Manhattan for over a year, without success. In 1954 they abandoned the idea of the American Film House and with the money they had borrowed for the project started a film society, which they called the Film Forum. Mekas wrote of the period "We showed films at public schools and at Carl Fischer Hall on 57th Street, wherever we could, until we went bankrupt in the middle of the second film series later in the year just in time to start Film Culture magazine, the first issue of which came out in December 1954." Film Culture was an outlet for anyone who had something to say about film. P. Adams Sitney wrote of the project "The brothers little realized at the time that they were actually elevating American culture to new heights, and marshaling a level of film criticism that has never been equaled since in our country." Adolfas served as editor of Film Culture until 1968. Together with his brother in the early 50s, Adolfas wrote, directed and photographed a number of films that were never finished, including his first script in 1950 – Lost, Lost, Lost, Lost, which was later renamed Lost, Lost, Lost, and in 1951, Grand Street – both films documented the fate of displaced persons, old and new immigrants to Brooklyn. In 1953, together with he and Jonas wrote, directed and edited a somber romance called Silent Journey, in which he played a principal role. In 1955, with Jonas and Edouard de Laurot, he began Film Essay, a spoof of American avant-garde film of that time. During those years, he made short trips to Canada to visit friends and find material for the novel he was writing, A Canadian Romance. In 1958 he left New York to spend a year in Oaxaca, Mexico. Living on $1 a day, he was free to write, and he wrote short stories, later published, and began longer works, notably his diaristic work George the Man. While in Mexico, he finished the screenplay for Hallelujah the Hills. In 1959 he returned to the States and to the daily struggle to live and create and express the needs of the growing movement of independent and avant-garde filmmakers in New York. On 28 September 1960, Adolfas, Jonas and producer Lew Allen hosted a group of 20 independent filmmakers at the Producers Theatre on West 16th Street and by unanimous vote bound themselves