The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  Vitagraph produced a steady output of serials. A Vitagraph founder, Commodore J. Stuart Blackton, organized the productions. Blackton liked to hire a singer with a foot-pumped organ and a megaphone to create atmosphere on his sets. Preferring a short commute, Blackton bought a large home four blocks west on Prospect Avenue. Vitagraph Studio later became KABC Television. The intersecting Talmadge Street, named a few years later for silent star and local resident Norma Talmadge is a memento of the silent movie era.

  In May 1912, after a year of busy production, David Horsley merged Nestor with a film company owned by German immigrant Carl Laemmle. Laemmle had organized mergers with other fledgling studios along Sunset Boulevard and centered the new Universal West Coast Studios at the former Blondeau Tavern. It proved an even busier operation than Nestor. During the year 1913, Universal hired an army of extras, including Hal Roach and Harold Lloyd.

  The Nestor Film Company. David Horsley stands in front with his young son, 1912.

  The main entrance to Vitagraph studios at Talmadge Street and Prospect Avenue, 1918.

  Vitagraph Studios on the east end of Hollywood Boulevard, 1918.

  Dr. Schloesser’s new Sans Souci commanded the northwest corner of Franklin and Argyle Avenues, 1912 (demolished).

  WELCOME TO OZ

  To some locals, it figured that movies found a haven in the former Blondeau Tavern, a perpetual magnet for low-lifes. Residents grew vocal in their concern over what movies would do to real estate values. Could a community intended as a beautiful suburb become a slum?

  Movie companies popped up as gypsy encampments, filled with a rough-edged crowd, soldiers of fortune, cowboys, and vaudeville performers down on their luck. Movie crews darted about, chasing fires and floods, and interfering with streetcar traffic. Even worse, movies brought manufacturing to the Cahuenga Valley.

  Sans Souci’s facade.

  The smell of film, a disagreeable odor, especially when burned, had supplanted the scent of lemon blossoms. The only way to dispose of film was to incinerate it, a process that recovered the silver. Unused scenes and rejected takes got tossed into open incinerators on backlots. The process stunk up the neighborhood. So explosive was nitrate film that, in 1913, some buildings at the Universal’s Sunset and Gower studio burned to the ground. Unfazed, Carl Laemmle got the company up and running again, bigger and better.

  Hollywood’s residents, who had come to the area for domestic tranquillity, treated the movies like a leper colony. “No Movies” began to appear on For Rent signs in windows and in newspaper advertisements. No one wanted to take a chance on tenants, there for a fast buck, known to skip on the rent and leave a rental house in shambles.

  Dr. Schloesser did not help matters, renting out Glengary Castle for movie scenes about millionaires’ homes. Glengary had stood empty since the doctor assumed the mantle of de Longpre and built himself a bigger castle, Sans Souci, across the street.

  With landscaping by the former gardener of the Czar of Russia, Sans Souci, was named after Frederick the Great’s castle in Potsdam. Building it as a series of terraces, Dr. Schloesser again crossbred European castles. Another large main hall displayed his collection of medieval whatnot. A pipe organ stood in an alcove on the main stairway. Close inspection of the massive oak paneling that lined the rooms revealed it to be a thin layer of wood over plastered chicken wire.

  “Ozcot,” the residence of L. Frank Baum, stood on the southwest corner of Cherokee Avenue and Yucca Street, 1912 (demolished).

  When he put Glengary Castle up for sale, the Hollywood Citizen commented, “Hollywood has given up trying to understand Dr. Schloesser.” Fortunately for local boosters, a real celebrity had already arrived.

  L. Frank Baum moved to Hollywood in 1911 when it was still pastoral. He had achieved renown in 1899 as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, both a successful book and a touring Broadway show. A writer of continuously popular fiction, Baum and his wife Maud bought a large corner lot at Cherokee Avenue and Yucca Street, one block north of Hollywood Boulevard. They built a two-story frame house that Baum christened Ozcot.

