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88 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
of the motion-picture craze through city ordinances for suppression or regulation of these “slum theatres.”
As for production, that lay still in control not of artists or showmen, but of engineers and mechanics. For the business, in this early stage of the game, was the prey of odd circumstances. No one man invented the moving picture. Both the camera which records the fluttering image and the projector which throws it onto the screen were the compound of many devices. Edison, it is true, laid his finger on the weak point in the camera; probably to him belongs the major credit. However, he stopped far short of perfection. Some of the minor improvements were invented almost simultaneously by different men. As these inventions became important, there followed a complex, tiresome series of lawsuits over patents and prior rights. So it happened that all who dealt with the production of moving pictures had their minds fixed not upon the finished product, but upon the tool.
In effect, the companies which manufactured apparatus governed the business. After the formation of the Moving Picture Patents Company and the General Film Company — the so-called “film trust” — they governed it in fact. The men in charge were concerned mostly with selling or leasing their machines; not with catching the nickels at the box office. At first they created film stories only as a means of giving the machines something to do, thereby creating demand.