An America Not Quite Mechanized

“An America Not Quite
Mechanized”: Fanchon and
Marco, Inc. Perform
Modernity
“An America Not Quite Mechanized”
Phil Wagner
[A]n “Idea”, in the Fanchon and Marco sense
of the word, was never just a vague mental
image, but a concrete and distinctly salable
commodity.
– B.R. Crisler, “By Way of Variety”, New York
Times (2 February 1936): 5.
We get our Ideas for stage presentations at all
times. ... Fanchon saw the possibility of a
“Salad Idea” one night at dinner.
– Marco Wolf “With Aerial Trimmings”, Los
Angeles Times (6 May 1928): C11.
It is not just that the relationship to commodi-
ties is now plain to see – commodities are now
all that there is to see; the world we see is the
world of the commodity.
– Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
(New York: Zone Books, 2008), 29.
T
he synchronized sound short subject was first
introduced to moviegoers as a form of “pro-
logue”, a performance attraction that preceded
feature-length films in the late 1920s. It is there-
fore appropriate that a journal issue dedicated to
sound shorts and their historical contexts should
begin with a discussion of the live song and dance
prologues that the later filmed ones sought to re-
place.1
The prologue’s archival disadvantage as an
ephemeral performance commodity helps explain its
historiographic marginalization in sound research,
where it has been brushed aside as a mere “atmos-
pheric” anticipation of a feature-length film.2
This
article seeks a fresh understanding of live prologues
through an aesthetically-informed industrial case
study of the Fanchon and Marco “Ideas”, outlandish
stage presentations produced by the eponymous
brother-sister team. Unlike “atmospheric” prologues
that sought a thematic harmony with the feature film,
Fanchon and Marco’s Ideas were, by contrast, delib-
erately discordant, as conveyed by a reporter for The
Dance: “If the picture was a South Sea Island affair”,
the reporter noted, then “expect icebergs” behind
chorines flamboyantly dressed to match the pro-
logue’s arbitrary theme.3
In particular, I want to use
Fanchon and Marco’s career as a way of reassessing
Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 analysis of revue-style
performance, in which he famously interpreted the
precision chorus lines of the Tiller Girls as a formal
crystallization of a hyper-rationalized modern soci-
ety. Thus, whereas Kracauer interpreted the revue’s
modernity as a geographically undifferentiated “aes-
thetic reflex” of modern capitalism, my argument
investigates how Fanchon and Marco mobilized the
revue’s modernity as part of a distinctly regional
prologue brand that opposed prestigious east coast
revues through a presentational style that resisted
theatrical unity and spectacularized social distrac-
tion.4
PhilWagnerisadoctoralstudentinCinemaandMedia
Studies at UCLA. His most recent publications have
appeared in Film & History, Afterimage, and the AFI
Reader The Epic Film in World Culture (Routledge,
2010). Correspondence to pjwagner@ucla.edu
Film History, Volume 23, pp. 251–267, 2011. Copyright © 2011 Indiana University Press
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America
FILM HISTORY: Volume 23, Number 3, 2011 – p. 251

California dreamin’
The children of Russian immigrant parents, Fanchon
and Marco were born in East Los Angeles at the end
of the nineteenth century under the names Fanny and
Mike Wolff (the second “f” was dropped from the
brother’s and sister’s showbiz monikers).5
At home,
the Wolff kids received strict musical training: Fan-
chon excelled at dance and the piano; Marco be-
came an impressive violinist. In 1912, Marco, who
was schooled in ballyhoo at an early age as a Los
Angeles Times newsboy, pitched the Wolf & Wolf act
to an agent from the small-time Bert Levey vaudeville
circuit. The Levey representative was interested, and
the brother-sister duo spent their summer vacation
that year charming audiences across the American
Southwest with their “violin novelty act”, in which
Marco played the fiddle as he waltzed with his older
sister.6
By 1915 the young vaudevillians had made
their way through the Deep South on the Interstate
circuit, and had even completed a brief tour of Aus-
tralia. Back in California, Fanchon and Marco re-
ceived headline attention at posh venues like the
Café Beautiful in Los Angeles and Tait’s in San Fran-
cisco, where they reportedly shared billing with an
unknown tango dancer named Rudolph Valentino.7
In the late 1910s, still barely twenty years of age, they
played to fanfare on the Orpheum Circuit, drawing
the attention of California impresarios Ackerman and
Harris, who, in 1919, bankrolled Fanchon and
Marco’s first original stage revue, Let’s Go.8
Fanchon
and Marco soon earned enough to finance their own
“spectacular super revue”, the Satires of 1920, a
parody of Hollywood centered around the antics of
a Texas oil baron determined to be a movie mogul.9
Satires was conceived as an explicitly Califor-
nian production in distinction from east coast revues
such as the Ziegfeld Follies, which gained prestige
by assimilating European movements in the visual
and performing arts. As musical theater historian
Gerald Bordman points out, New York showmen like
Florenz Ziegfeld and John Murray Anderson suc-
cessfully exploited the cultural allure of “Continental
traditions, especially to a well-heeled segment of
sophisticated New Yorkers”.10
Thus, Ziegfeld mod-
eled the roof garden space in which he rolled out his
first revue in 1907 in the architectural tradition of
French cabaret, and named it the “Jardin de Paris”.
Years later, he further elevated his esteemed New
York institution by contracting the reputable Austrian
stage designer Joseph Urban, whose pointillist sets,
inspired by the Post-Impressionism of Georges Seu-
rat, became a Follies hallmark. For Fanchon and
Marco, however, the Continental pretentions of New
York musical theater’s most imposing figure symbol-
ized the Old World’s de facto colonization of modern
American culture.11
Unlike New York, the young (An-
glo) Los Angeles was unencumbered by hidebound
theatrical traditions, inspiring fresh contributions to
American spectacular culture. Southern California
was, therefore, the ideal cultural backdrop for the
development of what Fanchon called “distinctly
western revues” that eschewed the East’s outmoded
fidelity to “the staid classics”.12
Fanchon once ob-
served how “there is a vast deal of material that has
been untouched out here [in Los Angeles], and I
don’t believe we have to go to New York for … our
ideas”.13
Fanchon’s implicit portrayal of Los Angeles
as a virgin land of “untouched” material is particularly
important here, as it reveals how certain corner-
stones of the frontier mythos – cultural reinvention,
Fig. 1. Fanchon
and Marco
(1920).
[Author’s
collection.]
252 FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 3 (2011) Phil Wagner

