To be sure, the motion pictures that Hollywood produced during the late teens were very "self-conscious, but they were beginning to develop smartness...
Los Angeles and its environs were crowded with new motion picture companies. The American Film Company, the Vitagraph Company, the Universal Company Christie Comedies and Selig found competitors springing up like weeds after rain: the demand for flickers was enjoying its first boom." Here is an article by one of the foot soldiers of legendary silent movie producer Adolf Zukor, in which she recalled a time in 1923 when the future president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mailed an unsolicited photoplay (ie. script) to their offices in hopes of securing some measure of Hollywood immortality. Knowing that FDR had tremendous power in both New York and Washington, Zukor instructed her to let him down gently; twenty years later Roosevelt would chuckle about his ambitions with her at a White House party.
President Lincoln had his own dreams and aspirations...
"Ten million people a day go to the movies in the United States, but how many of them know who made the first movie? The Noes have it. The man who made the first motion-picture, as we know it today, is C. Francis Jenkins (1867 - 1934). Many [actresses] who have not been 'in pictures' a month are better known."
C. Francis Jenkins was also one of the brainiacs who contributed his talent to the invention of television. This article is about the 1935 founding of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. Established with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation, today the MOMA Film Library is comprised of more than 14,000 films and four million motion picture stills. By the time this piece first appeared in THE CHICAGO DAILY NEWS (prior to being picked up by the fast crowd at FLAPPER MAGAZINE) Colleen Moore was all of twenty-one years of age with fourteen Hollywood films to her credit. This interview was conducted over lunch by the polished Hollywood reporter Gladys Hall, who no doubt, picked up the check; on that day Miss Moore wanted to talk about flappers.
The wise elders of Hollywood were perfectly fine about casting flappers to play in various movies, but they didn't always produce films that were sympathetic to their causes; for example, the editors of FLAPPER MAGAZINE hated this movie.
We recommend this book: The Silent Feminists | 
