Max Winkler was not a musician or composer, but as a clerk in music publisher Carl Fischer's office in New York City, he amassed encyclopedic knowledge of thousands of pieces of music that would be suitable to accompany moving pictures. He then came up with a pioneering method of compiling suitable suggestions for cinema musicians and called the result a "cue sheet". Making up a dummy cue sheet for a fictional film, he submitted the idea to Universal's New York office and they hired him to compile cue sheets for their future releases. Soon America's cinemas were supplied with Winkler cue sheets and his idea was copied by many others. Winkler formed his own company and supplied cue sheets for Fox, Vitagraph and Goldwyn. He also hired composers to write original cues, as well as plundering the classical music repertoire. Winkler's business thrived during the 1920s, but with the arrival of sound his tons of printed music ended up in a paper mill for pulping.
