Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture Through 1925 (A Touchstone book)

For the strange rank growth of the industry in general through the early days, the book is Terry Ramsaye’sMillion and One Nights, if you can read it and remember that Ramsaye is on the whole a journalist whose feet hurt and that he works today as the right hand of the practically unspeakable Martin Quigley.

Every important advance in the making of films has been claimed by at least two men, and usually, it would seem, the one now commonly believed to have been the honest man was actually the rogue. Great litigations have rocked the industry since its beginning in the old five-cent peep-shows, and others are apparently still ahead. It has got into Wall Street, and is hence technically respectable, show more but the ways of its early barkers and catchers still cling to it...

The rewards are almost beyond the imagination, and the failures are colossal. Mr. Ramsaye, if I understand his dithyrambs aright, is convinced that these frontier days are passing, and that the industry, in a few more years, will be as well organized as, say, the steel business, railroading or bootlegging... Thus the forces are set for a grand effort to lift the movies out of their wallow, and give them independence and dignity. Will it come to anything? We shall see what we shall see. Mr. Ramsaye's two fat volumes are immensely interesting. show less