perfect democracy the world has ever known, promised migrants a social equality that was still the stuff of dreams. Thus the story about how the déclassé “movie” business became the glamorous industry of Hollywood depended upon its publicists’ finesse at advertising “Motion-Picture Land” as located inside a new urban frontier that catered to women pioneers.25
For these reasons, the most widely circulated tales about Hollywood’s birth often linked the industry to the excitement and alarm prompted by the so-called revolution of manners and morals of modern young girls after the Great War, as this book’s second part explores. Strategies first developed in the original film centers of Chicago and New York laid the foundation for associating the movie colony’s residents with the era’s increasingly voluble, and volatile, debates about the terms under which women’s emancipation should advance after winning the fight for suffrage in 1919. In describing the movies as a great new frontier, as a “democratic art” that offered common cultural ground for all, industry publicists wrapped a business still feared by much of the respectable middle class as immoral and un-American in cherished stories about the nation’s frontier heritage. But journalists like Louella Parsons did much more than this when they retooled the frontier thesis that then commanded the country’s view of its past to describe motion pictures as a gold rush business for ambitious, single, young white women on the make. Most radically, the sexual politics of this booster literature promoted the movie colony as that quintessential metropolitan neighborhood of lusty self-invention, a bohemia—a Hollywood Bohemia to be exact. A novel character best personified the liberation that this bohemian scene promised: the extra girl who went west in search of unparalleled opportunities for self-invention, artistic exploration, professional advancement, romantic adventures, and just plain fun. For some, this Hollywood Bohemia intensified anxieties about the manners and morals of the rising generation of modern girls. For others, it offered a place to bring her to life. In this way, the flickers’ mass-produced narratives and personalities became another essential element in the era’s broader conversation about the “grounding of modern feminism.”26
III
Thus the women and men who went to Los Angeles with an interest in making and breaking into pictures entered a contest, often unwittingly, for cultural power that played out along the frontier of mass culture and inside Los Angeles’s new urban West. Arriving by train, taxicab, and automobile, the flickers moved into new bungalows and old barns where they quickly attracted both critics and fans. Like many artistic scenes, the so-called movie colony sported a cosmopolitan crew whose often sexually unconventional mien encouraged a kind of social insularity despite the highly public nature of their work. In addition to many prominent New Woman types, the colony also contained a number of powerful immigrant Jews who mostly hailed from the working-class, urban milieus of the business’s early fans. In short, the flickers were just the sorts that some already settled in Los Angeles wanted to avoid. Frances Marion, whom many consider the silent era’s most successful screenwriter, recalled the tensions that resulted after moving from her native San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1913. After working part-time as a commercial illustrator, the unhappily married Marion found a full-time job as an assistant for Lois Weber, then the most famous director on Universal Studio’s new lot. The new paycheck and the close friends she made, including writer Adela Rogers St. Johns and Mary Pickford, gave Marion the courage to divorce her husband. Marion’s life as a New Woman was possible only after trading her elite upbringing in more established San Francisco for the bohemian movie colony in Los Angeles. But she still seethed over the bigotry exhibited by some of her new neighbors, fuming over landlords who baldly declared, “No Jews, actors, or dogs allowed.” The neighborhood associations that sprung up at this moment also displayed the determination of some local Angelenos to keep the flickers out of their backyards.27
FIGURE 1. Inceville, Thomas Ince’s studio by the sea along the Santa Monica coast, c. 1915. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
Director King Vidor thought that the social insularity and artistic license that the movie colony’s residents displayed would have engendered a similar reaction in many other American towns. Hoping to become a director, Vidor left Texas for Los Angeles in 1915, not long after the newsreel cameraman made his directorial debut with the short story picture Hurricane of Galveston (1913). According to Vidor, the colony’s residents cultivated the experience of living in “a magic bubble,” a sense as much nurtured as imposed. Residents of the movie colony “spoke a silent language, a different language from the orange growers who surrounded them,” Vidor recalled. Yet they “felt camaraderie with all the other members of their clan” who congregated together inside ever more elaborate production lots like the “Studio by the Sea” that Thomas Ince built in 1912 on several thousand acres of land encompassing a stretch of Pacific coastline and the surrounding hills and plateaus of Santa Ynez Canyon at present-day Pacific Palisades and Malibu (figure 1). These environment’s camera-thin walls magnified their workers’ goings-on from multiple angles, acting as both blessing and curse for a business that needed viewers’ curiosity to survive. Like many early residents, Vidor remembered how the community’s isolation encouraged a release from customary restraints, leading inhabitants to believe “they could establish their own habits and behavior,” which could appear outlandish, immoral, or glamorously modern depending on the point of view.28
The firestorm of local, state, and federal actions to control the movies that swept the country during the 1910s supported Vidor’s judgment that the movies and their makers provoked anxiety not just among some Los Angeles landlords and orange growers but across the land. The Supreme Court decision Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio Industrial Commission (1915) displayed the intensification of concern about protecting moviegoers from the influence of films. The Mutual case made motion pictures the only medium of communication in the United States ever subject to prior restraint censorship, which allowed for the prescreening, cutting, and licensing of films before the public ever saw a foot of celluloid. Chicago pointed the way toward this type of regulation when it passed the first municipal censorship law in 1907. The law required a police permit for every moving picture shown in the city. During the nickelodeon era many other cities and towns had used their police powers to rectify the dangers presented by firetrap theaters. But police licensing proved a blunt instrument, helpful primarily for ensuring that early movie theaters conformed to fire safety codes and for excising scenes that contained obviously criminal behavior, like murder, arson, and robbery. Since most film censorship activists through the early 1910s believed that immigrant, working-class men dominated movie audiences, the approach indicated their intention to prevent films from inspiring anti-social behavior in this group. Two of the very few story pictures that were entirely suppressed, The James Boys in Missouri and Night Riders (both 1908), illustrated this concern.29
The revised censorship law that Chicago passed in 1914 displayed the shift in regulatory efforts that mirrored the larger change in attitudes about the movies’ cultural identity and location by the late 1910s. Go West! Young Women enters the history of censorship efforts here, when concerns over the impact of America’s newly feminized film audience first peaked. The re orientation of the business toward primarily female consumers caused film reformers to focus more on how film content and stars incited criminal behavior among young women. Chicago’s decision in 1915 to replace its police board with a ten-person commission of salaried civilians composed equally of men and women offered the more delicate touch needed to address problems associated with women’s immorality. The Supreme Court’s Mutual decision that same year also assumed that the movies tended to provoke immoral conduct among viewers. Most legal scholars agree that Mutual’s reasoning that film’s unique capacity to do “evil”—in this case, its special ability to incite sexual immorality—was what justified the Court’s protection of the state’s right to wield singular controls over the medium. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice McKenna suffused his opinion with fears about how the whole atmosphere of story pictures incited erotic havoc among the “promiscuous” crowd that attended
