But though these powers behind the films were for a long period blindly, and often disastrously, indifferent to their highest interests in connection with the sources from which they obtained the stories their new tale-teller told to the millions, they displayed an enthusiastic admiration for astronomy. They studied the stars. Would a given matinee idol “screen well?” Would a certain popular actress endure the searching ordeal of the camera? If they would, the public would flock to the movie’s box-office even though the scenario-writers had done their worst. Followed an era of star-gazing upon the part of the movie fans and of slow but certain enlightenment upon the part of the directors and producers. The latter discovered after a time that the fame of an actor is no safeguard against the destructive influence of a structurally poor picture-drama. They gradually had glimmerings of a basic truth, knowledge of which in the past would have saved countless theatrical managers from bankruptcy, namely, that, as Shakespeare sapiently remarked, “the play’s the thing!” The telling of a story either on the stage or on the screen is a justifiable venture, as a very wise and rather jaded public knows, only if that story possesses certain elements that make it as a tale worth while. Even Douglas Fairbanks would score a failure in a dramatization of the multiplication-table. But ordinary horse sense was acquired only slowly by the movies. It is an amazing story of stupidity, reckless expenditure of money, emphasis in the wrong place, exploitation of stars out of their legitimate orbit, appeals to the lowest passions in human nature; of tragic failures and inexplicable, actually laughable, successes, of cities built and abandoned, of fortunes made and lost, of a new, marvellous, mysterious art in the making—this tale of the kinetoscope in search of its kingdom. But it is worth telling for many reasons, not the least of which is that the coming of the screen into its own has had, and is having, a disintegrating effect upon the commercialized stage. What the ultimate outcome of this iconoclastic influence of the movie upon the stage is likely to be is a subject that must be reserved for a later chapter, but it is enlightening, in connection with the foregoing review of what may be called the fly-by-night era of the films, to glance at what has been happening to the American theatre during the years in which the picture palaces have been rising from the slums to the avenues. Walter Pritchard Eaton in _Scribner’s Magazine_ for November, 1922, says: