and ladies of Hollywood of 1925, with an exception here and there, then were hangers-on on the fringes of the studios, school children or mere units in the census statistics.
Gloria Swanson was a Keystone bathing girl, recently from behind the counter of a Pittsburgh department store. Harold Lloyd was a new and nameless shadow in Hal Roach's one-reel comedies. Ramon Navarro was a Wall Street messenger. Appalonia Chalupez was dancing in a Warsaw cabaret. She is known to you as Pola Negri. There is nothing in this to any one's discredit. I cite it only to evidence the giddy romance of the institution, infinitely more glamorous, more comic, more tragic, more thrilling than the gaudy stuff that it photographs.
Producers and exhibitors were, many of them, emerging from pants factories and penny arcades. It was about this time that Marcus Loew and Joseph Schenck, both now imposing figures in the show business, were opening the Royal Theater in Brooklyn. Loew had accumulated a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars running store shows and he put all of it into the Royal, rented a picture program costing him eighty dollars a week and opened the house at
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