The history of the Interstate Theatre Circuit is inextricably linked with the personal career of Karl St. John Hoblitzelle, a pioneer in the theatre industry in the Southwest. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1879, Hoblitzelle's first professional contact with the world of theatrical entertainment, which he had been raised to view as "the gateway of hell," came while he worked in the office of the Director of Works at the St. Louis World's Fair. A group of concessionaires at the Fair who admired his managerial abilities suggested that he start a circuit of vaudeville theatres in the South and Southwest. At the time this was the only section of the country which did not have such amusement facilities. In spring of 1905, Karl and his brother George Hoblitzelle founded the Interstate Amusement Company, a Missouri Corporation. Karl did not originally plan to guide the company personally, but unfavorable financial conditions of the company caused him to step into its management in summer 1905. Hoblitzelle was named president of the firm in 1906. The Interstate Amusement Company began operating theatres in Little Rock, Shreveport, and Birmingham as well as Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Waco. Their programs stuck strictly to family-oriented, high quality vaudeville acts; in 1920, motion pictures were added as a supplement to the bill.
Interstate Amusement pioneered in the use of air-conditioning in theatres in Texas, which formerly had to close because of heat during summer months. Karl Hoblitzelle was also the first operator in the Southwest to install sound equipment in his theatres.
Upon his marriage to Ester Thomas in 1920, Hoblitzelle made his permanent home in Dallas and throughout the rest of his life evinced his love for this city and state through his deep involvement in a wide variety of civic endeavors.
By 1929 Hoblitzelle had decided to retire, and was negotiating with Fox for takeover of his circuit at the time of the stock market crash. Fox was not financially stable enough to close the sale, so in May 1930 Hoblitzelle sold his theatre interests to RKO, retaining only ownership of certain theatre buildings purely as real estate. RKO leased these buildings for their own operations in the name of one of their subsidiaries, RKO Southern.
Just after this deal was struck, the theatre business all over the country went into a severe decline. The depressed state of the business in Texas was due in part to the overall economic depression and in part, in Hoblitzelle's opinion, to the competition between RKO and the Paramount-Publix chain of theatres. In 1932 Hoblitzelle went to New York to try to arrange a consolidation of the two groups of theatres in Texas, but these early efforts were unsuccessful. In early 1933 both RKO and Paramount went into bankruptcy. Hoblitzelle was concerned about what would happen to the theatre business he had built and the many workers he had formerly employed. He worked out an arrangement by which he took over the entire RKO operation in Texas. He reorganized a new Interstate Theatre Circuit which included the former Interstate Amusement Company-RKO Theatres and the Southern Enterprise Theatres (affiliated with Paramount). In the summer of 1933, W.E. Paschall, who operated a separate chain of Paramount theatres also, but under a separate chain of Paramount theatres in smaller towns in Texas (the Dent Circuit), was killed in an auto accident. Paramount asked Hoblitzelle to assume control of these theatres also, but under a separate corporation. Thus was established the Texas Consolidated Theatres, which operated in smaller towns while Interstate Theatres covered larger cities such as Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas, and San Antonio. By 1935 the receiverships of the parent companies were dismissed, and Hoblitzelle was president of both new corporations. Interstate's relationship with Paramount was that Hoblitzelle controlled 50% of the stock and Paramount the other 50%. However, Hoblitzelle controlled all Class A stock which carried with it management privileges; Paramount's Class B stock had no such privileges attached.
Interstate began to grow, acquiring other theatres, both fee and leasehold. They also entered into several 50/50 partnership deals, such as that with I. B. Adelman and Will Horowitz in Houston, L. Novy in Austin, and A. Martini in Galveston. Interstate was one of the chief circuits in the state. By the late 1930s there were several other major circuits in Texas besides Interstate and Texas Consolidated. The Jefferson Amusement Company was a chain of Texas theatres also affiliated with Paramount. Robb and Rowley were affiliated with 20th Century Fox, and the Griffith Amusement Company and J. C. Long were larger unaffiliated circuits.
Independent theatre operators complained that the larger circuits were using their ties to choke out any competition. The larger circuits had distinct territories and rarely encroached upon one another. Independents who had theatres in such territories claimed that it was difficult to contract for good pictures, and that the chains conspired to force the independent theatres to wait an undesirable length of time before allowing them to show particular films. This siphoned off most of the audience and reduced the profits of the independents, who claimed the chains were trying to force them out of business by unfair competition.
