Newman Theatre

The Newman Theatre at 1114 Main Street was Kansas City’s first true downtown movie palace: a 2,500-seat Italian Renaissance house built for the exhibitor Frank L. Newman and opened June 6, 1919 with Adolph Zukor, Wallace Reid and Will Rogers on its stage.¹² It was the third and largest of Newman’s three Kansas City theatres, and the house whose weekly in-program newsreel carried Walt Disney’s first films — the “Newman Laugh-O-Grams,” premiered there on March 20, 1921, more than a year before Disney incorporated Laugh-O-Gram Films.³⁴⁵ Paramount bought the house from Newman in 1925, renamed it the Paramount Theatre in June 1947, and split it into the four-screen Towne Theatre in 1969.⁶⁷⁸ It closed February 6, 1972 and was demolished the same year; the site now lies under the Lightwell (formerly City Center Square), the 30-storey tower built on the block in 1977.⁸⁹¹⁰

Three Newman theatres, not one

Frank L. Newman ran three downtown Kansas City houses, and the record is clear that they are distinct buildings. Sources that speak of “the Newman theatres” or “Newman’s chain” mean all three; this page is about the last and largest of them.

House	Address	Opened	Fate
Royal Theatre (Theatre Royal)	1022 Main Street	June 10, 1914	Replaced by retail stores, 193611
Regent Theatre	107 East 12th Street	March 26, 1916, with Fannie Ward in For the Defense; about 700 seats, cost $60,000	Sold to the Dubinsky brothers in 1920; closed May 12, 1964; demolished 198512
Newman Theatre	1114 Main Street	June 6, 1919	Renamed Paramount 1947, Towne 1969, demolished 1972

All three were designed by the same architect, H. Alexander Drake of Kansas City.²¹³¹² By December 1918 Newman was president of the Newman Theatre Company, owner of the Royal and the Regent, and was pushing construction of what the trade press called “his third enterprise.”¹⁴

The distinction matters for Disney: the arrangement that produced the “Newman Laugh-O-Grams” was made with the chain, and sources disagree about whether the films played in one house or all three (see below).

Frank L. Newman

Newman was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents who died when he was young, and was raised by an Irish family whose restaurant he worked in before taking a job in an iron foundry. Married at seventeen, he saw his first motion picture in Montreal, moved with his wife to St. Louis, and — with $25 saved and $100 borrowed — opened a movie house with a partner, calling it the Royal. He opened a second Royal in Joplin in 1909 and a third in St. Joseph a few years later, then came to Kansas City.¹¹

When the Theatre Royal was going up on Main Street in 1913 there was an outcry that a picture house was an undesirable intrusion into a strictly retail district — merchants feared two hours indoors meant two fewer hours at their windows. After it opened they changed their minds, and in 1915 a shoe store opened next door.¹¹

By 1919 Newman was, in the trade’s estimation, the leading exhibitor in the territory, and the Newman Theatre was described as the realisation of his “fondest dreams.”² The house adopted the slogan “The Supreme Achievement in Motion Picture Presentation.”¹³

Site and construction (1915–1919)

The theatre stood on the west side of Main Street between 11th and 12th, a short distance north of the 12th and Main crossing that was then the busiest corner in the city.¹⁵¹⁶ Moving Picture World reported in December 1918 that the building would occupy 100 feet of frontage and run 127 feet deep, would be five storeys high with high-class stores on the ground-floor front, and would represent, with equipment, “about half a million dollars.” Work was being done on Sundays and holidays and foundations were then rising, with an opening expected “early in spring.”¹⁴

Two accounts of the site’s earlier use exist and neither is fully corroborated:

• A 1914–1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists a house called Yale’s Automat Theatre at 1116 Main Street, which a Cinema Treasures contributor reasons would have sat under the later theatre’s footprint.⁸
• A 2018 Northeast News postcard column states the Newman was built in the Brady Building, “which had been gutted by fire in 1918.”¹⁶ No period source located here corroborates that name or that fire.

A 1967 Kansas City Times retrospective adds a detail that is unusual enough to be worth recording: in 1915 the Newman Theater company signed a 99-year ground lease, and the lease stipulated that the building be designed so that it could easily be converted to mercantile use — one of the landowning families, the article says, was afraid motion pictures would not last.¹⁷

Opening night, June 6, 1919

Moving Picture World dated the opening flatly: “The opening took place June 6.”¹ Crowds began forming at four in the afternoon and by five the newspapers described “a raging mob”; a reserve corps of thirty policemen was called to keep traffic moving, streetcars in front of the house had to be re-routed, and invited guests had to be brought in through a rear exit. Only one performance had been scheduled; a second was added, and the audience for it was not seated until nearly half past ten, with several hundred people still turned away. It was the Newman policy never to admit anyone without a seat.¹²

Adolph Zukor, president of Famous Players-Lasky, gave an address. Wallace Reid and Will Rogers appeared in person; Rogers gave one of his monologues. Also present were George Beban; A. H. Blank of the A. H. Blank Enterprises; H. M. Thomas of the Rialto, Omaha; Leo A. Landau of the Butterfly, Milwaukee; and E. S. Porter of the Precision Machine Company — the Edwin S. Porter of The Great Train Robbery, who had spent several weeks in Kansas City installing the theatre’s Simplex projectors.² Floral tributes sent to Newman were estimated by the newspapers at $10,000. After the second show Newman entertained some two hundred guests at a dinner-dance at the Hotel Muehlebach.²

