{"id":145,"date":"2009-03-23T10:58:32","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T10:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/?p=145"},"modified":"2009-03-23T11:07:35","modified_gmt":"2009-03-23T11:07:35","slug":"escape-to-a-cool-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/2009\/03\/23\/escape-to-a-cool-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Escape To A Cool Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Prior to the 1920’s, movie going was more of a cool weather pastime, as the stuffy confines of\u00a0theatre auditoriums\u00a0didn’t particularly lend themselves to personal comfort during the summer months.\u00a0With the arrival of\u00a0hot weather, one was more likely to frequent the park or a ball game than the local cinema, sending box office receipts plummeting. Theatre operators attempted to overcome this issue through various gimmicks, such as the distribution of paper fans\u00a0and free ice water (Anaheim’s Grand Theatre <\/a>even advertised “perfumed” air, as a means of overcoming the unpleasantness that often accompanied an auditorium full of over-heated patrons), but the problem persisted until Willis Carrier\u00a0introduced air conditioning to the industry in 1925.<\/p>\n

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First installed in New York City’s Rivoli Theatre, the new technology was\u00a0initially met with skepticism, as movie goers attended\u00a0a memorial day weekend test run with hand fans at the ready. However, by the\u00a0end of the film, Paramount Pictures’ chief, Adolf Zukor, summed up the experience of air conditioning with, “Yes,\u00a0the people are going to like it.” Within five years, Carrier had installed his system in an additional three hundred\u00a0cinemas and the hot summer months had transformed in to the movie industry’s top\u00a0grossing season.<\/p>\n

Billed as everything from “refrigerated air” to “cool comfort”, air conditioning became a key marketing tool for cinemas, often appearing as prominently on marquees and in print advertisements as the features being shown. There might even be an argument made that air conditioning played a greater role in cinema’s mid twentieth century boom than the Hollywood machine that\u00a0fueled the industry, as\u00a0movie theatres\u00a0stood as one of the few public outlets, that uniformly featured air conditioning, well\u00a0in to the 1950’s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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While “AC” would begin to proliferate the urban landscape by the 60’s, becoming a standard feature in most businesses and even a common household amenity,\u00a0cinemas remained a summer time staple. Even today,\u00a0movie goers flock to theatres during the summer months; not only to escape in to a blockbuster film, but to escape from the heat in a “cool movie”.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prior to the 1920’s, movie going was more of a cool weather pastime, as the stuffy confines of\u00a0theatre auditoriums\u00a0didn’t particularly lend themselves to personal comfort during the summer months.\u00a0With the arrival of\u00a0hot weather, one was more likely to frequent the park or a ball game than the local cinema, sending box office receipts plummeting. Theatre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions\/153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}