Mitchell Mark

Mitchel H. Mark
Born	Mitchel Henry Mark 1868 Richmond, Virginia
Died	March 20, 1918 Buffalo, New York
Resting place	Forest Lawn Cemetery
Nationality	American
Spouse(s)	Estelle Brock
Children	2
Relatives	Moe Mark (brother) Victor Lownes III (grandson)

Mitchel H. Mark a.k.a. Mitchell Mark a.k.a. Mitchell H. Mark (born as Mitchel Henry Mark) (1868 – March 20, 1918) was a pioneer of motion picture exhibition in the United States.

Mitchel Henry Mark was born in 1868 in Richmond Virginia. Early in his life, he moved to Buffalo and began in the wholesale hat trade, keeping a store in Buffalo the rest of his life.

Along with his younger brother, Moe Mark (1872–1932), Mitchel founded the Vitascope Theater (a special attraction of his Edisonia Hall in the Ellicott Square Building), one of the first permanent, purpose-built movie theaters in the world. It opened Monday, October 19, 1896 (according to local papers), in Buffalo, New York. It operated nearly two years, the longest run for any such theater at that time: comparable early theaters were temporary and lasted only days or weeks. Mark was the first American to have a distribution arrangement with Pathé Frères to import Pathé films to the United States. Indeed, nearly the entire Vitascope Theatre program of October 19, 1896, consisted of Lumiere films.

Again with his brother, Mitchel founded the Automatic Vaudeville Company in 1904 in New York City. Among their partners were Adolph Zukor (co-founder with Jesse Lasky of Paramount Pictures) and Marcus Loew (founder of Loew's Theatres). It was based in form on Edisonia Hall and the Vitascope Theatre in Buffalo. The Mark brothers eventually built and operated dozens of theaters in the United States.

The Mark Brothers owned and operated more than a dozen theaters in the United States and Canada called "Mark-Strand" or "Mark Strand". By 1917, Mark's importance in motion picture exhibition was such that when Cecil B. DeMille complained in his autobiography that exhibitors were protesting the high price of Hollywood movie rentals, he cited Mitchel Mark along with Thomas Lincoln Tally as the worst offenders.

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