HOLLYWOOD CLEANS UP

The 1920s broke new ground in many ways.  The notion that it had more work for actors and other performers than any other decade, however, is a fallacy.  The growth of the motion picture field, the beginnings of commercial radio, and the increasing use of automobiles to get to major cities (instead of being limited to those shows and plays that visited one's home town) knocked out a lot of work for performers of various kinds.  J.J. Shubert, in a letter, complained that motion pictures were "killing our business" (i.e., the live commercial stage) before the advent of the talkies.
This situation quickly worsened with the coming of sound films, network radio, and the Great Depression.  In 1928, E.F. Albee sold his controlling interest in the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville empire to Joseph P. Kennedy, who merged it with Radio Pictures and created R-K-O.  Warner Bros. purchased three major sheet music publishing companies that same year--Harms, Remick, and Witmark.  Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley (i.e., the sheet music publishing industry) were thus effectively taken over by the Hollywood Motion Picture industry within a matter of months.
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THE AMERICAN THEATRE AND WORLD WAR I

In 1917, the United States Armed Forces took over a large percentage of the railroad tracks in the United States in order to move troops to and from training camps prior to deployment overseas.  This created an emergency in the American theatrical business.

This business relied on trains to get shows and performers to the huge amount of operating theatres in this country.  When shows and plays could not fulfill commitments, everyone suffered.  This included the producers of the shows, the actors in them, the theatre proprietors in hundreds of cities, their employees, and numerous others.

How did local theatre owners and managers deal with this crisis situation?  By obtaining films.  These films drew good houses--with far less expense and far less work required.

Many of these theatres never returned to the live stage; their owners simply stayed with running films and made, in many instances, more profit.  A good number of people who had worked in the live theatre lost their jobs; movie houses needed fewer employees.

This scenario took place in city after city.  And the trend continued after World War I was over.  The result was less employment for the actor as well as for house managers, gaffers, stagehands, et. al., as time went by.

The Great Depression, commercial radio, and sound films devastated the professional theatre in the early 1930s.  Of this there is no doubt.  But the American actor had lost much of his employment years before that.

It was always a rough business.
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