“Was it the drug or the movie?” ponders Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece in her latest book, Movies under the Influence. It was one night long ago in Pasadena, Maryland, that she took LSD for the first time and proceeded to watch a VHS copy of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994)—also for the first time. She was, and still is, unable to tell what in her “tripping” was caused by which: “in my memory, the two are inseparable” (1). She cannot say with certainty whether she enjoyed the film more or less because of the drug, and she is unwilling to try either again. Luckily, decades later, her lasting inability to distinguish the effects of the one from the other led to Movies under the Influence, in which Szczepaniak-Gillece explores the relationship between drug use and moviegoing. “American culture has long,” for over one hundred years, she asserts, “been and is still under the influences of both intoxicants and film” (3).
In her new book, Szczepaniak-Gillece serves up a fascinating history of film exhibition’s relationship with spectators and their vices. Whereas at first glance the book’s title signals a focus on viewers’ consumption of movies while under the influence of an ingested, inhaled, or smoked substance, it also contains another key orientation: that of the institution of cinema under the influence and control of regulation—in particular, by “American legislative, legal, corporate, and capital power” (3). In short, Movies under the Influence considers how the industry has handled, embraced, or rejected the intoxicated spectator, delving into a discourse analysis and a cultural, material history of American exhibition from the 1910s through the 1970s.
Firsthand accounts of moviegoing under the influence of substances would, for obvious reasons, be inaccurate at best. Where, then, does one find traces of moviegoers indulging in their licit and illicit vices throughout much of the twentieth century? Szczepaniak-Gillece finds the answer in industry publications such as the Motion Picture Herald, a trade paper in which “exhibitors talked to exhibitors in language understood by the profession” (11). Through careful analysis, Szczepaniak-Gillece exposes these trade papers as a transparent record of the dominant discourses surrounding substance use and moviegoing, one that reveals the industry’s parameters of a desired, ideal form of spectatorship.
With an engaging narrative that juggles macro trends—considering the broad ways in which the exhibition market imagined and understood the intoxicated audience—and the microcosm of the movie theater—resorting to contemporaneous documents, data, legislation, and publications—Szczepaniak-Gillece convincingly argues that moviegoing and substance use occupy the same corner of American cultural history. Throughout, she adopts a Foucauldian approach to reading between the lines to uncover discursive practices around substance use in the movie theater, a method she cleverly sums up as “reading for substances in exhibition history” (12). This enables Szczepaniak-Gillece to address exhibition as the battleground in which the reach of governance—from interest groups, corporations, and the government itself—is confronted with the interests of the movie industry. Movies under the Influence explores how this confrontation touched, affected, and controlled moviegoers.
Exhibitors understood the commonalities between the promise of escapism offered by the movies and that offered by intoxicating substances, and widely employed the idiom of narcotics to lure spectators into their theaters. Meanwhile, regulators and conservative social groups recognized films’ and drugs’ ability to intoxicate or influence the morals of those who came into close contact with them. While they have been rhetorically equivalent in signifying tantalizing vices of the twentieth century, films and drugs are also entangled in more-concrete ways. To borrow Szczepaniak-Gillece’s characterization, whatever one consumes in the theater—popcorn or wine, a cigarette or acid—becomes a “conspirator” in cinema’s promised pleasures (2). And for those spectators unable or unwilling to consume substances in theaters, films may provide a substitute for them. Films themselves are, as Szczepaniak-Gillece terms them, psychoactive, capable of producing unexpected effects in their viewers. Thus, like intoxicants in their ability to influence and take over their consumers, films must also be subject to regulation by outside forces.
Movies under the Influence is structured according to specific intoxicating substances and how they were portrayed and handled by exhibitors throughout the movie theater’s long golden era, from the 1910s to the 1970s. In her first chapter, Szczepaniak-Gillece examines cigarette use from the 1920s through the late 1950s, by which time exhibitors were anxious to entice an audience increasingly tuned in to their television sets at home. Contrary to what popular memory might suggest, smoking was initially an unwelcome activity in the movie theater; cigarettes constituted fire hazards in an already highly flammable environment. During the tobacco shortage of the Second World War, theaters pandered to smokers by promoting movies as worthy substitutes for the relaxation provided by cigarettes.
