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32 A HISTORY OF THE MOVIES
could be retailed profitably for ten cents, the cost of admittance to a dime museum or a circus side-show.
In the early years there was no insistence upon quality in production or exhibition. The show-shops were adequate theaters; the audiences were not accustomed to the luxury of comfortable chairs, carpeted floors, and elaborate decorations; they came to see the pictures, not to admire the architecture and engineering. They didn't have to dress up to go to the movies and they didn't expect stylishness when they got there.
Any film that presented an interesting or amusing episode, or pictured a simple theme, was good enough to draw throngs to the store shows. For a while any camera that would expose film to a lens and produce any sort of wobbly, static-streaked negative would find buyers, and exhibitors had to be satisfied with projectors that would merely project. However, mechanical crudity did not last long; within a decade after film commerce had started, competent engineers and mechanics had smoothed out the roughest kinks in the instruments of the craft. The efficiency of cameras had been increased so that good photography in daylight was assured, and electric carbon lights had created acceptable photography within the simple picture factories. Projectors had been improved, and movies on the screen were ceasing to be "flickering monstrosities."
Changes in manufacturing methods were necessary to produce the long story-telling films of a thousand feet. Producers selected or so arranged scenarios so that as much of each picture as possible could be photographed outdoors, but more and more interior settings were needed as the playlets progressed in dramatic substance, and it became increasingly difficult for a director and camera man to "shoot the film" anywhere and everywhere. Factories — soon they were called studios — were needed; furniture and other properties had to be rented or bought; painted canvas scenery had to be stored when not in use; there had to be dressing-rooms for players, offices for directors and executives, and dark rooms in which negatives could be developed.