In the end, Elmer Rice did not believe he had been a success as a writer, not as he wished to define success. He needed to make a living and, while deriding the commercialism of the New York stage, he managed to earn a considerable amount of money, but at a cost to his more experimental vision. The realistic drama he could write with ease was at odds with the innovations that most intrigued him. "The Adding Machine" and "Street Scene" were anomalies and did not make money. An even more radical venture, "The Sidewalks of New York" of 1925, was an episodic play without words, "in which speech is indicated by gesture, by a series of situations in which there was no need for speech." The Theatre Guild turned the script down flat; Broadway would never be ready for the level of experimentation that inspired Rice, a reality that was a source of continuous frustration for him.