The Audience for The Western

The phenomenal success of Tom Mix (by 1925 he was earning $17,000 a week) decisively affected the future course of the Western film, not only through the introduction of a new kind of hero but also in its consequence for the organization of the industry. It showed that there was a ready and dependable market for films that placed action and excitement over complexities of character and theme.

Hart's films were made, one assumes, for the general audience that most films were made for. But with the advent of Tom Mix and his imitators and successors there was a shift towards a specialized audience. The absence of killing, and the fact that in his films Tom did not drink, smoke or cuss, made them particularly suitable for juveniles. Tom Mix leads in a straight line to Gene Autry, the most popular cowboy star of the late 1930s and early 40s. Autry it was who codified the behaviour of the Western star into a list of the Ten Cowboy Commandments, which would ensure that his films were fit for youthful consumption. In Gene Autry's world the cowboy hero: 1) Never takes unfair advantage. 2) Never goes back on his word. 3) Always tells the truth. 4) Is always gentle to old people, children and animals. 5) Is never racially or religiously intolerant. 6) Always helps people in distress. 7) Never smokes or drinks. 8) Is always clean in thought, word, deed and personal grooming. 9) Respects women and the nation's laws. 10) Is a patriot (above all).

In 1933 Ralston Purina, a St Louis cereal company, began sponsoring a radio show for children featuring Tom Mix. In turn Buck Jones advertised Grape Nuts and Roy Rogers Quaker Oats to a generation of youthful admirers. Of course an audience of children alone could not have sustained Tom Mix's huge success. As the mass production of Westerns, following on where Tom Mix had blazed the trail, became an increasingly specialized business, the evidence of booking patterns and exhibitors' reports in trade journals such as Motion Picture Herald suggests that the audience for this kind of Western was increasingly segregated not just by age but by geographical location. The series Western, of which Mix was the first great exponent, was as time went on sold primarily to theatres in rural areas and in small towns. Hard information about the audiences for Hollywood films is difficult to come by. With the exception of box-office returns, a notoriously unreliable source of data, Hollywood did virtually no market research during the years of its supremacy as the major purveyor of entertainment to the American people. What little we do know comes from the work of independent sociologists. As early as 1916a study of schoolchildren in Iowa City by Ray Leroy Short showed that Westerns became less popular as children got older. Research on the kinds of film preferred by audiences in rural New England in 1926 found that Westerns were the most popular of all. A more thoroughgoing study in the same year of 10,000 Chicago schoolchildren discovered that pre-teenage children preferred Westerns most, that boys liked them more than girls, and that with older children Westerns were supplanted in popularity by adventure and comedy films for boys, and romance films for girls.

?In a rare piece of research financed by the film industry in the early 1940s, performed for rko by a group led by George Gallup, the Western came low on the scale of popularity with adults generally, and extremely low with women. The categorization of films in such polls can be problematic. Westerns, after all, may also be comedies, they may contain romance, they may even be musicals. This difficulty of definition was pointed out by one of the pioneers of communications research, Paul Lazarsfeld, in research published in 1947. Nevertheless, Lazarsfeld was able to conclude that preferences for certain subjects did conform to a pattern. For example, Westerns were more popular outside urban areas: 'People want mainly to hear about themselves. In all preference studies we find a strong element of projection.... Westerns are most popular in the Rocky Mountains.