expressive freedom, and unchartered expansion –
motivated this youthful and ambitious company from
the West.
Satires’ New York City run accentuated the
young Fanchon and Marco’s regional style. The re-
vue opened at the Globe Theatre under the title
Sunkist, which was far more geographically sugges-
tive than Satires of 1920.14
Sunkist, Fanchon and
Marco’s “musical extravaganza from California” fea-
turing a “cluster of youthful, shapely, pretty California
maids”, was an exotic theatrical import, proudly dif-
ferent from haughty east coast revues.15
It was
hoped that Sunkist’s Hollywood setting and attractive
chorines would speak to New Yorkers’ imaginary
conception of Southern California glamour. Fanchon
and Marco’s “Sun-Kist Girls” – renamed the “Sunkist
Beauties” in Fanchon and Marco’s future prologues
– were paraded as proof of the region’s physically
enhancing environment. If modern New York feminin-
ity was characterized by a rejection of Victorian ac-
coutrements and an assertive presence in public life,
the modern existence of the California girl – at least
as promoted by Fanchon and Marco – was charac-
terized by passive beautification on sun-bleached
shores.
Apparently, New York was not taken by Fan-
chon and Marco’s Californian pulchritude. The
Dance wrote that when Fanchon and Marco returned
to California in debt after Sunkist closed, “It was
surely a grand day for the ‘I-told-you-so’s’, the ‘you-
will-try-to-buck New Yorkers’, and the whole con-
founded chorus of raspberry singers”.16
Other
accounts emphasized that if Marco had not taken a
promissory note for $2,800 from the Southern Pacific
Railroad, the down-and-out company would have
been stranded in hostile eastern territory.17
Rather
than hinder Fanchon and Marco’s developing re-
gional aesthetic, however, New York’s rejection of
Sunkist encouraged the pair to double down on their
refusal of east coast standards. An American Maga-
zine profile on Fanchon and Marco observed how
Sunkist’s failure helped the brother-sister team real-
ize that Broadway is “just another one-week stand
like Louisville or Kansas City”, not the ultimate test of
a theatrical company’s artistic legitimacy and cultural
appeal. Although the article presents an apocryphal
perseverance narrative that misleadingly portrays
the young Fanchon and Marco as a ragtag duo
barely scraping by before finding success in pro-
logues, it sheds significant light on how Fanchon and
Marco’s emergent brand mythology was shaped by
a coastal taste politics that pitted New York’s genteel,
tradition-bound musical theater against a new and
irreverent aesthetic of play. Sunkist did not reverently
borrow higher cultural forms, but jumbled them into
a playfully capricious hopscotch across theater’s
cultural strata.18
According to the profile (and the
Fanchon and Marco publicist who manufactured the
story), New Yorkers’ distaste for Sunkist was a sting-
ing confirmation of Ziegfeld’s imperious dismissal of
Fanchon and Marco’s act at his New Amsterdam
Roof Theatre: “No class”.19
Sunkist’s financial failure in New York thus
functioned as a dramatic touchstone in an inspira-
tional bildungsroman: a young and hopeful theatrical
company from the “hinterlands” discovers that pro-
fessional affirmation from New York City is a false
standard that straitjackets creativity. This narrative of
resilience and artistic iconoclasm lent dramatic sub-
stance to a company mythos that Fanchon and
Marco’s stage shows continually allegorized. The
San Francisco Chronicle’s acclaim for the “Midnight
Frolics” at the Little Club, where Fanchon and Marco
regained solvency after Sunkist, brings the coastal-
aesthetic politics that informed the incipient com-
pany’s trademark style into dramatic relief:
New York has been tooting its horn about what
it had to show in the way of midnight entertain-
ment ... Last night west turned on the east like
a peevish rattlesnake ... There are plenty of
colors in San Francisco when the summer
season is on, but Fanchon and Marco pro-
duced colors last night that California climate
never heard of ... EVERYTHING IS NEW ... was
the universal comment voiced by man, maid,
and matron when Fanchon and Marco patently
proud brother and sister [sic] burst into the
picture, filled with smiles and bowing to loud,
sustained applause, hand and foot ... The sec-
ond crowd which assembled at midnight saw
a brand new show of color, speed and wealth
of action that Flo Ziegfeld well might envy.20
When Fanchon and Marco returned to Los
Angeles in 1923 and began performing their elabo-
rate prologues for capacity crowds along the West
Coast Theatre chain, the local media took this as a
sign that Los Angeles was becoming an acknow-
ledged center for original stage productions. The Los
Angeles Times observed how the city was now not
only producing original shows for the stage, but was
“putting its own authoritative stamp of approval on
“An America Not Quite Mechanized” FILM HISTORY Vol. 23 Issue 3 (2011) 253

them”.21
Here, the Times anticipated American
Magazine’s mythologizing of the young and crea-
tively bold Fanchon and Marco. But rather than two
hopeful vaudevillians learning to “be Fanchon and
Marco of Los Angeles”, the newspaper implied that
Los Angeles was, at last, learning to be Los Angeles
through its brave indifference to New York’s “authori-
tative stamp” and the subsequent emergence of a
confident local taste culture, which Fanchon and
Marco’s homegrown productions symbolized.
Business in the flesh
In 1923, Fanchon and Marco entered the prologue
business. According to Marco, atmospheric pro-
logues of the style pioneered by Sid Grauman – that
is, live spectacles that reflected a feature film’s at-
mosphere – were dominant in San Francisco movie
theaters in the early 1920s. “These did not interest
me greatly”, Marco told the Los Angeles Times, “and
I felt there must be many people who felt as I did”.
So Marco gambled on a more diversified form of
entertainment, producing live presentations that
served to “round out the program rather than ape the
picture”.22
Marco’s preference for non-atmospheric
stage presentations (i.e. prologues that were the-
matically detached from the program’s feature film)
sprung more from sound economics than personal
taste. Marco had been quietly assessing the pro-
logue market for some time, and concluded that
business as usual was terribly shortsighted. The
great prologue pioneers like Grauman and Samuel
“Roxy” Rothafel would typically discard their costly
prologues after just a single run. Jack Partington, to
be sure, produced thematically disconnected pres-
entations in San Francisco a couple of years before
Fanchon and Marco began producing theirs, but, like
Roxy and Grauman, he did not tour his prologues on
a circuit.23
So, contrary to brand mythology, Marco
did not invent a new prologue genre, as non-atmos-
pheric prologues were already a part of the movie-
going experience. It would be more accurate to say
that Marco introduced a new, wholesale model of
prologue distribution. The Dance cogently outlined
Marco’s innovative thought process:
To [Marco] it appeared that a presentation on
a scale elaborate enough for recognition
would be unprofitable because it would last
but the week a picture ran. ... [H]ouses show-
ing long-run pictures could afford a lavish
prolog [sic], as the picture might run for
Fig. 2. Abundant
atmosphere in
the
non-atmospheric
“Pagoda” Idea
(1927).
[Courtesy
Huntington
Library.]

months. Marco believed that a system could
be perfected whereby patrons of program pic-
tures could have these same lavish displays
with their nightly picture fare. … The problem
resolved itself to this: To pay, an act costing
two or more thousand dollars to produce
would have to be shown in more than one
theatre or for longer than a week’s run. Obvi-
ously, then, his next step was to secure a chain
of theatres for which to supply his entertain-
ments. The larger the chain the more elaborate
the act; therefore, the more drawing power. ...
the American plan of quantity production.24
Here was the plan: Fanchon and Marco would
be able to sell their presentations at an affordable
price because, unlike Grauman’s lavish prologues or
Partington’s “Impressions”, their profits were not de-
termined by a single run at a deluxe house. Instead,
the same Fanchon and Marco Idea preceded differ-
ent “program pictures” on a sprawling chain. Fan-
chon and Marco’s wholesale distribution method
would make the Ideas the nation’s most prominent
stage presentation brand – and, as things transpired,
even made it possible for Fanchon and Marco to
endure in a world of synchronized sound prologues.
The Fanchon and Marco Ideas first found their
home on the West Coast Theatre circuit. Their first
Idea was presented at San Francisco’s Warfield
Theatre, operated by West Coast Theatres’ Northern
Division, in October 1923. Almost immediately new
Ideas were being produced every week, moving to
Oakland’s T&D Theatre after their inaugural showing
at the Warfield. West Coast’s Southern Division
quickly took notice of the Ideas’ success, and in 1924
Fanchon and Marco became the permanent pro-
logue company at Loew’s State, West Coast’s high
profile theater in downtown Los Angeles. Fanchon,
who had resettled in Los Angeles after their San
Francisco Midnight Frolics closed in late 1922, over-
saw production activities at the State, while Marco
remained temporarily in San Francisco, before in-
creased bookings in the Southland soon brought him
to Los Angeles too. Fanchon and Marco stage pres-
entations were typically launched in and around Hol-
lywood before touring the West Coast circuit, which
by 1926 stretched from San Diego to Seattle.25
Wil-
liam Fox’s acquisition of a majority interest in West
Coast Theatres in March of 1928 integrated the west-
ern chain into a circuit reaching New York, making
the Ideas the first truly national prologue brand.
Increased demand for Fanchon and Marco
entertainment necessitated an efficient, specialized
work environment in which Ideas could be rationally
manufactured. Fanchon and Marco, the “Henry
Fords of entertainment”, maintained the volume that
their ever-expanding chain demanded in a “musical
comedy factory” known as the Studio of Fanchon
and Marco Ideas, located at Sunset and St. Andrews
on the northeast side of the Hollywood flatlands.26
Production started with the conception of new Ideas,
which either came from Fanchon or one of her con-
tracted art directors. An army of carpenters, painters,
and dressmakers working in separate departments
gave concrete, dramatic substance to the arbitrary
themes that Fanchon and her team conjured. Song-
writers adapted an Idea’s visual scheme into peppy
original music, which inflected Fanchon and her as-
sistants’ dance choreography. While Ideas were
hammered into shape, Marco, head of business
affairs, crunched numbers, scoured journals for fresh
talent, and conferred with theater managers. Fan-
chon worked on her feet, marching to and from the
studio’s five rehearsal halls in which new routines
were developed.27
In 1931, well after sound shorts
had become standard fare on theater programs, a
reporter from the New York Times visited the Fanchon
and Marco studios and painted a Fordist image of
relentless production: “Something ... is always going
on. No sooner does a five-star Fanchon and Marco
‘Idea’ matriculate at the front gate than it is rushed
into action and graduated within a month. [The]
rehearsal stages echo to the tapping feet of a chorus
known as the Sunkist Beauties.”28
As the only prologue company enjoying na-
tionwide visibility, Fanchon and Marco had the cor-
porate muscle to consolidate what seemed like all
the potential categories of stage diversion. Careful,
bureaucratic organization guaranteed that countless
toe-steppers, singing comediennes, and adagio-
dancing beauties were all at their immediate dis-
posal. “On file in my office are the names and
qualifications of over a thousand girls representing
almost all performers of consequence on the Pacific
Coast”, Fanchon once stated in an interview.29
The
diversity of performers alleged to be on the company
payroll was comic in its breadth and scale:
1,214 chorus girls, 4 blackface comedians, 13
dogs, 15 contortionists, 6 pantomime comics,
85 specialty dancers, 3 xylophonists, 5 dog
trainers, 3 whistlers, 14 marionettes, 15 nut

