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THE STAR SYSTEM 91
and sound economics, that the well-trained brains of trust rulers denounced it as a fad, an exhibition of popular foolishness that would presently exhaust itself and depart without having affected their business seriously.
Although no factory — trust or independent — functioning on a system of a dollar-per-foot cost for negative film, could continue to operate comfortably when the ladies and gentlemen whose camera personalities were the raw material to be fabricated into dramatic strips of canned celluloid, unexpectedly announced that they could not express themselves unless wages were doubled or quadrupled, and that they must be regarded as artists instead of factory hands — although no studio could maintain any semblance of standardized sanity after star frenzy swept into the show-shops — the independent producers, never having been standardized or regulated in any way, rushed into all sorts of wild, apparently insane, experiments, while the members of General Film were restrained by the trust leaders' cautious adherence to the well-established rules of mass production for mass distribution. The difference between trust philosophy and independent practice was that the patents company rulers believed in giving the public what the trust thought the populace needed and the "outlaws" poignantly yearned to discover what the people wanted and to "pander to the public" by manufacturing the discovery and selling it at "the highest price the traffic would bear." (My quotations are from the current phrases of the period.)
These distinctively contrary viewpoints and the relentless battle of trust and anti-trust forces that raged behind the screen interested the populace not in the slightest degree. Public apathy to the rights or wrongs of the contest was one hundred percent complete, but universal enjoyment of the new delights of star personalities caused vast additions to the throngs of ticket buyers everywhere, and hugely augmented streams of nickels and dimes daily poured into the little show-shops, to the great enrichment of exhibitors, distributors, and producers. For a while the wellorganized trust was the principal beneficiary of these swollen