Free Moving Pictures by Schulberg Page A

stayed there until dawn, inside the police barricade, while the firemen fought a losing battle against the flames. Actually the building was a firetrap, a jerry-built renovation of an old armory. As the disaster was reconstructed, it had started in a braid or rope factory on the second floor and had raged upward through the Famous Players offices on the third floor and the flimsy sets and cutting room on the top floor. Film companies were uninsurable because of the flammability of their product. So the entire assets of Famous Players were seemingly being consumed in that flaming inferno of a “studio.” However, since insurance was not available, Frank Meyer, the studio manager, had installed a fireproof vault on the third floor; in it, seventeen completed but still unreleased features had been deposited.
    The night of the fire all of the Famous Players “family,” my father included, had gone to a lightweight boxing match between two great Irish fighters, Packy McFarland and Mike Gibbons. (Irish fighters were then the dominant performers, with the East Side Jews getting ready to battle them for supremacy. There were some marvelous Negroes—Jack Johnson, Sam Langford, Joe Gans—but the great Black tide was still to come.) All the Famous Players crowd were ardent fight fans, maybe because their leader, Mr. Zukor, had implemented his meager earnings as a fur worker with five-dollar purses as a flyweight. The entire staff had gone to the big fight that night, with one exception: Frank Meyer. He had decided to pass up the event to finish cutting the latest Mary Pickford film. Apparently he was trapped up there in the cutting room and my parents, along with the rest of the “family,” were terrified that he would be burned alive in his cubbyhole. But suddenly heappeared. It was a scene as melodramatic as anything he had been working on. He had been trapped on a fire escape but had finally managed to jump across to an adjoining roof. To keep the fire from spreading, firemen had been pouring powerful streams of water onto that roof and instead of burning to death, Frank had almost been drowned. He was soaked to the skin and shivering, but quite alive.
    To my parents and their friends waiting outside, it was miraculous to see him emerge from a building now totally ablaze. But they were movie people and after being reassured of Frank’s safety, their first question was: Did the Pickford film burn? And what about the cans of film on shelves in the cutting room? Frank said he had fought through the smoke to throw as much footage as possible into the cylinder vault. This was heroic but only partly reassuring. If the walls fell in as they threatened to, it was doubtful that the precious vault would survive. And even if it did, the intensity of the fire might be so great that enough heat would be generated inside the cylinder to melt their completed films. They had been trying to turn out fifty feature films a year, or one a week, to satisfy the aroused appetite of the American public—with a new Mary Pickford picture promised every month—and the loss of their product plus the loss of a huge investment in equipment could mean the end of Famous Players.
    While watching his first studio engulfed in flames, Adolph Zukor remained incredibly cool, according to my father. He never lost control of himself, never cried out, but simply waited for the smoke to clear. “I never admired him as much as I did during those hours when we were waiting to see if the roof was—literally—going to fall in on us,” my father told me. “The rest of us were hysterical, but Mr. Zukor, who had the most to lose, stood there like a general watching his army go into a crucial battle. If the fire resulted in total loss, I’m sure he had no idea how he would meet his next payroll. But he assured us that come what may we would all be paid at the end of the week.”
    By morning the building had been reduced to smoking rubble. The fireproof vault had come