comics, 1 Jewish comedian, 1 monkey, 12
unicycle riders, 2 mind readers, 1 dare-devil
bicycle rider, 57 assorted acrobats, 4 grizzly
bears, 2 roping acts, 3 elephants, 2 horses, 35
straight comedians, 5 eccentric dancers, 6
accordionists, 4 fire walkers, 3 iron-jaw ex-
perts, 1 ventriloquist, 2 violin soloists, 4 drunk
dancers, 1 magician, 12 ballet dancers, 13
punching-bag artists, 11 masters of ceremo-
nies and monologists, 3 crazy musicians, 7
impersonators, 3 jugglers, 3 Dutch comics, 44
adagio dancers, 11 acrobatic dancers, 110
singers, 10 harmonica players, 4 one-legged
dancers, 2 comedy jugglers, 2 Negro singers,
33 knockabout comedians, 1 piano soloist.30
Fanchon and Marco’s distribution strategy of
maximal use-value also drove this mass-collection of
talent. Frank Cullen has observed how Fanchon and
Marco, Inc. operated as an extraordinarily profitable
“farm system that fed dancers into the performing
companies”.31
Touring was particularly grueling,
which meant that Fanchon and Marco had to fever-
ishly collect talent in order to maintain the chain’s
necessary volume. On average, dancers performed
four to five times a day for fifty weeks a year. Most
chorines could endure the chain’s taxing monotony
for a maximum of two years.32
Fortune pointed out
how returned dancers were generally less valuable
than recycled set decoration:
What is left of the scenery and costumes, after
eleven hundred odd performances, [is] to rest
in the warehouse until they again find a place
in a unit. Such items can usually be salvaged
to about fifteen percent of their original value.
As for the girls, they rarely make the circuit
more than two or three times. Those who show
unusual talent may become soloists, or try their
luck in the movies or on Broadway, the others
presumably turning back to less glamorous
but also less strenuous domesticity, cured for
all time of a desire to go on stage.33
This predictable disposability of the Fanchon
Fig. 3. Fanchon
and Marco
dancers and
unknown
specialty
performers mug
for the camera
backstage
between acts (ca.
late 1920s).
[Author’s
collection.]

and Marco chorine was counterbalanced by consis-
tently high enrollment at the Fanchon and Marco
dance school, where unknown hoofers auditioned for
the circuit.34
The school’s diploma system provided
brand regulation – it had been discovered that lesser
talents were falsely claiming experience in Ideas –
even as it guaranteed that retired dancers could still
be of significant use to Fanchon and Marco. Perform-
ers who left the Fanchon and Marco system with a
“golden card”, the company’s highest graduation
honor, continued to generate cultural capital for the
company. The roster of distinguished graduates was
evidence for precious schooling received under the
Fanchon and Marco system, which lent credibility to
the brother and sister’s self-casting in the formative
histories of popular entertainers.35
And eager, fresh
talent – capital in the flesh – kept knocking at the
studio’s door.
Industrial boosters
As if compensating for an old-fashioned liveness in
an era of technological mediation, Fanchon and
Marco promoted certain presentations as instructive
display sites for new media. The 1926 “Radio Idea”,
developed for the West Coast circuit, is telling in this
light, as it not only collected talent from a popular
genre of performance, but fashioned itself as a privi-
leged demonstration of radio technology. Mezzo-
contralto Lilyan May Challenger, whose “perfect
radio voice” had recently been acclaimed in a rare
international broadcast, was the headlining act in this
live, simulated radio show.36
It is likely, however, that
the “Radio Idea’s” spectacularization of technology
was its most attractive feature. On stage, radio para-
phernalia surrounded performers “from leading local
broadcast stations”, whose voices were amplified by
prominently placed loudspeakers.37
At the time, the
electro-acoustic enhancement of voices was stage-
worthy stuff, as prologues were not regularly ampli-
fied until motion picture theaters were wired for
sound.38
This, then, was a rare theatrical encounter
with electronically mediated sound: the “Radio Idea”
offered an alluring and novel performance of technol-
ogy that not only evidenced the commodity value of
electronically transmitted sound (which the cinema
soon reaffirmed on a far greater scale) but confirmed
Fanchon and Marco’s brand identity as consistent
and enticing purveyors of modern forms of percep-
tion.39
Such intersections of revue-style performance
and industrially-mediated commodity culture evoke,
of course, the insights of Siegfried Kracauer, who
saw reflected in such performances the abstract and
rationalized “ornamental” design that sustained
modern capitalism. No less than Kracauer’s Tiller
Girls, Fanchon and Marco’s Sunkist Beauties – eye-
catching and endlessly reproducible – offered a per-
formative distillation of modernity’s industrial ethos.
Therefore, it was no mere non sequitur when the
Sunkist Beauties performed as “Industrial Boosters”
on a 1926 promotional caravan tour for the Colorado
River Project, a massive infrastructural endeavor that
was vital to Los Angeles’ growth as a sustainable
metropolis.40
The Sunkist Beauties, the premier
dancers for a corporation that uniquely specialized
in the mass-distribution of spectacular live produc-
tions, spiritually resonated with the “new world of
abundance” that the awesome hydroelectric pro-
jects of the 1920s and 1930s represented.41
In a different cross-promotional stunt that
same year, Fanchon and Marco chorines appeared
as attractive embodiments of an industrial consumer
product: the luxury sedan. A publicity shot of the stunt
shows Fanchon and Marco dancers Gladys Rowe,
Leona Nichols, and Anna Marie coyly smiling beside
a Studebaker Big Six, while the accompanying text
observes how the dancers and the car are “Are All
Two-Named Beauties” – thus drawing an explicit,
ontological connection between Fanchon and
Marco’s adorable employees and the elegant auto-
mobile. Such extra-theatrical publicity stunts in fact
bring into focus a possible modification of Kracauer’s
thesis: where the German critic drew analogies be-
tween the “hands of the factory” and the “legs of the
Tiller Girls”, the Fanchon and Marco stunt slightly
tweaks this formulation.42
The chorine’s body does
not figuratively mirror the alienated factory worker,
but the impressive factory product. The objects
within this promotional mise-en-scène conspire in a
mutual eroticization: through association, the danc-
ers acquire the machinic slickness of the Stude-
baker, while the car’s attractive features are
illuminated by these shapely feminine analogues for
the six cylinder model.43
Fanchon and Marco, Inc. consciously personi-
fied capitalist modernity’s economically-motivated
elision of time and space; as a 1928 Variety adver-
tisement for the Ideas promised “Value – Anywhere
– Anytime”.44
By the late 1920s, Fanchon and
Marco’s seeming omnipresence along the Pacific
forced Marco to adopt air transportation as his pre-
ferred method of business travel. In an interview with

