At Coney Island
R: Mack Sennett. K: Arthur C. Miller. D: Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand, Ford Sterling, Gus Pixley. P: Keystone Film Company. USA 1912
Print: EYE collection
Dutch titles

“In May of 1912, people were still reeling from the Titanic disaster and sorting through a messy presidential election between four viable presidential candidates (Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Eugene V Debs). But most left their worries behind once they stepped off the train at Coney Island, where the amusement parks were just opening their doors that month, making way for the summer crowds with an even wilder array of rides and shows.
Most of the amusements at Steeplechase Park were totally new, as a fire in 1907 had decimated most of the park. Nearby sat the ruins of Dreamland, destroyed in a fire in 1911 and never rebuilt. Luna Park also expanded in 1912 with many new rides, including one that seemed to mock the misfortunes of its rival parks — the Great Fire Show, which presented a Western town ravaged in flame.
But a brand new entertainment was making itself known in Coney Island — moving pictures. For instance, when Luna Park threw open its doors on May 25, 1912, the park contained a theater which presented some of the world’s first color short films in the British-invented Kinemacolor process.
(…)
Coney Island theater proprietor Herman Wacke, no stranger to the moving image, is touted by some as the first commercial exhibitor of a motion picture at his Trocadero Hotel in 1893. Wacke’s hotel, a stalwart from Coney’s early years located along a strip of cabarets and beerhalls affectionately called the Bowery, was nearly destroyed in the fire that consumed Steeplechase in 1907. In 1912, Wacke fanned a few new flames.
He began showing films for free in the saloon as a way to entice people to come in and purchase food and beer. Wacke’s was probably the best known of many along the Bowery to exhibit films in this fashion. But the proprietor didn’t have a license to do so, and during one particular sting, Wacke was arrested — ‘charged with conducting a free show in connection with his bar’ — and fined $5. Not a huge sum of money for a successful saloon owner, and Wacke went willingly, becoming a test case for a law that many certainly thought was rigid and overly meddling.
(…)
As one of America’s premier leisure destinations, Coney Island was so closely associated with films of this period that it even starred in a few of them, including Mack Sennett’s At Coney Island in 1912. There’s even an Edison film from 1903 called Rube and Mandy at Coney Island.”
The Bowery Boys

Coney Island – Movie List:
Westland

TRAUM UND EXZESS, p. 140-42