We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE AMERICAN FILM
After some consideration, I have ultimately decided (with a few notable exceptions) to regard Hollywood much as I would a factory, managed and owned by a number of astute business men, who seek only large financial returns from the goods that they manufacture. Among the employees of these big firms is undoubtedly a number of artists, sincere in their aims, who sacrifice their intentions for the sake of a living, for which they are hardly to be belittled. It follows that the bigger the profits made by the owners for themselves and their shareholders, the vaster the business expands and the more pictures are manufactured. It has already been seen that American producing concerns, beginning in a small way by making one or two-reel storypictures, gradually developed the trade until, taking advantage of the situation offered by the first World War, they eventually assumed control of the world market.
Now the vagaries of public taste are well known, and it has been the constant occupation of the film producer to gauge that taste and to keep abreast with its fluctuation. But, not content with pandering to the public taste, the film producer has also set out to create public likes and dislikes by clever advertising and world-wide distribution of certain classes of films. In a business-like way, the film men of Hollywood have experimented with the appetite of the public, and they are not to be blamed from a commercial point of view for having turned out stereotyped productions when the public has shown its acceptance of such forms. When any new type of film comes from Hollywood and is successful, there quickly follows a swarm of similar but inferior pictures, trading on the success of the first.
To the shrewd observer of the cinema, the difficulty lies in differentiation between films demanded by public taste, and movies deliberately foisted upon the masses. The public does not by any means choose its own players. If a big
American firm wish to put over Miss as a leading
star, they can and will do so, by systematically presenting movies at their own chain of cinemas with that particular young lady in them. In time, seduced by an exhaustive
127