  Baum planned Ozcot for comfort rather than architectural show. A fireplace dominated an immense living room where the author passed evenings by a large fire. In the dining room, Baum designed light fixtures of cut copper sheets with thick pieces of emerald glass. At night, intricate green patterns of light danced on the walls. Besides the necessary rooms, the house had a solarium, a large library, and a huge attic where the author stored his manuscripts and props from his plays.

  Every morning, after a hearty breakfast, Baum worked in his large garden, where flowerbeds stretched from the solarium, past a goldfish pond, to a chicken yard where the author kept a flock of dearly loved Rhode Island Reds.

  With a gardener helping with the heavy work, Baum became a Southern California champion amateur horticulturist of dahlias and chrysanthemums. He won many of his twenty-one cups at the Hollywood Woman’s Club shows. He also kept an aviary with several hundred song birds.

  After lunch, Baum wrote his fiction. For first drafts, he sat in his summer house in the center of the garden and wrote with paper and pencil on his knees. If he came across a plot problem, he would walk or work with his flowers until the solution came to him. The first complete book written at Ozcot was The Tik-Tok Man of Oz.

  Admiring children regularly called on the famous author, who graciously received them at his home. Baum loved his young readers. For him, life in Hollywood began as a happy monotony with Maud and their dog, Toto, too.

  L. Frank Baum in his Hollywood garden, 1913.

  D.W. Griffith and his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, 1916.

  Cecil B. DeMille, third from right, directs the Squaw Man cast on the Vine Street lot, 1913.

  GO WEST, YOUNG MOVIES

  A couple named Thoren leased a portion of their fig orchard at 4500 Sunset Boulevard (where Sunset meets Hollywood Boulevard) to a movie company headed by L.L. Burns and Harry Revier. The company used the peninsula of land where the boulevards meet as their backlot. When that company folded, Burns ran a film laboratory in a shed among the fig trees. When he sold that business to Kinemacolor, one of the earliest attempts at color movies, Burns and Revier looked for a new production site.

  They leased land from Jacob Stern at Selma Avenue and Vine Street. The partners built an open stage and a laboratory shed among the lemon trees. They used Stern’s horse barn for an office. Stern’s only stipulation was that his horse and carriage remain in the building. With production sporadic, Burns and Revier leased the site to comedy star Fred Mace. Then the partners heard about The Squaw Man company.

  In December 20, 1912, fledgling director Cecil B. DeMille, his crew, and Broadway star Dustin Farnum arrived in Los Angeles, looking for a place to shoot a feature-length western based on the hit play, The Squaw Man. The Lasky Feature Play Company had formed in New York with Jesse Lasky as president, Samuel Goldfish (soon Goldwyn) as business manager, Cecil B. DeMille as director-general, and Oscar Apfel as the film’s co-director. After a disastrous attempt at filming in Flagstaff, Arizona, they found Los Angeles more hospitable. Receiving many offers for studio space, they picked the best offer (Seventy-five dollars a month) from Burns and Revier at Selma and Vine. As DeMille had to deliver the finished film to New York by February, the company drove the bumpy road to Hollywood and immediately started to work. On its release, The Squaw Man was a hit movie and a financial bonanza for the new studio.

  Within eighteen months, the Lasky studio had bought the entire block from Jacob Stern, plus the block east to El Centro Avenue which they made into their backlot. The studio used a huge San Fernando Valley tract named the Lasky Ranch for locations. (It later became Forest Lawn Cemetery.) A board went outside Stern’s barn that read “Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company.” During the next few months, the backlot filled with sets and, after removing some lemon trees, a glass-walled stage. The enterprise, one block south of Hollywood and Vine, was soon Paramount Pictures, t
he reigning silent film studio of the era.

  Mack Sennett Studio entrance on Glendale Boulevard, 1920.

  The Thoren’s fig orchard did not remain idle either. After Kinemacolor went bust, the Thorens found themselves landlords to several different companies until Harry Aitken from New York leased their property in 1913 for his Reliance Film Company. Aitken had recently signed D.W. Griffith, who now had the reputation as one of the finest directors in the business. Aitken had also bought an estate on Long Island for Griffith to use as a studio, but the director hated cold weather and preferred Los Angeles.

