Dallas Film Row

For half a century the film trade of North Texas ran out of a few blocks on the southeast edge of downtown Dallas. The studios kept exchanges in these streets, warehouses where prints were stored, shipped out to small town theatres across Texas and into Oklahoma and New Mexico, then shipped back to be inspected and repaired by hand. The stock was cellulose nitrate, which carries its own oxidiser and cannot be put out once lit, so the vaults were fireproof and the city fire code is what had pushed the whole trade out of the timber framed core in the first place. By 1950 some eighty film businesses stood in the district. Theatre owners came to book entire seasons, and the supply houses around them sold everything from projector carbons to popcorn machines. The Warner Brothers exchange at 508 Park Avenue, a zigzag moderne building opened in 1930, had film vaults on the ground floor, offices above and a screening room on the roof that is still there. Brunswick Records took the third floor, and the producer Don Law recorded there, walling off a room in Beaver Board for the acoustics. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys cut their first sides in the building in 1935. Robert Johnson recorded across two days, the nineteenth and twentieth of June 1937, thirteen songs including Hellhound on My Trail and Love in Vain, the last sessions of his life. It is one of only two places Johnson is known to have recorded; the other, room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, is still a working hotel.