Changes in the postwar media landscape such as the spread of television and the popularity of drive-in theaters forced exhibitors to recalculate their approach to smoking. As a means to lure smokers into theatrical venues, theaters began to feature “larger and more luxurious” smoking loges (44), some even equipped with “dream chairs” that included individual ashtrays. Here, in addition to their intoxicating and addictive powers, cinema and cigarettes were presented as pleasurable sources of relaxation. Independent of any given film, these theatrical luxuries promoted a sophisticated form of spectatorship tied to smoking.
Although not a fire hazard, drinking in theaters was also frowned upon. From the perspective of the exhibitor, a drunk spectator could cause much more trouble than the relaxed smoker. In her second chapter, Szczepaniak-Gillece turns to the Prohibition era, which, for exhibitors, proved to be a headache worthy of the worst of hangovers. The Eighteenth Amendment was first met by theater owners with cautious optimism, as income once diverted to alcohol consumption could presumably be rerouted to other forms of entertainment such as moviegoing. Yet, the puritan impulse fueling Prohibition soon directed its attention to another source of pleasure—cinemagoing—with films seen as another form of vice. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which enjoyed considerable power during the Prohibition era, frequently attacked Hollywood’s connections to the alcohol industry. With the repeal of Prohibition, the WCTU forcefully denounced the film industry’s negative impact on the American family, citing both its products and its cozy relationship with the alcohol industry. In terms of content, Hollywood had already begun responding to public pressure and attempted to sidestep threats of governmental control by establishing the 1934 Production Code. Exhibitors, in turn, were enjoying the new stream of revenue generated by concession stands, a Depression-era innovation. Rather than risk poor behavior from drunk spectators along with the ire of local temperance groups, exhibitors refrained from including alcohol among their concession-stand offerings.
Whereas Hollywood’s discourse around booze was relatively conservative, its approach to some other substances was, at least on the surface, much more relaxed. In her third chapter, Szczepaniak-Gillece explores the industry’s entanglement with what the author calls drowsy drugs, by which she means not only opium and cannabis, but also information. (The chapter’s subtitle is “The Inside Dope on Dope.”) Curiously, from the 1920s through the 1940s, exhibitors exploited the ambivalent meanings of the term dope to align the effects of cinema to those of drowsy drugs. A popular strategy for promoting films involved the distribution of gelatin capsules containing “dope sheets” that provided information about an upcoming release. By the 1930s, “the joke was widespread, with exhibitors passing thousands of dope capsules on streets across America” (106). For Szczepaniak-Gillece, though, exhibitors’ willingness to treat dope with humor indicates how little concern they had around actual drug use in theaters. By the end of the decade, however, dope had turned from a playful term to a serious matter, especially as opium and cannabis—increasingly associated with Asia and Latin America—were increasingly perceived as threats to America’s hegemonic whiteness.
Nowhere else do films, intoxicants, and regulation coalesce as clearly as in the negotiations around the release of To the Ends of the Earth (Robert Stevenson, 1948), a Hollywood docudrama focusing on the international smuggling of opium. Conceived and written by a con man known by the name of Jay Richard Kennedy and fiercely supported by Harry J. Anslinger—a commissioner of the narcotics division of the Treasury Department for decades—the film celebrated the division’s efforts in the war against drugs, effectively doubling as a tool of law enforcement and ideological operations. Due to Motion Picture Production Code restrictions, the film could see the light of day only once the Production Code Administration (PCA) passed an amendment—following much pressure from Anslinger—that would enable the depiction of drugs on-screen as long as they were not shown being consumed. Exhibitors showed little enthusiasm for the amendment, fearing it would encourage more-explicit depictions of drugs on-screen. Indeed, as soon as the amendment was announced, studios considered proposals for films on dope with titles as unsubtle as Cocaine and Marijuana. Fearing that public dissatisfaction with the amendment would play out on theaters’ doorsteps, exhibitors succeeded in killing it so quickly that To the Ends of the Earth remained its only beneficiary. Through the chapter’s focus on this case study, Szczepaniak-Gillece turns dope into a useful lens through which to consider the ambivalent effects of cinemagoing, an activity simultaneously informative and risky.