the Los Angeles Times, “perhaps one of the first to ...
take place in the air”, the busy executive related how
this “more rapid way of traveling” has enabled him
“to keep a watchful eye on touring companies over
the West Coast Theaters circuit”.45
The number of
laboring bodies under Fanchon and Marco, Inc. grew
significantly as more and more Ideas dotted the map,
in turn intensifying Marco’s regulatory burdens. In
order to maintain the brand’s integrity, the daily ac-
tivities of dancers, orchestra conductors, theater
managers, emcees, and other workers scattered
across the West Coast chain required careful scru-
tiny – “a watchful eye”. Time was of the essence:
regulatory oversight caused by sluggish travel could
tarnish the brand and hurt profit. Marco measured
his duties carefully and exploited the wonder of air
travel as a new form of managerial omniscience,
symbolizing the rationalization of time that propelled
modern capitalism.
Indeed, in 1928, Fanchon and Marco joined a
handful of movie industry associates in launching
one of Southern California’s first commercial airlines,
Ambassador Airways.46
As had been the case with
their automobile and radio cross-promotions, Fan-
chon and Marco’s chorines were ideal promotional
tools for this diversifying venture into commercial air
travel, and were exploited for the “creation of airmind-
edness” in order to capitalize on the recent “arrival
of aviation at its spectacular peak”.47
The Los Ange-
les Times reported that “Fanchon and Marco, local
producers, have evolved a number of dances elabo-
rately costumed for presentation ... to promote inter-
est in Aviation”.48
The Fanchon and Marco chorine’s
embodied relationship to modern industrial marvels
was made explicit in the “Air-Minded Idea”, debuted
at the 1931 Los Angeles County Fair, which involved
dancers “representing in novel dance effects and
acrobatics the take-off of an airplane”.49
The creative
dynamic between Fanchon and Marco’s brand iden-
tity and their aesthetic productions was subsequently
underscored by the “Lindberg Idea”, in which cho-
rines in aviation garb paraded before a miniature
“Spirit of St. Louis”, which traveled from stage left to
stage right before a painted backdrop of the Atlantic
Ocean. The “Lindberg Idea” did not verisimilarly rec-
reate the historic trans-Atlantic flight, but spectacu-
larly dramatized a concept that reflected both
Lindberg’s historic voyage and Fanchon and
Marco’s brand image: the heroic ingenuity of modern
American industry.
An appetite spoiled?
In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Anne
Doane argues that early-twentieth-century moder-
nity’s audiovisual excess and haphazardness were
rendered photographically as alluring attractions,
even as they were perceived collectively as sources
of great anxiety.50
According to Doane, the potential
meaninglessness of modernity’s density, noise, and
contingency was mitigated by normative structures
like statistics, classical narrative cinema, and – I
would add – atmospheric prologues, which assured
Fig. 4. Chorines
promote
American
infrastructure in
the Los Angeles
Times (1 July
1926).
[Courtesy Los
Angeles Times.]

paying customers of an organizational, thematic
logic tying together an evening’s program. Doane’s
provocative thoughts on the modern suppression of
excess shed light on critical hostility towards Fan-
chon and Marco’s irreverent non-atmospheric pro-
logue tradition, which spectacularized modernity’s
commotion and discord.
A Fanchon and Marco presentation was char-
acterized by multiple peaks of dramatic excitation.
The typical Idea ran between forty and fifty minutes,
and included three or four impressive adagio, ballet,
or precision chorus line routines that decoratively
conveyed each Idea’s theme (e.g. birds, yachting,
Mardi Gras, Russia – the list goes on). These line
routines were interspersed with punchy and often
tangential specialty acts by the master of ceremo-
nies, a guest performer, or an especially capable duo
selected from the chorus. Fanchon once remarked
how “the secret of a good prologue in a downtown
… theater is to have the most entertainment in the
least amount of time”.51
Here, Fanchon specifies an
ideal social geography (this is the secret for down-
town theaters), indicating that the company’s exces-
sive stage presentations were tailored for audiences
perceptually acclimated to a frenzied brand of enter-
tainment. The 1929 pacifist-themed “Gobs of Joy” –
more a rapid chain of sensory assaults than a coher-
ent statement against war – was indicative of the
Idea’s standard tempo. Variety recalled how
“Gobs of Joy” runs 40 minutes. It seemed to
run 20 ... Dancers] entering and exiting as fast
as they work, and working for one or two min-
utes at a time. Speed. Speedy people speedily
routined. After the speed and specialties, a
flash finish. Guns revolve on a turret in the
battleship set, flashlight powder is discharged
from one and the word “Peace” is flashed on
a sheet in the rear ... “Gobs of Joy” left jabbed
them all the way through then slipped over a
right at the end.52
Ideas were delirious. Not only were they the-
matically autonomous from the feature presentation,
but they would take sharp detours from their appar-
ent themes. Consider the “Wee Bit of Scotch” Idea,
which, as one might expect, included a “band of real
Scotch lassies [who] play the bagpipes in old country
style … [performing] highland dances with a fling”.
But, as a reviewer observed, this Idea “isn’t all Scot-
tish”, since the emcee’s impersonation of a Highland
chief was irreverently exchanged for the accent of a
“Spanish Don from Barcelona”.53
Such unpre-
dictable role revision was a hallmark of Fanchon and
Marco stage presentations. A reviewer of a 1926 Idea
wrote how the “Gershwin chorus number was espe-
cially good”, but added that it would have been
preferable if the “orchestra boys ... confined them-
selves to their instruments and passed up the terp-
sichorean attempts”.54
A diary entry from Fanchon
and Marco dancer Reva Howitt Clar underscored the
Idea’s decorative inclination for mutating surfaces.
For the “Vanities” Idea, Reva recalled, “We do a
spectacular peacock number in very scanty cos-
tumes, a Red Riding Hood number dressed accord-
ingly, and a buck number with tin-soled shoes which
make blue sparks”.55
Rube Wolf, Fanchon and Marco’s brother and
most popular emcee, personified the Idea’s push for
extraordinary transformations. A promotional car-
toon vividly captured Rube’s inclination for hyperac-
tive role changes, showing Rube cavorting with guest
vaudevillian Nell Kelly, directing the house orchestra,
playing the cornet, and, finally, “dancing the gazot-
sky” by his lonesome.56
Sometimes variation and
speed themselves stood as the Idea’s determining
themes, as in the “Diversities” Idea – again featuring
Rube – which the Los Angeles Times celebrated as
a novel act that “holds consistently high speed from
the opening orchestral number to the closing
mélange of waltz tunes”.57
The middle act by trapeze
artists Prosper and Maret and the flippant cross-talk
between Rube Wolf and comedienne Nell Kelly only
amplified the lunacy. A 1926 Idea that premiered at
the Loew’s State before the Joan Crawford vehicle
Paris (1926) again demonstrated Rube Wolf’s perfor-
mative eclecticism. After Rube introduced Don Bar-
clay, a former comedian for the Ziegfeld Follies, as
the night’s “guest conductor”, the two performers
“forg[o]t all about conducting” and spiraled into a
two-minute burlesque of the “old mind-reading
stunt”. After this digression, a second guest was
introduced, Norwegian Olympiad Charles Hoff, oth-
erwise known as the “Vaulting Viking”, who danced
the tango with Sunkist Beauty Joyzell and then might-
ily soared over a towering set of cross bars.58
Performance in Fanchon and Marco’s Ideas
spiritually captured what Jonathan Crary has called
the “dynamic, kinetic, distracted texture of modern
sensory life”.59
The intense dynamism of perform-
ance was only amplified by the Idea’s perceptually
deranging set design. In the “Russian Revels” Idea,
for instance, baroquely dressed revelers stood in a

