(1) I make no grand claims for Lexington's typicality in the prenickelodeon period, nor do I make excuses for the fact that this essay has a pointedly local focus. But what about those locales outside the orbit of the major vaudeville circuits? How and under what auspices were motion pictures made available to the provinces? How was the new medium exploited, promoted, and legitimated in cities, small towns, and rural areas far removed from Boston, Chicago, and New York City? With these questions in mind, I will examine how motion pictures were situated in Lexington, Kentucky, a biracial city of 26,000, with virtually no industry and in-migration and a very small immigrant population. The incorporation of motion pictures into vaudeville is a well-documented case in point. In the prenickelodeon period, the marketing and exhibition of motion pictures was predominantly a matter of situating this new commodity within entertainment sites and occasions that were for the most part already established. In this regard, the decade before nickelodeons became a regular feature of everyday leisure life is of particular interest, and not only because the turn of the century was a crucial time of transition for the culture at large. It is also the cultural history of film in America-how and where Americans took in and took to the movies. THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FILM IS MORE than a story of great artists and canny entrepreneurs, technological inventions, industrial practices, and aesthetic/formal uses of the medium.

Lexington opera house capacity