The opening program, as printed in the theatre’s own advertisement and reproduced in Motion Picture News, ran: the William Tell Overture by the concert orchestra of forty; Newman News and Views, the house newsreel, “including selections from the various weeklies”; “The Spirit of the Dance,” danced by Mlle. Rhea, a Kansas City dancer; a selected comedy; “The Bell Song” from Lakmé sung by the soprano Mlle. Alys Michot; and the feature, Cecil B. DeMille’s “For Better, For Worse,” with Gloria Swanson and Elliott Dexter. Two performances, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.²¹

A correction to the commonly repeated opening film. A Kansas City Times retrospective of August 19, 1967 — written forty-eight years later and built on the recollections of two men who had been there — says the opening picture was “The Roaring Road,” starring Wallace Reid, and that account has been repeated since.¹⁷ Both period trade papers, reporting within weeks and quoting the theatre’s own advertisement, name “For Better, For Worse.”¹² Wallace Reid was on the stage that night, and The Roaring Road was his current release, which is a plausible route to the confusion. This page follows the contemporaneous trade press.

The building

Descriptions below come from Motion Picture News’s account of the new house in 1919 and from Exhibitors Trade Review’s feature on it six years later.²¹³

• Exterior — Italian Renaissance, “an adaptation of the facade effect” of a stately Italian palace, relieved with pilasters and semi-balconies intended to be planted with flowers and shrubbery.
• Lobby — thirty feet wide and twenty-four feet high, with an Italian vaulted ceiling, polychrome terra-cotta side walls, majolica ornament, a marble floor in old Italian designs, bronze period light fixtures, and a ticket office for three sellers. Stairways on either side rose to balcony and mezzanine.
• Auditorium — 96 feet wide and 100 feet from stage to entrance, with a ceiling 75 feet high and a great lighting dome 54 feet across. The picture stage sat at the centre of a large cyclorama.
• Seating — 1,000 on the main floor, 1,200 in the balcony, and 350 in loges: about 2,550.²
• Salon promenade — behind the balcony, 54 feet long and 20 feet wide, with marble drinking fountains, retiring rooms for men and women, the manager’s office, checking rooms and telephone booths. The 1967 retrospective remembers it decorated with marble statues and elaborate stained glass.²¹⁷
• Basement — lounging rooms reached by marble stairways, including a Louis XV boudoir for women and a club room for men; and a nursery decorated in Mother Goose designs with cradles, chairs and toys, with nurses in constant attendance.
• Projection room — occupying a balcony of its own, and described in 1919 as “the model of the whole country.”
• Interior finish — “from cellar to dome every square foot of floor space is either of terrazzo or white marble,” with marble wainscot throughout, Italian tapestry wall hangings, and hand-painted murals of cherubs and Grecian figures in the dome and on the auditorium walls. The design motif was the Ducal Palace of Urbino.¹³¹⁷
• The chandelier — recalled in 1967 as twenty feet long, twelve feet wide, and lit by 220 candles; it had been removed by the time that article was written, leaving “only a large naked light bulb.”¹⁷

A design detail relevant to what happened here. The basement also held a theatrette, 32 feet wide and 50 feet long, described in 1919 as “the workshop of Mr. Newman and his staff in preparing the programs for the three theatres” — where films were screened, musical accompaniments written and presentations planned.² The Newman chain built its own programs in-house, which is the practice that made room for a local nineteen-year-old’s cartoons.

An opening-week program of fifty pages, the Newman Theatre Magazine, was issued; the second issue ran thirty-six pages, six by nine and a quarter inches, and the format was kept. Its first issue carried portraits of Newman, Reid, Swanson, Dexter, Zukor, Mlle. Rhea, Mlle. Michot — and of Milton H. Feld, house manager of the Newman.²

Cost — a wide and unreconciled spread

No single construction figure survives verification. In order of publication:

Source	Date	Figure
Moving Picture World	Dec 21, 1918	Headline “$500,000 theatre”; building with equipment “about half a million dollars”14
Motion Picture News	Jul 1919	”representing an investment of two million dollars”2
Exhibitors Herald	May 1925	”costing nearly $2,000,000”6
Exhibitors Trade Review	1925–26	”total cost of which exceeded $1,000,000”13
Northeast News / Clio	2018 / n.d.	”almost $400,000 to erect”169

The $500,000 figure is the only one published while the building was going up and the only one that states what it covers (building plus equipment); this page treats it as the best available construction estimate and prints the rest as what they are — later valuations, promotional round numbers, and modern retellings that cite no source for the $400,000. ****

Architecture: a contested style label

Period sources are consistent and specific: Motion Picture News (1919) says “Italian Renaissance is the motif of the architecture and the exterior represents one of the stately Italian palaces”; Exhibitors Trade Review (1925–26) says “the Italian Renaissance design, as typified by the Ducal Palace of Urbino, was used as a motif for the style and decoration”; and the 1967 Kansas City Times piece says “the decor and architecture were patterned after an Italian ducal palace.”²¹³¹⁷ Cinema Treasures files the building under Colonial Revival, and modern local retellings have followed it.⁸⁹ This page prefers the period sources.