descending diagonal figuration against a cubist
backdrop of violently clashing angular shapes. Fan-
chon once noted how the successful modern stage
presentation requires “artistic lighting, scenery and a
punch”.60
The Fanchon and Marco Idea – with its
breakneck pace set by a wired and incredibly versa-
tile master of ceremonies – was pure punch. As
Marco once suggested, the Ideas were an aesthetic
crystallization of modern life’s cultural pulse. Fan-
chon and Marco stage presentations “serve to mirror
the life of the times”, mused the showman, they
“illustrate, burlesque, dramatize and wisecrack the
daily doings of the people – on an intensive scale”.61
Yet Fanchon and Marco’s frenzied and irrever-
ent style hardly found unanimous favor in the late
1920s. In article entitled “Film Prologue of Irrelevant
Type Ossailed [sic]”, Warner Bros. associate pro-
ducer Raymond Schrock lashed out against the non-
atmospheric performance mode in which Fanchon
and Marco specialized. “A prologue is an appetizer
offered before dinner to your guests”, asserted
Schrock. “[U]nless a prologue synchronizes with the
feature picture on the program, the audience lags in
a display of interest and finds it difficult to retrieve the
enthusiasm [that had brought them to the theater].”62
The polemic is telling with regard to modernity’s
institutional management of the ubiquitous threat of
absurdity, as discussed by Doane.63
Schrock main-
tained that both “relevance” – he is railing against
allegedly “irrelevant” prologues – and audience in-
terest were contingent on an explicit structural har-
mony between live presentation and marquee
feature: meaning should be stretched across the
program as much as possible. Hal Roach echoed
Schrock in a press statement in which he complained
about “thoughtless theater managers whose con-
ception of a prologue or ‘presentation’ is the intro-
duction of a hodgepodge of bicycle riding, juggling,
[and] tightrope walking, and display of ‘child won-
ders’, assembled with absolutely no thought as to
their relativity [sic] to the subject matter of a picture
exhibited”. Roach, like Schrock, highlighted the ulti-
mate insubstantiality of live prologues through a cu-
linary metaphor: “One who orders a turkey in a café,
usually wishes the turkey and is completely indiffer-
ent to the sort of dressing served with it. So it is in
amusement shopping”.64
Prologue producer Bud
Murray also spoke out against thematically discon-
nected presentations. “Special music should be writ-
ten, special costumes created and new ideas
Fig. 5. An epic
Idea: “Pyramids”
(1926).
[Courtesy
Huntington
Library.]

incorporated”, Murray admitted, but added that “al-
ways in this type of entertainment the film should be
kept in mind”. For Murray, a prologue’s atmospheric
resonance with the feature presentation ought to be
explicit enough for the live show to “dissolve” seam-
lessly into the film: “The ideal prologue ... would
suggest the idea and the atmosphere of the piece
and would immediately precede it, fading off of the
stage and on to the screen”.65
Such jeremiads against programming disso-
nance point towards a different phenomenology of
the film program than is typically emphasized by
recent historians of silent and early sound exhibition.
In place of the oft-stressed pleasures of “diversified”
appeal, protests against discontinuous program-
ming indicated a desire for the feature film to stand
as both main draw and semiotic fulcrum.66
For a
significant number of high-profile industrial figures,
the Fanchon and Marco Idea was an unwelcome
vestige of turn-of-the-century attractions that not only
knocked programs galley-west but had the potential
to outshine the feature film. As Marquis Busby wrote
of the extravagant “Pyramid Idea”, “Nothing short of
an epic, as the motion-picture producers fondly call
their most elaborate feature productions, could ever
possibly compete on a program with ‘Pyramids’, the
Fanchon and Marco presentation at West Coast’s
Loew’s State theater this week. It is a glorious thing
... . Unfortunately, the feature attraction runs a rather
poor second to the prologue”.67
At times, outstand-
ing prologues were bad PR for mediocre studio fare.
More was at stake in the debate over pro-
logues than a simple question of taste. Corporate
objectives linked to synchronized sound also fueled
this antagonism. Schrock’s Warners was, of course,
at the vanguard of sound’s expansion with Vita-
phone, while Hal Roach, whose short comedies were
distributed by MGM, was similarly invested in the
future of talking short subjects. Here it is worth reem-
phasizing how the non-atmospheric Fanchon and
Marco Ideas shared sound shorts’ capacity to travel
freely in the theater world. The real issue, then, was
not necessarily programming decorum, but financial
elasticity. Donald Crafton has observed how Warner
Bros. “saw the [live] presentation fad as a double
opportunity. The [small town] exhibitor who wanted
[a prologue] could have it, but filmed, not live ... And
the showman who wanted to get rid of the expense
of the presentation could substitute much cheaper
Vitaphone ‘virtual’ versions. From the producers’
point of view, filmed presentations could help drive
away the live competitors”.68
But despite this daunt-
ing economic disadvantage, Fanchon and Marco’s
live presentations endured in a world of synchronized
sound. Records show that as more theaters were
being wired for sound in the late 1920s, Ideas actually
appeared on more theater programs.
Putting the view in revue
As the 1930s drew near, Fanchon and Marco were
engaged in a number of momentous deals that sig-
nificantly enhanced their national presence. The Fan-
chon and Marco Idea, affiliated with West Coast
Theatres since 1923, increased proportionately over
the decade as the reach of West Coast Theatres
became more dispersed along the Pacific. On 15
June 1927 it was announced that the Ideas, which at
the time could be seen in forty theaters along the
coast, would within a year be enjoyed in over 100
from San Diego to Vancouver.69
The announcement
was made following a meeting between West Coast
Theatres president Harold B. Franklin and Para-
mount-Publix managing director Frank L. Newman,
whereby it was agreed to open up theaters from the
massive Publix chain to Fanchon and Marco stage
offerings.70
Later that summer it was announced that
theatergoers would also witness “the circulation of
the Fanchon and Marco prologues through the
East”.71
Fanchon and Marco’s eastward ambitions
were further expedited by William Fox’s acquisition
of a majority interest in West Coast Theatres in early
1928, which eventually linked West Coast and Fox’s
eastern venues into an incredibly dense national
chain.72
This merger is of special interest here be-
cause it points to a simultaneous growth of live pres-
entations and synchronized sound shorts, a twin
development that unsettles conventional prologue
historiography, as typified by dance historian Bar-
bara Cohen. “[Prologues] were designed and staged
to entertain before a silent film”, Cohen writes, “to
provide [the] sound, music, and color ... that their
accompanying films lacked. When the movies ac-
quired that self-sufficient artistry, the Prologs were
doomed”.73
Yet such teleological historicizing fails to
explain the persistence of Fanchon and Marco enter-
tainment in the early sound era. “Canned” Ideas
apparently didn’t cut it.
The question remains why Fanchon and
Marco’s live prologues continued to circulate nation-
wide when sound film versions could have been
distributed far more cheaply? I would suggest that

