Hollywood Stage One

By the time 1927 ushered itself in, 'Hollywood' meant the greater Los Angeles area, a veritable board game in which several powerhouses dueled to the end with one another and excluded the Johnny come lately MGM, Universal, Paramount, Warners and Fox and a retinue of smaller studios including Columbia - mostly in what was known as 'Poverty Row,' which was the Gower Street district. The majors were alike in that they generally had factories located in and around Los Angeles, East Coast financing and distribution, large holdings in cinemas and a head of production who doled out long-term contracts; would oversee every other film on the lot and ensured that the factory machine was up and running. A film director was as it were, still a professional assigned to a movie and not quite lordly visionaries: King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Frank Capra, Frank Borzage and Allan Dwan were a generation of top talents who did precisely what they were told to do, or who cultivated that reputation.

Irving Thalberg (1899-1936) had single-handedly consolidated the role of the producer, and that meant one who made certain a picture kept on schedule while never surpassing its budget, who ran a project from the early stages of script concept to the final cut. No incident had quite demonstrated the significance of the producer as when Thalberg issued marching orders to director Erich von Stroheim during production of 1924's Greed and then turned the monstrous masterpiece over to a series of editors with the instructions to pare the film for showing (the original print was a shocking ten hours in length). Thalberg would also pull rank on the production of Ben Hur (1925) making key personnel changes and bringing it back from its foreign location.

Hollywood had a shrewd awakening from Irving Thalberg.

The audience for pictures was astronomical; the annual box-office takings just before the advent of sound in America was over $500 million (when the cost of a ticket was a paltry twenty-five cents), and more films were being turned out than any other time in history. The profits were immense and income tax was still quite low. Los Angeles filled out with prosperity. More mansions were being built, some mirroring the styles of those on the studio back lots. Between them, there appeared the less opulent but luxurious and spacious houses of supporting actors, technicians, agents, publicity folk, attorneys, doctors and every practical soothsayer. The new money was here and it consumed everything top of the line from cars to divorces and a plethora of new sensations. There were shops and there were hotels to appease each and every taste. As Alla Nazimova's acting career floundered, she sold her tony estate and it was turned into a lavish hotel - the Garden of Allah.

All the egos had a tight squeeze in this Brown Derby

The Musso and Frank Grill located at 6667-9 Hollywood Boulevard, was the first 'in' restaurant, and since it opened its doors to the public in 1919 it has been famously referred to as 'the genesis of Hollywood' and Wilson Mizner's original Brown Derby, an enormous hat-shaped building appeared on Wilshire Boulevard in 1926. The 'Hollywoodland' sign would go up, the ad for a housing development scheme, and a few years later a crestfallen starlet plunged to her own death from the top of H. Grauman's Chinese Theater and the Pantages sought to prove that Los Angeles had the gaudiest theaters. Sea-shore homes were built off the Pacific Coast Highway and in Malibu. A private housing estate, Bel-Air bloomed and a few magnificent dwellings were perched up on the hills. Conviviality, gaiety and conspicuous self-indulgence reigned, and Hollywood won its reputation for decadent money-mindedness and ostentatious extravagance.

Hollywood introduces the first human feather duster (Gloria Swanson in Male And Female,1919)

The mood of the pictures had now shifted; skirts, spirits and profits went up together after the first World War. In 1919, Griffith was still locked into the pious moralizing of True Heart Susie and the pained virtue of early American sweetheart Lillian Gish. But Demille embarked on a new kind of film - Male and Female (1919) it was cutting-edge, forthright and frivolous, and centered on the pent-up bee-stung mouth of one Gloria Swanson who cut her chompers portraying women of ill-repute and flappers. Clara Bow's knowing sex-appeal undermined even that of vamp du jour Theda Bara's. There were indeed new kids in town, what with Rudy Valentino, Greta Garbo, Pola Negri, Ronald Colman ,Marion Davies and John Gilbert. Davies had a particularly erotic vitality,one that was both ebullient and brooding all the same and soon hers was to be acknowledged as the energy of the Jazz Age. Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney were extreme examples of silent male appeal - frozen beauty and seething beastliness.

It Hearst to be you - Marion Davies at your service

The audience reveled in these new thrills and the high-octane energy of the pictures, but some were growing suspicious and fearful of the movies' influence. Then in the early Twenties, a series of real-life scandals confused the standards of Hollywood private life and the rules of the motion pictures. On Labor Day in 1921 - not in Los Angeles, but in San Francisco, Roscoe Arbuckle hosted a party that ended in tragedy - the death of a small-part actress,Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter and eventually acquitted. But the legend of notoriety stuck - from Hollywood's earliest days the audience was all too eager to believe the worst of its stars.

Roscoe Arbuckle (fourth from left) in Court on manslaughter charges (later acquitted )

Virginia Rappe

Tragedy struck only a few months later, director William Desmond Taylor was found shot to death. Investigations dragged Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter into circles of orgies and drug-taking. Within another year, Wallace Reid would succumb to the effects of drugs.

Life was a wild ride for Normand and Arbuckle 

Wallace Reid was hailed the' screen's most perfect lover'

The industry feared its reputation would be marred and admonished that the various educational and religious guardians of moral America might intimidate the audience. In 1922, the leaders of the movie business founded MPPDA (Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America), and they appointed U.S. Postmaster General Will H. Hays to be president. 



Hays was now officially spokesman for Hollywood and he helped create the impression that the place was sober and responsible. He organized Central Casting as the agency for extras in 1926, and he would ease the way for what passed for unions in the very conservative industry. To the chagrin of most film artists, he introduced a Production Code in 1930, the first step toward systematic self-censorship in film. The industry thus formed its own Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) in 1927 and designed annual prizes - Oscars - to show how well behaved and diligent Tinseltown truly was.