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278 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
were unsound/’ he says, “but at the moment the ‘yeas’ appeared to have it.”
He won over the Baliban brothers — and entered First National. A year or two more, and he found himself discontented with that connection, veering again toward Zukor. By 1923, Baliban and Katz, through an interlock too complicated for description here, became main outlet for the Famous Players-Lasky films — the connection for which Zukor had been looking. And in 1925 was formed Publix Theatres, a subsidiary of Famous Players-Lasky. It drew in all the Paramount houses in the South and New England, the Baliban and Katz interests, a few smaller strings. Sam Katz, being then but thirty-three years old, came on to New York to serve as manager. Seven Baliban brothers had reached years of discretion; and all work in the Middle West as sub-managers for Publix. There are some seven hundred theatres in this string, including one important house in each “key city” — the towns which set fashions for their subsidiary regions, as Denver for the Rocky Mountains, Atlanta for the Southeast.
At about the same period. Paramount began spotting Europe with big theatres of its own; the “key-city” plan again. Now, the chain runs from Vienna to San Francisco. And as it lengthened, Adolph Zukor, a showman to his bones, conceived the idea of one great, dominant mother-house, symbolical of all his business. Four or five years before he broached this plan to his