Moving Pictures (5 page)

Still, there seemed no logic in giving up a modestly profitable fur business in Chicago to try his hand at the newfangled moving-picture show. “Mr. Zukor backed into the movie game more or less by accident,” B.P. told me. He had loaned a relative three thousand dollars to invest in a penny arcade on 14
^th
Street in lower Manhattan. Penny arcades were becoming the new low-life entertainment. A nickel in a slot brought coochee-coochee dancers and other delights on Edison’s Kinetoscope, or Sousa’s Band on his Graphophone. There were rifles to fire at moving ducks, and bags to test punching power against the recorded impact of the reigning prizefighters of the day. Passersby had nickels jingling in their pockets; a restlessness for new forms of entertainment was in the air. But somehow the penny arcade in which Zukor had entrusted his three thousand dollars was being mismanaged, and so the young furrier decided to move back to New York and look into the business himself. Fade out Zukor the furrier, fade in Zukor the motion-picture pioneer. Fascinated with the potential of the new entertainment, he joined forces with Marcus Loew, another ex-furrier, and decided to expand the operation with branches in other cities. Then young Zukor met Bill Brady, the big, out-going, energetic, openhanded Broadway man-about-town.

Brady told Zukor of a brand-new form of entertainment he had just seen in Chicago. It was called “Hales Tours” and “Scenes of the World” and was the brainstorm of the Fire Chief of Kansas City. Chief Hales had created a simulated railroad car which customers could board from the observation platform. Once settled in their seats, there were sounds of steam and a loud railroad bell. The uniformed ticket-taker would shout “All aboard!” and then the car would lurch into simulated movement, rattling and swaying, while the passengers would face a screen fixed to the end of the observation platform on which they could watch a moving-picture travel adventure: ascending the Alps, peering into the depths of the Grand Canyon, or crossing the Rockies. It was as if Edison and Disney had combined their talents. Brady and Zukor pooled their resources to obtain the franchise from Hales for New York City and other Eastern centers. Customers flocked onto the novel contraption by the thousands. Bill Brady was noisily elated and Adolph Zukor, always more self-contained, was quietly pleased. They were enjoying a healthy return on their sizeable investment.

But once customers had enjoyed the Hales Tour experience, they seemed to feel no great desire to return. They had come for the novelty
and now sought other forms of entertainment. So Zukor decided on an experiment. A few years earlier he had been impressed by Porter’s
The Great Train Robbery.
In ten minutes it had told a gripping story, without the use of a single word or a single subtitle. Zukor had gone back to see the “play without words” again and again. Now he suggested to Brady that they try a parlay—first the now-familiar Hales Tour with the railroad car swaying and the moving scenery taking their customers on a vicarious trip. Then bring the car to a halt and, on the stationary Pullman, show
The Great Train Robbery,
followed by any other story films they could rent. In other words, turn their simulated railroad car into a movie theater!

The experiment worked so well that Zukor was convinced that what the people were truly hungry for was movies, not theatrical travelogues. In fact he had made it his business to ask departing customers which they had most enjoyed, the travelogue stunt or the Porter movie. The response was overwhelming. Nine out often customers wanted to see the movie again. Whereupon the decisive, increasingly Americanized Hungarian Jew told his exuberant Irish partner that they should junk Hales’ railroad cars—even though each car, with its elaborate equipment to make it rattle and sway, had cost about $8,000. They would be junking $180,000 worth of equipment.

Deciding to be a silent partner in whatever scheme his young associate chose to get them off the hook, Brady went back to his first love, the Broadway stage. Zukor opened a small movie house, the Comedy Theater, on 14
^th
Street next door to his penny arcade. Over the next two years he brought to Brady’s office the returns from his movie exhibition. At the end of that time they were not only out of debt on the costly Hales Tours investment, they were in the black. The nickelodeon was no overnight fad, as most theater and vaudeville people believed. Millions of five-cent customers were coming to the movies, and wanted to keep on coming.

