when director Alfred Hitchcock decided that for his 1960 movie “Psycho,” he wouldn’t let anyone into the theater once the screening started. For years afterward, second-run theaters continued to operate on continuous performance.

In the largest downtown movie palaces in the 1920s and 1930s, those operated by theatrical showmen like Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, the motion picture was just part of what you got when you bought a ticket. At the Roxy Theatre in New York City, for example, patrons were treated to a half-hour live prologue that included orchestral overtures, operatic numbers, acrobats, and a dance team called the Roxyettes (which later became the Rockettes). For working-class moviegoers, the cinema was giving them a Broadway show along with the film.

The bouncing ball was a sing-along technique used by Max and Dave Fleischer in the “Song Car-Tunes” cartoons created at Fleischer Studios beginning in 1924. They made a glowing orb bounce around the lyrics during a song, synchronizing with the accompaniment of the theater organist so that everyone in the audience could sing the lyrics to “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” Max Fleischer patented the device in 1926, and it continued to be used in theaters through the 1930s.

Prior to the main feature, the likes of Universal, Republic, and Columbia were running chapter plays like “Flash Gordon” and “Zorro,” broken into 12-15 weekly installments lasting around 15-20 minutes apiece. Every chapter stopped on a life-or-death moment, a falling car or an explosion, which is where the word “cliffhanger” actually comes from. The audience had to return next week to find out if the hero made it.

Prior to the introduction of network TV news circa 1955, newsreels were ubiquitous. Theaters routinely featured Pathé News, Fox Movietone and Paramount News shorts before each movie. Audiences saw the horrors of World War II, heard presidential speeches, and watched the Hindenburg disaster unfold in 1937. Newsreel studios operated for a number of additional years even as their audiences dwindled.

Theater ushers between the 1910s and 1950s were not standing at the front door waving you inside. They were, in fact, working the floor. Dressed in military-style uniforms with brass buttons and white gloves, they ushered patrons to their seats with flashlights, since movies were shown continuously and patrons walked into dark auditoriums at all hours. Ushers also shushed loud patrons, looked out for violators of the smoking ban, and even delivered urgent phone messages directly to a patron’s seat.

Between reel changes in the theaters from the 1900s to the 1930s, projectionists would project painted glass lantern slides from commercial slide companies to fill in the time. Slides flashed rules of conduct, asking women to take off their wide-brimmed hats, discouraging spitting and smoking, alongside local merchant ads and lost-child announcements. In the days before the trailer, the glass slide was how the theater talked to its patrons.

In the days before air-conditioned homes, the summer heat was so oppressive to businesses that theaters often closed in July and August. In 1922, when New York City’s Rivoli Theatre installed a chiller developed by Carrier Engineering Corporation, it hung signs outside that read “It’s Cool Inside,” complete with painted icicles. Suddenly, the 25-cent movie ticket became an escape from the oppressive heat of the outdoors, and summer turned into one of the busiest seasons.

During the Great Depression, theaters began showing a big-studio “A-picture” along with a cheaper “B-picture,” often from a low-budget studio such as Monogram Pictures. Along with newsreels and cartoons, the ticket bought you three to four hours of entertainment. This system, called the double feature, became the norm for going to the movies in North America up until the 1950s.

In exchange for a nickel or a dime, kids in the 1920s through the 1950s flooded theaters on Saturday afternoons to watch matinees put on by the theaters themselves: two feature films, typically Westerns or action films, with cartoons, newsreels, and another episode of a serial. The shows lasted for hours and brought entertainment to kids and leisure to their parents. To a lot of kids, going to the movies in the middle of the 20th century meant going to a matinee.

Warner Bros. had Bugs Bunny, Disney had Mickey Mouse, MGM had Tom and Jerry, Paramount had Popeye. All four studios produced six- to eight-minute cartoon shorts for general audiences, all ages, in both day and evening showings, not just kids’ matinees. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that theatrical cartoon production died out. Rather, studios licensed their libraries for TV.

In 1957, Chicago’s Filmack Studios released “Let’s All Go to the Lobby,” an animated short where a marching chorus line of cartoon snacks sang viewers toward the concession stand during intermission. It was made by Dave Fleischer, the animator behind those earlier bouncing-ball sing-alongs. As television chipped away at ticket sales, theaters leaned harder on snack revenue. In 2000, the short was chosen for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.

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