But the times they were a-changin’ both for movies and for drugs, whose escapist dimensions coalesced in the counterculture of the 1960s. In her fourth chapter, Szczepaniak-Gillece turns to LSD and explains how films banked on the countercultural embrace of psychedelic effects by becoming “trippy.” This is when drugs finally blend with film form and aesthetics to produce in viewers an overwhelming experience akin to that of a drug high. Whereas studio-era Hollywood questioned cigarette use and alcohol consumption both on- and off-screen, and mostly abided by the PCA’s rule against depicting drug use, during the 1960s, LSD and other psychedelic drugs appear to have provided visual inspiration for broad experiments in filmmaking, from avant-garde to mainstream cinema.
Carving a place in the counterculture, the Black Gate Theater in New York City presented Aldo Tambellini’s Psychedelia series (1966), a multimedia collection of “short films and installations meant to replicate (or enhance) the experience of tripping” (143). The avant-garde industrial cinema made by Tanya Ward (aka Virginia Bell) and others at On Film Inc. also featured psychedelic iconography and explored “the effects of substances on the human mind” (152). As psychedelic art gained momentum across the United States, its resonance could be found across different media, including mainstream films. Special-effects technicians such as Douglas Trumbull helped bridge psychedelic experimentation and commercial cinema with his revolutionary imagery in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But it was Richard Fleischer’s sci-fi Fantastic Voyage (1966) that, according to Szczepaniak-Gillece, accidentally paved the way for mainstream cinematic psychedelia with its combination of aesthetic inventiveness and technological innovation at the expense of narrative coherence. On the heels of the unexpected success of Fantastic Voyage with the turned-on generation, films such as the animated Beatles vehicle Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968) and 2001 aimed their promotional materials to that audience—with the latter film being advertised by MGM as “the ultimate trip” (167). Even Disney would follow suit in basing its marketing of the rerelease of Fantasia (1940) and Alice in Wonderland (1951) on the films’ psychedelic appeal, resulting in greater success than they had had during their original theatrical runs.
For Szczepaniak-Gillece, materials used to promote these films prove that tripping audiences were indeed among Hollywood’s targets. And because, intentionally or unintentionally, psychedelic films seemed to encourage tripping—with or without LSD—exhibitors had to turn a blind eye to an increasingly high audience. Once concerned with regulating the potentially rowdy behavior of drunken audiences, exhibitors now appeared to believe that the effects of psychedelic drugs worked in their favor by aligning, in Szczepaniak-Gillece’s words, “with acceptable spectatorial practice” and making viewers “pleasantly antisocial” (160). Additionally, unlike the use of other substances more readily associated with immigrants and racial others, the use of psychedelic drugs was largely a white phenomenon, thus making tripping spectators doubly ideal at the time of racial desegregation in the theaters.
Given exhibitors’ recognition of the presence of tripping viewers in their theaters, it should only make sense that specialized screenings would eventually be devised to better accommodate their habits. As Szczepaniak-Gillece notes in her conclusion, it was in the midnight-movies boom of the 1970s that “weird films and open substance use mingled in an intoxicating witches’ brew” (185). Now, theaters bank on selling alcohol at their concession stands while spectators streaming content in their own homes “can smoke and drink and watch without (much) fear of repercussion or danger” (189).
In vivid language, Szczepaniak-Gillece pieces together an intoxicating narrative of how exhibitors, regulators, legislators, and even filmmakers dealt with the points of contact between movies and substances. As the book demonstrates throughout, Hollywood managed to swim the cultural and legal currents of permission and prohibition of various substances throughout the twentieth century for its own benefit. Movies under the Influence evinces that exhibitors, in developing their stance around substance use, have been much less bound by a stable moral code than by the pressures of the market and of regulation, making clear that “spectatorship is itself partially a product of governance and always a product made for profit” (141). It seems, after all, that it is in exhibitors’ best interests to leave unanswered the question of what truly causes the high: is it the drug or the movie?
