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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