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66 MONEY BEHIND THE SCREEN
General Film Company was dissolved by court order in 1915 and when the Supreme Court declared in 1917 that the purchaser of a patented projector could not be legally forced to exhibit only the manufacturer's own films.
The first film combine thus collapsed, in spite of its apparently inassailable strength, because it attempted to stabilise a new and entirely unprecedented form of mass entertainment at a time when the demand for that entertainment had only just been aroused and the lines of its future development were as jet whollj obscure. Lacking the great advantage of their opponents, who were not only of the people but also in continuous contact with the people, the executives of the combine failed to recognise the decisive importance of ever changing mass tastes entirely beyond the scope of ordinar}^ rationalisation practices. In calling a halt they soon agged behind the rapidly expanding requirements of their aucliences, nd despite their financial and organisational supremacy, the}^ left the field to their opponents whose main strength lay in their ability to anticipate, instead of smothering, every new desire of the movie public.
The Second Phase, 1912-1929.
The period commencing with the gradual eclipse of the patents monopoly and terminating with the general installation of sound equipment about 1929 and the impact of the crisis on the film industry during the following j^ear constitutes the second phase in the history of American film finance. Its salient feature from the creative point of view was the emergence of the modern entertainments film of the pre-talkie era with its as yet largely undifferentiated general " human " appeals of sex, adventure, self-improvement, lavish settings, glamorous fashions and happy endings. From the organisational point of view this period saw the gradual consolidation, after incessant and bitter rivalry and man}^ failures, of the eight major companies which dominate the industry to-day. These companies survived largely because they succeeded in breaking through the original isolation of the three distinct spheres of the industry : because as producers they secured a sufficientlv widespread exhibition outlet for their films through the control of cinema circuits, or else, because as exhibitors and distributors they assured themselves of steady supplies at remunerative rentals by absorbing production units.
The Paramount organisation (a merger of Zukor's Famous Players with Lasky's and other production units that jointly absorbed the Paramount distributing organisation founded by Hodgkinson and ultimately — in 1930 — controlled 1,600 cinemas in the U.S.A.) is the outstanding example of the former type. Among the exhibitors, Loew's Inc., during the lifetime of its founder always closely allied (by family ties and personal friendship) to Zukor's