Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Newsreels,
largely forgotten today, were a major news medium for
most of the 20th century providing audiences a “you are there” quality to news
events. Newsreels, like radio and TV, at first complemented the news coverage
of the Mobile Register and other printed media. Later they competed for
audiences.
Silent versions of newsreels had been around since the early 1900s and were enormously popular. When newsreels added sound in the late 1920s, they became wildly more attractive to audiences. At the high point of newsreels’ popularity, more than 7 out of every 10 Americans watched them every week.
Theaters most often showed newsreels as part of their entertainment programs before the feature film.
Newsreels took their style and structure from newspapers and served as an illustrated supplement to the stories audiences were familiar with from the dailies. Audiences watched newsreels to see for themselves the events they had read about in the newspaper. Many years later, when television supplanted newsreels, this audience relationship reversed. TV viewers bought newspapers to read more details about the stories they had seen broadcast on the small screen.
Just as newspaper owners invested in the new medium of radio, they also backed the newsreel business. William Randolph Hearst, for example, owned Hearst Metrotone, one of the big five newsreel companies, the other four being: Fox Movietone, Paramount, Universal, and Warner-Pathe, owned by RKO after 1931.
Whether any newspaper owners in Mobile produced newsreels or operated newsreel theaters or other theaters isn’t known. But there are at least two existing newsreels about Mobile and there may have been others. One of the two existing newsreels is a Pathe film from the silent era and shows President Woodrow Wilson’s visit to Mobile in 1913. The other, produced during World War II by the Office of War Information Bureau of Motion Pictures, shows the effect on the Port City of the influx of tens of thousands of war workers.
Evidence that there were other local newsreels comes from a 1920 photo by Mobile photographer Erik Overbey, whose photos also appeared in the Register. His photo of the Crown Theater on Dauphin Street shows a hand-lettered display board announcing “TODAY. LAUNCHING THE CITY OF MOBILE AT CHICASAW,” apparently a newsreel about the launching of a cargo ship at the Chickasaw shipyard north of Mobile.
Newsreels lost audience popularity in the long transition to television. But even early TV programs sometime used newsreels. Newsreels managed to hold out in some theaters until the early 1970s when the medium disappeared.
Sources
Selina Williams, “Newsreels, 100 Years Legacies: The Lasting Impact of World War I,” the Wall Street Journal. Web: https://graphics.wsj.com/100-legacies-from-world-war-1/newsreels; Accessed on August 11, 2019; “Collecting news,” The Newsroom blog, British Library, December 16, 2018. Web: https://blogs.bl.uk/thenewsroom/2018/12/index.html?_ga=2.122523720.239422061.1565540831-2095941634.1565540831; Accessed on August 11, 2019; Luke McKernan, “ Newsreels and history,” XI Jornadas de Investigação do CIAC Faro, February 9, 2017. Web: https://lukemckernan.com/2017/02/12/newsreels-and-history/; Accessed on August 11, 2019; Joseph E.J. Clark, “Canned History: American Newsreels and the Commodification of Reality, 1927-1945,” (Dissertation, Brown University: 2011). Web: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:11195/; Accessed on August 11, 2019; Scott L. Althaus, “The Forgotten Role of the Global Newsreel Industry in the Long Transition from Text to Television,” International Journal of Press/Politics 15(2) 193-218. Web: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1940161209358761; Accessed on August 11, 2019.
