ABSTRACT
The term ‘prominent’…does not express real artistic accomplishments, but is part of the grandiloquent phraseology affected by all advertising in the entertainment industry, with its insincere slogan that nothing is too good for the public. This kind of prominence is determined by the fabulous salaries paid to those whom the publicity agencies elect to build up—the prominence of Radio City, the Pathé Theatre in Paris, or the Ufapalast am Zoo in Berlin. It belongs to the realm that Siegfried Kracauer called Angestelltenkultur, culture of the white-collar workers, of supposedly high-class entertainment, accessible to recipients of small pay checks, yet presented in such a way that nothing seems too good or too expensive for them. It is a pseudo-democratic luxury, which is neither luxurious nor democratic, for the people who walk on heavily carpeted stairways into the marble palaces and glamorous castles of moviedom are incessantly frustrated without being aware of it.