Music, orchestra and organ

The house opened with a concert orchestra of forty under Leo F. Forbstein, who had come from conducting at the Royal Theatre in St. Joseph and who left Kansas City in the mid-1920s for Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre and then Warner Bros., where he became general music director and collected an Academy Award for Anthony Adverse.¹¹⁸ The 1967 Times article, which puts the orchestra pit at 14 by 40 feet, says Forbstein later became musical director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; that is an error — it was Warner Bros.¹⁷¹⁸ By late 1925 the orchestra of forty was under Bronislaw Mirskey.¹³

The theatre had an Austin pipe organ at first, replaced in 1925 by a Wurlitzer style 260 — a three-manual, fifteen-rank instrument with 32-foot diaphones. Cinema Treasures reports the organ survives in a private home in Zanesville, Ohio.⁸

Wikipedia’s article on Forbstein states that the organist at the Newman was Carl W. Stalling, later Disney’s first music director and then the composer of the Warner Bros. cartoons.¹⁸ A 1919 Moving Picture World feature places Stalling at that date at the Isis Theatre at 31st and Troost, conducting an eight-man orchestra from the organ bench.¹⁹ Both can be true at different dates; the Newman posting is not confirmed here. ****

Walt Disney and the Newman Laugh-O-Grams (1920–1921)

This is the building’s largest claim on film history, and it is also where popular retellings and the documented record diverge most.

What is documented

While working days at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Disney made short animated films at night, first in the family garage at 3028 Bellefontaine Avenue. He persuaded the Newman organisation to run them inside the chain’s weekly house newsreel — the same Newman News and Views that had played on the theatre’s opening night in 1919.³²⁰² The films were named, in the historians Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman’s word, “tactfully”: Newman Laugh-O-Grams.

They were roughly one-minute topical items — “moving editorial cartoons” — drawn as lightning-sketch gags about local conditions: road conditions and potholes, women’s fashions, the wait for public transport, and a police corruption scandal.²¹²⁰³ The technique was a flat photograph of the back of Disney’s moving hand holding a pen, with drawings appearing under it until a punchline about Kansas City resolved.²⁰

The Kansas City premiere was at the Newman Theatre on March 20, 1921 — the date given both by the Walt Disney Archives’ D23 and by Merritt and Kaufman’s programme notes for the surviving reel.⁴³ The Walt Disney Archives’ own encyclopedia entry dates the making of the shorts to 1920; Merritt and Kaufman likewise say the films “began in 1920 as after-work projects.” The two dates are not in conflict — 1920 is when he started making them, March 1921 when the first reached the Newman’s screen.²¹³

The deal itself was arranged not by Frank Newman personally but by Milton H. Feld, the Newman’s house manager from 1919 and later managing director of the Newman and Royal — the same Feld who left for Los Angeles with Newman in 1925.²²²⁰²⁶ Merritt and Kaufman credit the persuasion to Disney “persuading Frank Newman”; Wikipedia and Jim Korkis credit Feld. Both are printed here; the two accounts are compatible if Feld negotiated on the chain’s behalf. ****

The one contemporaneous trade notice found for the arrangement is a July 22, 1922 item in Exhibitor’s Trade Review announcing the roster of the new Laugh-O-gram Films, Inc.: “Walter Disney is the cartoonist. He has been the originator of several comedy strips, among them the Newman Laugh-O-grams shown exclusively in the Newman Theatre, Kansas City.”⁵

Only a two-and-a-half-minute sample reel survives, and it is a compilation of the better items assembled as a sales reel — which is probably why it survived at all, since Disney carried it to California.³²⁰ Its last scene, on the police-corruption headlines, was animated by Disney alone and is one of the few surviving sequences he completed entirely himself.³

The films made Disney, at nineteen, a minor local celebrity, and led to further commissions from the chain: animated intermission fillers, coming-attraction slides, and one-off bits including an anniversary sequence in which stars jumped out of a cake.³²⁰

One house or three?

Sources split on where the Laugh-O-Grams actually played. Merritt and Kaufman and Korkis say the films ran in the newsreel of Newman’s chain of three theatres.³²⁰ The 1922 Exhibitor’s Trade Review notice says they were shown “exclusively in the Newman Theatre.”⁵ The trade notice is nearer in time but is a publicity announcement written by the new company’s sales manager; the historians worked from the Disney Archives. Both are recorded; neither is dismissed.

Where this page differs from the vault’s Walt Disney page

The vault’s walt-disney page and its laugh-o-gram-studio page, following the Kansas City Public Library’s Pendergast Years, place the “Newman Laugh-O-Grams” inside the account of Laugh-O-Gram Films — the company incorporated in May 1922 at the McConahay Building — and describe them as that company’s “modernized fairy tales” screening at the Newman.²³²⁴

That compresses two separate things. The Newman Laugh-O-Grams were one-minute topical joke reels Disney made largely by himself in 1920–21, before Laugh-O-Gram Films existed; the modernised fairy tales (Little Red Riding Hood, The Four Musicians of Bremen, Goldie Locks and the Three Bears, and the rest) were six-minute narrative cartoons made by the 1922 company, and the studio took its name from the earlier series rather than the other way round.³²⁰²² The Newman connection is real; the sequence in the Pendergast Years summary is not. This page states the distinction rather than silently contradicting the existing pages; reconciling them is a Compiler task, not one for this page. ****

What is legend

The frequently repeated story that Disney sold the reels to Newman at thirty cents a foot — his exact cost — and only realised afterwards that he had “forgotten to include a profit” could not be traced in this research pass to any source with a resolvable citation. It is a fixture of popular Disney retellings and may well originate in Disney’s own later anecdote, but it is not asserted on this page. ****

Programme and performers under Newman and Paramount

The Newman ran long engagements — “a show never played at that theater for less than a week, live or filmed,” its late-1920s manager George Baker recalled.¹⁷ Documented and recollected appearances include:

