It is a safe bet that the majority of my readers can remember the time when they looked upon motion pictures with a mingling of contempt and impatience, realizing vaguely, perhaps, the promise the screen suggested of better things but disgusted with its seemingly stubborn adherence to cheap claptrap, crude melodrama, and unspeakably vulgar farce. My personal experience in connection with the movies is, I imagine, typical of that which has come to thousands of Americans during the past quarter of a century. I can still remember the thrill I experienced when I first gazed upon human beings in motion screened by a camera. What the photographed puppets did was not, at the moment, of great consequence. The mere fact that they came and went, walked, ran, danced before my eyes was startling enough. I was fascinated by a scientific achievement that was of itself sufficiently interesting to warrant my presence in that audience of long ago. But my subsequent activities as a movie fan in embryo were of short duration. Like thousands of my fellow Americans, I came, I saw, but I did not conquer—in fact, I was repelled. For years thereafter I avoided the movie palaces, realizing that I was temperamentally unfitted to enjoy optical contacts with adultery, murder, theft and sudden death. Nor was my sense of humor of a kind that found anything to laugh at in squash-pie farce. But even the cupidity and stupidity that had their effect upon the screen in its earlier years could not kill the goose that was destined eventually to lay something better than golden eggs. Though ignorance, avarice and vulgarity for many years influenced, to too great an extent, the movies, they could not destroy its inherent power of regeneration, nor the cumulative force exercised by the higher type of producers which eventually made that regeneration possible. How the screen was saved from becoming the exclusive property of the underworld by the survival of the fittest, or the most enlightened, of the early promoters, will be told presently, but it is interesting, at this juncture, to discuss for a moment the question as to why its earlier career was so deplorably reprehensible.