We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE LOW SPOT
189
woman of her time. Its long success, both at home and abroad, pulled Famous Players past all financial danger and established it on the heights of security — so far as there is security in the moving-picture business.
Before that, however, Adolph Zukor was to totter again on the perilous verge of ruin. This crisis arose not from his own large and bold attitude toward the future, but from a blow of fate. Beginning as a tragedy, it ended perhaps as a comedy.
In those days, insurance companies looked on the inflammable film with great suspicion. The famous Charity Bazar fire in Paris, which started in a cinema booth, had accentuated that prejudice. Also, the business was so new that actuaries had not calculated the appropriate premiums. Insurance let the moving picture strictly alone.
Frank Meyer, realizing this, had at the very beginning looked into the matter of a fireproof safe for their precious negatives. He chose a huge affair, protected both with an asbestos lining and vacuum cells. When it arrived it seemed too heavy for a somewhat insecure floor already burdened with a tank. So he had it fastened to the wall by a pair of steel straps. Presently, the fire inspector, looking over this dangerous establishment, noted the arrangement and vetoed it on the spot. It imposed, he said, too much strain on that wall. Some day, wall and safe might come down together and crash through both floors onto the braid factory below. In the