I’m particularly interested in books about the movie industry in NYC and Florida during the days when theaters were more likely to be a general store with a screen and projector than a movie palace. I live in a city where the early success of hometown boy Oliver Hardy* in pics (long before he teamed up with Stan Laurel) led several young folk to briefly run off to Florida and NYC and I’m curious as to what they’d have found in either place.
*A case of prophet in his own country: Oliver Hardy (who officially went by his middle name of Norvell when he lived here, though almost everybody called him “Fatty”) lived in the shadow of his good looking and popular older half-brothers (one of whom drowned while partying with Fatty and some other relatives and friends- the story relayed by one of his contemporaries 50 years later on THIS IS YOUR LIFE brought him to tears again); he was known for his beautiful singing voice but that was about it. When he left town to enter the motion picture industry (he was the town’s first projectionist and thought to himself “I can make better stuff than this”) he was pretty much written off as a loss, but when his first motion picture was shown here after WW1 (it was several years old at the time) he was honored in the paper in a headline that hangs on my wall:
“FATTY HARDY MAKES MOVIE”
(More hometown movie trivia: The movie was shown in a general store that became a movie theater twice a week; the store was soon sold to an unpleasant merchant named Marion Stembridge who would later kill a young black girl whose brother owed him money and later, in 1953, he went on a killing spree of local lawyers. These events were fictionalized (but barely) in the book and movie Paris Trout and in a short story by other famous hometowner, Flannery O’Connor.