[Describing his days at Kinemacolor Co., a studio in the early 20th century that shot all of its films in the "Kinemacolor" process] Our little one-reel pictures were made to exploit color for color's sake. There was one about a hospital fire, showing lots of flames; another, from a [
Nathaniel Hawthorne] story about a pumpkin that becomes a man, showed up the golden yellow of the carved jack-o'-lantern very well indeed. There was another about British soldiers, featuring the red and gold and white of their uniforms . . . The audiences [in] California seemed to care nothing about our beautiful colors. What they wanted was raw melodrama and lots of it, and what seemed to stir them most of all was the steady flood of pictures made by a man named
D.W. Griffith.