One Summer: America, 1927

producer named Herbert Lubin, who was effectively bankrupted by the project, but the name and vision came from Samuel Lionel Rothafel – known to one and all as ‘Roxy’. A Minnesotan, Rothafel grew up in Stillwater, twenty miles east of St Paul, the son of a shoemaker, and was headed for a career in professional baseball when he was unexpectedly sidetracked (through a romantic entanglement) into cinema management. He quickly distinguished himself as a showman with a particular gift for rescuing troubled operations. The idea of combining movie presentations with live shows was a Roxy invention. The most notable fact about Roxy himself was that he didn’t actually like movies. He lived in an apartment hidden above the cinema’s five-storey-high rotunda.
    The opening of the new Roxy was such a momentous occasion that President Coolidge and Vice-President Charles Dawes both sent congratulations (though Coolidge in his predictably odd way praised Rothafel for some equipment he had donated to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington and never mentioned the cinema).
    The new Roxy took in $127,000 in its first week, but such business could never be sustained. fn1 The New Yorker , in the Talk of the Town column in the summer of 1927, noted that just three New York cinemas – the Paramount, the Roxy and the Capitol – offered 70,000 seats a day.
    While the cinemas were struggling to maintain their audiences,things were not going terribly well on the production side of the business either. The previous November unions representing the craft trades – painters, carpenters, electricians and the like – had secured something called the Studio Basic Agreement, which granted them important and costly concessions. The studios were now terrified of being squeezed similarly by actors and writers. With this in mind, thirty-six people from the creative side of the industry met for dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in January 1927 and formed a kind of executive club to promote – but even more to protect – the studios. It was a reflection of their own sense of self-importance that they called it the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, elevating films from popular entertainment to something more grandly artistic, scientific and, literally, academic. In the second week of May, while the world fretted over the missing airmen Nungesser and Coli, the academy was formally inaugurated at a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. (The idea of having an awards ceremony was something of an afterthought, and wasn’t introduced until the academy’s second-anniversary dinner in 1929.)
    Then came a stunning setback. On 9 July, the Federal Trade Commission ordered an immediate end to the system known as block booking, wherein cinemas were required to take all or most of a studio’s output, not just its more desirable features. Block booking had sustained Hollywood for years. Under it, exhibitors might be compelled to take as many as fifty dreadful to mediocre pictures in order to get perhaps two or three more promising ones. The FTC ruling threw everything into uncertainty, and left the film industry in the exceedingly odd position of being hugely successful and gravely imperilled at the same time.
    Something radical was needed to put the movie business back on track. In Los Angeles, a tiny, somewhat ragtag studio named Warner Brothers stood ready to provide it with a novel picture with sound called The Jazz Singer .
     
    It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were arriving at a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last. Of no film was that more true than Wings , which opened on 12 August at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh.
    The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, gifted writer, handsome philanderer and drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his