Münsterberg received a baffling letter from someone named Adolph Zukor. Apparently, he was in the throne at a place called Paramount, and he was an ally of Fox. Zukor wrote that Münsterberg’s erudition (he used this word) impressed him. He loved The Photoplay: A Psychological Study Would the esteemed professor be interested in scribing a monthly column for Paramount Pictograph, a magazine celebrating the achievements of motion pictures? It would be distributed widely, and appeal chiefly to intellectual analysis, Zukor said, in the spirit of promoting the pictograph as an art form.

Münsterberg, delighted, complied. He was pleased to see that the debut issue featured actual photographs of Annette Kellerman in Bermuda (he had been wrong about being wrong about Neptune’s Daughter being filmed there). In his second editorial, he wrote an essay analyzing the Paramount pictograph itself, an almost impenetrable discussion of diegetic effect applied to an entirely new medium. Never before had there been a profession so compelling that a magazine celebrated it. He concluded that film was a perfect tool for rapprochement with Germany: “No one wants war. Looking to aggression as a casus belli is only fruitful when we recognize our own aggressions as prophases. Settling with Germany is in our best interests.”

The bastions of morality were struck dumb—an intellectual was proving that the photoplay throbbed with the best of the human spirit. Soon enough, he received a request from Universal: would he consider taking his lecture on Neptune’s Daughter, the heart and soul of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, from theater to theater? The chance to play lecturer, intermediary, and interlocutor—stand-in!—was too important to pass up. He accepted.

For the first several weeks on the Redpath Chautauqua circuit, after a mother-daughter team of tragedians performed bowdlerized selections of Shakespeare, Münsterberg had shown Neptune’s Daughter and spoken on the film’s use of bust-shots or scene cards or lighting. “Look! Look how the sneer of the concubine forces our focus hither, to, yes, this bust-shot of the mermaid, her maidenhood in flower, her conflict when sacrificing herself for the honor of her people! See the intercutting among herself and her beloved and her rival, how it forces us to wonder if we have the same fortitude ourselves? It en-nobles us to answer that yes, we do!”