"We must get into the picture business. This is a new industry and a gold mine. it looks like another telephone industry"
About this Quote
Kennedy’s line reads like the moment American culture tilts from parlor entertainment to industrial empire. The phrase “picture business” is deliberately plain, almost contemptuous of art-talk; he’s not admiring movies, he’s inventorying them. “Must” is the tell: this isn’t curiosity, it’s strategic necessity. He’s clocking a shift in where money, influence, and public attention are about to concentrate, and he wants in before the gates close.
Calling film “a new industry and a gold mine” does two things at once. It flatters the medium with the romance of frontier wealth, while reducing it to extraction: dig here, profit there. The subtext is less about storytelling than about scale. Movies weren’t just products; they were repeatable, exportable experiences that could be standardized, distributed, and monetized with ruthless efficiency. That’s why the comparison lands: “another telephone industry” invokes the era’s cleanest symbol of network power. Telephones weren’t lucrative because of a single device; they were lucrative because they created dependency, infrastructure, and near-inescapable monopoly dynamics. Kennedy is implying film can work the same way: control the pipeline (studios, theaters, distribution), and you control the market.
Context matters because Kennedy sits at the crossroads of capital and politics. As a banker-speculator turned public figure, he’s practicing a distinctly early-20th-century form of vision: treating mass media as the next utility. The line isn’t prophetic because it’s poetic; it’s prophetic because it’s cold. It spots that entertainment is about to become an organized system of persuasion and profit, and it moves to buy the switchboard.
Calling film “a new industry and a gold mine” does two things at once. It flatters the medium with the romance of frontier wealth, while reducing it to extraction: dig here, profit there. The subtext is less about storytelling than about scale. Movies weren’t just products; they were repeatable, exportable experiences that could be standardized, distributed, and monetized with ruthless efficiency. That’s why the comparison lands: “another telephone industry” invokes the era’s cleanest symbol of network power. Telephones weren’t lucrative because of a single device; they were lucrative because they created dependency, infrastructure, and near-inescapable monopoly dynamics. Kennedy is implying film can work the same way: control the pipeline (studios, theaters, distribution), and you control the market.
Context matters because Kennedy sits at the crossroads of capital and politics. As a banker-speculator turned public figure, he’s practicing a distinctly early-20th-century form of vision: treating mass media as the next utility. The line isn’t prophetic because it’s poetic; it’s prophetic because it’s cold. It spots that entertainment is about to become an organized system of persuasion and profit, and it moves to buy the switchboard.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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