Silent Screens the Decline and Transformation of the American Movie Theater
by: Putnam, Michael

Hardcover. Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Starkly beautiful photos of abandoned and converted movie theaters with new essays by Peter Bogdanovich, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, and Chester H. Liebs. The single-screen movie theaters that punctuated small-town America's main streets and city neighborhoods since the 1920s are all but gone. The well-dressed throng of moviegoers has vanished; the facades are boarded. In Silent Screens, photographer Michael Putnam captures these once prominent cinemas in decline and transformation. His photographs of abandoned movie houses and forlorn marquees are an elegy to this disappearing cultural icon.