Zukor’s vision was my birthright. This surrogate grandfather was one of the first to realize that audiences would tire of the standard one-reel fare, those pale carbon copies of the original
Great Train Robbery
being cranked out by Porter’s imitators, and that people would grow as weary of stale and repetitious ten-minute movies as they had of the Tours. Zukor had a dream. He saw the movies not for what they were at the end of their first decade, but for what they could become in the decades to follow. European filmmakers were making forty- and fifty-minute
spectacles—biblical films and historical dramas. That was the direction in which the cinematic tide was moving; common sense and foresight told Zukor to move with it. He was prepared to gamble his life savings on the improvement of motion pictures, and that gamble was to bring my father to his side as one of his most valued young lieutenants. Zukor’s dream was to bring the world’s great plays and literature to the screen and to people them with the finest actors and actresses who could be lured from the legitimate stage. It was time to move up from nickelodeon owner to motion-picture manufacturer.

An Italian-made four-reel version of
Quo Vadis?
had been booked into the Astor Theater, at an admission price of one dollar. The Motion Picture Patents Company—comprising the Edison Company and eight other associated companies that forbade outsiders to use their equipment—was unable to bar
Quo Vadis?
or any other foreign-made film, because Edison had not bothered to establish European patents. (He had told Porter, back in 1900, that it wasn’t worth the two hundred and fifty dollars it would cost to establish his trademark in Europe.) So there was a great leak in the Patents Company dam. Zukor stood outside the Astor and watched the line of hungry filmgoers willing to pay a whole whopping dollar to see
Quo Vadis?
Other multiple-reel films, as they were then called, the Italian
Cabiria
and the French
Les Miserables,
were also drawing lines to the box office. Even though the self-satisfied officers of the Patents Company were determined to lock the movies within their old one-reel formula, he knew the motion picture was ready to take a giant step, from nickels to dollars, from one reel to four, from a penny-arcade business to the only art to become an industry and the only industry to become an art.

The diminutive Adolph supplied his theaters with moving pictures of higher quality by forming his own film-producing company, Famous Players, furthering his concept in employing theater marquee names instead of the unknown silent performers. Still thinking like a furrier, Zukor knew he would need “a good inside man” and “a good outside man”—someone to make the product and someone to front for it and sell it. For the inside man, his number-one choice was the leading American director of that day, B. P.’s boss, Edwin S. Porter. His offer to Porter was that he become Director-General of Famous Players.

Porter and Zukor got along
famously,
as my incorrigible punster-father insisted, and the deal was made on a handshake, with B.P. brought along as scenario editor and publicity director. An ardent
sloganeer, B. P. dreamed one up for the new company: “Famous Players in Famous Plays.” Porter had told Zukor that “Young Ben Schulberg is a crackerjack with words.” Zukor told my father that a new film company fighting against the all-powerful Patents Company trust would need a barrage of publicity to put itself on the map. The challenge excited my father. He was also excited by the prospect of making more money, to support his new marriage and its soon-to-appear firstborn. Zukor said this would have to be a gamble for all of them: There would be a heavy investment before any returns were in. But all three men were convinced that the little minds of the big Trust were dead wrong, and that the Zukor-Porter-Schulberg vision—unless blocked by Patent Company thugs and legal harassment—would carry the day.

It was like a war, this conflict between the imagination of the Independents and the tight-minded obstinacy of the Trust. B.P. felt as if he were engaged in a cultural revolution. Ever practical, Mr. Zukor told B.P. he would have to be satisfied with the five hundred dollars a week that Porter had been paying, plus two hundred shares of stock in the new company. If the company prospered they would all share in its growth.

To get “famous players” to work for a lowly nickelodeon owner, Zukor had to find a way to make movies seem respectable. If he were to try on his own to lure to the silent screen such towering stage figures as James O’Neill, James K. Hackett, John Barrymore, Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, Pauline Frederick, and Marguerite Clark, he would probably not even be admitted to their dressing rooms. The gulf between the theater and the movies seemed unbridgeable. (Film stars were to assume the same attitude toward television in the early years of the little box.)

So Zukor found a calling card in Daniel Frohman. The Frohman brothers, Daniel and Charles, were, with David Belasco, the Big Three of the Broadway theater. But for the past few seasons, Daniel Frohman had had a series of flops. So when he was invited to become managing director of Famous Players, he accepted—and famous players at last became accessible to Famous Players.

