Mitchell & Moe Mark - Table of Contents ..........Buffalo Movie Theaters - Table of Contents

Moe Mark Obituary
The article below is reprinted from Time Magazine  Monday, Nov. 14, 1932

Died. Moe Mark, 60, pioneer cinema showman; of a cerebral hemorrhage while en route from a Clifton Springs (N. Y.) sanitarium to his White Plains home; in Utica, N. Y.

With his brother Mitchell H., he first showed moving pictures with Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope (1894) in a Buffalo dime museum.

In 1903 he showed a first film of fire horses answering an alarm.

In 1905, in Lynn, Mass., a colored film of the Oberammergau Passion Play was sensational.

In 1914 the Brothers Mark opened the first million-dollar Broadway cinema palace, the Mark Strand. Impresario of the epochmaking 18-piece orchestra was Samuel Lionel ("Roxy") Rothafel.

In 1926 Moe Mark sold some of his chain of cinema theatres to Stanley Co. of America which merged (1928) with Warner Brothers; in 1929 he sold the rest to Warner.

[This obituary is in error about "showing" films with the "kinetoscope." The Kinetoscope was a viewer that one person at a time peered into.  This (along with the Mutoscope which the Marks exhibited at the Pan American Exposition) were the pre-movie projector way that people saw films. Kinetoscopes and Mutoscopes usually cost 5 cents. Hence, the term "Nickelodeon."]