Pay to Play Movies

The great radio show/podcast “On The Media” did a really cool story about Melton Barker,  a man who traveled from town to town charging people to put their kids in a movie. The same movie over and over again. I love this news story. Listen, read about it, and watch a couple of the movies below.


The practice of itinerant filmmaking – traveling from town to town, charging a fee for residents to become the stars of a film – mostly died out in the early 50’s. But one man continued the practice for nearly 40 years, filming the same movie over and over again. Bob talks to Caroline Frick, Executive Director of the The Texas Archive of the Moving Image about her decade-long fixation on filmmaker Melton Barker and his oft-filmed movie The Kidnapper’s Foil.