T IMELINES
Pictures in Motion: Everybody Went
‘Back in the
early to middle
Twenties
it wasn’t a
question to most
of the University
students if you
were going,
rather which
of the two
afternoon or
two evening
shows you
would attend.’
William W.
Prouty ’ 35
The Tar Heel of Nov. 10, 1909,
carried the following ad:
THE PICKWICK
High class motion pictures.
Change daily, open 6 to 11
Illustrated Song.
Note that it read “high class motion
pictures,” not movies. The fascination was
with the movement of images.
The Pickwick was Chapel Hill’s first theater, though the showing of the occasional
film in Gerrard Hall preceded it, Jane Toy
Coolidge recalled in Growing Up With
Chapel Hill — The Village from 1901-1925.
“Such productions were more in the
character of scientific experiments than popular entertainment. As Dr. Johnson said of
women preachers and walking dogs, the
point was not how well they did it but that
they did it at all. My first recollection of a
movie is of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
shown here in the early years of the century.”
John Alcott said in his book on campus
architecture that the first motion pictures
shown in town were in the chapel of the
Campus Y.
But the old Pickwick was the first
movie theater.
The student newspaper gave no opening
date, but this instead: “… its bill of attraction will commence as soon as the University Power Plant can furnish the electricity.”
When the Pickwick burned Feb. 9,
1924, the Chapel Hill Weekly celebrated
NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION
An ad in the 1913
Yackety Yack for
“High-Class Motion
Pictures” at the
Pickwick. At left,
exteriors of the Pick
circa 1918 and from
the Carolina in about
1937.
Gerrard’s being pressed into service:
“There is more than one reason to look
forward with pleasure to the new regime.
For one thing, the hoodlum behavior
which has attended the nightly performances at the Pickwick is no longer to be
part of the entertainment. New equipment
for projecting pictures on the screen is to
be installed. And certainly the ventilation
