After the end of the first World War there was a paradigm shift in the pictures - it was now all skirts, spirits and profits. In 1919, for example D.W. Griffith was locked into the pious moralizing of True Heart Susie and the ever so pained virtue of one Lillian Gish. But Demille was about to make a new kind of film - like Male and Female (1919). It was hi-octane, racy and frivolous, centering on the pent-up bee-stung mouth of Gloria Swanson, who built her on-screen reputation on playing working girls and fearless flappers. Clara Bow's baby-faced good looks made contemporaneous vamp Theda Bara look like a female impersonator. There were new stars emerging - Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Pola Negri, Ronald Colman to name a few, each coming with their own erotic vitality, be it cheerful or brooding that was soon to be recognized as the energy of the Jazz Age. Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney were extreme examples of silent male appeal - for zen beauty and seething beastliness.
The audience was hooked on all the excitement and the speed of the movies, but some were suspicious and had some trepidation of the movies' influence. Then, in the early Twenties, a series of real-life scandals rocked Hollywood. William Desmond Taylor was found shot to death, investigations dragged Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter into an alleged circle of orgies and drug-abusing. Within another year the actor Wallace Reid was dead from the effects of drugs.