• Victor Herbert as guest conductor, 1923.¹⁷
• Lillian Roth, singing torch songs on the stage.¹⁷
• The Coon-Sanders Novelty Orchestra, photographed at the Newman performing a skit to accompany Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim.¹⁵
• Impromptu lobby appearances by stars whose trains laid over in Kansas City — Baker names Gary Cooper and Richard Arlen off the Santa Fe Chief.¹⁷
• On screen: Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Roscoe Arbuckle, Gloria Swanson, Charles Ray and Marguerite Clark in the silent years; Clara Bow, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Al Jolson, William Powell and Gary Cooper after the house was wired for sound.¹⁷

Baker also remembered the streetcar company telephoning before the last show every Saturday night to ask how big the crowd was, so it could send the right number of cars; the cars sometimes queued for two blocks.¹⁷

By 1925 the standard screen programme was the “Newman Mirror of the World” — the house newsreel, by then assembled from Pathé, Kinograms and International News plus local photography — a comedy, a cartoon, an occasional educational reel, and the feature.¹³ In the Depression the house advertised itself as the “Greater Newman,” “Cooled By Refrigeration,” and continued the practice of building its selling around local news; in late May 1933 it ran “the first motion pictures of Mary McElroy’s sensational kidnaping” alongside International House.²⁵

Sale to Paramount and Newman’s departure (1925)

Rumours of a sale were denied for weeks. On April 28, 1925, Exhibitors Herald’s Kansas City correspondent reported that Sidney R. Kent, general manager for Paramount, had confirmed the deal aboard the Paramount special to California: Newman would leave Kansas City that summer to manage the Rialto, Metropolitan and Grauman theatres in Los Angeles for Paramount, and final papers for the sale of the Newman and Royal theatres would probably be signed at the Paramount sales convention in Los Angeles. Newman’s contract was rumoured at $1,000 a week. Milton Feld went with him.⁶

Northeast News dates the departure to June 1925, after eleven profitable years, and puts the price Famous Players-Lasky paid for the Newman and Royal at $900,000; many of Newman’s employees followed him to California.¹⁶ By late 1925 the Newman was under a new manager, Bruce Fowler, “who assumed charge of the house when Paramount obtained it from Mr. Newman,” heading a staff of more than a hundred.¹³

The theatre kept the Newman name for another twenty-two years under Paramount and Publix operation.¹³⁸

Paramount, Towne, and the end (1947–1972)

June 1947 — the renaming. Paramount put its own name on the house. Boxoffice described the ceremony: “Amid 1,500 eager fans Veronica Lake held the small control box while Mayor William Kemp turned on the lights of the new red and white vertical sign. The Newman Theatre was now officially the Paramount, and the show inside the theatre began.” Alan Ladd, Lake and William Demarest headlined a premiere benefit on a Tuesday night that raised about $4,500 for the Jackson County Cancer Society.⁷ Cinema Treasures dates the renaming to June 15, 1947; June 15, 1947 was a Sunday, so the Boxoffice “Tuesday night” and the Cinema Treasures date cannot both describe the same evening. Both are recorded. ****

August 1, 1967 — closure. The Kansas City Times reported that the Paramount had “closed indefinitely August 1,” with 47 years still to run on the 1915 ninety-nine-year lease. Its account of the interior at that moment is the clearest evidence of the decline: murals “faded and soiled… marked with patches of white plaster,” tapestries “limp and, in places torn,” marble without lustre, and the great chandelier gone.¹⁷

January 29, 1969 — the Towne 4. The building reopened as the four-screen Towne Theatre, converted by the architectural firm Lund-Balderson for Durwood Theatres (operating as American Royal Cinema; the chain became AMC).⁸ In 1970 AMC and Lund-Balderson took a Quigley Award for Theatre Design for the conversion.⁸ A former Paramount employee’s recollection on Cinema Treasures says Stanley Durwood knew of the murals and had them covered rather than destroyed during the conversion.⁸

February 6, 1972 — closing and demolition. The multiplex lasted three years. It closed on February 6, 1972; an urban-renewal plan was announced, the AMC Towne 4 and the nearby Roxy were auctioned, and both were razed later that year.⁸⁹

The site today

The block bounded by 11th, 12th, Main and Baltimore was cleared under urban renewal and redeveloped as City Center Square, a 30-storey, 404-foot reinforced-concrete tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, completed in the spring of 1977. It was renamed the Lightwell in 2019.¹⁰⁹ Nothing of the Newman survives above ground.

Timeline

Date	Event
1913–1914	Frank L. Newman builds the Royal at 1022 Main; opens June 10, 1914.11
1915	Ninety-nine-year ground lease signed by the Newman Theater company, with a clause requiring the building be convertible to mercantile use.17
Mar 26, 1916	Newman’s Regent opens at 107 East 12th Street.12
Dec 21, 1918	Moving Picture World: “Newman Building $500,000 Theatre” — 100 ft frontage, 127 ft deep, five storeys, foundations rising.14
Jun 6, 1919	Newman Theatre opens with For Better, For Worse; Zukor, Wallace Reid and Will Rogers in person; two performances; police reserves called.12
1920	Newman appoints Milton H. Feld house manager (in post from opening); Disney begins making animated joke reels at night at 3028 Bellefontaine.2321
Mar 20, 1921	Newman Laugh-O-Grams premiere at the Newman Theatre — Walt Disney’s first films to reach a screen.43
May 1922	Laugh-O-Gram Films incorporated at the McConahay Building; takes its name from the Newman series.2220
Jul 22, 1922	Exhibitor’s Trade Review names Disney “originator of… the Newman Laugh-O-grams shown exclusively in the Newman Theatre.”5
1923	Victor Herbert guest-conducts.17
Apr–Jun 1925	Paramount deal confirmed; Newman and Feld leave for Los Angeles; Bruce Fowler takes over the house.61613
1925	Austin organ replaced by a Wurlitzer style 260.8
1933	”Greater Newman” ties its selling to the Mary McElroy kidnapping.25
1941	Operated by Paramount Pictures Inc.8
Jun 1947	Renamed the Paramount Theatre; Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd and William Demarest at the inaugural benefit.78
Aug 1, 1967	Closes indefinitely, 47 years left on the lease.17
Jan 29, 1969	Reopens as the four-screen Towne Theatre, converted by Lund-Balderson for Durwood.8
1970	Quigley Award for Theatre Design for the Towne 4 conversion.8
Feb 6, 1972	Closes; auctioned and demolished later that year.89
Spring 1977	City Center Square (SOM, 30 storeys) completed on the block; renamed the Lightwell in 2019.10

