There is no obvious single list for this query; apologies to those who are are on more than one of the lists above. Anything you can add will be appreciated. Respond to me, or to the list as you think appropriate. Thanks. RESEARCH INQUIRY FROM Cal Pryluck Along with many of you, I suppose, I suffer from the Scholar's Compulsion: the obsessive fear that out there somewhere is something that I should have read before I started writing. My specialties as a scholar have been film theory, and the social context of film (that is, history, economics, and sociology of film). My reading of the evidence is that early movies were just one more kind of entertain- ment, similar to circuses, melodramas, variety shows, minstrel shows and the like. This conclusion leads to an interest in the general history of popular entertainment in the United States. I have a pretty good idea of the development of show business as a business, but I don't have a clear theoretical position on the social relevance of entertainment. My queries then: 1. Can anyone suggest references to material dealing with entertain- ment and audiences as social phenomena? I find Harold Mendel- sohn's 1966 book MASS ENTERTAINMENT interesting, but its empha- sis on television limits its value for a historical investigation of popular entertainment. 2. Any suggestions of the locations of extant town halls, opera houses, and theaters that operated in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, would be appreciated. 3. I'd also welcome any particular or general thoughts on town halls, touring entertainers, or popular entertainment in the same period. Some background observations All over the United States there are itty-bitty towns that had some kind of space for entertainment before the coming of movies at the end of the nineteenth century. Over the years as an unfocused hobby I've investigated these spaces as I came across them while traveling. It finally dawned on me that there was something more than civic pride involved in these concert halls, town halls and opera houses, often located in towns that in pre-automotive years were no more than an hour or two distant from each other. Many of these tiny rural towns appear to have been off the beaten track followed by the entertainment attractions touring from metropolitan centers. At the same time, these locales seem to have had regular seasons of shows, touring from somewhere. I suspect these shows were what carnies call "forty- milers" -- shows that toured within a small range. And when shows did not appear from outside, communities created their own. Harlowe Hoyt's TOWN HALL TONIGHT is an account of one of these venues during the 1880s in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. My own casual wanderings have led me to extant buildings once used for entertainment in places like Norwich, Vermont; Pinkneyville, Illinois; and Earlville, New York. What these apparent facts are saying to me is that entertainment (in the sense of performances for audiences) ranks up there with food, sex, and socializing in general. There should be some significance to the evidence that suggests that there was no place so remote that it did not have entertainment. thanks, Cal Pryluck <PRYLUCK@TEMPLEVM> Dept of Radio-Television-Film <[log in to unmask]> Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122