Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
But these primitive adventurings, these earlier pioneering quests into
the realm of the speculative were all in limbo behind them, all wiped
off the slate, in part forgiven, in a measure forgotten. Since that
primitive beginning and those formulative middle periods Lobel
Masterfilms had found their field, and having found it, now plowed and
tilled it. To those familiar with the rise and the ever-forward movement
of this, now the fourth largest industry in the civilized globe--or is
it the third?--it sufficiently will fix the stage of evolutionary
development attained by this component unit of that industry when I
state that Lobel Masterfilms now dealt preponderantly with vampires. To
be sure, it continued to handle such side lines as taffy-haired ingenues
from the country, set adrift among the wiles and pitfalls of a cruel
city; such incidentals as soft-pie comickers and chin-whiskered
by-Hectors; such necessary by-products as rarely beautiful he-juveniles
with plush eyelashes and the hair combed slickly back off the forehead
in the approved Hudson seal effect--splendid, manly youths these, who
might have dodged a draft or two but never yet had flinched from before
the camera's aiming muzzle. But even though it had to be conceded that
Goldilockses and Prince Charmings endure and that while drolls and
jesters may come and go, pies are permanent and stale not, neither do
they wither; still, and with all that, such like as these were, in the
Lobel scheme of things, merely so many side lines and incidentals and
by-products devised and designed to fatten out a program.
Where Mr. Lobel excelled was in the vamp stuff. Even his competitors
admitted it the while they vainly strove to rival him. In this, his own
chosen realm of exploration and conquest he stood supremely alone; a
monarch anointed with the holy oils of superiority, coroneted with
success's glittering diadem. Look at his Woman of a Million Sins! Look
at his Satan's Stepchild, or How Human Souls are Dragged Down to Hell,
in six reels! Look at A Daughter of Darkness! Look at The Wrecker of
Lives! Look at The Spider Lady, or The Net Where Men Were the Flies!
Look at Fair of Face Yet Black of Heart! All of them his, all box-office
best bets and all still going strong!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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