Cinema Corner

One day in 1915 a strapping young Chicago reporter stepped into a cinema theatre. It was perhaps the third time in his life he had "gone to the movies." What he saw--D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation--made his eyes pop, his heart thump. An industry doing things like that, he decided, was the place for him. So Reporter Martin Quigley quit his job with the Chicago evening Post and two months later began publishing the Exhibitors Herald. After absorbing two competitors, Motography, Motion Picture World, the magazine became the potent Exhibitors Herald-World and Publisher Quigley was a millionaire, with a summer home in Connecticut, cabin cruiser, polo ponies. By his acquired enthusiasm for polo, Publisher Quigley was impelled to back Editor Peter Vischer in starting Polo magazine, which he subsequently sold to Harper & Bros. (TIME, May 19). Also he publishes the smart fortnightly Chicagoan, which not long ago "turned the corner."

Sole national competitors to the Exhibitors Herald-World (circ. 12,000, more than blanketing the 9,500 owners of U. S. pictures houses) were Motion Picture News, Exhibitors Daily Review & Motion Picture News Today, and Film Daily. The new lineup of head men in the film industry (No. 1 still Adolph Zukor, No. 2 Harley L. Clarke instead of William Fox) made it seem wise and profitable for Publisher Quigley to acquire all but Film Daily and try to give the film industry something comparable to the steel industry's august Iron Age.

Out of the conglomeration of five titles he will publish two: Motion Picture Herald (weekly) and Motion Picture Daily. Also he will establish a Hollywood daily, thus relegating Film Daily to the status of a local New York paper. The merged properties were valued at $2,000,000, the Herald-World accounting for one-half.

From the transaction, Publisher Quigley emerges as the only man solely to control the entire national trade press of a first-magnitude U. S. industry.

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