Imagine that you are a young sociologist working around 1907. On your daily ride to the university, you witness an explosion of nickelodeons along the trolley route. They seem to operate continuously, day and night, and it is rare not to see a queue outside their doors. Because your children spend an extravagant amount of time and money unsupervised within their walls and exhibit an extraordinary and sometimes incomprehensible fascination with the characters presented there and the people who play them, perhaps you have gone inside to see a photoplay or two. How can you comprehend, despite the breadth and depth of your knowledge, that an entirely new medium and an important industry are being created that, in many respects, will come to define the visual culture of the twentieth century?