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THE ACTUAL
Elizabeth, with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. This picture created a sensation wherever it was shown and was bought for America in 191 2 by Adolf Zukor (then an exhibitor in New York) in conjunction with Edwin S. Porter, Daniel Frohman and others. From Italy came a series of big productions or 'feature films,' as they were known, including a version of Homer's Odyssey, The Fall of Troy, Faust, The Three Musketeers, and The Sack of Rome-, but greatest of all, the forerunner of every spectacle film since, was Quo Vadis?, a veritable mammoth production of 191 3, eight thousand feet in length. This also was bought and shown by George Kleine in America, where to that date the most pretentious effort had been The Life of Buffalo Bill. Since the day when American producers first saw Quo Vadis?, cinema audiences of the world have been presented with super-spectacle after super-spectacle. From The Birth of a Nation, Griffith's reply to the Italian picture at the end of j 914, through the years of Intolerance, The Ten Commandments, Robin Hood, Ben-Hur, Noah's Ark, Metropolis, Secrets of the East and Casanova, super-films abounded, developing to-day into Broadways, Hollywood Revues, and General Cracks of the singing, dancing, and talking variety. In the few years just before the war the feature film sufficed to build up the industry (increased audiences meant bigger film studios and larger cinema theatres) , and in 1 9 1 4 the opening of the Strand Theatre on Broadway marked a new era in the history of the cinema. The way was open for the position as it is to:day.
* With the outbreak of war in 19 14, film production naturally came to an end in Europe. The road was left clear for America to secure for herself the supreme commercial control which she still holds. It was simply a matter of circumstance of which the Americans were quick to take full advantage. That they made the best of their opportunity is only to their credit. But all was not easy for their producers. Financiers were at first reluctant to put their war gains into the film business. Great sums of money were lost, serious risks taken, and wild speculations made in those early days before the monied men of America realised the vast financial profits waiting to be reaped from the movies.1
1 The reader is referred to the enthralling accounts of early struggles in Samuel Goldwyn's Behind the Screen, Terry Ramsaye's A Million and One Nights, and D. W. Griffith's When the Movies were Young.
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