Also, survivor bias. You have to go out of the way to find mentions of crap 3rd rate old movies. We only remember the good ones.
There was a cinema magazine, and i ran into a 6 page obituary for this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lon_Chaney
Some silent movie star. Never heard of him before. Looks like he was worth 1/8 of the non-ad content 1 year after his death in 1931.