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Menaces
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I. Pigmy Go
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Millions Ci Dollars Awll
By CAMPBEJ
Above, a close-up of a course built beside a theater at First Street and Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, to attract crowds to both golf and movies. Movie magnates did not start worrying until golf fans started turning out at night, as at right
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ONE thing after another seems to conspire to disturb the peace of mind of the motion picture impresario. The day before yesterday, it was his inability to make enough of the kind of pictures the public wanted. Yesterday, it was the public demand that all pictures be conversational. To-day, it is the public madness for poor-man's golf. To-morrow.?— one can hardly blame him for
looking longingly at the fortune teller's ad.
Undoubtedly, the poor picture producer and theater owner have a good deal to think about. For a time, they had the entertainment business in their grasp. People fell easily into the habit of patronizing the movies, for two principal reasons: they wanted cheap amusement at short intervals, and the picture entrepreneur provided it at the time when there was little else to do. But in recent years a number of competitive factors have appeared. The automobile became cheap, radio poked its head out of the maze of things unborn, and the American people began to lean more intensively to sport.
In 1921, William W. Hodkinson, one of the earliest of the intuitive picture distributors — and the organizer of the Paramount institution, by the way, told me that he considered that radio had dangerous possibilities.
"Any picture man who doesn't see a potential menace in it is asleep," he said. "It may develop into a major entertainment, or it may prove merely a minor adjunct. If the former, it might prove so competitive that the motion picture industry would have to adopt it, or effect some combination. To-day, it is free entertainment, delivered into the home. But who knows where it is heading, or how much it will affect distribution.?"
Rather prophetic now, isn't it.? With the Radio Co poration making pictures, and Paramount buying a hal interest in the Columbia Broadcasting system.?
How It All Started
ABOUT a year ago, a Tennessee innkeeper name Garnet Carter stumbled on an idea. Doubtless, \ had seen a riotous game of lawn croquet illustrated i an old copy of Gody's Lady Book and had mixed that in h mind with a golf match on an adjacent links. Whateve the process, the result was an eighteen-hole dwarf goll course outside his inn, with tin cans sunk in the groun and greens of cottonseed hulls. And forthwith the Ameri can public performed one of its characteristic emotions flip-flops and went completely gaga.
Psychologically — or perhaps pathologically — the ide clicked with the public taste. For years as a nation, w have been hearing about golf. The game arrived in th' United States on a recognized basis some thirty-five year ago. There had been sporadic evidences before that, 0 course. At first, as a nation, we sneered. Then, as nation, we tolerated the thing. Next, as a nation, w« accepted it, much as we accepted polo, the I. W. W. anc
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