The federal government in 1938 instigated antitrust litigation against several major film companies; one of the first attacked was Paramount. After years in court, in February 1949 Paramount entered into a Consent Judgment with the Department of Justice whereby Paramount's domestic exhibition business was completely divorced from its production and distribution business. Paramount was given three years to dissolve all its joint interests with local theatres. It split into two new corporations, Paramount Pictures Inc. which produced and distributed films, and United Paramount Pictures which exhibited films. Hoblitzelle's stock was sold to United Paramount; Interstate remained affiliated with Paramount and reported to New York. In February 1953 the Federal Communications Commission allowed the merger of United Paramount Theatres with the American Broadcasting Company. Interstate was a subsidiary of the new corporation formed, American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres (AB-PT). In July, 1965 this corporation changed its name to American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. By 1967 ABC's motion picture exhibition operations, of which Interstate was a part, were the largest of their kind in the United States.
Despite the connections with a national firm headquartered in New York, Hoblitzelle remained active and influential as president of Interstate until his death in 1967. Leadership in the company passed to other men who had been with Interstate since its early days: R. J. O'Donnell, Raymond Willie, John Q. Adams, and W. E. Mitchell. It was not uncommon for a company officer to have begun as a theatre usher and then to have moved through the ranks to the top. This remarkable longevity of top-level staff accounts for the intense personal loyalties which characterized the Interstate operations. The civic-mindedness of Karl Hoblitzelle was duplicated in the philanthropic activities of many of his staff. Karl Hoblitzelle's ideal was not simply to turn a profit, but to make his theatres an integral part of the community and to set high standards of civic involvement. On the cornerstone of the Majestic Theatre in Dallas, which was the flagship of the Interstate theatres, were inscribed these words of Hoblitzelle's: "Dedicated to art, music, and wholesome entertainment in grateful recognition of the support always given me by the people of Dallas."
The Majestic in Dallas closed in July, 1973. The economic problems of operating a theatre on such a grand scale (2,400 seats) combined with the trends in audience theatre attendance had altered the theatre business as Hoblitzelle and the Interstate Circuit had known it for so many years. It is evident from the product shown in many Interstate theatres in the mid-1970s that Hoblitzelle's original ideal of "wholesome family entertainment" had slipped greatly as public tastes changed. Interstate retained regional offices in the old Majestic until 1976, but major management had shifted to the East Coast. When the Majestic Theatre was turned over to the City of Dallas by the Hoblitzelle Foundation, many records of the Hoblitzelle era were considered unuseful residue and abandoned by ABC Interstate as it moved its offices. These records show how the history of the Interstate Theatre Circuit charted entertainment history in Texas from the days of traveling vaudeville acts and flickering movie shorts to the time of x-rated motion pictures.
The Interstate Theatre Collection consists of office files abandoned by the ABC Interstate Company when they vacated their offices at the Majestic Theatre in Dallas in 1977. The Majestic Theatre had housed the administrative offices of the Interstate Theatre Circuit from its date of reorganization in 1933 under the auspices of Karl Hoblitzelle. Over the course of time the Interstate Circuit came under the control of the national offices of the American Broadcast Company (see history), but regional offices remained at the Majestic. When the Majestic Theatre ceased operation in July 1973, Interstate continued to lease office space from the theatre's owner, the Hoblitzelle Foundation. The Foundation donated the building to the City of Dallas with the stipulation that it be restored and made available for productions; when the city took possession, it found abandoned records literally heaped in piles. Diana Clark of the City of Dallas and Lynn Harris of the Hoblitzelle Foundation were instrumental in salvaging the mterials and having their possession turned over to the Dallas Public Library. The Interstate Theatre Collection was formally received by the Library in March 1977.
