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in The Jazz Singer of 1927. Cutting, editing, music recording and sound mixing and dubbing became increasingly sophisticated. Different studios honed their specialties: between 1912 and 1917 the Keystone Film Company under Mack Sennett produced slapstick comedy; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made spectacular musicals from its foundation in 1924; Warner Brothers, established in 1918, was celebrated for its thrillers. Profit was always the bottom line. Hollywood was, as John Dos Passos put it, a “bargain sale of five and ten cent lusts and dreams.” The British novelist J. B. Priestley, writing for the movies in the 1930s, quipped that Hollywood was “run by businessmen pretending to be artists and artists pretending to be businessmen.”

Like its sister industry, advertising, Hollywood drew customers in by persuading them that their normal lives were bereft of value. “All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you lack in your daily life are in—Pictures,” declared one mid- 1920s advertisement. “They take you completely out of yourself into a wonderful new world…Out of the cage of everyday existence! If only for an afternoon or an evening—escape!” A film like The Sheik set an entire generation of young men pomading their hair and learning to tango in the hope of capturing some of Valentino’s allure.

A new type of journalism sprang up to feed the public’s hunger for information about movies and their stars. The first tabloid, the New York Daily News, came out in 1919; William Randolph Hearst’s even more lurid Daily Mirror followed it on to the newsstands five years later. These papers pioneered “keyhole journalism”—intrusive, usually sensationalized (and often entirely fabricated) accounts of celebrity lives. Well aware of how tabloid exposés fueled public interest in their stars, studios encouraged an almost parasitical relationship between actors and gossip columnists.

Gloria Swanson listed the inane questions reporters fired at her: “They wanted to know whether I liked tall men or short men, how often I ate dessert, what my favorite breed of dog was, if I dyed my hair, what my favorite color was, if I got depressed on rainy days, what my favorite flower was, if I considered myself stuck-up, if I thought So-and-so was a nice dresser, if I ever obeyed silly impulses.”

In 1924 the starlet Ruby Miller “sensationally” revealed to the Los Angeles Times, her tongue firmly in her cheek, how she made her love scenes so convincing. “I must have time to know my hero and always insist that my love scenes come last of all…I’m always a sympathetic listener. He . . . thinks me brilliant when I permit him to explain, by the hour, how he would have ‘holed’ in two if only that d—caddie had kept his eye on the ball…Then dawns the day of the big love scenes. I appear in a beautiful gown. By this time the hero is so crazy to kiss me that it requires no effort upon my part. His natural fervor awakening my own—and hence the perfect love scene. I am told that my method is very dangerous and liable to wreck the homes of my heroes. My reply is, ‘I am first, last and all time an artist—and if my love scenes are destined to thrill millions, why worry about wrecking a few thousand homes?’”

Contemporary moralists were concerned that the movies’ obsession with sex appeal was destroying traditional American values, but in an essay of 1927 John Peale Bishop argued that, on the contrary, the most popular and enduring actors were innocent rather than sexualized. No other stars were adored like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, whose appeal lay in their childlike naïveté rather than in high-voltage glamour.

Directors didn’t need to be sophisticated to appeal to moviegoers, either. D.W. Griffith’s views on race, sex and morality were reactionary in their simplicity. Although Cecil B. deMille admired the Flapper as a “maligned and plucky little person. Youth always revolts; it wouldn’t be worth its salt if it didn’t,” he described himself as essentially conservative. Even when film heroines dressed provocatively, drank cocktails or allowed themselves to