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FEATURE PICTURES 103
principal studios in Hollywood, later moving to a ranch north of Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, where he built Universal City.
During the period of intense activity, while the industry was shaking off the restraints of the patents company and General Film and trying every conceivable experiment to capture the public's fancy, William Randolph Hearst, the only prominent newspaper publisher to enter the motion-picture field, organized the International Film Company and produced a film-news service in connection with William Selig, later transferring the service to Universal.
Edward A. McManus, a young Irishman graduated from the circulation department of Hampton s Magazine into the Metropolitan Newspaper Syndicate — then under the same ownership as Hampton s — conceived the idea that serial stories could be told on the screen as effectively as in periodicals. McManus joined Hearst International and for several years serial movies, consisting of a two-reel installment each week for three or four months, were extremely popular. The American Film Manufacturing Company, distributing through Mutual, created a sensation by paying Roy McCardell, who had abandoned newspaper work for scenario writing, $30,000 for the story and editorial supervision of a serial, "The Diamond from the Sky." Until this event writers had been receiving fifty to five hundred dollars for film stories, and no novelist or playwright had hitherto been paid more than a thousand dollars or so for the use of his material. American's fee to McCardell aroused the literary world, and authors and playwrights began to believe that the movies might become an important factor in their business affairs.
While studios in the United States were intent on pleasing the store-room patrons, giving never a thought to intellectual and cultured classes, the comparatively few producers operating in Europe were striving to create photoplays that would be enjoyed by the very classes that Americans were neglecting. Euro