Came the dawn : memories of a film pioneer (1951)

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a horse picture called Dick Turpin and then the catalogue comes to an undignified end with a few short and quite insignificant nonentities. For with the apparently important number of one thousand and ninety-five, we had realised that the time had come to drop the making of short films, such as can be sold on a catalogue description, and to start making pictures on a very different scale — the sort that were afterwards called 'feature5 films. Well, that is how it appeared to me at the first glance. But looking back rather more carefully I begin to perceive that it could not possibly have happened like that. There must have been a period, probably a long period, during which the transition very gradually took shape. I should think it kept step to some extent with the changes which were occurring in the showmanship side of the business. These changes were probably epitomised in the similar changes in our own village. The occasional fairs which visited us at regatta time did not come to us to buy their films, if they had any, which is doubtful, and I don't think we had a converted shop either. We did have a small village hall in the High Street for dances and bazaars and so on, and this was early converted into a sort of picture-house which had the field to itself for several years. Then a slightly larger hall was erected in Church Street and that became our 'Electric Palace.' Soon that was conquered in turn by a large picture theatre at the other end of the town — it could no longer be called a village — and then that in its turn 70