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ZUKOR PLOTS HIS FUTURE 145
playhouse in Union Square, become for him a kind of experimental laboratory. Still he stood at the entrance when the crowds emerged, picking up conversation with typical auditors, asking what they liked about the show. More and more often it was the film.
There came at last an Imp two-reeler entitled Under the Sea, which for story and technical effect he felt excelled anything he had ever shown before. That week, his gossips at the door never so much as mentioned the vaudeville acts. All talked of the film. When a one-reel version of Camille appeared in the catalogues, Zukor used it for an experiment. He took a versatile young vaudeville performer, who became afterward famous as Lowell Sherman, stationed him in a box beside the screen, and had him talk off, in four “voices,” the appropriate dialogue. As in most early attempts to synchronize voice and vision, the result seemed somehow unnatural; Zukor abandoned that.
Always he had doubted the superstition that an audience could not keep its attention on more than two reels of film. In 1910, he had a chance to prove his skepticism. Europeans, who held no preconceived notions on the practical length of a moving-picture film, had reproduced the Passion Play at Oberammergau in three reels. Zukor ventured to buy it, at exceptional prices, for the New York, Boston, and Newark houses. Soberly and appropriately advertised at the Comedy, it drew full houses for a double run. No need this time to