The era also saw the rise of the movie palace, as marble nickelodeons became splendid pleasure domes dedicated to public entertainment, such as Radio City Music Hall in New York and the Roxy in Los Angeles. Paramount began an aggressive policy of theater ownership to make sure that their films would find an appreciative audience, and instituted the policies of block booking (in which a theater owner had to take an entire slate of films from a studio, including lesser ones, in order to get the hit films) and blind bidding (in which theater owners were forced to bid on a hot film sight unseen, and play it no matter what it eventually turned out to be). Although block booking and blind bidding were eventually outlawed, the practice continues today in a subterranean fashion; theater chains that don’t regularly play a studio’s minor films are sometimes denied a shot at more lucrative titles.
And yet, in the midst of all this production and prosperity, a storm was brewing.
Arbuckle, Minter, and Normand were all forced to leave the screen as a result of the ensuing bad publicity; pathetically, Arbuckle tried to make a comeback several years later under the name Will B. Good, but to no avail. At the same time, one of the silent era’s most popular stars, Wallace Reid, died in 1923 as a result of morphine addiction and alcoholism at the age of thirty-one, and mainstream America demanded that the motion picture industry clean house.
In late
MPPDA. Soon known informally as the Hays Office, the MPPDA set about to police the private lives of the stars, inserting morality clauses in the contracts of all studio personnel that subjected them to immediate dismissal if they failed to live up to a stringent code of personal conduct. Not coincidentally, Wallace Reid’s wife, actress Dorothy Davenport Reid, became a director in 1923 with her production of Human Wreckage (in which she also starred), about the evils of narcotics-made with the approval and assistance of the Hays Office.