Customer Reviews

The Southern Movie Palace: Rise, Fall, and Resurrection

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I found Jones's book to be informative and engaging from the start. While others find Jones's approach of only focusing on 5 theaters a disservice to the subject area, I find her method of focusing on distinct southern regions a great way to show the diverse economic and social lines that criss-cross throughout the South. The history of Southern movie palaces itself is quite broad; it covers nearly a century of film history, Old South/New South history, suburbanization after World War II, Civil Rights and downtown revitalization - just to name a few topics. Jones narrows her focus to five theaters and gives these topics a general overview helping the reader to understand the many facets that make up the history of the Southern movie palace. This book is by no means meant to be an end-all-be-all single source of information for the history of these culturally significant buildings. Jones is one of the handful of authors analyzing this topic and her work will only compliment the future study of the history of Southern movie palaces. I found the work to be informative, heartening (in her discussion of her love for the Tampa Theater) and a good addition to the historiography of this very important, cultural significant topic.

How do you make the history of the rise, fall and resurrection of southern movie palaces dull? You limit yourself to five theaters, minimize the history of the theaters, focus on the civil rights movement, provide few photos and none in color and make the text as dry as possible. I should have known from the low price that this was going to be a waste of my money--and it was. A great topic wasted by a startlingly dull approach. Hopefully, someone else will tackle the theme.