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Hollywood — The ?Mad?iess of ^Movietone
were in every community, and they were a complete mental anaesthesia. ... So they boomed.
The car's wide popularity among all classes, the invention of wireless, bootleg liquor, and the growth of flagrant and cynical concupiscence among youth are all factors in the deposing of the movies as a prime drug of the unthinking classes, although no doubt the movies themselves, with their darkened halls and their sex-stimulating subjects, encouraged the last-named rival. But there were other and internal factors. Technical improvements of the silent film had just reached a point from which further developments would have been most interesting, although of a nature probably too subtle for the ordinary spectator. Outpouring movie plots — a waste almost as reckless as that of natural oil resources — combined with restrictions of concealed censorship by the sheriff's office, the clergy, and sentimental optimism, brought an exhaustion of idea and consequent repetition or banality. Further, the movies are rather silent as a spectacle ; apart from what happens unseen in the dark, they are almost discreet. Modern youth demands noise to span its nerves to an ever-increasing pitch of hysteria.
Owing to exceptional opportunities, the movies have for many years held a position out of all true comparison with their intrinsic value. For a time they could carry on by the impulse of inertia. But with their novelty dead and their inertia lost they were threatening to sink to their legitimate position.
This failure of intrinsic interest was confessed by the magnificence of such movie theatres as Roxy's or the Paramount in New York, or Graumann's in Hollywood itself. It was confessed by the spectacles called * prologues,' in which the visibly human was called to assist. Spectacles and music-hall turns were used as interludes. But the only result of the human actors, poor and vulgar as their shows might be, was s [273]