ABSTRACT
As traditionally described, the newsreel was “a ten-minute potpourri of motion picture news footage” (Fielding), bound to the studio system, and exhibited as a supporting element of a show whose main attraction was the feature fiction film. Aronson shows how the little-known Telenews Theater chain challenges almost every aspect of this still prevailing definition. Aronson himself enters this particular film history as, in November 1941, his grandfather orchestrated the opening of the Dallas Telenews Theater, which the elder Aronson managed. The Dallas Telenews was the ninth branch of this American chain, which offered a distinct multimedia experience. Patrons could consult the lobby’s teletype machines or listen to its live radio station booths before entering the theater to view an hour-long show produced every week by the local theater manager, who edited together up to six different commercial newsreels. Thirteen Telenews theaters were open across the country from 1939 to 1967, but the chain was most successful in the 1940s during the news-fertile years of World War II. This chapter narrates the history of the Telenews Company, from its San Francisco theatrical origins to its successful transformation in the late 1940s as the leader in newsfilm production that moved beyond the cinema experience, when the company produced newsfilm for the country’s burgeoning local television markets. In this way, Aronson decenters the customary understanding of the newsreel as a supplement to the feature film and focuses our attention instead on its participation in habits of news production and consumption that bridged print, radio, film, and television.
