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AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
The people own motion pictures in a way and to a degree that they own no other art. Pictures are their especial property, their darlings, their wards. They will not permit anyone to do anything to pictures unless they give consent. It has been so from the first; it will always be so. Dictators may dictate to the screen, but the result is failure unless sustained by majority vote.
Watching all this come about occupied twenty of the most interesting years of my life, but I find the story difficult to set down in any sort of order. Pioneers seldom leave diaries; they are too busy getting to the next camping place. Soldiers in the trenches don’t know much about the war; they are doing the shooting, not planning the battle. Therefore I will not attempt to go into the screen’s political and business history; I am merely a commentator, not an historian, and this field has been splendidly covered by my friends : Terry Ramsaye in two wonderfully well-informed volumes, and Ben Hampton, who knew the politics and the business end of pictures better than I can ever hope to know them. I write as a lover of the drama who left the theater, for a time, in order to stay with the audience. Never for one moment have I regretted giving such a large portion of my professional life to do what I could in helping to develop this new form of art, in whose destiny and importance I have always believed.
Twenty years of thrilling work are not easily forgotten. My memory is filled with the faces and voices of that host of comrades with whom I had the privilege and the joy of working. We were like an English garrison in India; speaking a different language, isolated, intent only upon our objective. We talked, breathed, lived and ate pictures. Stars were not important in those days nor was there much
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