How did you first get started with this project?
As all the best academic monographs do, this one started as a joke. My dear friend Stephen Groening and I put together a panel for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies on objects in cinema spaces. This was at a moment when object-oriented ontology was really big and smoking most definitely was not, and I thought it would be funny if someone wrote about the vulgar and déclassé cigarette. Steve, in his infinite wisdom, told me I should do it. I ended up turning that paper into an article, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about intoxicating substances in the movie theater. I thought about the movies I’d seen under various influences and how the experiences changed depending on what I’d ingested. I watched, mystified, as alcohol became de rigueur in the theater and wondered why in the world a social lubricant would become ubiquitous in a space that demands quiet attention. I kept reading about how folks who would never have touched a tab of acid in the 1990s suddenly espoused the values of microdosing for corporate productivity but not for an aesthetic experience. All of this, I realized, was quite rich material for interrogating the structures that shape cultural history.
So many of us have had concomitant experiences of movies and intoxicants and realized the dramatic impact each has upon the other. But there has been virtually nothing written on it, with some notable exceptions such as Caetlin Benson-Allott’s excellent The Stuff of Spectatorship and work by David Church. Intoxicants of all kinds are in the zeitgeist right now, but I’m not setting out to make an argument about why drugs are good or bad. Instead, I’m just really interested in the shifting meanings of intoxicants and of the movies. Both are defining cultural objects and tell us so much about what it means to be an American in the twentieth century under late capitalism. And they also, even if only a little bit, tell us something about what it means to be human and how we dream of existing differently.
Broadly speaking, how are discourses on movies and drugs historically entangled in the United States?
People have been experiencing aesthetic phenomena under various influences for as long as we can document. It’s nothing new, really, and therefore no surprise that film spectators would fall into the same patterns. On the one hand, then, it’s just expected that viewers would seek out enhancements. But what makes the discourses of movies and drugs in the United States so fascinating is that both are emblems of modernity, of vice, of capital, of desire, of governance, of control, and also—this is important—of escape. They are both quite dangerous in terms of addictive power but also in terms of enabling us to imagine different worlds. Both movies and drugs are destabilizing forces that power seeks to stabilize. And those moments where power reaches into culture to conform, to shape, to mold, and to enclose are also when culture finds a crack to slip through. I am drawn entirely to seeking out those junctures, to prodding at them and letting the light in. I have no interest in trying to solve a puzzle; instead, I want to expose new conundrums. Those mystifying questions are where history’s webs glimmer and expand fractally into patterns we had no idea existed. That’s when mystery and wonder reenter the world.
What key challenges did you face in studying mostly illicit or discreet behaviors connected to spectatorship?
Well, you can’t really find trustworthy archival evidence that clearly discusses messed-up spectators! It’s unfortunate but true. There are memoirs, especially from the 1960s, that might talk about writers getting stoned and going to the movies, but using memoirs as evidence has to be done for very specific reasons. And no one really wants to sit through someone’s recollection of watching The Wall on mushrooms. What I thought was going to be a history of intoxicated spectators became, instead, a history of the idea of the intoxicated spectator. When we think about an intellectual history of spectatorship, we begin to uncover and untangle the threads of power hidden within cultural narratives. And ultimately, for me, that’s much more interesting.
How was your project impacted or changed by these challenges?
My entire approach transformed over time due to research challenges. Once I understood that an ethnographic approach simply wouldn’t work—and once I realized it wasn’t even the approach I wanted—I shifted to thinking about what the available archive could tell me. My archive tended toward primary-source documents like newspapers, magazines, industrial publications, and some archival materials, like the Jay Richard Kennedy papers at Boston University. Industrial publications like Boxoffice form the crux of the exhibition historian’s archive. They are, however, notoriously untrustworthy. They avoid talking about difficult subjects, like segregation, and they often self-aggrandize or espouse conservative viewpoints or state patently untrue things as facts. This can be very frustrating in terms of accuracy, but in terms of ideological analysis, it’s pure gold.
