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SHOWMAN
vacant store next to his arcade on Fourteenth Street, where each outfit would feed customers to the other. Then we formed a corporation and ran the thing into amusement parks all over— Coney Island, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston and so forth. Everywhere it went great about six weeks and then died out as the novelty of seeing a Pullman car backing out of a building wore off. As soon as we had to rely on the pictures people stopped coming because, like most travelogues in any period, the pictures were dull.
To keep the thing alive we got hold of "The Great Train Robbery," the first feature picture ever to make real money, and an extraordinary success. That, as a natural combination with our railroad atmosphere, kept us going another six months. But in the end we were $160,000 in the red. I recommended putting the corporation into bankruptcy before more damage was done. Zukor wouldn't hear of it. He kept saying over and over that he didn't like going into bankruptcy, much as if he'd been remarking he couldn't stand Brussels sprouts. "You go on back to Broadway and look after your own business," he said, "and let me see what I can do." He did it. He ripped out the Pullman car, fixed the stores in all our spots as little theaters seating about one hundred and fifty, kept them open from nine in the morning till midnight every night— and inside two years he'd paid off our $160,000 and was showing a profit.
After that you couldn't head him. Presently he was
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