Significance

The Newman Theatre is the point at which Kansas City acquired a first-rank downtown picture palace, two years before the Mainstreet and eight before the Midland. Its opening night — a Famous Players-Lasky president on the stage, two film stars in person, a forty-piece orchestra, thirty police holding the street and streetcars re-routed — is a fair marker for the moment when the movies stopped being a nickel amusement in Kansas City and became civic occasion.

Its longer significance is what the house did with its own programme. Because the Newman chain assembled its shows in a basement theatrette rather than buying them ready-made, there was a weekly slot for local material — and into that slot, in March 1921, went the first films Walt Disney ever put in front of an audience. The Laugh-O-Gram studio that followed, and everything downstream of it, took its name from this theatre’s marquee. The Newman is therefore the third fixed point in Disney’s Kansas City geography, alongside the Film Ad Company and the McConahay Building — and the only one of the three that no longer exists.

It is also a clean case of the pattern that emptied downtown Kansas City of its theatres: a house sold to a national circuit at its peak, run under a distributor’s name through the studio era, closed once the audience moved to the suburbs, chopped into a multiplex in a last attempt, and then cleared for an office tower. The Royal became retail in 1936; the Regent became a men’s clothing store and then rubble in 1985; the Newman and the Roxy went together in 1972.

Sources

Footnotes

1. The Moving Picture World, June 1919 — “Zukor at Kansas City for Newman Theatre Opening.” Read via Lantern — asserts: “The opening took place June 6”; Adolph Zukor, president of Famous Players-Lasky, made an address; Will Rogers (Goldwyn) and Wallace Reid (Famous Players-Lasky) represented the acting profession; by 4 p.m. the queue stretched more than two blocks; the second show was not seated until nearly half past ten and several hundred were turned away; flowers arrived all day; “the picture was ‘For Better, For Worse’”; Forbstein’s orchestra of forty; Mlle. Rhea, a Kansas City dancer, and Mlle. Alys Michot, soprano, on the programme. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Motion Picture News, July–August 1919, p. 508 — “Newman’s Dream Comes True With Opening of Kansas City Theatre.” Read via Lantern — asserts: Newman already proprietor of the Royal and Regent; the new house represents “an investment of two million dollars”; guests included Zukor, Wallace Reid, Will Rogers, George Beban, A. H. Blank, H. M. Thomas (Rialto, Omaha), Leo A. Landau (Butterfly, Milwaukee) and E. S. Porter of the Precision Machine Co.; two performances were needed; afterwards Newman entertained some two hundred at a dinner-dance at the Hotel Muehlebach; crowds from four o’clock, thirty police reserves, streetcars re-routed, guests admitted through a rear exit; floral greetings estimated at $10,000; architect H. Alexander Drake of Kansas City, who also designed the Royal and the Regent; Italian Renaissance motif, exterior after a stately Italian palace; lobby 30 ft wide and 24 ft high with Italian vaulted ceiling, polychrome terra-cotta walls, marble floor, bronze fixtures, three-seller ticket office; auditorium 96 ft wide and 100 ft stage to entrance, seating 1,000 on the main floor, with a lighting dome 54 ft across; balcony 1,200 seats and loges 350; salon promenade behind the balcony 54 by 20 ft with marble drinking fountains and retiring rooms; projection room on its own balcony, “the model of the whole country,” with Simplex machines installed over several weeks by E. S. Porter; basement lounging rooms including a Louis XV boudoir and a nursery in Mother Goose designs with cradles, chairs, toys and nurses in attendance; a basement theatrette 32 by 50 ft as the workshop where programmes for the three theatres were prepared; a fifty-page opening-week Newman Theatre Magazine (second issue 36 pages, 6 by 9.25 in.) carrying a portrait of Milton H. Feld, house manager; and the printed opening advertisement — two performances at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Wallace Reid and Will Rogers in person, Gloria Swanson and Elliott Dexter in For Better, For Worse, Mlle. Michot, Mlle. Rhea, Newman News and Views, selected comedy, concert orchestra of forty. (The OCR line “Newman Theatre seats 25,000” is a garble; the itemised figures in the same paragraph total 2,550.) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

3. Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman, “Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-grams, 1921–1923,” essay for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Festival 2011 — asserts: Disney’s first animated films began in 1920 as after-work projects while he was a commercial artist for a Kansas City advertising company; he “started by persuading Frank Newman, Kansas City’s leading exhibitor, to include short snippets of animation in the series of weekly newsreels Newman produced for his chain of three theaters”; the films were “tactfully called ‘Newman Laugh-O-grams’” and mixed advertising with topical humour; only the pilot survives, a two-and-a-half-minute sample reel using the lightning-sketch format, whose last scene editorialises on local police-corruption headlines and was animated by Disney alone; the Laugh-O-grams were a hit and led to commissions for animated intermission fillers and coming-attraction slides for Newman’s theatres; and, in the programme note, “NEWMAN LAUGH-O-GRAMS Sample reel directed and animated by Walt Disney in his garage at 3028 Bellefontaine Avenue. Kansas City premiere at Newman Theater March 20, 1921. Print courtesy of Walt Disney Archives.” Merritt and Kaufman are the standard scholars of the Kansas City Disney films. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