  An aerial view of the Lasky studios in their heyday of 1920 at Vine Street and Selma Avenue. The Jacob Stern estate is at bottom left.

  Griffith wanted to make longer movies. His Biograph bosses had objected, so Griffith had left the company, taking his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, and several actors, including the Gish sisters. (Mack Sennett also left Biograph at the same time, taking Mable Normand and others to his new studio in Edendale across from Colonel Selig’s studio.) The ambitious Griffith planned to create the greatest pictures ever made, make a million dollars, and retire in five years.

  Griffith’s crew and actors arrived before the director and immediately started making two-reelers, mostly Westerns. Vermont Canyon to the north became their favorite location. Cowboys and Indians rode their horses through the streets from studio to location. Awestruck neighborhood children watched the noisy productions. Local boys started hobbies collecting spent shells and gun powder from misfired blanks. Some lucky gawkers got rewarded with small parts in the pictures.

  A C.E. Toberman building went up on southeast Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Mary Moll’s Bonnie Brier Hotel is on the opposite corner, 1913.

  MOVIES MEAN DEVELOPMENT

  Movie people arriving from the East Coast saw Los Angeles as a dirty, unattractive hick town. Hollywood seemed quainter, like a country hamlet with lemon trees and setback homes.

  Hollywood residents easily spotted the outsiders rushing down the new sidewalks, treating slower pedestrians as obstructions.

  C.E. Toberman predicted that Hollywood Boulevard would soon be an entertainment center and sold vacant land, advertising “Hollywood is at the threshold of a new era of development.”

  The Pacific Electric Railway included itself in the new era, raising carfares from a nickel to a dime and, in some cases, fifteen cents. Colegrove residents protested the hike, but Hollywood believed that higher fares kept the riffraff out. The Cole family discovered the increase was illegal and successfully sued to return it to a moderate five cents.

  A commercial block appeared on a vegetable field between Highland and McCadden in 1913. It included Hollywood’s second movie theater, the Hollywood Theater. With its white-glazed brick exterior and marble interior, it opened with 700 seats and charged ten cents for admission. To its west, Toberman bought the southeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue in 1914 and financed the area’s first four-story building. It had street-level stores, offices above them, and apartments on the top two floors.

  Dr. Schloesser bought the opposite corner (on the southwest) with investors from Chicago and New York. He planned a pretentious apartment house on Mary Moll’s strawberry farm. When his development failed, the land returned to Moll, who built her own hotel, the three-story Bonnie Brier.

  By 1913, the ambitious Dr. Palmer had abandoned his Hollywood Boulevard home and moved to Yucca Street. He replaced his former house with a brick commercial building. To its west, on the southeast corner of Wilcox Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, a new two-story commercial opened with an ice cream store called Wrights, the precursor to the successful Southern California chain, Wil Wright’s. The Hollywood Boulevard block between Cahuenga and Wilcox had become completely commercial.

  Across the street, Daeida Beveridge also found herself surrounded by businesses. In the front yard of the Hurd house, owners built a one-story commercial building. East of the Beveridge home, Louis Blondeau built two brick buildings with four storefronts. The Idle Hour leased space, sprucing up to meet the Hollywood Theater’s competition. Its new name, the Iris, paid tribute to the former de Longpre garden where the movie theater now stood. The Iris had the first ornamental electric lighting on Hollywood Boulevard. Five years after this, Blondeau built another two-story commercial structure next to the Beveridge front lawn.

  Despite Dr. Palmer and C.E. Toberman’s dreams for a bustling commercial district, the residents who fish-eyed the movie business didn’t want their tranquillity shattered by lots of tradesmen. They were content with the three clusters of necessary stores at Highland, Cahuenga, and a new squat row of square brick buildings on the southwest corner of Hollywood and Vermont.

  Real estate investors ran a trackless trolley up narrow, winding Laurel Canyon to a log cabin on Lookout Mountain. They hoped it would stimulate sales on the canyon floor. The developers never finished their trackless trolley and soon folded it.

  There was better and flatter land elsewhere. The arrival of Owens Valley water had turned surrounding farmland into sparsely populated towns named Culver City and Beverly Hills. San Fernando Valley land waited, cheap and plentiful.

