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ZUKOR BECOMES A SHOWMAN 87
business of exhibition. Most of the early contracts are signed, on the part of the exhibitor, with crosses !
At about this period, a young bank clerk of St. Louis named Frank Meyer acquired a taste for “the pictures” and let his imagination play on their possibilities. Halfdisguised, he dodged through the slums and sidled in at the ticket-taker’s door, dreading lest some acquaintance see him and report his bad habit to the bank. After he took the plunge and went into the business of motionpicture distribution, the ladies of his banking circle dropped him from their lists.
When these little picture houses began to attract public attention, reformers and uplifters took frantic alarm. Moving-picture technique was still so crude that the audience, in order to see action on the screen, must sit in total darkness. That gave opportunity for “spooning,” the mild Victorian ancestor of our modern “petting”; therefore was it dangerous to the morals of the populace. Europe had produced a few pictures with a slant toward what the trade called afterward “that sex stuff.” The positives of these pictures have gone long since to the scrapheap; and I have never found any old witness of such iniquities. It is impossible, therefore, to say whether in our own time even reformers would consider them so very vicious. Nor were they produced widely. But that was enough for minds afflicted with the common human infirmity, suspicion of a new thing. Generally, the prosperous and respectable first heard