The collection comprises correspondence, leases, photographs, maps, surveys, legal records, promotional literature, financial records, interoffice memos, theatre reports, corporate minute books, posters, film trailers, and contracts. The material dates back to the mid-1910s with leases and correspondence relating to theatre organizations that were the forerunners of the Interstate Theatre Circuit. The complex interrelationships between the Interstate Circuit and its national parent company, Paramount, on the one hand and with its local theatre partners, such as I.B. Adelman in Houston, on the other necessitated the keeping of longterm records. Moreover, the continuing legal difficulties experienced by both Interstate and Paramount during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s also dictated the keeping of documentary proof of contracts, leases, accounts, and correspondence. These legal problems centered around antitrust litigation instigated by the federal government and around antigambling and censorship laws on the state and local level. Roughly 10% of the collection is given over to legal files. The efforts of Interstate to avoid government interference in its operations are revealed in correspondence with its lobbyist in Austin (1930s-1940s) and its material on Operation Round Table conducted in Washington D.C. in 1947 and 1948. The loss of antitrust suits against film producer-distributors led to the organization of an extremely confidential effort among major theatre chains to dissuade the federal government from stepping in to further regulate the film industry. Because Karl Hoblitzelle took a personal interest in the project and John Q. Adams of Interstate was in charge of finances, the Interstate collection contains probably the most comprehensive records of these often secret negotiations held at a crucial point in film industry history.
The collection also houses records of the Texas World's Fair Commission, which evolved into a film project called Cavalcade of Texas meant to tout the glories of the state; Karl Hoblitzelle was chairman of this endeavor. There are records of Interstate subsidiary companies such as the Dallas Dispatch-Journal, a local daily newspaper, and Mar Productions, an oil company. The interest of theatre chains in closed-circuit television opportunities and their fear of competition from television, especially cable television with its feature films, are revealed in files on telecommunications from the early 1950s.
The early period of Interstate from 1933 to 1953 is well represented. The challenges faced by the theatre circuit during this time, as disclosed by records in this collection, include: finding suitable tenants for commercial space connected with theatre buildings, especially during the depression years; contracting for Mexican made Spanish language films for theaters in the Valley which catered to the Mexican populace; developing a reliable popcorn supply and managing to get it shipped to theatres, a particular problem in wartime (Interstate even subsidized popcorn research by Texas A&M to solve this particular problem); creating exciting promotional gimmicks to entice customers into the theatres while staying one step ahead of the state lottery laws; dealing with the advent of the television, at first seen as a mortal competitor; adjusting to population movement to the suburbs and the building of theatres outside of the downtown area; building and promoting drive-ins in the late 1940s; coping with the declining amounts of film production available for exhibitors and the economic difficulties created for theatre management by the beginnings of unionism and the minimum wage law; and combating local censorship laws as films became more "adult."
It was in 1953 that Paramount, Interstate's parent company, merged with the American Broadcast Company. The national offices of ABC in New York oversaw the regional operations of the Interstate Circuit. In time records of the Hoblitzelle era were no longer as important to the national office, which accounts for why so many of them were left behind. However, more recent records had value to the ongoing operations of the circuit and were moved when Interstate vacated the Majestic. The majority of the collection materials from the later period (1960 to the mid-1970s) are duplicates of interoffice memos, advertising and promotional material, and periodic reports filed by local theatres with the regional and national offices on such subjects as features expenses, film rental and booking, admission receipts, ticket inventory, payroll and managers' funds.
The collection's subject headings are of mixed classification. The oldest records, from the 1910s through the 1940s, were generally arranged chronologically and by general headings such as correspondence with local theatres, correspondence with state legislature lobbyist, subsidiary records (i.e., Mar Productions) and legal suits. These materials arrived in a hodgepodge and often with no discernable provenance. Material from the later era, especially from 1960 through the mid-1970s, often pertained to a particular department of the company. An attempt was made to keep particular organizational sections intact as they appeared to have been divided in Interstate's working files. Thus were kept in separate series the office files of W.E. Mitchell and Raymond Willie, vice presidents and general managers of Texas Consolidated and Interstate Theatres respectively. Series of reports, such as Feature Expenses and Manager's Fund Reports, are also grouped together and arranged chonologically.
The Interstate Theatre Collection offers a magnificent resource on the entertainment industry in Texas. Often film industry histories are written from the top; that is, they focus on the movie production or the biographoes of celebrities. The Interstate Theatre Collection offers the opportunity to explore change in entertainment technology and public demand from the point of view of the middleman, the exhibitioner, who is the vital connection between the audience and the film maker. Here in the Interstate Theatre Collection is embodied the history of movie theatres from their vaudeville roots through neighborhood family entertainment to X rated movies and drive-ins.
For additional Interstate Theatre Collection material, see the Interstate Theatre Collection II (MA 81.1) in the Texas/Dallas History Division. Also see the Hoblitzelle and Interstate Theater Collection located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
This record series is indexed under the following controlled access subject terms.
MA77-1 Interstate Theatre Collection, Texas/Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
Katherine Faust and Paul Beck