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AVARICE AMONG THE AVOCADOS 77 By this time movies were big business in the East. One of the industry's fathers, Albert E. Smith, was budgeting million- dollar pictures at his Vitagraph studio. Adolph Zukor was pay- ing stars like Mary Pickford as much as $10,000 a week. The public's desire for flickers was already whetted when the Lasky company moved into the citrus groves of the sleepy little village. Goldwyn instructed DeMille on expenditures. "No long-term commitments/' DeMille obeyed to the letter, renting half of a barn from a Jacob Stern for $25 a month on a month-to-month basis. It sat in the heart of a lemon grove near the present inter- section of Hollywood and Vine. The protection of the lemon trees was comforting and on one occasion profitable. Losing heavily on a picture, the crew was ordered out to harvest the lemon crop and recouped its losses. The sewer in Stern's barn was on the firm's side, causing the office workers to retreat to chairs and high ground when Stern was watering down his horses. Two former horse stalls, draped with black cambric, were dressing rooms for Farnum and Winifred Kingston, a glamorous star of the stage who had come out from New York to play the feminine lead. "She was a fine enough trouper. She didn't ask what performer last used the dressing room," DeMille once recalled. The Squaw Man was filmed in three weeks at a cost of $15,000, most of its scenes taking place on a set consisting of a wooden platform and two walls of canvas with a large cotton umbrella serving as a light diffuser. Early that January 1914, DeMille and his assistants gathered in the barn to screen the picture for the first time in edited form. Puzzled, angry cries greeted the picture as it began to unreel, showing scratches and dark blotches. Obviously the film had been gouged, probably with a knife or icepick, and the scratches