The Key to Peace

ILLUSTRATEDChapter OneIN WHICH IS FILMED THE BIRTH OF A NOTIONIt was something more than nine years ago that I walked into a little motion-picture theatre on Broadway. I paid ten cents admission. As I took my seat a player-piano was digging viciously into a waltz. Upon the floor a squalid statuette lay under its rain of peanut-shells.And all around me men women and children were divided between the sustained comfort of chewing-gum and the sharp fleeting rapture of the nut.Only a decade ago! Yet this was a representative setting and audience for motion-pictures. Likewise typical was the film itself. For as were practically all productions of that day this was only one or two reels. And faithful to the prevailing tradition the drama of to-night was Western.I looked at the cowboys galloping over the Western plains and in their place there rose before me Henry Esmond crossing swords with the Young Pretender wiry young D’Artagnan riding out from Gascony on his pony to the Paris of Richelieu Carmen on her way to the bull-fight where Don José waited to stab her.Why not? Here was the most wonderful medium of expression in the world. Through it every great novel every great drama might be uttered in the one language that needs no translation. Why get nothing from this medium save situations which were just about as fresh and unexpected as the multiplication tables?When I went into that theatre I had no idea of ever going into the film business. When I went out I was glowing with the sudden realisation of my way to fortune. I could hardly wait until I told my idea to my brother-in-law Jesse Lasky.“Lasky do you want to make a fortune?” With these words I burst in upon him that evening.Lasky who was at that time in the vaudeville business indicated that he had no morbid dread of the responsibility of great wealth.“Very well then” I continued. “Put up some money.”“In what?”“In motion-pictures” I answered.“Motion-pictures!” scoffed he. “You and I would be a fine pair in that business—me a vaudeville man and you a glove salesman! What do we know about the game? Besides how about the trust?”