NPR
Nickelodeons were once as common as coffee shops, and the nickel-a-pop silent films they showed were as disposable as YouTube videos. That made for a lot of competition in the early days of the movie business — competition that fueled the rise of an indie-films culture as early as 1909. Not that you’d know it from the history books. “We don’t know 90 percent of the history yet,” says Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, who teaches film history at Georgia State University. Then as now, she says, the dominant movie studios hogged the limelight, and most of the era’s chroniclers overlooked the little guys.”…The demand was so great that these few studios who tried to lock up the American market couldn’t satisfy all their needs.” One man who saw opportunity in that picture was Edwin Thanhouser, who ran a theater company in Milwaukee, Wis. Read more about the survival of Thanhouser’s company and to watch two vintage Thanhouser films.