| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 213 words from this article are provided below; about 343 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910–1914. By Richard Abel. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xviii, 373 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 9780-520-24742-0. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-520-24743-7.)

This book is in many ways the sequel to Richard Abel's earlier work, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (1999), which explains how the French Pathé company helped Americanize cinema in the United States by emerging—unwillingly—as its "foreign" counterpart amid the early industrialization of motion picture production and distribution. Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910–1914 advances from the nickelodeon era of the 1900s to the crucial 1910s when the Motion Picture Patents Company "trust" vied with "independents" to dominate the industry and when multi-reel narratives began to emerge as its cardinal commodities. The so-called special feature, or simply "feature," films were exhibited across the country in grand new movie palaces. The U.S. market depended on American-made films and films made in Europe, primarily in France and Italy. As Abel explains, some of the earliest successful feature films were imports, so that for some observers the emergent industry—its very emergence—remained marked by foreignness. Given the coincident foreignness of so many urban audiences in those peak years of immigration, Americanization remains a pressing and multifaceted issue, one that Abel ably addresses.

. . .

There are about 343 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.