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.
80 A HISTORY OF THE MOVIES
part of this enchanted town. No other city ever enjoyed the publicity that came to Los Angeles through the accident of its location near the Mexican border. From all over the country, tourists began to arrive. They came by thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and within a decade so many of them had remained that Los Angeles had grown from a little city to a great metropolis of a million and a quarter.
Not all of the independent producers and distributors that defied the trust were the "riff-raff" so colorfully described by its officers and lawyers. All the outlaw methods in the world would never have enabled the independents to battle long with an organization so solid and substantial as the Motion Picture Patents Company. The pirates and crooks who lived only by short cuts lacked the brains and stamina to go very far. They gradually disappeared, and the contestants who remained on the battlefield were alert, shrewd showmen who developed the ability to organize their affairs in accordance with common commercial practices. Of several dozen independent manufacturers and distributors who made of themselves a constantly increasing nuisance and menace to the trust, William Fox, Patrick A. Powers, Carl Laemmle, and the Mutual Film Company group became the most effective and most prominent.
William Fox, owner of several theaters and an exchange in New York, refused to accept General Film's offer for his distributing business. When General Film threatened to shut off his supply of pictures, he opened a studio of his own and started a national distributing system to handle his product. He prospered, and steadily increased his holdings of theaters in Greater New York, and soon was presenting popular-priced vaudeville in addition to pictures.
Winneld Sheehan, a Buffalo newspaper reporter, came to New York to work on the New York World. He left newspaper work to become secretary to the metropolitan police commission. While in charge of the issuance of theater licenses by the police depart