Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising

Between the advent of print advertising and the dawn of radio came cinema ads. These ads, aimed at a captive theater audience, became a symbol of the developing binary between upper-class film consumption and more consumerist media.In Profit Margins, Jeremy Groskopf examines how the ad industry jockeyed for direct advertisement space in American motion pictures. In fact, advertisers, who recognized the import of film audiences, fought exhibitors over what audiences expected in a theater out...