fortuitous partnerships and aesthetic distinction led
to Fanchon and Marco’s sustained visibility in motion
picture theaters during the early sound period. The
Fanchon and Marco Ideas enjoyed a parallel expan-
sion with Movietone, as the West Coast merger gave
Fox an enhanced outlet for his increasingly popular
sound films, which by 1928 accounted for the entire
Fox production slate.74
While Fox sought domination
over the synchronized sound market, he also fore-
saw the erasure of prologues from competing deluxe
chains. The prologue’s general disappearance
would make the continued investment in Fanchon
and Marco’s live presentations a sign of distinction
in Fox palaces, a business decision consistent with
Fox’s gravitation towards risky prestige projects, like
the short-lived widescreen Grandeur process. Also
key was Fox’s involvement in a deluxe house building
“campaign”, when he gained access to Fanchon and
Marco entertainment: Fox evidently recognized Fan-
chon and Marco not only as a popular and increas-
ingly unique entertainment brand, but one that would
help keep his new 5,000-seaters full and his studio
flush with cash.
Nor did Paramount-Publix drop Fanchon and
Marco. Crafton has pinpointed April 1929, when
Paramount executive Sam Katz decided to begin
replacing live presentations with sound shorts, as the
“beginning of the end” of the live prologue era.75
However, although Paramount did indeed convert
the majority of its theaters to “straight picture poli-
cies”, the company also continued to book Fanchon
and Marco units for a substantial number of houses
along the Publix chain. In July of 1931, Variety re-
ported on the enduring “business romance” between
Fanchon and Marco and Paramount-Publix, evi-
denced by the ten weeks added to Fanchon and
Marco’s Publix route that summer. The article added
that Fanchon and Marco “as booker and producer
of presentations now looms over the field more than
any other similar circuit in the past, including Pub-
lix”.76
In March of 1930, Film Daily – in a report
entitled, “Fanchon and Marco’s Bookings Increase
Despite Sound” – cited Marco’s observation that it is
“only the cheaper grade of vaudeville which sound
can permanently supplant”. “Despite the competi-
tion offered vaudeville by sound pictures”, Marco
continued, the Fanchon and Marco Idea “was able
to add 15 weeks to its bookings in 1929”.77
This
persistence of Fanchon and Marco prologues at the
turn of the decade compelled Philip K. Scheuer of
the Los Angeles Times to conclude: “An America not
quite mechanized is crying for its pound of flesh ...
Fanchon and Marco have more new ‘Ideas’ than a
compiler of dictionaries”.78
The prologue’s diminished presence in the
early years of the Depression, instigated by extensive
theater closings and the general switch from live
presentations to cheaper “canned vaudeville”,
makes Fanchon and Marco’s survival in first-run ex-
hibition a particularly intriguing point of historical
inquiry. What did audiences see (and hear) in the
Fanchon and Marco Ideas that was so special? Our
fragmentary aesthetic record offers possible expla-
nations. Reading the Idea’s meticulous orchestration
of bodies in space against the unidirectional, vaude-
ville-style address of early sound shorts can help us
understand why Fanchon and Marco presentations
remained desirable aesthetic commodities. The
Idea’s complex and perceptually jarring spatial cho-
reography offered potential reprieve from the an-
chored-down spatiality of early sound shorts.
A journalist from Fortune who visited Fanchon
and Marco’s studios in 1932 painted a vivid picture
of the Idea’s surprise-oriented spatial play:
[A] giant illuminated red heart will glide across
the stage framing a pair of ballad singers; then
a swing will descend from above bearing a
beautiful lady pointed with rhinestones; cur-
tains will part revealing a trio dressed as holly-
hocks holding aloft a stuffed dove; and finally
a frame outlined in electric lights drops from
the skies, stopping fifteen feet from the stage
while an adagio dancer leaps therefrom into
the arms of her partner.79
Programs for the “Aztec Idea” further high-
lighted Fanchon and Marco’s choreographic pen-
chant for a revelatory disclosure of concealed
objects, and pointed to the dynamic verticality that
was evident in such later Ideas as “Up in the Air”, in
which panels concealed by a draped background
open up to reveal a line of girls on stilts covered by
giant hoopskirts from which more dancers emerge,
and “Aerial Ballet”, where ballerinas in white leotards
pose and twirl in unison on ropes spanning the
heights of the stage.80
The “Aztec Idea” opens as
“mysterious urns emit the fragrance of the past”. The
curtain rises on an ancient temple on top of which
two female “slave dancers” perform an exotic sword
dance for an Aztec chief, who is seated on a throne
that rests beneath a “black mystic circle”. The chief
grows tired of his female attendants, and directs his

attention to the mystic circle stationed above him,
which splits open and reveals a glimpse of the future:
the hep Loew’s State orchestra playing live jazz.81
In
a nostalgic New York Times article from 1936, B.R.
Crisler reminisced about how Fanchon and Marco’s
orchestras would “ris[e] from the pit as unexpectedly
as demons”.82
A splintering of attention through the
unannounced disclosure of human figures could
also be seen in the “Mission Bells Idea”, where a
colorful assembly of gauchos is interrupted when a
row of enormous bells (whose clappers are straddled
by girls in fanned miniskirts) descends from the raf-
ters. The Ideas’ choreography, which was kinetically
charged by the jolting announcement of figures hid-
den inside perpetually mutating scenery and the
manipulation of attention through the careful splinter-
ing of mise-en-scène, was a salable aesthetic alter-
native to the centripetal gravity of early Movietone
News and Vitaphone vaudeville, which often unrav-
eled in a paralyzed direct address.
We are history
Fanchon and Marco were collectors of the world by
trade – the Idea concept made all external reality a
potential Fanchon and Marco commodity, while the
consistent production of exotic prologues like “Ori-
Fig. 6. Reflexive
awe in the
“Daisies” Idea
(1927).
[Courtesy
Huntington
Library.]

ental”, “Pan-Americana”, and “Nile Nights” made the
Fanchon and Marco studios a virtual archive of
global delights – reproducing an exhilarating and
self-affirming modern worldview for the stage. The
Idea’s performative cataloguing of industrial innova-
tions and cultural curiosities gave rich expression to
modernity’s “representational code”, which Jacques
Attali has defined as “the aesthetic codes and forms
in which [a] new audience wished to see itself re-
flected”.83
Whereas Roxy’s famous business adage
– “Don’t give the people what they want, give them
something better” – implied audience submission to
a project of cultural uplift, Fanchon and Marco ro-
mantically allegorized the mass audience’s partici-
pation in popular modernity. The Fanchon and Marco
Ideas theatrically incarnated Kracauer’s vision for a
“sincere” modern prologue, which would not “claim
the status of high art” by “rehearsing anachronistic
forms”, but would radically operate in a mode of
“pure externality” that reflected its audience’s social
reality through “the fragmented sequence of splen-
did sense impressions”.84
It is especially telling how
Fanchon and Marco’s use of the exotic past differed
from that of the prestigious New York shows: unlike
Roxy, for instance, who would distribute “explanatory
program notes” verifying the authenticity of his pag-
eantry, Fanchon and Marco’s theatrical farragoes
flouted verisimilitude with their schizophrenic em-
cees and anachronistic performance numbers.85
In
the Ideas, history was not evoked for the sake of
illusory transport, as it was, say, in Sid Grauman’s
more extravagantly “authentic” prologues, which
shared in the New York shows’ adherence to Victo-
rian codes of theatrical realism; rather, Fanchon and
Marco offered their historical episodes as dramatic
installments on a progressive timeline of fashion and
performance for which the Idea marked the zenith.86
In the “Aztec Idea”, the future of music was incar-
nated by the Loew’s State orchestra; in the “Parisian
Idea”, chorines demonstrated “the change of style of
women’s dress since the days of Mother Eve”; and
in the “Follies of 1906”, “a modern sequence in which
the ‘black bottom’ is purveyed with distinction” fol-
lowed a plodding historical number with chorines
“dressed in the prevailing mode of the [early cen-
tury’s] girly-girly shows”, which provoked gratitude
for Fanchon and Marco’s faster pace and, of course,
more up-to-date, abbreviated costuming.87
Ulti-
mately, this corporate self-fashioning as supreme
arbiters of modern sensory experience distinguished
Fanchon and Marco’s frenetic and perceptually chal-
lenging Ideas from the cement-bound style of early
sound shorts.
But the Depression continued to pressure
strapped theater managers to replace the once af-
fordable Ideas with even more economical synchro-
nized sound shorts, and in 1936 Fanchon and Marco
closed down their Hollywood prologue factory.88
In
the winter of 1937, Fanchon and Marco, who had by
then moved their corporate operations to a suite in
Rockefeller Center, pulled the plug on the Ideas for
good and began producing far less design-intensive,
traditional variety shows that mirrored Roxy’s pro-
grams at New York’s grandest nostalgia institution,
Radio City Music Hall. By the late 1930s Fanchon and
Marco’s prologues could be seen at only two grand
palaces in the country, the Paramount in Los Angeles
and the Roxy in New York.89
Fanchon and Marco, an
entertainment company that had constructed its
original brand image on an opposition to the theatri-
cal anti-modernism that Roxy and other New York
impresarios represented, staged some of their last
presentations as relics from the glorious prologue
era – at the Roxy.90
For a time, Fanchon and Marco
were able to harness and spectacularize an evolving,
modern technosphere. Yet one irrevocable, funda-
mental principal of modern capitalism was all too
powerful, even for Fanchon and Marco’s impressive
and industrially innovative Ideas: forced obsoles-
cence.
Acknowledgements:MygratitudegoesouttoErinChase
at the Huntington Library for her friendly assistance with
the Fanchon and Marco Collection.
1. For a valuable typology of the prologue, see Philip
K. Scheuer, “Prologue Rivalry is Keen”, Los Angeles
Times (henceforth LAT) (20 November 1927): C15.
Scheuer outlines the “four general groups” of prefa-
tory entertainment policies: (1) the straight-picture
policy (a feature preceded by short silent subjects);
(2) the atmospheric prologue (a live thematic antici-
pation of the feature film, as pioneered by Sid Grau-
man from 1918 at his Million Dollar theater in down-
town Los Angeles); (3) the varieties format (a stage
show that shared no thematic relation to the feature
film, à la the Fanchon and Marco Ideas); and (4) the
synchronized sound short subject.
Notes

