Part 28

The idea is that if enough people are watching, some of the advertisers’ message will rub off on them to make the series worth while. But if enough people stop watching the stuff that’s put on their screens, then commercial television faces a similar fate to the movies, in spite of color sets or tomorrow’s gimmicks such as giant screens to hang on your living-room wall.

I believe the only possible solution for television and movies alike is a recognition of the eternal values of real talent, excitement, and glamour. Audiences are starved for all three. Entertainment must be a satisfying emotional experience, a stirring of the heart. We need all kinds of young men and women. Those people with an artist’s eye and an executive’s brain that we term directors. Those wrestlers with their souls and typewriters known as authors. The beggars on horseback called actors and actresses.

* * * * *

Hollywood is my home, and most of my friends live there. I like to travel sometimes, but I find scenery as a diet doesn’t nourish me. So I intend to stick around and watch what happens, remembering a few more words from the plaque that stands on my desk:

I do the very best I know how--the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Obvious typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

All of the photographs are in one section, as they were in the original book. Originally, the section followed the first page of Chapter Ten, but to avoid disrupting the flow of reading, in this eBook, that section has been moved to precede Chapter Ten.

In the original book, there usually were 2-4 photographs per page, with descriptions for all of them in the middle of the page. Here, the photographs are separate and contiguous with their descriptions. References such as left/right/above/below have been removed from those descriptions, as they are not needed here.

The original book has no Table of Contents. The Transcriber added one to the HTML version of this eBook.