photoplay

Styled as a retro, black-and-white photoplay with intertitles, sound effects, cranked-up speeds and jaunty music, “Hundreds of Beavers” ostensibly tells a story, but only insofar as a magician does, to simply contextualize your enjoyment of the tricks.

In 1918, an essay in the film fan magazine Photoplay criticized the older arts as elitist, but noted that when the moving picture arrived “democracy clasped it to its heart” — this was, the writer proclaimed, “the first art-child of democracy.”

Then called the U-Neptune, it was described as “Seattle’s newest photoplay palace and the finest suburban motion picture theater in this part of the country.”

Pitting Bernie Sanders against a cultural juggernaut like the Mayflower Photoplay Company of Boston, Massachusetts is a surefire way to convince young voters to stay home and hand the election to Donald Trump.

As the movie industry blossomed, in the nineteen-tens and twenties, so did fan magazines, such as Photoplay.