The grindhouse and where the word came from

A grindhouse is a cinema that runs continuous performances, and the word describes a booking policy rather than a kind of film. Green's Dictionary of Slang defines it as a second-rate theatre that rarely showed any first-run feature, often screening pornography, and traces the name to two things at once: the physical turning of the early projectors, like the arm of a coffee grinder, and the films a studio simply grinds out.

Nothing in that definition mentions Italian cannibals or kung fu. The genre associations came fifty years after the word did, and they came from what the houses could afford to book rather than from anything the houses set out to be.

Trade vocabulary in 1925 Los Angeles

The earliest use Green's Dictionary of Slang records is not from New York and has nothing to do with sleaze. The Los Angeles Times of 10 October 1925 reported an agreement by the Motion-Picture Theater Owners' Association of Southern California under which payment would be three dollars higher in suburban houses, five dollars higher in downtown grind houses and eight dollars in the de luxe theatres.

Read that as an exhibitor would. In 1925 the grind house was already a recognised class of building, ranked between the neighbourhood theatre and the de luxe palace, sitting downtown and open all day. The term was trade vocabulary for a kind of real estate and a way of running it, and it was in print thirty years before anyone associated it with a genre.

Eight or nine shows a day

The economics are stated plainly in the trade press of the period. Billboard, on 18 September 1948, observed that a good picture playing a grind house eight or nine shows a day would bring in more than a vaudeville and picture combination limited to four or five. That is the whole business model in one sentence.

A theatre with no fixed start times has no interval between programmes and no live acts to pay. It opens in the morning, runs the reels until it closes, and sells a seat to anyone who walks past at any hour. Turnover replaces the event. By 1951, when Green and Laurie published their history of American show business, the definition had shrunk to four words: continuous performance theater.

The consequence for programming is the part that matters here. A house running the same double bill nine times a day burns through prints and burns through titles, and it cannot pay first-run rentals to do it. It needs volume, it needs the rental to be cheap, and it does not much care what the film is as long as the poster works from across the street.

Where the cheap product came from

The supply arrived by court order. In United States v. Paramount Pictures, decided in 1948, the United States Supreme Court held block booking illegal, finding that the practice prevented competitors from bidding for single features on their individual merits. The consent decrees that followed required the studios to separate their distribution arms from their theatre chains and banned block booking, circuit dealing, resale price maintenance and overbroad clearances.

Once the majors no longer owned the theatres and no longer sold their output as a bundle, an independent producer could sell a picture directly to whoever would play it, and an independent exhibitor could book whatever he liked. That is the door the sexploitation operators walked through, and later the importers who dubbed European product for the American market. A grind house did not create those films. It gave them somewhere to play nine times a day.

The twenty-four hour houses between Seventh and Eighth

By 1970 the word had moved east and got harder. Ernest Tidyman's novel Shaft refers in passing to the twenty-four hour movie grind houses between Seventh and Eighth, which is 42nd Street, and the phrasing assumes the reader knows exactly what kind of building that is.

The programming had changed with the neighbourhood. A 1994 study of Times Square records that the theatres began showing pornographic films commonly called grind flicks, named for the number of times a film could be shown in the course of a day. The old trade term for a booking policy had become a name for the content, because on that block the two had collapsed into each other.

This is the period the modern usage remembers, and it is a narrow slice of the word's life. Roughly 1968 to 1985, largely Manhattan, with parallel strips in Chicago, Los Angeles and every port city with a run-down downtown. The martial arts imports and the blaxploitation run were made for a wider circuit than that, and reached audiences who had never set foot on 42nd Street.

The word as an aesthetic

Since the 1990s grindhouse has named a look: scratched prints, splices, missing reels, jump cuts where the projectionist lost a frame. The damage is now applied deliberately in post-production by people who like the texture, which is an odd fate for a word that began as trade vocabulary among Southern California exhibitors.

The distinction worth keeping is between what a film was and where it played. A film is not a grindhouse film because of its content. It played a grindhouse because a house running continuous shows needed something to run, and it took what was cheap and what would fill a seat at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. The word names the building and its clock.