26 Facts About Alexander Pantages

Alexander Pantages was a Greek American vaudeville impresario and early motion picture producer.

Alexander Pantages created a large and powerful circuit of theatres across the Western United States and Canada.

At the height of his empire, Pantages owned or operated 84 theatres across the United States and Canada.

Alexander Pantages is largely forgotten today in historical accounts of the early development of motion pictures.

Alexander Pantages then went to sea and spent the next two years working as a deck hand.

Alexander Pantages arrived in the United States in the early 1880s.

Alexander Pantages headed north, stopping briefly in Seattle but eventually settling in San Francisco where he worked as a waiter and, briefly and unsuccessfully, as a boxer.

Alexander Pantages left San Francisco in 1897, and made his way to Canada's Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush, ending up in the mining boom-town of Dawson City.

Alexander Pantages moved to Seattle, Washington, where he opened the Crystal Theater, a short-form vaudeville and motion picture house of his own.

Alexander Pantages ran the operation almost entirely by himself, and charged 10 cents admission.

In 1904, Alexander Pantages opened a second Seattle theatre, the Alexander Pantages; in 1906 he added a stock theater, the Lois, named after his wife.

Alexander Pantages showcased both film and live vaudeville to his audiences.

All Alexander Pantages tours originated in Winnipeg and moved from there around the circuit of theatres.

Alexander Pantages's favored architect in these ventures was B Marcus Priteca, of Seattle, who regularly worked with muralist Anthony Heinsbergen.

Alexander Pantages often sought out and judged performers personally instead of relying on New York agents like many of his competitors did.

Alexander Pantages invested his theatrical profits into new outlets and eventually moved to Los Angeles.

Around 1920, Alexander Pantages entered into partnership with the motion picture distributor Famous Players, a subsidiary of film producer Paramount Pictures, and further expanded his "combo" houses, designed to exhibit films as well as staging live vaudeville, to new sites in the western US Throughout the 1920s, the Alexander Pantages Circuit dominated the vaudeville and motion picture market in North America west of the Mississippi River.

Alexander Pantages was effectively blocked from expansion into the eastern market by New York-based Keith-Albee-Orpheum.

Pringle, an aspiring vaudeville dancer, alleged that Alexander Pantages had attacked her in a small side-office of his downtown Los Angeles theater after she came to see him to discuss her audition.

Newspaper coverage of the trial, particularly by William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner, was strongly antagonistic towards the Greek-accented Alexander Pantages while portraying Pringle as an innocent victim.

On October 27,1929, Alexander Pantages was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Alexander Pantages engaged attorney Jerry Giesler and San Francisco lawyer Jake Ehrlich to file an appeal on his behalf.

Alexander Pantages died in 1936 and was interred in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Benediction, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

The rumour, begun at the second trial, that RKO and Kennedy paid Eunice Pringle to frame Alexander Pantages, was revived in Ronald Kessler's 1997 biography of Joseph P Kennedy Sr.

The alleged conspiracy against Alexander Pantages plays a prominent role in the book Hollywood and the Mob by Tim Adler.

Alexander Pantages was the grandfather of actors John Considine III and Tim Considine via his daughter Carmen who married John Considine Jr.