Decline
The studio was rented out to others, and was eventually demolished. Unlike the case with The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908), Baum invested none of his own money in the venture and was not financially affected by the studio's failure, though it is probable it impacted his health, which took a turn for the worse not long after the failure.
Frank Joslyn Baum, Baum's eldest son and sometime attorney, who handled East Coast distribution from an office in Times Square, took over the company and renamed it Dramatic Feature Films, which made one feature and one short, probably from scripts by the younger Baum. Although ads announced the release of the feature film, The Gray Nun of Belgium, it does not appear to actually have been released. While some speculate that Baum would have allied himself with United Artists had he been able to sustain the company, there is no evidence for this, nor evidence that he had ever met UA's founding members, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith, though Gottschalk went on to work with all of them. It is known that fairy tale/fantasy films were produced more frequently by 1917.
The four feature films were considered lost for many years. By the 1980s, all three fairy tale films were made available on home video. All of the feature films have been released on both DVD and VHS with the exception of The Last Egyptian. The Museum of Modern Art owns a worn copy that was used in Bill Morrison's Decasia, but it remains unreleased and is not part of their screening repertoire. The shorts remain lost.
Read more about this topic: The Oz Film Manufacturing Company
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Considered physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually reduces his strength. The effect of ugliness can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever anyone feels depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with ugliness, they rise with beauty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)