Ilf and Petrov's American Roadtrip

Here's an interesting little historical gem from 1935 that I wasn't aware of until yesterday when I first laid hands on it. Unfortunately, most of the Leica made photographs that accompanied this work have been lost forever, but the text lives on to record an America that endures much as first recorded some 70 odd years ago by these itinerant Russian satirists who met untimely deaths...

Here's a short, revealing take from their Hollywood experience:

There are four main kinds of pictures... Each kind of movie has only one plot, with endless and excruciating variations. So year in and year out, American audiences are actually watching the same thing. And they're so used to it that sometimes a picture with an original plot doesn't do well at the box office.