4. “The First Newman Laugh-O-grams Film Premieres at Newman Theater in Kansas City,” This Day in Disney, Walt Disney Archives / D23, dated March 20, 1921 (page published April 9, 2019) — asserts: the first Newman Laugh-O-grams film premiered at the Newman Theater in Kansas City on March 20, 1921, and Disney “sold his animated Laugh-O-grams to the Newman Theatre in Kansas City.” The page’s own framing runs the 1921 Newman series and the 1922 Laugh-O-gram Films company together, which is the conflation this page separates. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Exhibitor’s Trade Review, July 22, 1922, p. 587 — “Leslie B. Mace Announces Laugh-O-gram Films Roster.” Read via Lantern — asserts: Laugh-O-gram Films, Inc. is producing one-reel cartoons of modernised fairy tales for release every fortnight; “Walter Disney is the cartoonist. He has been the originator of several comedy strips, among them the Newman Laugh-O-grams shown exclusively in the Newman Theatre, Kansas City”; R. C. Ising is assistant to Disney and in charge of the art room; William “Red” Lyon heads photography; Walter J. Pfeiffer is scenario editor. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Exhibitors Herald, May 9, 1925, p. 19 — “Sidney R. Kent Admits Kansas City Deal” (special to Exhibitors Herald, Kansas City, April 28). Read via Lantern — asserts: after weeks of denial, Paramount general manager Sidney R. Kent confirmed the deal with Frank L. Newman, owner of the Newman and Royal theatres; Newman would leave Kansas City that summer to manage the Rialto, Metropolitan and Grauman theatres in Los Angeles for Paramount; final papers for the sale of the Newman and Royal expected at the Paramount sales convention in Los Angeles; Newman’s contract rumoured at $1,000 weekly; Feld, managing director of the Newman and Royal, would accompany him; “the Newman theatre is Kansas City’s finest, costing nearly $2,000,000, while the Royal… is conceded to be the best ‘money maker’ in the city.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

7. Boxoffice (April–June 1947) — “Inaugurate Paramount With Premiere, Stars,” Kansas City. Read via Lantern — asserts: before 1,500 fans, Veronica Lake held the control box while Mayor William Kemp lit the new red and white vertical sign; “The Newman Theatre was now officially the Paramount”; Alan Ladd, Lake and William Demarest headlined a premiere benefit held on a Tuesday night, raising an estimated $4,500 for the Jackson County Cancer Society. ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. “Paramount Theatre,” Cinema Treasures theater record 3356, and its comment thread, accessed 2026-09-08 — asserts: 1114 Main Street; 1,914 seats; 4 screens; architect H. Alexander Drake; firm Lund-Balderson; style Colonial Revival; previous names Newman Theatre and Towne Theatre; previously operated by Durwood Theatres Inc. and Paramount Pictures Inc.; Yale’s Automat Theatre at 1116 Main had opened by 1914 on the site (Joe Vogel, citing the 1914–1915 American Motion Picture Directory); opened as the Newman in June 1919; an Austin pipe organ replaced in 1925 by a Wurlitzer style 260, three-manual fifteen-rank with 32-foot diaphones, now in a private home in Zanesville, Ohio; operated by Paramount Pictures Inc. in 1941 and renamed Paramount Theatre on June 15, 1947; reopened as the Towne 4 by American Royal Cinema (Durwood) on January 29, 1969; a 1970 Quigley Award for Theatre Design to AMC and Lund-Balderson for the conversion; closed February 6, 1972 and razed later that year, with the Roxy auctioned and razed alongside it. A user-contributed database; the murals, the Stanley Durwood covering-over recollection, and the Edwin S. Porter projection-booth note come from signed comments, the last of which is independently confirmed by ². ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

9. “Newman Theatre (1919-1972),” Clio entry 61682, accessed 2026-09-08 via Firecrawl (the site returns HTTP 403 to a plain fetch) — asserts: built in 1919 for local exhibitor Frank L. Newman, the premier exhibitor in Kansas City; known for opulence; the biggest and most costly Kansas City theatre of its time, holding 2,000; in 1921 the Newman Laugh-O-grams, “the first animated productions created solely by Walt Disney,” were screened there; became the Paramount in 1947 and operated briefly as the Towne; demolished in 1972 for an urban renewal project; the site is now occupied by the Lightwell Building. The entry’s map pin reads 1111 Main St, which is on the east side of Main and inconsistent with every other source; the entry carries a narration by Steve Kraske. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

10. “City Center Square,” Wikipedia, accessed 2026-09-08 — asserts: the Lightwell Building, formerly City Center Square, is a skyscraper in downtown Kansas City built by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the spring of 1977; it occupies the entire block from 11th to 12th Street and from Main to Baltimore; the tower is 30 storeys and 404 feet; and it was renamed the Lightwell in 2019. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. “Royal Theatre,” Cinema Treasures theater record 5208, accessed 2026-09-08 — asserts: the Theatre Royal at 1022 Main opened June 10, 1914; architect H. Alexander Drake; Frank L. Newman was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents who died when he was young and was reared by an Irish family, worked in an iron foundry, married at 17, saw his first movie in Montreal, and with $25 saved and $100 borrowed opened a movie house called the Royal in St. Louis with a partner, then another Royal in Joplin in 1909 and one in St. Joseph a few years later; an outcry greeted the Royal’s construction in Kansas City in 1913 as an intrusion into a retail district, and merchants changed their minds after it opened; Newman later opened the Regent and the Newman; the Royal was replaced in 1936 by retail stores. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

