Editing Vaudeville (section)

== Decline ==
{{POV section|date=February 2022}}
[[File:Lady Duff Gordon styles sketched by Marguerite Martyn, 1918.jpg|thumb|right|Styles of [[Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon]], as presented in a vaudeville circuit pantomime and sketched by [[Marguerite Martyn]] of the ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' in April 1918]]

The continued growth of the lower-priced cinema in the early 1910s dealt the heaviest blow to vaudeville. This was similar to the advent of free broadcast [[television]]'s diminishing the cultural and economic strength of the cinema. Cinema was first regularly commercially presented in the US in vaudeville halls. The first public showing of movies projected on a screen took place at [[Koster and Bial's Music Hall]] in 1896. Lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions, many performers and personalities, such as [[Al Jolson]], [[W. C. Fields]], [[Mae West]], [[Buster Keaton]], the [[Marx Brothers]], [[Jimmy Durante]], [[Bill Robinson|Bill "Bojangles" Robinson]], [[Edgar Bergen]], [[Fanny Brice]], [[Burns and Allen]], and [[Eddie Cantor]], used the prominence gained in live variety performance to vault into the new medium of cinema. In doing so, such performers often exhausted in a few moments of screen time the novelty of an act that might have kept them on tour for several years. Other performers who entered in vaudeville's later years, including [[Jack Benny]], [[Abbott and Costello]], [[Kate Smith]], [[Cary Grant]], [[Bob Hope]], [[Milton Berle]], [[Judy Garland]], [[Rose Marie]], [[Sammy Davis Jr.]], [[Red Skelton]], [[Larry Storch]] and [[The Three Stooges]], used vaudeville only as a launching pad for later careers. They left live performance before achieving the national celebrity of earlier vaudeville stars, and found fame in new venues.

The line between live and filmed performances was blurred by the number of vaudeville entrepreneurs who made more or less successful forays into the movie business. For example, [[Alexander Pantages]] quickly realized the importance of motion pictures as a form of entertainment. He incorporated them in his shows as early as 1902. Later, he entered into a partnership with the [[Famous Players–Lasky]], a major Hollywood production company and an affiliate of [[Paramount Pictures]].

By the late 1920s, most vaudeville shows included a healthy selection of cinema. Earlier in the century, many vaudevillians, cognizant of the threat represented by cinema, held out hope that the silent nature of the "flickering shadow sweethearts" would prevent movies from ever overtaking vaudeville in popularity. However, with the introduction of talking pictures in 1926, the burgeoning film studios removed what had remained the chief difference in favor of live theatrical performance: spoken dialogue. Historian [[John Kenrick (theatre writer)|John Kenrick]] wrote:

<blockquote>Top vaudeville stars filmed their acts for one-time pay-offs, inadvertently helping to speed the death of vaudeville. After all, when "small time" theatres could offer "big time" performers on screen at a nickel a seat, who could ask audiences to pay higher amounts for less impressive live talent? The {{Not a typo|newly-formed}} [[RKO Pictures|RKO studios]] took over the famed [[Orpheum Circuit|Orpheum vaudeville circuit]] and swiftly turned it into a chain of full-time movie theatres. The half-century tradition of vaudeville was effectively wiped out within less than four years.<ref name=KenrickLove>Kenrick, John. [http://www.musicals101.com/1927-30film2.htm "History of Musical Film, 1927–30: Part II"]. Musicals101.com, 2004, accessed May 17, 2010</ref></blockquote>

Inevitably, managers further trimmed costs by eliminating the last of the live performances. Vaudeville also suffered due to the rise of broadcast radio following the greater availability of inexpensive receiver sets later in the decade. Even the hardiest in the vaudeville industry realized the form was in decline; the perceptive understood the condition to be terminal. The standardized film distribution and talking pictures of the 1930s confirmed the end of vaudeville. By 1930, the vast majority of formerly live theatres had been wired for sound, and none of the major studios were producing silent pictures. For a time, the most luxurious theatres continued to offer live entertainment, but most theatres were forced by the [[Great Depression]] to economize.

Some in the industry blamed cinema's drain of talent from the vaudeville circuits for the medium's demise. Others argued that vaudeville had allowed its performances to become too familiar to its famously loyal, now seemingly fickle audiences.

There was no abrupt end to vaudeville, though the form was clearly sagging by the late 1920s. [[Joseph Kennedy Sr.]] in a hostile buyout, acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theatres Corporation (KAO), which had more than 700 vaudeville theatres across the United States which had begun showing movies. The shift of New York City's Palace Theatre, vaudeville's center, to an exclusively cinema presentation on 16 November 1932, is often considered to have been the death knell of vaudeville.<ref>{{cite book |last=Senelick |first=Laurence |editor-first=Don B.| editor-last=Wilmeth |title=Cambridge Guide to American Theatre |publisher=Cambridge University Press |date=22 October 2007 |page=480 |edition=Second |isbn=978-0-521-83538-1 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=UYsXbFvjrXkC&q=480 |url-access=subscription }}</ref>

Though talk of its resurrection was heard during the 1930s and later, the demise of the supporting apparatus of the circuits and the higher cost of live performance made any large-scale renewal of vaudeville unrealistic.