National Comparison
Trends in Little Rock vs Trends in the United States
Although there were a couple discrepancies, overall, the chi-squared tests indicated that Little Rock had similar movie preferences regarding war, film noir, horror, and family movies to the rest of the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s.
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Comparison of Population
City Size and the Movies
According to one of the main arguments in film studies, film production and cultural acceptance was specifically developed by and for large urban centers. These metropolises controlled the creation and distribution of movies. They also reflected the attitudes of the nation as a whole and set the example of modernity for the rest of the country.
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While the movie industry catered to metropolitan audiences, a majority of the American population lived outside of major cities. According to a 1938 Motion Picture Herald national survey, eighteen out of forty-eight states had two-thirds of their theaters in nonmetropolitan areas (population less than 5,000). Therefore, one should not assume that small towns underwent the same moviegoing experiences as major cities.
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Although Little Rock is the capital city of Arkansas, it is still a comparatively small city. From 1930 to 1960, Little Rock was one of the smaller Southern capital cities in terms of population size, and when compared to the major urban centers of New York and Los Angeles, it could be easily overlooked. However, despite the population difference and Southern demographics, Little Rock booked similar types of films as the nation's major cities.
Genre Trends of the 1930s-1960s
Little Rock vs America
The chi-squared tests on the National movie dataset showed strong statistically significant patterns in war and film noir movies, a weak pattern in family movies, and no significant pattern in horror films. While these results differed from the Little Rock tests, which indicated that all genres had significant patterns, they most likely resulted because of the difference in the sample sizes of the two datasets and not from movie preferences. The Little Rock dataset had 10,098 movies while the national dataset only had 350. Having such a large difference between the sampling groups made for a less accurate comparison; however, it still yielded interesting results.
The national results for war, film noir, and family movies displayed the same popularity spikes found in the Little Rock movie data.
The national results for war, film noir, and family movies displayed the same popularity spikes found in the Little Rock movie data. Both war and film noir movies peaked in 1943 and 1949 respectively just as they had in Little Rock. Although family films only indicated a borderline statistically significant pattern, the graph still displayed a detectable trend towards more family movies in the early 1960s. Most likely, this trend would have been stronger if there was a larger sampling of national movies.
The same was likely true for the horror films as well. The national data set indicated no significant pattern, but with only six horror movies making the top fifty ranking, this result was not surprising. A sampling size of six is not sufficient to draw any conclusive patterns. However, it does indicate that horror movies were rarely popular on a national level. The ones that did reach national fame were a couple of the classic horror films from the 1930s, but interestingly the popular ones in Little Rock were the horror films of the late 1950s. There is no clear reason for this difference, but it could be because the AAC was struggling financially in the 1960s so it booked less popular movies or because horror was an emerging genre in the 1930s but became more niche by the 1960s.
Besides the limitations of the small sample size and small anomaly in horror movies, the National movie data revealed that people in Little Rock watched similar types of movies that were popular across the country and that the popularity of the genres fluctuated with current historical events and national attitudes.