A World Beyond Words

A century ago, all Hollywood knew was silent films. People flocked to the cinemas. Dressed in gowns and tuxes, they treated a night at the movies like a night at the opera. Of course, they had nothing to which to compare it. Perhaps to our bleary, overstimulated eyes, the silent film is as much a quaint relic as the rotary phone or a children’s toy fashioned out of sticks. To the moviegoer of 1925, though, going to the theater to see static photographs transformed into moving images must have seemed as mystical as the thought of flying to the moon.