But the numbers in 1917 were unexpected: box office was up. Even though everyone in the country had seen movies, they all wanted to see more of them. At Paramount Studios, Adolph Zukor, who had owned Mary Pickford at one point, let loose a trial balloon, charging exhibitors a percentage of the box-office profits, and they let him. He was puzzled by this, because he had thought there was too much competition out of his control. But then an inspiration: he asked for a complete list of films from overseas distributed in the United States that month. The number? Zero. A couple of years beforehand, perhaps half the films had come from Europe. But Europe was otherwise engaged, and so now America was the center of this particular universe. Which fascinated Zukor. People would pay more to see movies, and see them more often if the studios provided them. Studios could continually adjust terms to their advantage, and there was still plenty of money to go around.

Zukor did not live in Hollywood much—he was suspicious of the weather, and preferred New York. But he was at the Paramount studios in the summer of 1918, because he sensed yet another change in the marketplace—in other words, fortune—and he wanted to lay his finger on her pulse.

Only forty-five years old, Zukor nonetheless was stooped like a buzzard, as if youth were a folly he had defeated. He wore Victorian high-collar suits, and walked through the lot so quietly, his presence striking such panic, that his nickname was “the Creeping Jesus.”

When he was driven from his office to the flats of Hollywood, he saw the first peacock displays of wealth, houses put flush to the road, each of them a tribute to an individual’s dream of trumping his forefathers. “I want Monticello, only better,” Julian Eltinge had said, and it was made so, high over Silver Lake. All around Sunset there were construction sites and exotic gardens springing up around them, reminders of the Taj Mahal, Versailles, Sunnyside, Windsor Castle, Schloss Neuschwanstein, each seeming to have over its roof, over the scaffolding and armies of Portuguese construction workers, hanging in the blue and pleasant sky itself, a single broad question mark following: “Will we get away with this?” Zukor imagined the almost unspeakable pleasures, as a Hungarian Jew, of building a house exactly like Buda Castle, only better.

He would not actually do this—he had little feeling for architecture— but he enjoyed the feeling of success, and he was troubled only by one problem: actors. Actors were paid entirely too much money.