that unrivaled generator of good dreams and bad, played in drawing migrants west and subsequently shaping the growth and reputation of modern Los Angeles.5 The avoidance stems from the long-standing penchant among the city’s educated, Anglo elite to discount the influence of the “flickers” and their “movies,” as many called the infant industry’s workers and product. The idea that Los Angeles was too controlled by uptight, conservative Anglo midwesterners to nurture anything but artless conformity became a shibboleth of the city’s image as early as 1915, when Willard Huntington Wright published his infamous essay “Los Angeles—The Chemically Pure” in the Smart Set.6 The tendency supported casting Los Angeles as colorful, cosmopolitan San Francisco’s censorious, pale-faced sister and thus eased the erasure of the movie industry’s dynamism from most histories about the city’s development. By 1920, a leading progressive journal could poke fun at many respectable residents’ denial of the city’s most obvious attraction: “The Angelo rises and paws the air, when told the present booming prosperity of the city is due to motion pictures and tourists,” but “everyone knows that the factories are trivial, that the fruit-growing lands are miles removed from the city, and that the money pouring into Los Angeles is from movies and tourists.”7
At first Los Angeles was just one faraway destination among many for early filmmakers. “How far will a modern motion picture company go to get the ‘atmosphere’ for a film drama?” the Mirror wondered in 1910. The answer was far indeed. As the nickelodeon business boomed between 1905 and 1914, the thirst for fresh incidents and locations initially sent film companies along many different roads. To avoid “Jersey scenery,” a term the New York Dramatic Mirror coined to describe the attempt to foist fake locations on eyes grown adept at discerning the real thing, early film studios traveled from northern New York to Florida. Keeping up with the competition in Chicago and New York required a daily program adjustment to satisfy the “nickel madness” that was sweeping the land. The omnivorous demand from thousands of exhibitors left the flickers scrambling for new material. In a pinch for new product, many realized that story pictures, or narrative films, best satisfied the diverse tastes of fans. Story pictures were also easier to make since their dramatic events could be staged, unlike earlier actuality films that displayed brief glimpses of significant places and people, new inventions, and civic events. Film production companies sprang up in response to the demand for story pictures and hit the road in search of gasp-producing vistas to help sustain interest in these longer films.8
Los Angeles earned the loyalty of early motion picture makers for several tangible reasons, some as evanescent as the light. First there was the land, which offered to the camera’s eye not just unparalleled variety but each thing in a seemingly ideal form. Within a day’s drive of Los Angeles, a film crew might access mountains that tumbled down to the Pacific; forests of redwoods, the tallest and oldest trees on Earth; hundreds of miles of beach; uninhabited islands, canyons, and desert. Next came the light, whose color and constancy lived up to the best advertisements, the most lyrical description penned by Bancroft or his like. The sun shone, as Moving Picture World reported in 1910, an average of 320 days a year. This surfeit of sunshine and splendid scenery was a critical natural resource for the industry’s growth. Selig Polyscope, the first picture studio known to have shot in Los Angeles, left Chicago in the midst of a typically brutal winter in 1907. As Colonel Selig trumpeted, “nowhere, but in the real West could the proper atmosphere and wide vistas have been found.”9
Southern California also sported several man-made advantages. The Southern Pacific Railroad and the city’s electric trolley system offered transportation services with both a national and a neighborhood reach. Ever expanding streets provided access to cheap sprawling spaces on which to build the first enormous production studios, like the new ranch-cum-zoo-cum–technological wonder Universal City that opened its gates in 1915. And finally, the implacable hostility of business leaders toward unions, coupled with many rural Midwesterners’ distrust of organized labor, gave the city a well-deserved reputation as a defender of the open shop.10
The sum of these natural and commercial charms prompted American film production to relocate to Los Angles in short order as the “Come to California” campaign that attracted Midwesterners and tourists also drew would-be moving picture directors, actors, writers, producers, and technicians when short days and cold settled upon the original film centers of New York, New Jersey, and Chicago. Few in motion pictures had ventured to Los Angeles in 1910. By 1922, industry trade papers estimated that the city produced 84 percent of the pictures made in America and nearly two-thirds of those shown around the world. The modern motion picture industry and Los Angeles, the “Film Capital of the World,” sprang up together, and virtually overnight.11
Thus Go West, Young Women! opens with an insight that was as obvious as Southern Californian sunshine to the era’s contemporaries: the Los Angeles that emerged after the city’s explosive transformation during the 1910s was largely built around its identity as the “Capital of Movie-Land.” A chorus of commentators marveled at how motion pictures had become not just the largest business on the Pacific Coast but the fourth-largest industry in the nation immediately after the conclusion of the Great War, as contemporaries called World War I. By the mid-twenties some 35,000 of the city’s residents earned $1.25 million a year working in the picture industry—not including extras paid to wait on call. The publicity surrounding the city’s rise as a movie-made metropolis drew many different types of people tempted by its promotions that promised liberation from the Protestant work ethic’s mistrust of pleasure and new freedom to reinvent the self. Put differently, as the industry settled in the West, motion pictures embellished the image of California Pastoral in ways that intensified its appeal for many. In advertising this “Picture Eldorado” as the “Chameleon City of the Cinema,” this publicity described a shape-shifting, cosmopolitan city within a city, a place “as changeable as a woman,” “the biggest city of make-believe in the universe,” where “the occident and the Orient” met. Wherever they hailed from, those who created and consumed such promotions imagined Los Angeles as a new kind of city-by-the sea where residents appeared to make something new from once irreconcilable parts.12
II
Beginning with the film industry’s invention of Los Angeles also recasts the explanation of how the formerly marginal, WASP-controlled and run-amok business of making movies in America became the dominant, highly centralized, cosmopolitan industry of early Hollywood. Indeed, the burden of this book’s opening chapters is to reconceive this process by describing the central role that women and the era’s sexual politics played in the metamorphosis. Accounts of the transition from the nickelodeon era to the age of the silent feature production in Los Angeles during the 1910s have long focused on how the industry abandoned its working-class, immigrant orientation to become a classless form of respectable entertainment. From this view, the move west helped producers to shed the nickelodeon’s identity as a disreputable, working-class form of entertainment “made by and for men.” This version of how Hollywood became Hollywood has an aesthetic corollary as well, one that roots American cinema’s development as an art form in the innovations of a few heroes out west. “By the end of the silent era [in 1929] the major dramatis personae of the tale were well known,” writes film scholar David Bordwell about the invention of what he calls the “Basic Story” about the origins of the look and feel of American-made movies: “American film is the creation of [D.W.] Griffith, Thomas Ince, [Cecil B.] DeMille, Mack Sennett, and Charlie Chaplin.” Iris Barry, the English film critic who became the world’s first film curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933, helped to create this canon by preserving and publicizing these filmmakers’ work. Their films display the black-and-white moral certainties of Griffith’s traditional melodramas, the sweeping vistas of Ince’s many Westerns, and the slapstick antics and pathos of Sennett and Chaplin, the early industry’s two favorite clowns. Down to the present-day, retrospectives on American silent film still focus mostly on Griffith, whom Barry called “the ruling planet of the birth of motion picture production” and eulogized in her D.W. Griffith: American Film Master (1940).13
But
