The House That Shadows Built (1928)

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THE TRUST GOES TO SEED I3S to an ordinary audience is a personality. The inventions of playwrights, the devices of stage managers merely serve to throw this personality into interesting situations. And the cheaper and less sophisticated the audience, the truer the rule. Highbrows and scholars may go to see Shaw or Ibsen; the populace goes to see John Barrymore or Ed Wynn. But the magnates of the moving-picture Trust never admitted this. Also, they feared the effect of publicity on their actors. Advertise them, get them swell-headed and up-stage, and they would demand more salary — perhaps even the undreamed-of salaries paid on the “legitimate” stage, where stars sometimes cost a thousand dollars a week. Mary Bickford did some of h^r most effective work for Biograph at a salary of fifty dollars; and to the end of her service there, the public knew her only as “The Biograph Girl,” or “Little Mary, the Movie Girl with the Curls.” It is easy, in view of what happened afterward, to laugh at their shortness of vision. But they were pioneers, and those who break ground can seldom imagine the harvest. And their eventual rivals, the theatrical managers, were worse than short-sighted: they were blind. Any experienced Broadway showman, it seems now, might have taken hold on the “picture” business and, by applying the basic principles of his own craft, transformed it. But Broadway ignored its existence, even when, in the space of two years, the moving