How did smoking help exhibitors lure patrons back into the theaters? Did commercial and art-house cinemas adopt different positions on cigarette use?
Smoking tended to be highly regulated because, in short, it was highly dangerous. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, not only was nitrate film explosive, but the entire theater was covered in materials like heavy curtains, lush upholstery, and thick carpets, making it a virtual tinderbox. But at the same time, smoking was a cultural phenomenon with varying, even contradictory, associations, from the factory laborer to the flapper to the jazz musician to the French actor. By the time the art-house theater was in full swing in the midcentury, smoking was deeply associated with European cool. That’s part of why ashtrays and even free cigarettes in the lobby became important fixtures in theaters; cigarettes made spectators feel sophisticated and continental, and theaters monetized that. This really shows us how movie theaters have always sold much more than the movie. They also sell us fantasies of who we are and who we might be.
Not only was smoking continental at midcentury, but it also spoke of the comforts of home. Theater owners in the 1950s and early 1960s were terrified about the impact of television on their box-office numbers and sought out ways both to valorize the theater over the home and to demonstrate that the theater could be just as comfortable as a domestic setting. At that time, some exhibitors created smoking sections in the loge and provided enormous easy-chair options with built-in ashtrays. While smoking now isn’t permitted at all in the theater, we can think about current seating trends like recliners as a vestige of this impulse. Today, theater owners compete with streaming, and while the moment seems completely different, some of the responses to both situations end up being strikingly similar.
What tensions arose between exhibitors and Hollywood producers at the dawn of Prohibition?
Alcohol was a flash point of political and social debate. There really wasn’t any consistency across the country in terms of the “wets” versus the “drys”; the United States was pretty divided about the value of Prohibition or of alcohol. While Hollywood studios tended to be a bit more in support of the pro-alcohol lobbies, many exhibitors thought that the Eighteenth Amendment would end up being very profitable. If the saloons closed, they thought, then people might spend that money at the theater. This wasn’t completely wrong; in the 1920s, box-office numbers soared. But we can’t say for certain that it was on the back of Prohibition. Still, many exhibitors did rely on somewhat strange tactics to encourage barflys to attend the theater, like advertising that the saloon may be closed but the movie theater was open. It seems at best aspirational to me—one isn’t simply a replacement for the other. I’m not going to plan a night catching up at a bar with a friend and then decide at the last minute to see a movie instead. But I think it illustrates how vice and the movies were often interchangeable. And a lot of that is due to political headwinds—to the law, to taxation, and to the chaos that vice and the movies threaten. Vice and the movies are both at once eminently capitalist and eminently anarchic. How delightful is that?
When did concessions become ubiquitous in movie theaters, and what is their relationship to alcohol sales and consumption?
Concessions really took off around the Depression, meaning that the practice was in place as Prohibition fell in the early 1930s. Once it became clear that the Twenty-First Amendment was going to pass, exhibitors quickly started considering whether they should sell alcohol. Some theater owners thought they could open beer gardens or cocktail bars connected to the theater, while others steadfastly rejected the notion of booze in the theater. It’s really incredible to look at these plans from the 1930s and see such similarities to today’s theater. I recently was a bit befuddled to see a full bar with barstools and tables in a relatively small suburban chain theater unattached to a mall. Who is sitting there and drinking a strawberry margarita? Whom does the theater owner think they are attracting? And what is the purpose of this space: to see a movie or to get drunk? It’s a bit bizarre, but then again, so is capitalism. Any time we are reminded that what seems natural is actually deeply strange is a significant win for critical and historical thinking in a very ahistorical and uncritical moment.
What was the “dope amendment,” and what does it reveal about Hollywood’s feelings about drowsy-drug use? What were its immediate aftermaths?