  As movie studios unhesitatingly cut down citrus trees for expansion, locals chopped down trees to subdivide. Hundreds of fruit trees reaching their prime bearing years got yanked out along Hollywood Boulevard. One concerned orchardist asked at a public meeting, “Do we want our lemon groves cut into town lots and sold for so much down and so much a month? It might be a good thing for a few real estate dealers, but it would be a poor thing for beautiful Hollywood.”

  For the small grower who had retired to Hollywood, it was disheartening to watch the change. Some felt too old to move and start elsewhere. Thomas Hudson and George Stevenson saw their lemon orchards along Hollywood Boulevard between Wilcox and Las Palmas edged by business blocks.

  The Hurd house peeks over the new commercial development at Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue, 1920.

  The trackless trolley through Laurel Canyon, 1912.

  One of Hollywood’s remaining lemon groves stood on the Wattles estate, Hollywood Boulevard and Curson Avenue, 1919.

  The Birth of a Nation clansmen gallop through a flooded Hollywood street, 1914.

  1914

  The outbreak of World War I crippled Europe’s film production. Americans dominated the movie industry. Griffith and DeMille, in their separate studios, were becoming masters of the filmed spectacle.

  Through the year, D.W. Griffith created a film that would make Hollywood an internationally known movieland. At twelve reels, The Birth of a Nation, based on a racist and superstitious novel by Thomas Dixon, was Griffith’s most ambitious project yet.

  Griffith worked his company ragged, mostly on vacant land at the head of Hollywood Boulevard where the Vista Theater stands today. His construction crew built an antebellum town of the deep South complete with slave quarters and black-faced whites portraying slaves. With a huge budget for the time ($110,000), The Birth of a Nation transformed movie-making into a multi-million dollar industry. At Griffith’s studio, more fig trees came out for buildings.

  Other local movie studios boomed. The Lasky Company had three production units operating simultaneously besides Cecil B. DeMille’s unit. When Universal needed more room, there was no bargain land available in Hollywood. Carl Laemmle went to the other side of the Cahuenga Pass. He bought land for a studio near the Los Angeles River, the former Cabueg-na site. That was in 1912. Two years later, Laemmle opened new studio facilities on the ranch. As a publicity gimmick with the newly established, and nearby, district of North Hollywood, Universal City became a township with a mayor and the trappings of a small city

  Actors costumed as clansmen for Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

  L. Frank Baum decided to get into the movie business. His stage version of The Tik-Tok Man of Oz had been successful, but Baum realized that movies were taking away his audience. He created Oz Film Ma
nufacturing and built a studio on the northwest corner of Santa Monica and Gower. By August 13, his first production, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, had its premiere screening.

  The actors and crew of Lasky studios, 1915.

  Oz Studios at Santa Monica Boulevard and Gower Street, 1914.

  On August 7, 1914, Daeida Wilcox Beveridge died of cancer eight days after her fifty-second birthday. Somehow, in spite of her personal strength and courage, she proved as tenuous to Hollywood as the de Longpre garden.

  Within the month, Dr. Palmer, with Harlan Palmer as his legal consultant, bought a series of lots along Hollywood Boulevard, west of Whitley Avenue. He established a lumberyard on one of them and then sued to clear the Ocean View Tract commercial restrictions. Hollywood Boulevard was now zoned for business from Cahuenga Boulevard to Highland Avenue.

  Residents who objected to lighting on the Iris Theater next door to the Beveridge home were silenced when C.E. Toberman installed lights on his business block at Highland Avenue.

  Streetlights appeared at this time, courtesy of Los Angeles City, in a botched bureaucratic maze of red tape, poor planning and extra work.

  A month after Daeida Beveridge’s death, Hollywood came into immediate contact with the rest of the United States. Western Union opened a telegraph office at 1703 Cahuenga Boulevard. Telephones had already arrived, but there was no line from California to New York. Every night local studios wired long reports to their East Coast home offices — a task that fell to Mr. Elder, who shut down his candy store at Hollywood Boulevard at Cherokee to become Western Union’s telegraph operator.