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Ill
THE COMEDY THEATRE;
Marcus Loew, like Zukor forced out of the original Penny Arcade at Number 48, had himself embarked in the business of exhibiting motion pictures. Within the year, he was juggling finances for a string of five-cent motion-picture-and-vaudeville houses, mostly in Greater New York; in so far as anyone considered this humble business at all, he was a more considerable factor than his old friend of the fur trade. Their theatres stood in different parts of the city, they did not come into direct competition; and so they found themselves making common cause, working out a policy.
As yet the pictures were so crude, so uneven in merit, that a manager even of a five-cent house could not depend upon them alone. Fortunately for the infant industry, the vaudeville craze was on. Out of the East Side had emerged such popular figures as Weber and Fields, Dave Warfield, Francis Wilson. Every boy with a jig in his legs, every girl with a tune in her throat, nursed an ambition for the footlights. Promising semiamateur material came cheap. You could get a passable songster, black-face comedian, or dance artist for twentyfive dollars a week; a team for forty dollars. Indeed, Loew considered himself more a vaudeville manager than a motion-picture exhibitor. At his first houses, the cinema merely filled in, cheaply, the space between the turns.
To Zukor, on the other hand, the vaudeville acts were an expensive necessity — a stabilizer of the show until