I love the “dope amendment” because it shows how unequivocally the American federal government meddled in what the public got to see on-screen. Generally, the Production Code prohibited the depiction of drug trafficking on-screen. But then this absolutely outlandish con man by the name of Jay Richard Kennedy [born Samuel Solomonick] got it into his head that he had to make To the Ends of the Earth, a rather terrible movie celebrating the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the U.S. Treasury Department and their tireless crusade to eradicate the drug menace. (If you watch this movie, do not blame me; I warned you.) Kennedy, who was an outrageous fabulist and fascinating figure, deserves his own book. I have rarely had more fun in an archive than when I looked through his papers, which are stuffed to the brim with half-truths, half-baked philosophies, and fully demented futurisms. Suffice it to say that Kennedy developed a relationship with Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, to the point where Anslinger even appeared in the eventual 1948 film. The only problem was that the movie showed opium, a major no-no for a Columbia Pictures film. From pressure exerted by, among others, Anslinger, the Production Code Administration folded like a cheap suit and passed the “dope amendment” to allow films to show drug trafficking but not drug use.
Exhibitors went nuts. Panics arose that movies focused on drugs would appeal to Americans with minds weakened by war and prompt spectators to start using with abandon. Still, the door was opened and couldn’t really be closed again. The “dope amendment” only lasted about six months, but it did signal the beginning of the end for at least that portion of the Production Code.
Why were exhibitors less strict with regards to patrons intoxicated with psychedelic drugs than with other substances?
This is a harder question to answer with absolute historical certainty. But when you examine the discourse around psychedelic drugs compared with, say, cannabis or opium, the default user tends to be white. There just aren’t the same levels of racialized panic around psychedelics that there are around other drugs. This isn’t to say there weren’t panics around LSD and so on—there certainly were. But they didn’t tend to be as xenophobic or racist in nature. In the United States, LSD, mushrooms, and mescaline were associated early on with hippie movements. We don’t have a ton of clear evidence as to the racial makeup of psychedelic-drug aficionados, but certainly American psychedelia in general tends to be whiter. In addition, psychedelia hit all areas of US culture hard. It was a very saleable phenomenon. And if there’s one thing exhibitors love above all else, it’s making money.
Why did Disney market Fantasia as “the ultimate experience”? Whom was the company appealing to?
This is one of my favorite portions of the book. Disney rereleased Fantasia at the end of 1969, a year after 2001’s rampant success. 2001 was marketed as “the ultimate trip,” an intentionally nuanced phrase that resulted in high numbers of very high audience members. By referring to Fantasia as “the ultimate experience,” Disney cannily drew on these earlier associations of 2001 with a voyage beyond the stars—and beyond one’s headspace. It became abundantly clear to me as I looked into this moment that the Disney Corporation knew exactly what it was doing: appealing to the turned-on acidhead generation in order to drum up enough interest that Fantasia could finally turn a profit, over twenty years after its first release. It worked. Disney claimed they had no idea what was going to happen, but the timing doesn’t add up. Few things give me greater glee than imagining the secret meetings where buttoned-up Disney execs threw up their hands and acquiesced to better living through chemistry.
What is your next project about?
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m really interested in thinking about streaming and spectatorship. It’s not really so far afield from Movies under the Influence; after all, Timothy Leary declared in the early 1980s that computers were the new acid. I’d like to get more into some of Leary’s focus on the individual and return to some of Terence McKenna’s ideas about what kinds of media resemble what kinds of drugs. It’s pretty well-worn territory now to think about Silicon Valley and psychotropic drugs, but I think there are a lot more connections to be made in terms of models of the psyche, consciousness, and patterns of viewing. My first move into this area, an article called “The Right to Sit Still,” was actually in the Summer 2024 issue of Film Quarterly. I’m thinking about the new project as a series of stand-alone essays that take on the implications of algorithmic viewing for labor, for aesthetics, for transcendence, and for how spectators understand what it means to be in the world. I’m excited to dive into more-theoretical waters and consider how historical models of spectatorship seem to disappear but also inform present practice. The success of this moment of AI hype machines and digital fatalism relies upon its influences remaining occluded. To resist that, let’s dig a bit deeper toward what wants to hide. I think we’ll see that the world isn’t flattened at all. It’s just that some of its complexities are yet to be revealed.
University of California Press