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CINEMA ORGAN IS BORN 243
suffered the fate which has befallen so many of the dreams of picture pioneers.
Despairing of interesting British capital, Lauste gave up the unequal struggle and took his invention to the United States, thinking the newer land might be more appreciative, but his reception there was ill-timed. He left Britain up to its neck in World War I ; within a year of his arrival in America that country was likewise getting ready to enter the conflict.
By the time talkies burst upon the world in the late '2o's, many of Lauste's patents had lapsed. However, it is heart-warming to record that he did not end his days, like so many other film pioneers, in want. The American cinema industry treated him with consideration and his old age was spent in comfort and self-respect.
In the era which followed the days when Lauste used a Brixton back garden for his talkie stage, the film industry became more interested in musical accompaniments for films than in synchronised speech. In America, Erno Rapee published his Motion Picture Moods, a volume which listed practically every emotion and every setting and gave the titles of those musical compositions which, in the opinion of the author, reflected the appropriate " mood " of both. Love, hate, Chinese atmosphere, Paris, temptation, anger, all were catalogued and, opposite to each, was named one or more suitable musical " selections ". It became the Bible of all orchestra leaders. One ran the new films through at rehearsal, all the time turning up the appropriate " pieces " in the book, then hunted them up in one's musical library and strung them together to form the accompaniment.
The result was not so hackneyed as one might imagine. The public had already wearied of Hearts and Flowers for every wistful love scene and the Post Horn Gallop for every chase. Rapee gave a great deal of thought to the compilation of his book, for he was himself the leader of a small town cinema orchestra.
About this time, too, disused chapels were bought and converted for use as cinemas. In some of them the organ was included in the purchase price. The small exhibitors found them, as they thought, invaluable as one-man orchestras — just one man could fill a theatre with a tremendous volume of sound, and what sound, impressive, rolling waves of it that made the walls tremble.
Thus was the cinema organ born. Cinemas which were not converted chapels and had no organs fell victims to the craze, and very soon organs were being built especially for sale to cinemas, organs