The House That Shadows Built (1928)

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY 105 “But how can we quit?” asked Zukor. “Throw her into bankruptcy,” said Brady. “That’s fair and usual. This is a limited liability company. We wipe out our debts and lose only the few thousand we invested in the beginning.” To this day, Billy Brady remembers the effect of this proposal on his young and obscure partner. “ It was as though I’d touched him with a live wire,” he says. “ He bounced up from his chair and came at me with his hands out. I never dreamed he had such a temper. And he yelled, ‘I won’t go into bankruptcy! I won’t!’” When the partners recovered their balance, Adolph Zukor proposed a plan to regain solvency. He had been listening to the gossip of the little, submerged movingpicture world. Porter’s masterpiece had started a slow movement forward. Although a twelve-minute film with a dozen actors, a mob, and trained horses seemed too daring an enterprise for general adoption, directors were beginning to introduce coherent stories; month by month their product improved. It was possible to get a reasonably steady supply of films which, though stopping far from ideal, drew the public. Zukor proposed frankly to scrap the machinery of Hale’s Tours, to turn the houses into five-cent moving-picture theatres. On those terms, he believed, the company could return profits and eventually pay off its debts. At any rate, he wanted to make the try. Even yet, he failed in thorough