Roxy and His Gang: Silent film exhibition and the birth of media convergence

This dissertation analyzes the industrial, cultural, and formal influence of Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel (1882--1936), the most prolific motion picture exhibitor during the silent and early sound film eras and one of the country's earliest and most influential broadcasters. This study examines Roxy's work as a filmmaker, editor, music director, stage producer, propagandist, broadcaster, and published author to more fully articulate how silent era film exhibitors were not bureaucratic functionaries, but producers who should be analyzed for their own thematic and stylistic predilections and industrial and cultural influence. This research demonstrates that motion picture theaters during this period were not only sites of entertainment consumption but of entertainment production that spawned the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording that foreshadowed contemporary media conglomeration and helped create a new multimedia and multinational entertainment industry. Roxy and His Gang redefines the function of deluxe motion picture theaters---as venues for live and recorded entertainment---and reorients our focus on media convergence to a much earlier period in order to trace the industry's persistent desire for technological and corporate synergy. This study uses primary sources including film, radio, and music trade press reports, contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, and internal memoranda and external correspondence to demonstrate Roxy's industrial and aesthetic influence on motion picture exhibition and the film industry, early broadcasting and the creation of the variety show format, the theme song craze of the late 1920s and its impact on music publishing and recording, and the convergence of these once disparate technologies and industries. "Roxy and His Gang" traces his rise from a nickelodeon operator to his management of New York's most important motion picture theaters in the 1910s, his role in World War I filmmaking and fundraising, and his management of the Capitol Theatre and its nationally broadcasted radio show, "Roxy and His Gang." This dissertation further establishes Roxy's leading role in the convergence of film and radio in the 1920s and his work scoring/assembling Fox Movietone soundtracks. His disappointment with Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy Theatre demonstrates his declining power after the coming of sound.