We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Star-dust in Hollywood
plunge nightly into literature as a relief and an ever-blessed refuge. His everyday task there could not break into the secret chambers of his mind. But here his daily task was too closely akin to the one he had cherished as a refuge. It verged so much on the other that it could take on the characteristics of an obsession. His mind now tended to reduce all thoughts to the possibility of their becoming movie plays. An artist cannot serve both God and Mammon. He must be an ideal artist or a commercial artist, and if necessity binds him to the lower grade his mind may be longing constantly for the clear feeling of the heights that are denied him. He then accumulates an increasing charge of regret and exasperation. Only two courses are open to him : he must resolutely climb back to the heights and be satisfied with the rewards that the gods send him, or he must determine to content himself with the valleys. How many a young artist has thought to himself: " I will do commercial art till I have banked enough to keep me in comfort, and then I will do ideal art"? But talents need to be exercised, and many a man has finally confessed that the compromise proved to be a failure and has been obliged to admit that he had sacrificed his higher possibilities for the benefits of commerce.
In this way Hollywood is a real menace to the younger writers of America. Sixty pounds a week is a tempting lure for mere plot-making. Some, like Miss Wynne, were automatically protected because their talents did not meet with movie approval, although young Isaacs had further to protect himself by remaining almost consistently intoxicated during the greater part of his stay there. But to authors such as Ornitz, who showed a natural ingenuity that adapted them to the demands of the films, the danger was great. He had certain safeguards. He had a strong consciousness of the mental aridity of the place, a sensation felt by most cultivated New Yorkers. He had a desire to do his work for the work's sake,
[J3o]