Constructing a New Urban Exhibition Circuit: Black Cinema After the Baldwin Theatre

Brendan Kredell, Northwestern University

The Baldwin Theatre was built in the late 1940s and closed nearly fifty years later when its owners went bankrupt. It would barely merit a footnote in the history of motion picture exhibition, but for its claim to be the country’s only African-American owned first-run theater during the 1980s and 1990s. However, from this small theater in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles came a new generation of film exhibitors, who saw an audience where other chains saw a risky investment. While their innovative thinking about exhibition models was not enough to save the theater, we can look to the Baldwin as the site where a new movement in film exhibition, and indeed a new turn in film culture more generally, began.

In this paper, I chart the construction of a new black cinema in the United States, beginning in the wake of the Baldwin’s closure. Over time, an alternative exhibition circuit with over 100 screens nationwide would emerge, adapting the model of the suburban megaplex to the inner city. I argue in this paper that by recognizing and targeting this underserved audience, these exhibitors have created a market niche that has sustained robust growth. Using box office data collected from a Chicago-based chain of these theaters, I show how this has affected the direction that commercially distributed “black film” has taken over the past fifteen years, arguing that the establishment of these new theatrical venues has allowed new types of cinema forms to become commercially viable.