Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood and no time for reading other than the Yellow Press. In the family one seldom hears a discussion about abstract subjects except among the professionally intelligent. On one occasion we almost compelled a well-to-do Chicago man and his wife to remain at home by their own fireside and talk for an evening. They confessed that they had never tried the experiment before, but found it quite enjoyable. Nevertheless this comment is not really concerned with the better-educated, but with the general mass of the people. In our Los Angeles bungalow court I do not believe that one book was bought by one of the inhabitants during the whole of our six-months stay. Out of the twelve bungalows not a person except ourselves used the excellent local free library, a five-minutes walk away. One contributing reason may be that, owing to the polyglot quality of antecedents, no desire to entertain itself by reading has been handed down, and all sense of art inherited from folk-tradition, either of a poetical, narrative, or decorative kind, has vanished in the melting-pot. The loud-speaker is now turned on at eight in the morning and continues to bawl uninterruptedly until midnight, so that the housewife shall never be cursed with a moment of silence in which she must think. The wireless, the car, and the movies have become three insidious drugs, moral morphias that can render habitues insensible to any vacant spaces of mental life unfilled with thought. The movies' first overpowering success was no doubt due to the fact that they, first of these three popular anodynes, became cheap enough to be enjoyed by all. When movies were launched their only rival was the saloon. Prohibition was a strong factor in movie success, since national organization of smuggling and illicit distilling required time to reach its present perfection. Cars have approached saturationpoint only in recent years ; so that during the War movies had an almost undisturbed position. They were cheap, they [272]