The Life and Adventures of Carl Laemmle (1931)

VICTORY 129 lar fees paid under duress should be returned to the defrauded exhibitors. The government, with a view to making the order effective, sought to attach the bank account of the combine. But the Patents Company and Gen. Filmco had gone silently away, leaving behind them closed doors and empty offices. The fortunes that had been made by exploiting an industry slid furtively into the backwaters of sundry private accounts. No compensation for wrongs done was recoverable. The Trust had to be written off as a bad debtor, bad to the core. But it was exterminated. When at an earlier date the Trust had begun to suffer serious inroads on its business through Independent competition, one of its lawyers had said — "Laemmle is the man to whom, more than any other, is due the large damage inflicted on the Motion Pictures Patents Company." And now, when the finding of the Court was known, one of the Trust leaders made a generous admission in defeat: "My hat's off to Carl Laemmle. There's no use denying that the man is the keenest fighter we've had to contend with, and that his Filmco advertisements have hurt us more than any other one thing." News of the judgment was brought by a messenger to Laemmle as he was crossing the street. Passers-by were mildly astonished to see a small gentleman in his early middle-age making strange demonstrations in the middle of a net-work of