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CHAPTER 25
The First Year in Hollywood, 19221923
H A D an Aladdin's genie appeared to me as I left New York on the fateful trip that was also to include a train accident, and had he told me that in a few days I would be offered the post of "czar" of the motion picture industry, I surely would have thought it a fairy tale. My astonishment was utter and complete when, on the eighth day of December, 1921, Saul Rogers and Lewis J. Selznick asked to see me in my suite at the Wardman Park Hotel.
I was still convalescing from injuries sustained in the train wreck, and I had never met either man before. My first impulse was to beg off the interview, which I thought vaguely must have to do with some motion picture problem of the Post Office Department. Surely this could wait. Yet, to be consistent with the "open door" policy I had already established, and since I did not think I was honestly too ill to receive visitors, I consented.
Mr. Rogers and Mr. Selznick came straight to the point. They handed me a round-robin letter signed by ten of the leading motion picture producers and by officers of two additional companies, asking me to become head of the Association they felt it urgently necessary to form. There had been a previous association under the presidency of the illustrious producer, William A. Brady, but this had become useless owing to lack of agreement among its members. In the face of pressing problems, a comprehensive and definite program was now being sought.
Beyond the fact that I had arranged for the newsreels to have proportionate coverage with the press during the campaign, I had never been identified with any phase of motion pictures. I was an Indiana lawyer who had become Republican national chairman, then Postmaster General. Just that. I was aware, of course, of a certain ferment going on in the industry and of increasing tension between the industry and some influential sections of the public. As happens in the history of every institution, human frailty had ushered in by degrees what appeared to many to be an era of scandal. This had even happened in our wholesome national game of baseball and had resulted in the selection of Judge Kenesaw M. Landis as an over-all commissioner,