What we mean by the “non-theatrical” is historically specific, since the parameters, visibility, circulation, and significance of this largely overlooked aspect of cinema vary over time and from place to place. This essay examines the practice of American non-theatrical cinema in the mid-1910s, that is, well before the widespread adoption of safety film and portable projectors and any appreciable use of film in the classroom. It predates also the appearance of field-specific publications like Educational Screen (1922) and Business Screen (1938), and the emergence of a range of distributors focusing on the non-theatrical market. Much more than is the case with theatrical film exhibition, we cannot gauge with any thoroughness the extent and everyday presence of non-theatrical film exhibition in the mid- 1910s. But using newspapers, the motion-picture trade press, and a range of other periodicals (all increasingly available in digital form), we can learn something about how non-theatrical audiences in the United States were addressed and constituted at a historical moment when commercial film distribution was becoming more systemized and nationalized, and much of what came to be known as the Hollywood system was being set into place. Most significant for the purposes of this essay, by the mid-1910s the movie theater had unquestionably become the standard exhibition site for commercial cinema. The key to thinking about American non-theatrical audiences at the moment of Hollywood's consolidation – and probably at least up to World War II – is, I propose, the notion of the targeted, sponsored screening.

The Diversified American Public

In its official statement of “Policy and Standards,” the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures in October 1915 pointed to what it took to be a definitive and all-important characteristic of the “moving picture show” in the United States: