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ness on his own, but with the rise of Nickelodeons had switched to motion pictures. William Fox did about the same thing. I notice that movie historians refer to Fox as a former "pants sponger," and maybe he was. But he was an entertainer too. As one of a team billed as the Schmaltz Brothers he had enjoyed a minor success in the neighborhood of Fourteenth Street. Fox set up a film exchange, a fact which was to prove important to the industry a few years later.
Unhappily, the public began to lose interest in films about 1907-8. The novelty had worn off and the picturemakers remained in a rut. There were attacks, too, from ministers and reformers. Even The Great Train Robbery was a blood-and-thunder thriller and consequently was lumped with the dime novels. We avoided salacious pictures, yet many were being made and shown widely.
Marcus Loew lost faith in the movies and switched almost entirely to vaudeville. Other houses did the same. Now the motion picture became known as a "chaser," a boring device to drive patrons from a vaudeville house to make room for others. We, too, switched to vaudeville, though not to the extent that Loew did. I remember particularly a slender, supple girl named Sophie Tucker who did blackface songs for us.
About this time I went into talking pictures. Edison and others were working on mechanical devices with some success. One might say I was like the old treadmill operators who used human power instead of machines. I simply put live actors behind the screen. One of them,