In public and in private, Frohman spoke highly of the future of the motion picture, and my father found himself writing heady press releases. James O’Neill (now better known, sadly, as the prototype of the father in his son Eugene’s
Long Day’s Journey into Night)
was signed to launch Famous Players’ new program of four-reel pictures with a film version of his great stage success
The Count of Monte Cristo,
under the direction of Edwin S. Porter. And James K. Hackett was signed to
appear in
The Prisoner of Zenda
(based on another of Frohman’s Broadway hits), again with Porter directing and with subtitles by B.P.

Along with my father, Porter brought with him to the Zukor organization another now-forgotten but once greatly influential figure, J. Searle Dawley. Porter had recruited Dawley from the stage, where he had been a successful stock player. Where Porter excelled in scenes of action and as an innovative film editor, Dawley’s interest as a director was in performances. He made perhaps the first effort to tone down the bravura acting of the stage actors, trying to guide them toward the more subtle pantomime suited to plays without words. He also served as a casting director for Porter, roaming Broadway in search of out-of-work actors who might be effective in their films.

My father the phrasemaker hung a neat identification collar on Dawley: “The man who made Famous Players famous.” And it was true that in my highchair days, long before Father’s work had any meaning for me, Dawley was directing such famous stage stars as Mrs. Fiske, House Peters, Cissy Loftus, John Barrymore, and Mary Pickford. Some names were never to lose their luster while others were to drop into the dustbin like J. Searle Dawley’s.

Father received pats on the back for his glowing announcement of the signing of O’Neill and Hackett. “Whenever I did something that particularly pleased Mr. Zukor, he would take me to Sulka’s and buy me a tie,” he told me. “Finally one day I balked. ‘Mr. Zukor,’ I said, ‘I appreciate your generosity, but I now have so many ties I don’t have room for them on my rack.’ ‘So what would you suggest instead?’ asked the imperturbable Mr. Zukor. ‘A r-r-raise,’” my father stammered. (Ever-facile when there were words to write, B.P. frequently stammered when trying to speak them.) Zukor, always firm but rarely unreasonable, accepted his young writer’s suggestion and B.P. moved up from fifty to one hundred to two hundred dollars a week in the period immediately preceding my arrival.

Then the forward progress of the new company hit its first detour. While Famous Players was boasting that it was on its way to cornering the market in theatrical stars, news came from overseas that a French film company, Eclipse, had just completed a four-reel film starring Sarah Bernhardt in her own stage triumph,
Queen Elizabeth.

“Mr. Zukor was shaken,” my father told me. “Facing the daily crises of a newborn film company, he was usually stoic. But this time he showed signs of panic. How could they base a new company on the
concept of corralling the most famous players when the single most famous player in the world, the Divine Sarah, had already made her first film for a rival company? Eclipse. Was there more than coincidence in the company’s name? Could this signify the eclipse of Famous Players?”

“I wonder if they have an American outlet?” asked Al Lichtman, the energetic salesman for the company. Word came back that the American rights were still for sale. Zukor tried to buy the film for fifteen thousand dollars, a handsome advance in those days, but the French company held out. Determined to have Sarah Bernhardt on his roster at any cost, he finally settled for eighteen thousand dollars down, with a second eighteen thousand to be paid from box-office returns.

It was an unprecedented sum. People up and down Broadway pointed to their temples and told my father his boss must be crazy. Thirty-six thousand dollars represented nearly three-quarters of a million nickels! That is what Famous Players would have to repay before the company earned the first dollar on its investment.

“There was talk that our small ship would sink before it even left the harbor,” my father remembered. “The Zukors let their maid go and moved to a smaller apartment where Lottie Zukor did all the work. But Mr. Zukor never lost his composure. He had an inborn dignity. Innate class.”

Zukor realized that the enormous advance to which he had committed the company could never be covered by the nickelodeons. For “Famous Players Presents Sarah Bernhardt in
Queen Elizabeth
” he would charge a roadshow admission price of one dollar. And instead of showing the picture at his little Comedy Theater on 14
^th
Street, he would, through the good graces of Daniel Frohman, lease the Frohmans’ grandiose legitimate theater, the Lyceum. If Porter’s
The Great Train Robbery
was a milestone in its day, Zukor would make
Queen Elizabeth
a milestone in terms of ultrarespectable, luxury-house exhibition that would attract the carriage trade, a breakthrough to a new audience that had scorned the flickers and had considered only the opera or legitimate theater worthy of its patronage.