Rethinking Rothafel: Roxy's Forgotten Legacy

Abstract

We can only wonder now what motion picture exhibition would have been in the classical period without the unique contribution of Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel. Manager of movie houses, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, stage producer, filmmaker, and technical innovator, he created "high class" motion picture presentation in the pre- and post-World War I periods, developing the movie palace experience that would frame motion picture exhibition for decades. Yet, just as that era of movie palaces has faded into history, so has the memory of Rothafel. What remains of his legacy are anecdotes, legends, and incomplete histories. This essay will attempt at least partially to reconstruct the story of this important pioneer of American movie theater history. [End Page 63]

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.