(Click and click again to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on Sept. 18, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on Sept. 21, 2025
Kirkland historian brings web close-ups to Seattle’s silent-film era
By Clay Eals
When was the last time you saw a movie in a theater? Today, many stream movies from anywhere but theaters. No surprise, given society’s embrace of the convenience and selectivity of the internet.
So maybe it fits that a comprehensive new history of our region’s early movie exhibition is virtual, not physical. The fledgling but voluminous website “Northwest Picture Show” supplies chronologies and anecdotes aiming to lure movie-maven Alices into a rewarding rabbit hole.
It’s the creation of Eric Flom, by day a benefits writer but at all other times a deep documenter of local theater lore. The 57-year-old Kirkland resident has devoured vintage trade magazines, newspapers and theater programs for the past 25 years.
With 236,000 words posted on his illustrated site (and 128,000 more coming this fall), Flom admits, “Brevity is not my strong suit.”
A fan of the pre-sound era, Flom isn’t averse to the limiting yet tangible medium of books to tell its stories. His 300-page tome “Silent Film Stars on the Stages of Seattle” (2009, McFarland) appraised our city’s turn-of-the-20th-century stage performances by scores of future celluloid luminaries, from Theda Bara to Buster Keaton.
But today the internet is Flom’s vehicle. Arguably his most significant narrative examines the Clemmer Theatre, which opened April 10, 1912, at 1414 Second Ave. downtown.
Capitalizing on widespread film fervor, James Q. Clemmer, the theater’s dream-big owner, became the first to construct an enduring palace in Seattle expressly designed for movies, not stage shows. The $100,000 project featured interior Roman columns and murals, 1,200 seats and a $10,000 pipe organ.
The alternate claim to fame, or infamy, for Clemmer is that he outflanked other local operators to mount lavish screenings of “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s cinematically innovative but racist 1915 epic about the Civil War and its aftermath.
Clemmer, who thrived in the Seattle theater business until his 1942 death at age 61, was a lifelong pitchman. In 1915 for Moving Picture World, a Seattle financier illuminated Clemmer’s aggressive approach:
“He came rushing into my office, pulled off his coat, unrolled a set of plans and started to talk. I excused myself, rushed into the next room and locked the safe. I was afraid he would grab my money, push me into the safe and run. Before he was through talking, I began to tremble in my boots for fear that I could not remember the combination to the safe in time to grab some of the stock of the Clemmer [Theatre] before it was all gone.”
Just one of myriad in-person, scene-stealing stories that Flom brings alive online.
WEB EXTRAS
Big thanks to Tom Blackwell and David Jeffers of the Puget Sound Theatre Organ Society, Lisa Oberg of University of Washington Special Collections, Bob Carney, Gavin MacDougall and especially Eric Flom for their invaluable help with this installment!
To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.
Below, you also will find a link to “The Birth of a Nation” plus 1 additional photo and 19 historical clips (including two Paul Dorpat “Now & Then” columns) from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.
