Sunday, January 19, is national popcorn day. A century ago, the ultimate movie snack was actually banned from theaters. A saleswoman in Kansas City Missouri helped create a new movie tradition.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Today is National Popcorn Day, but it might surprise you to learn that popcorn wasn’t always seen as the ultimate movie snack. In fact, a century ago, popcorn was banned from the cinema. A saleswoman from Kansas City, Missouri, was one of the first vendors to bring the tasty treat into the theaters, and she built a concession empire in the middle of the Great Depression. Mackenzie Martin from member station KCUR has the story.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Hey, I ordered my tickets online.
MACKENZIE MARTIN, BYLINE: At a small independent movie theater, you can smell the buttery aroma of popcorn before you even walk in.
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ADAM ROBERTS: If a building didn’t smell like popcorn and I went in to watch a movie, I’m questioning where I’m at.
MARTIN: This is Screenland Armour owner Adam Roberts, who naturally swears they have the best movie theater popcorn in town.
ROBERTS: Our popcorn is particularly good because we use a butter-flavored salt that makes it aromatic. That is what you smell when you’re outside down the street.
MARTIN: Today, it’s almost unthinkable to see a film without popcorn, which is why it’s pretty crazy that, a hundred years ago, popcorn wasn’t even allowed in movie theaters.
ANDREW SMITH: It would be very unusual prior to the 1930s if anybody started selling popcorn in lobbies.
MARTIN: This is Professor Andrew F. Smith, author of “Popped Culture: A Social History Of Popcorn In America.” He says back then, if you even tried bringing a bag of popcorn into the movies, you’d be asked to kindly check it at the door. See, the movie palaces of the 1910s and ’20s were these grand, beautiful structures with ornate ceilings. Going to the movies was a formal affair. It was certainly not the kind of place where you could bring in cheap, messy street food.
SMITH: They had rugs on the floor and they didn’t really want people coming in and eating things.
MARTIN: But when the Great Depression forced movie theaters to close by the thousands, the remaining owners became desperate for new sources of revenue. An obvious solution stood just outside – snack-slinging street vendors. They figured, why not make some of that money themselves?
SMITH: The goal was to get people into the theater, so your cost of admission was relatively low. You wanted to make money on your concession stand.
MARTIN: Fragrant buttery popcorn proved particularly profitable because you could smell it even before seeing it. And unlike sugar, popcorn wasn’t rationed during World War II.
SMITH: It really saved theaters during the Depression.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP: (Singing) Let’s all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat.
MARTIN: Smith says we’ll never know who first brought popcorn inside the theater, but a Kansas City widow named Julia Braden is certainly in the running for the title. In a 1931 profile, Braden told the Kansas City Star she opened her first popcorn stand inside the Linwood Theatre in 1915 – that’s 14 years before the Great Depression. By the time it was widespread practice, Julia Braden had already built a small empire. She had four stands around Kansas City, all inside or near movie theaters.
SMITH: Popcorn sales just generated because of people like Julia Braden, and they made a lot of money compared to a lot of other people.
MARTIN: Braden claimed she was making about $15,000 a year, which is the staggering equivalent of more than $300,000 today. At the national chain B&B Theatres based in Liberty, Missouri, co-president Bobbie Bagby Ford says that concessions and popcorn specifically is still a movie theater’s largest source of revenue.
BOBBIE BAGBY FORD: There is the sensory overload of walking in and smelling fresh popcorn going into the theater, the crunch of it while you’re enjoying something and escaping together.
MARTIN: So you could say popcorn saved movie theaters in the ’30s, and nearly a century later, it’s still keeping theaters around.
For NPR News, I’m Mackenzie Martin.
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