12. “Regent Theatre,” Cinema Treasures theater record 8913, accessed 2026-09-08 — asserts: built in 1914 for Frank Newman and opened March 26, 1916 with Fannie Ward in For the Defense; Kimball organ; bought in 1920 by Maurice, Edward and Barney Dubinsky; operated by Commonwealth Amusement c. 1943–1950 with a 1947 Boller Brothers remodelling; the Dubinsky line became Durwood and then AMC; closed May 12, 1964, converted to a men’s clothing store, demolished 1985. Contributor Joe Vogel quotes The Moving Picture World, March 4, 1916: the Regent was being erected at 107 East 12th Street by Frank L. Newman, manager of the Royal, to a capacity of 700 on a lot 38 by 76 feet, architect Alexander Drake, total cost $60,000 — and notes Drake also designed the Royal of 1914 and the Newman of 1919. ↩ ↩² ↩³

13. Frank C. True, “The Shrine of Kansas City Filmdom,” Exhibitors Trade Review (November 1925 – February 1926), p. 18. Read via Lantern — asserts: “Since the summer of 1919 the Newman Theatre has stood as the undisputed shrine of Kansas City filmdom”; total cost exceeded $1,000,000; H. Alexander Drake designed all of the theatres built by Frank L. Newman; manager Bruce Fowler “assumed charge of the house when Paramount obtained it from Mr. Newman,” heading an organisation of more than 100; slogan “The Supreme Achievement in Motion Picture Presentation”; orchestra of forty under Bronislaw Mirskey; screen programme of the “Newman Mirror of the World” (Pathé, Kinograms, International News and local photography), a comedy, a cartoon, an occasional educational reel and the feature; Italian Renaissance design “as typified by the Ducal Palace of Urbino”; every square foot of floor either terrazzo or white marble, marble wainscot, terra-cotta lobby with majolica ornament; auditorium 96 ft wide, 100 ft stage to entrance, ceiling 75 ft high, picture stage at the centre of a great cyclorama. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

14. The Moving Picture World, December 21, 1918, p. 1363 — “Newman Building $500,000 Theatre: Many Features Will Distinguish the New House — Work Being Rushed for Early Spring Opening,” by the Kansas City News Service. Read via Lantern (Media History Digital Library) — asserts: Frank L. Newman is president of the Newman Theatre Company, owners of the Royal and Regent theatres; the third house, to be called the Newman Theatre, will occupy 100 feet of frontage and 127 feet depth on Main Street between Eleventh and Twelfth, a few doors from the Liberty; five storeys, with high-class stores only on the ground-floor front; building with equipment to represent about half a million dollars; opening expected early in spring; work proceeding on Sundays and holidays with foundations rising. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

15. “Newman Theater,” subject page, The Pendergast Years (Kansas City Public Library), accessed 2026-09-08 — asserts: the Newman Theater stood at 1114 Main Street on the west side of Main between 11th and 12th Streets; a c. 1928 photograph shows its marquee advertising White Desert and Ice Carnival, with the Baltimore Shop next door; the Coon-Sanders Novelty Orchestra was photographed at the Newman performing a skit to accompany Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim; a postcard shows the auditorium. ↩ ↩²

16. Michael Bushnell, “Newman Theater was a beauty downtown,” Northeast News (Postcard column), December 5, 2018 — asserts: the Newman was the third and finest of Frank L. Newman’s Kansas City movie houses; it was located in the Brady Building, which had been gutted by fire in 1918; built on a 100-foot frontage at 1114-18 Main Street just north of 12th; Newman’s other downtown theatres were the Royal, half a block north, and the Regent, on 12th near Walnut; architect Alexander Drake drew the plans for a fireproof steel and concrete building costing almost $400,000; seating a little over 2,000, with an orchestra pit for 35; a mezzanine promenade with lounges and a children’s nursery; annual week-long anniversary celebrations featuring stage acts including the Marie Kelly Dancers; Frank Newman left Kansas City in June 1925 after eleven profitable years, going to manage theatres in Los Angeles for Famous Players-Lasky, which paid $900,000 for the Newman and Royal; many employees followed him; the theatre was later called the Paramount and then the Towne, and was razed in the early 1970s for a high-rise office building. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

