And just as in San Francisco, after the gold fever, the Vigilantes had to come along and try to straighten things out without the old machinery of the law, so recently we have seen the censorship movement, that has tried to make the movies clean up, whether they wanted to or not. But the most striking parallel of all is in the forgotten towns of the Kern River valley, and the country now opening up and so wonderfully fertile and productive around Bakersfield. The old gold rush is over, for the most part, in the movies as with California and the Klondike. Greenhorn City, the old mining town of the first gold-seekers, is hardly more than a memory—as are the old lurid, unreal movie melodramas of the first years, that drew crowds simply because they showed people and things in motion. Isabella and Bodfish still survive, but nobody pays much attention to them any more. At Bakersfield, though, oil has been discovered and developed, and the great farming country is at last being really cultivated—just as in the movies the big “better-class” pictures have at last been found to pay more than the old melodramatic gold-getters. We can compare the old-time films, with their impossible situations and their innumerable “stars” to the old gold nuggets and lawless claims of ’49; the pictures of Douglas Fairbanks and Griffith, and some of the rest, correspond to the oil development, let us say, of the second period; and the final stage of all, the development of the fertile fields around Bakersfield through good sense and hard work, is even now only just beginning to come to the movies, in the educational field, with scientific films, and films for the schoolrooms, and in the really high-grade product of the new, hard-working, clear-thinking movie producers who are gradually beginning to force their way into the field. Now-a-days one can talk with the straightforward business-like president of a $300,000 concern just formed to make, after a few experimental months, educational pictures for classroom use; while Yale University is lending its name and prestige to the production of historical films that will cost $150,000 or more of as honorable dollars as can be found in the whole country. Yes, in the movies, as in the Sierras, Greenhorn City will soon be hardly more than a memory. [Illustration: _Courtesy Famous Players._ ACTRESS, OR A VICTIM OF AN ACCIDENT? Scenes in a well-made photoplay, such as this from “Saturday Night,” are sometimes almost as realistic as news reels.] [Illustration: _Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation._ GETTING A REAL “THRILLER.” Movie actors are called upon to do many nerve-wracking things. Even though the danger from the approaching locomotive can be reduced by slow-cranking, there is enough left.] CHAPTER VII WHAT MAKES GOOD PICTURES GOOD