2. See Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2004), 385–387.
3. Kenneth Calvin, “The Big Idea of Fanchon and
Marco”, Part II, The Dance, (April 1929): 42.
4. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar
Essays, Thomas Y. Levin (ed. and trans.) (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79.
5. “Solomon Wolff”, obituary, Variety (20 March 1929),
n.p., Fanchon and Marco clippings file, Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences (hereafter AMPAS). Fanchon was born in
1892, Marco in 1894.
6. Kenneth Calvin, “The Big Idea of Fanchon and
Marco”, Part I, The Dance (March 1929): 15.
7. See Paramount press statement for Turn Off the
Moon (1 April 1937), Fanchon and Marco clippings
file, AMPAS.
8. Advertisement for “Let’s Go”, LAT (21 November
1919): 4.
9. “Rialto’s Variety”, LAT (10 September 1920): 4.
10. Gerald Bordman, American Musical Revue: From the
Passing Show to the Sugar Babies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 31, 58–59. Anderson’s
GreenwichVillageFollieswereknownfortheirelegant
“ballet ballads”, which were often based on literary
classics.
11. Indeed, as Bordman points out, Ziegfeld’s “unstint-
ing largesse” was, by the mid-1920s, often seen as
“overstuffed Victorian excess”. Ibid., 47–48.
12. Grace Kingsley, “Flashes”, LAT (23 September
1920): 4. Fanchon’s remark about east coast revues’
continued cultural promotion of “staid classics”
comes from “American Chorines Lead”, LAT (17
January 1932): 21. Fanchon adds that the new audi-
ence does not seek aesthetic uplift through popular
theater, but rather “fast, unusual [and] eye-opening”
spectacles.
13. Kingsley, “Flashes”.
14. “This Week’s New Plays”, New York Times (hereafter
NYT) (22 May 1921): 70.
15. “‘GoldenGateRevels’forGlobe”,NYT(12May1921):
26.
16. Calvin, “The Big Idea”, Part I, 16.
17. This detail was reported in “Flesh of the Nation”,
Fortune, undated 1932 galley, 10, Fanchon and
Marco clippings file, Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
New York Public Library (hereafter BRTC).
18. As the Los Angeles Times noted, Sunkist whimsically
samples “everything from burlesque to grand opera,
with dashes of musical comedy and vaudeville in
between”. “‘Sunkist’ with Fanchon and Marco Here”,
LAT (7 November 1921): 26.
19. J.B. Griswold, “Let’s Be Ourselves: The Story of a
Brother and Sister Who Licked the Big City by Going
Back Home”, American Magazine 114 (1932): n.p.,
Fanchon and Marco scrapbook, Huntington Library.
For more on Fanchon and Marco’s early vaudeville
career, see the detailed “Family History” section on
the Fanchon and Marco website, designed by rela-
tives of the Wolff family. http://fanchonand-
marco.com/fanchon_and_marco_004.htm
20. Eddie Boyden, “N’Yawk’s Roof Shows Matched”,
San Francisco Chronicle (13 January 1922): 5.
21. Mona Gardner, “Local Musical Revues and Plays
MakeMark”,LAT(7December1924):C29(emphasis
added).
22. “With Aerial Trimmings”, C11; Calvin, “The Big Idea”,
Part II, 42. See also, “Big Plans Outlined to Group”,
LAT (6 June 1927): 9.
23. See “Well-Varied Bill Put on at the California”, San
Francisco Chronicle (17 January 1921): 6.
24. Calvin, “The Big Idea”, Part II, 42.
25. See Calvin, “The Big Idea”, Part II, 42–43, for infor-
mation on Fanchon and Marco’s early San Francisco
prologues. For their expansion into the Pacific North-
west see Reva Howitt Clar, Lollipop: Vaudeville Turns
with aFanchonandMarcoDancer,MimiMelnick(ed.)
(Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2002), 54.
26. The Fordist analogies come from Griswold, “Let’s
Be Ourselves”, n.p.
27. “The Flesh of a Nation”, 10–14.
28. “The Way of All Flesh”, NYT (26 April 1931): X3. If this
studio operation sounds familiar, this might be be-
cause the Fanchon and Marco Ideas provided the
real-life inspiration for the Chester Kent (James Cag-
ney) chain prologue company in Warner Bros.’ clas-
sic backstage musical, Footlight Parade (1933). See
Robert Birchard’s production history of Footlight Pa-
rade, “A Song-and-Dance Spectacular”, American
Cinematographer (November 2005): 66–73.
29. Calvin, “The Big Idea”, Part II, 43, 56.
30. Griswold, “Let’s Be Ourselves”, n.p.
31. Frank Cullen, Vaudeville Old and New: Encyclopedia
of Variety Performers in America (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2007), 369.
32. Tours usually entailed unexpected performances for
promotional stunts, parades, corporate parties,
beauty pageants, and various other events that
called for fleshly decoration. See Howitt Clar, Lolli-
pop, 25, for more on “the appalling exploitation of
the dancers working at that time”.
33. “The Flesh of a Nation”, 13 (emphasis added).
34. Established in 1926, the Fanchon and Marco school
was an auditioning apparatus and rehearsal boot-
camp for the units, and was therefore free of charge.
By 1930, however, demand for Ideas overwhelmed
the auditioning capacity at the studios, so Fanchon

and Marco merged with the famous Meglin School
of Dancing, which charged for enrollment. See “To
Build Rehearsal Theater”, LAT (13 January 1926):
A13, and the advertisement for the Meglin School,
LAT (13 July 1930): 11.
35. “Chorines Will Get Diplomas”, LAT (6 March 1927):
B7.
36. “Girl with ‘Radio Voice’ at Loew’s”, LAT (25 May
1926): A10.
37. Herbert Moulton, “New Comedy Flair Shown by
Corinne”, LAT (24 May 1926): A11. Moulton reports
that this was the third annual version of the “Radio
Idea”.
38. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity:
Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening
in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
2004), 241–242.
39. In 1928, Fanchon and Marco lent added marvel to
the “Radio Idea” by changing it to the “Radio-Tele-
vision Idea”, which the company publicized as the
introduction of “television for the first time on any
stage”. See “Laugh Clown Arrives”, LAT (27 April
1928): A11.
40. During the four-day tour the Sunkist Beauties report-
edly performed “Fanchon and Marco stage special-
ties” in 40 towns throughout Southern California. As
a proud Los Angeles cultural institution, Fanchon
and Marco, Inc., no doubt had a special stake in the
Colorado River Project, which, in 1936, wrapped up
with the completion of the Hoover Dam, a major
source for Los Angeles’s electricity. See “Entertain-
ment to End Booster Tonight”, LAT (2 July 1926): A1.
41. “RooseveltCallsforAbundantLifeinthisPowerAge”,
NYT (12 September 1936): 3, quoted in David E. Nye,
American Technological Sublime (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1994), 137.
42. Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament”, 79.
43. “Latest ‘Ricks’ Get Attention”, LAT (7 February 1926):
G14.
44. Advertisement for Fanchon and Marco Ideas, Variety
(18 January 1928): 19.
45. “With Aerial Trimmings”, C11.
46. “Aerial Taxi Service Started”, LAT (26 August 1928):
H7.
47. “Air Meet Pays Own Expenses”, LAT (18 September
1928): A1.
48. “To Promote Interest inAviation”, LAT (26 April 1928):
A1.
49. “New Entertainment for Fair”, LAT (11 September
1931): 12.
50. Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic
Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), es-
pecially chapter 5, “Dead Time, or the Concept of
the Event”.
51. “Prologue Here to Stay?” LAT (29 August 1929): C19.
52. “GobsofJoy”,Variety (17 July1929),quotedinHowitt
Clar, 167.
53. “Playdom”, LAT (6 September 1926): A10.
54. “Vigorous Heroes Having Their Day”, LAT (25 Sep-
tember 1926): 13.
55. Howitt Clar, Lollipop, 44.
56. “Rube Swings Baton at the Metropolitan Theater”,
LAT (26 June 1927): C13.
57. Marquis Busby, “Waiters Come Into Their Own”, LAT
(15 July 1927): A11.
58. “Hoff Headlines ‘Idea’ Prelude at Loew’s State”, LAT
(8 July 1926): A11.
59. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Atten-
tion, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 2000), 283.
60. Marguerite Tazelaar, “Some of the Stars Shining
Now”, New York Herald Tribune, n.p., Fanchon and
Marco clippings file, BRTC (emphasis added).
61. Calvin, “The Big Idea”, Part II, 58.
62. “Film Prologue of Irrelevant Type Ossailed”, LAT (2
January 1927): C30.
63. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 165.
64. “Film Producer Takes Fling at Hodge-Podge Pro-
logues”, LAT (3 October 1926): C29.
65. “Prologues Offer Problem”, LAT (22 March 1931):
B16.
66. Avaluable theoretical modelforthediverse program-
ming strategies of the silent and early sound eras is
Ross Melnick’s concept of the “unitary text”, which
defines the classical moviegoing experience as a
“collective textual event” that has been “authored”
by the theater manager. See Ross Melnick, “Roxy
and His Gang: Silent Film Exhibition and the Birth of
Media Convergence” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cali-
fornia Los Angeles, 2009), especially 27–38.
67. MarquisBusby, “‘Pyramids’Beauty Parade”, LAT (30
October 1926): A9. The night’s feature was Don
Juan’s Three Nights (1926).
68. Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s
Transition to Sound (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997), 76.
69. Calvin, “The Big Idea”, Part II, records that by early
1929 Fanchon and Marco were serving “three hun-
dred and fifty theatres” (14). My section subheading
comes from Grace Kingsley, “Fanchon to Travel”,
LAT (29 April 1927): A10.
70. “Big Plans Outlined to Group”, LAT (16 June 1927):
A9.

71. Marquis Busby, “Annual Greater Movie Season Rolls
Around”, LAT (14 August 1927): C15, 16.
72. “Fox-West Coast Hook-Up”, Variety (25 January
1928): 5, 14.
73. Barbar Naomi Cohen, “Chain Prologues: Dance at
the Picture Palaces”, Dance Scope (Fall 1978): 34.
74. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System
(London: British Film Institute, 2003), 43.
75. Crafton, The Talkies, 252.
76. “A Business Romance”, Variety (14 July 1931): n.p.,
BRTC.
77. “Fanchon-Marco Bookings Increase Despite
Sound”, Film Daily (30 March 1930): 14.
78. Philip K. Scheuer, “Prologue Out in Front Again”, LAT
(29 June 1930): A1.
79. “Flesh of the Nation”, 5–6.
80. “Film House Reviews – Loew’s State (Los Angeles)”,
Variety (5 September 1928): 39. Photographic stills
for “Aerial Ballet” can be found in the Fanchon and
Marco Collection, Huntington Library.
81. This description of the Aztec Idea is gathered from
various West Coast Theatres programs in the Myra
Kinch Scrapbooks, BRTC.
82. B.R. Crisler, “By Way of Variety”, NYT (2 February
1936): X5.
83. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Mu-
sic, Brian Massumi (trans.) (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1985 [1977]), 57.
84. Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s
Picture Palaces”, in Kracauer, Mass Ornament, 326.
85. “Film House Reviews – Roxy (New York)”, Variety (1
February 1928): 36.
86. Charles Beardsley, Hollywood Master’s Showman:
The Legendary Sid Grauman (New York: Cornwall
Books, 1983), 46–47.
87. See note 81 above for information on the Aztec Idea.
For the “Parisian Idea”, see Marquis Busby, “Farce
is Gay Bit of Nothing”, LAT (19 September 1927): A7;
for the “Follies of 1906”, see Marquis Busby, “Great
Open Spaces Again”, LAT (4 December 1926): 7.
88. “Show Agents Move Office”, New York Daily Mirror
(6 June 1936): n.p., Fanchon and Marco clippings
file, BRTC.
89. “Fanchon and Marco Drop Vaude Units”, Variety (27
October 1937), n.p., Fanchon and Marco clippings
file, BRTC. Fanchon and Marco continued to run an
influential talent agency for film, radio, and musical
theater. See Frank Rose, The Agency: William Morris
and the Hidden History of Show Business (New York:
Harper Collins, 1995), 53–55. Yet themost intriguing,
under-researched chapter in Fanchon and Marco’s
life after Ideas is perhaps Fanchon’s work at Para-
mount as “a pioneer woman producer of [the] sound
pictures” Turn Off the Moon (1937) and Thrill of a
Lifetime (1937). See “Woman Makes Bow as Pro-
ducer”, LAT (16 May 1937): C1. See also Barbara
Cohen Stratyner, “Fanchon: Popular Entertainment
Entrepreneur”, Women and Performance: A Journal
of Feminist Theory 2.1 (1984): 63–74.
90. “Roxy, New York – Film House Reviews”, Variety (7
December1938):n.p.,FanchonandMarcoclippings
file, BRTC.
Abstract: “An America Not Quite Mechanized”: Fanchon and Marco, Inc.
Perform Modernity,
by Phil Wagner
This article seeks a fresh understanding of live motion picture theater prologues through an aesthetic and
industrial case history of the Fanchon and Marco “Ideas”, baroque stage revues that assumed no logical
relationship to the films with which they billed. Fanchon and Marco’s prologues, which traveled the West
Coast Theatre chain throughout the 1920s, deliberately eschewed east coast variety’s reverent borrowing
from European high culture. The Ideas playfully spectacularized the absurdity and distraction that
characterized modern experience and made Fanchon and Marco’s prologue brand a national sensation,
even as synchronized sound shorts competed for billing on theater programs.
Key words: Exhibition, Fanchon and Marco, Siegfried Kracauer, modernity, prologues, vaudeville.

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An America Not Quite Mechanized

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