17. Roselind K. Ellingsworth, “Defunct Theater Was Once Grand,” The Kansas City Times, August 19, 1967 — transcribed in full in the catalogue record for the Anderson Photo Company photograph “Newman Theater,” Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library (SC225, f.506; item 10031108) — asserts: the photograph shows the Newman building at 1112–1118 Main Street, its marquee advertising the 1925 film Shock Punch with Richard Dix; and the transcribed 1967 article asserts a warm June evening in 1919 opening at 1114 Main with The Roaring Road starring Wallace Reid (see the correction in the body); Arthur H. Cole of Paramount-Famous-Lasky recalling seats sold out in advance; decor and architecture patterned after an Italian ducal palace; renaming to the Paramount in 1947 “when that film company decided it needed a change”; comparisons to the Missouri in St. Louis, the Oriental in Chicago and the Metropolitan in Los Angeles; Italian tapestry hangings, marble walls and flooring, a fully equipped nursery with full-time maid, a men’s club room on the lower level, and a salon promenade behind the balcony with marble statues and stained glass; a 99-year lease signed in 1915 by the Newman Theater company with a clause requiring the building be convertible to mercantile use; closure “indefinitely August 1” with 47 years left on the lease; Leo F. Forbstein conducting the symphonic orchestra from a 14-by-40-foot pit (the article says he later went to MGM — see ¹⁸); silent-era and sound-era stars listed; manager George Baker on week-minimum engagements, Lillian Roth, Victor Herbert as guest conductor in 1923, Gary Cooper and Richard Arlen off the Santa Fe Chief, and the Saturday-night streetcar calls; a chandelier 20 ft long and 12 ft wide lit by 220 candles; and the theatre’s decayed state in 1967. Retrieved through the page’s HTML metadata; the KCHistory viewer is a JavaScript shell. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷

18. “Leo F. Forbstein,” Wikipedia, accessed 2026-09-08 — asserts: Forbstein (1892–1948) conducted at the Royal Theater in St. Joseph, “then became principal conductor at the Newman Theatre in Kansas City, where the organist was future Warner Bros. colleague Carl W. Stalling”; he relocated to Hollywood in the mid-1920s to head the orchestra at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, joined Warner Bros. for the Vitaphone Orchestra, became its general music director in 1931, and won the Academy Award for Anthony Adverse. Used here to correct the 1967 Kansas City Times statement that Forbstein went to MGM. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

19. The Moving Picture World, July 1919 — feature on the Isis Theatre, Kansas City. Read via Lantern — asserts: the Isis cost $100,000 plus $35,000 of furnishing, seats 1,500, and its $22,000 Hope-Jones organ “is augmented at night by an orchestra of eight men, conducted by the organist, Carl Stalling.” Cited here only to date Stalling’s 1919 posting away from the Newman. ↩

20. Jim Korkis, “The Laugh-O-gram Story: Part One,” MousePlanet, March 22, 2017 — asserts: Disney made “a previous series all by himself in 1921 of less than a dozen one-minute cartoon joke reels called the Newman Laugh-O-grams for the Newman Theater chain of three movie theaters in Kansas City about topical conditions in the city,” on topics including potholes, ladies’ fashion, the wait for public transport and a police scandal; they were inserted into Newman’s weekly newsreel, News and Views, which ran before the feature alongside comedy shorts and live stage acts; the deal was arranged by Milton Feld, manager of the Newman Theaters; the Newman houses first promoted them as “Laugh-A-grams” until Disney insisted otherwise; the format was a flat photograph of the back of Disney’s moving hand holding a pen; they appeared sporadically over a few months from March 1921 because Disney made them at night while working days at the Kansas City Film Ad Company; he also supplied other cartooning for the theatre including an anniversary sequence with stars jumping from a cake and a bit with a professor warning the audience not to read title cards aloud; they made the 19-year-old a minor local celebrity; the commonly seen reel is a compilation sales reel; and Disney transferred the Laugh-O-gram name to his new company. Korkis also states that Milton Feld’s family is behind today’s Disney on Ice; that claim is not repeated here — see Open Questions. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

21. “Newman Laugh-O-grams (film),” Disney A to Z, Walt Disney Archives / D23 — asserts: “Short cartoons made for the Newman Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, by Walt Disney in 1920. Typical local problems, such as Kansas City’s road conditions and corruption in the police force, were the subjects of the approximately one-minute shorts. These were the first films Disney made.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

22. “Laugh-O-Gram Studio,” Wikipedia, accessed 2026-09-08 — asserts: “In 1921, Walt Disney was contracted by Milton Feld to animate twelve cartoons, which he called Newman’s Laugh-O-Grams”; the company was incorporated in May 1922 “to produce a series of contracted animated shorts called Newman’s Laugh-O-Grams”; Disney was encouraged by their local popularity and began his own modernised fairy tales; the Pictorial Clubs contract and the July 1923 bankruptcy. A tertiary source, used here only for the Feld contracting claim and the name-derivation sequence, both corroborated by ²⁰. ↩ ↩² ↩³

23. walt-disney and laugh-o-gram-studio (KS.City Wiki) — assert: that the “Newman Laugh-O-Grams,” described as modernized fairy tales, were the cartoons of Laugh-O-Gram Films (opened May 23, 1922) and screened at the Newman Theater. See the sequencing note in the body. ↩

24. “Walt Disney,” The Pendergast Years (Kansas City Public Library) — asserts: “Disney and his friends created ‘Laugh-O-grams,’ which were very short silent animation clips that complemented feature films at the Newman Theater in Kansas City, and by 1922 he opened his first animation studio on the second floor of the small McConahy Building on 31st Street.” This is the source the vault’s walt-disney page follows; see the sequencing note in the body. ↩

25. John McElwee, “It Was Happening In Kansas City…,” Greenbriar Picture Shows, March 17, 2014 — asserts: the 2,000-seat luxury house opened June 1919; Frank L. Newman had dealt film to Kansas City audiences since the nickelodeons and his Royal Theatre was a 1913 bid for elegance; by 1920 Newman was the city’s leading exhibitor; the Newman Laugh-O-Grams were short cartoons spun off local happenings that made Disney a local celebrity; and reproduces precode Newman advertising, including a late-May 1933 pairing of “The First motion pictures of Mary McElroy’s sensational kidnaping” with International House at the “Cooled By Refrigeration” Greater Newman. A specialist exhibition-history blog working from original trade advertising. ↩ ↩²