The next time you plunk down $10 for a movie ticket at the cineplex and maybe another $8 at the concession stand, then sit through a half hour of commercials for the privilege of seeing the movie, imagine a time when movie theaters charged a nickel.

It's just as hard to imagine that in 1914 more than 100 movie theaters -- "nickelodeons" -- blanketed Pittsburgh. And these weren't just stuffy little parlors with hard chairs.

		"NICKELODEON CITY: PITTSBURGH AT THE MOVIES 1905-1929" By Michael Aronson University of Pittsburgh Press ($39.95)

In his new book, University of Oregon film professor Michael Aaronson tells us that although these early movie houses may have started out by thrilling small standing-room-only crowds with 400 hundred feet of moving images, by 1914, movie venues in Pittsburgh "ranged from 150-seat storefronts to elaborate picture palaces that accommodated thousands."

They had names like the Bijou, the Royal, the Minerva, the Avenue and the Olympic. With 900 plush seats, the East Liberty Regent (renovated and renamed the Kelly-Strayhorn nearly a century later) was not the largest, but it was one of the most luxurious.

Movies initially were part of the amusement business, or the "business of commercial leisure." And the businessmen who saw an opportunity were already skilled in running penny arcades, bowling alleys, shooting galleries and billiard rooms. Proprietors soon found that adding a picture show required larger digs just to accommodate insatiable audiences.

Aronson examines Pittsburgh's many cultural and socioeconomic factors in the early 1900s, including the resistance to higher ticket prices, which helped to keep the nickelodeon business strong here, even after the industry was taken over by Hollywood.

Most of "Nickelodeon City" focuses on the business of motion picture exhibition, distribution (called film "exchanges" in those days) and promotion. The core of his book is based on a collection of vintage trade journals Aronson discovered while a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.

The "Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin" (1914-23) was created for film workers of this region from impresarios to delivery boys. For Aronson, this rare cache brought to life "the vast ensemble of people and practices involved in the movies ... that often fall beyond the borders of history."

Movie buffs might be disappointed to find there are few stories about movie stars or famous silent films. There are, however, many wonderful tales of enterprising theater owners and operators, the hilarious gimmicks used to attract audiences, and the challenges exhibitors faced with state and local censorship boards in the days before the Production Code.

One such fellow was Charlie Silveus, a theater owner in Waynesburg, Greene County, and well-known in the Pittsburgh region, circa 1920. Silveus was one of a handful of exhibitors who was also a filmmaker. He delighted his hometown by filming and screening movies of parades, football game highlights, floods and fires.

"The people of Waynesburg were both the subject and audience of the films ...," Aronson writes.

Aronson tells us that in the past decade film scholars have started to recognize the significance of early locally produced short films (called "local views") in communities all over the country. The practice continued into the 1950s, when television arrived.

Silveus died in 1957, but, fortunately, his son saved his father's nitrate-based 35mm films. Fearing their incendiary nature, though, he handed the collection over to the local fire department, who decided to look at them before destroying them.

"Their pleasure in seeing this past," Aronson says, "meant that the films, rather than becoming smoke and fire, became history."

However, the present fate of most of these films is unknown.

Film historians like Aronson are, by necessity, excavators. Everything is pretty much gone: The people are long dead, the theaters have burned down or been plowed under and the highly combustible celluloid has disintegrated.

So ultimately, much of what's left of film history is oral history, hearsay and legend.

"The stories that are told are as important to the history of the movies as the movies themselves," Aronson says.

In Pittsburgh lore, for example, the credit goes to John P. Harris for starting it all on June 19, 1905. Currently a bronze plaque mounted on a Smithfield Street facade commemorates Harris' opening of the world's first nickelodeon, and thus "the beginning of the motion picture theatre industry."

But Aronson, who challenges many assumptions in this meticulously researched text, tells us that, in fact, the commercial exhibition of movies began nine years earlier in September 1896. "Despite many claims otherwise," he says, it was actually a Mr. R. M. Gulick, manager of the Bijou Theatre, who first dazzled a gathering of newspapermen with life-size moving pictures.

With a touch of poignancy, Aronson concludes, "What survives -- a newspaper, a film, or a family -- often determines what is remembered and what is forgotten."