Cinema

To have asked a banker 20 years ago for the financing of a cinema concern would have been of no avail. He had probably never heard of motion pictures. Or, if he had, he held them in contempt as grotesque novelties of penny arcades, honkytonks. And he classed the cinema entrepreneur as a probably illiterate and possibly dirty "outsider." Today the banker reaches out for cinema investments, which are all the more attractive because they represent a $1,500,000,000 amusement industry operated on a cash basis. Not one of the 45,000,000 people who in the course of any week visit the 20,250 U. S. theatres would think of giving his promissory note. Admission fees--$700,000,000 last year--are in current money, money that flows from exhibitor to distributor, to producer, to investor--cash, cash. The cinema, with yearly income 50% of its total investment, is a stable, an important industry. And the most important figure in it is a little man, Adolph Zukor, who last week gave a smiling, chattering welcome to his friends--bankers, actors, merchants, politicos--come for the opening of his new Paramount Theatre in Manhattan. This new theatre--it is the latest of more than 800 that Adolph Zukor with Jesse L. Lasky and their Famous Players-Lasky associates have built or bought--is a $3,000,000 affair built into the new $17,000,000 Paramount Building at 43rd Street and Times Square. Most of the money went into equipment--marble lobby, rotunda, halls; 3,900 seats; elevators, even to the cheapest gallery seats, lounge rooms, the music room for people waiting to be seated in the theatre. The rug is lighted so that latecomers can find a softly glowing path to their seats in a darkened theatre. But large further sums were spent on such bric-a- brackery, such articles of virtu, as 37 bronze-labeled stones from foreign countries in the "Hall of Nations." This hall also contains a bronze bas-relief of Thomas A. Edison, who presented the first practical cinema reel (1894), scenes of prize fights, fencing matches, dances and vaudeville skits. Inventor Edison was so intent on maintaining the profitable novelty of his pictures in the U. S. that he neglected to patent his process abroad. The side rooms of the theatre all bear names for the patrons' convenience in making appoint ments. They are the Elizabethan Room (containing porcelain heads in hair dresses from the time of Queen Elizabeth to now), Peacock Promenade, Chinoiserie (women's smoking rooms), Club Room, Hunting Room, Jade Room, Powder Box, Venetian Room, Marie An toinette Room, Colonial Room, Empire Room and Music Room. The auditorium, simulating French Renaissance architecture, is dec orated in ivory, rose-red and turquoise blue. Some 38 years ago, the Atlantic washed onto the shores of the U. S. an entirely insignificant underfed boy of 16. In those days, immigrants were not taken so seriously. No one cared whether he could speak English, knew the articles of the Constitution, how much money he carried on his person. Since that time, people have troubled to inquire. But there are no records of Adolph Zukor, immigrant, and Adolph Zukor himself can not remember distinctly whether he landed with $40 in his pocket or $25.

For $2 a week the Hungarian youth worked in an upholstery shop. Later he found a better job trimming mink, sable and fox skins for a furrier. Still later he went into the fur business as a partner.

In 1903 he got a share in a penny arcade, the type still seen at inferior amusement resorts. That was the year The Great Train Robbery appeared, the first "story" cinema. The entire reel was 800 feet long. (Present feature films run to 12,000 feet). But Adolph Zukor did not see it until two years later, in Pittsburgh, in the first nickelodeon. That nickel show promised him a better future. . . . The great thing that Adolph Zukor has done for the motion picture industry is to make it a medium for "dramas." He brought professional actors, "legitimates," before his cameras and he photographed stage plays. Since then scenarios have been written especially for the cinema and, beginning with Mary Pickford, mimes have been trained specifically for this new art. Before Adolph Zukor's day, the cinema was regarded as unsuitable for anything except slapstick. With Edwin S. Porter, collaborator in the Thomas Edison laboratory of cinematography, Mr. Zukor amassed $35,000, including the fruit of all his years of toil, invested it in a new film of the sort that he wanted to produce. It was a screen version of "Queen Elizabeth," was acted by Sarah Bernhardt. Such huge expenditure on a motion picture was then considered pure folly. That was the first Famous Players Production. It not only gave the cinema a new dignity, but it made enough money to launch a series of constantly improving films. Later Daniel Frohman listened to the little, smiling, persuasive man and gave him The Prisoner of Zenda, in which the late James K. Hackett (died recently, TIME, Nov. 15), played, the first well-known actor to enter the U. S. cinema. The world public wanted that sort of thing, and Famous Players-Lasky* did ever increasing business, until now their yearly gross income touches $100,000,000.