Jonathan Kay on the model Jewish immigrant who became one of New York’s vaudeville kings
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uring his early 20th-century heyday as a New York City showman, B.S. Moss (1878-1951) lived a professional life that was likely more intense than that of any modern movie executive. He found himself with more than a dozen theatres to stock with daily entertainment. Each hybrid show—part film, part live act—might involve hundreds of moving parts, from live dancers, jugglers, tumblers and musicians, to the technicians required to operate the still finicky and unreliable technology used to project films. Vaudeville content turned over rapidly, and critics could be scathing, taking pains to point out if a pretty actress looked overweight or a comedian seemed hung over. Since many homes, businesses and hotels didn’t have tele-
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phones, merely getting hold of an actor or projectionist to fill an open date might take days. In one episode that made its way to a New York City entertainment columnist, a famous comedian touring the Midwest found out that he’d be starring in a B.S. Moss vaudeville show only after he saw his face staring back at him from an advertisement contained in a local newspaper. Another complicating factor was the fragmented nature of the entertainment marketplace. The mass market was still in its infancy. Moss had to monitor and accommodate the particular tastes of each neighborhood in which he exhibited. New York City was a patchwork of immigrant languages. And what slayed the Irish might fall flat with the Germans. His publicity scrapbooks, some of them surviving in archives to this day, contain clippings in a dozen different melting-pot languages. A dearth of quality films continued to present yet another problem. Even by World War I, the industry was taking its time about graduating from shorter novelty reels. Until the early 1920s, few Hollywood producers were making feature-length dramas. And when they did finally produce them in volume, another problem arose: the industry organized into vertically integrated anti-competitive trusts, which played their own movies at their own theatres so as to freeze out “independents” like B.S. Moss. It was a fundamentally anti-competitive arrangement that eventually would lead to a landmark 1948 Supreme Court judgment, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., which had the effect of busting up Hollywood’s exploitative oldtime studio system.
