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Smashing Success. In early 1931, Time Inc. launched a new project that had an extraordinary impact on radio broadcasting and later on movie news reporting: THE MARCH OF TIME. Put together by Roy Larsen, TIME's vice president (now chairman of the Time Inc. executive committee), THE MARCH OF TIME could fairly claim to have been the precursor of the TV documentary. Under the aegis of Larsen and Producer Louis de Rochemont, it produced hundreds of provocative films for 15 years before being phased out in the face of TV in 1951. In addition to its value to the art of cinema documentary, it heightened Luce's already considerable interest in the place of pictures in journalism. "Pictures cannot tell all," Luce wrote in launching THE MARCH OF TIME. "But what pictures can tell (with the help of a word or two), they tell with a force, an explicitness, an overwhelmingness which reportorial words can rarely equal." Recognizing that photojournalism was not merely a sideline of journalism but an independent branch of the craft, Luce decided to start a picture magazine.
The field was wide open in the U.S. Luce promised that the new magazine's purpose would be "to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed." As this language suggests, Luce himself chose the name LIFE and bought out a humor magazine of that name for his own use.
LIFE promised to scour the world for the best pictures, to edit them with feeling for history and drama, and to publish them on fine paper—a feat made possible by the recent development of fast-drying inks, the engineering of heating units on presses to dry them immediately, and the manufacture of coated paper in rolls.
LIFE was such a smashing success that it nearly smashed Time Inc. Its first run, Nov. 23, 1936, was 466,000 copies—but that was far from enough to meet demand. Succeeding issues of higher runs were similarly grabbed up. LIFE's advertising rates had been set for the first year with the expectation of a small and slowly growing circulation. When the demand for it went beyond the capacity of the presses to print, advertisers swarmed aboard for a free ride, while the bills for paper and ink alone swallowed up the magazine's revenues—and then some. Before launching LIFE, Luce had declared: "It can be safely assumed that $1,000,000 will see LIFE safely through to a break-even 500,000 circulation or to an honorable grave." Yet Time Inc. spent $5,000,000 to keep LIFE from dying of success before the magazine finally turned the profit corner in 1939, when its circulation had reached more than 2,000,000. LIFE, which hardly needed extra attention, nevertheless got it when it published a frank and explicit (for that day) photographic account of the birth of a baby. Roy Larsen, who had moved to LIFE, submitted to arrest to test a ban, was acquitted in court.