by Bill Bryson
Only one of the studios actually set up in Hollywood, the Nestor Film Company in 1911. Locals were so upset at the sudden appearance of ramshackle film sets and the louche appearance of actors that they enacted an ordinance forbidding the erection of further studios. So in fact Hollywood has never really had a film industry. The studios that began to dot the landscape in the following years were all elsewhere – in Culver City, Edendale, Boyle Heights, Burbank, Santa Monica, indeed almost anywhere but Hollywood. As late as 1913, when Cecil B. de Mille filmed The Squaw Man in a studio at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine, Hollywood was a country hamlet.11 Hollywood Boulevard was not yet so named – indeed it was just a dirt road. None the less, by 1915 Hollywood had become so generic as a term for the movie business that neighbouring communities scrambled to associate themselves with its magic. Ivanhoe and Prospect Park reincorporated as East Hollywood and Lankersheim became North Hollywood.12 Laurelwood, not to be outdone, transformed itself into Studio City,
Beverly Hills, the other southern California name that most of us automatically associate with the movies, and more particularly with movie stars (a term coined in 1919), was likewise named on a whim. It was christened in 1907 by a property developer, who named his 3,200-acre housing development (although it had just one house at the time) Beverly Hills after his hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts. It became especially fashionable with the stars after Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks married in 1920 and moved into a Beverly Hills mansion they called Pickfair.
In 1917 the Motion Picture Patents Company was declared an illegal cartel and ordered to disband. It hardly mattered. By that time, Hollywood (and from here on in I am using the term generically) all but owned the movie business. It is a curious fact that this most American of phenomena was created almost entirely by non-Americans. Apart from Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford (who were in any case both Canadian), the early studios were run by a small band of men who had begun life from strikingly similar backgrounds: they were all eastern European Jews, poor and uneducated, who had left Europe in the same decade (the 1880s), and had established themselves in the New World in mostly lowly trades before they all abruptly – and instinctively, it seems – abandoned their careers in the first decade of this century and became seized with the opportunities to be found in the nickelodeon business.
It is most odd, but consider: Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was a scrap merchant from Lithuania. The Hungarian-born Adolf Zukor of Famous Players Studios was a janitor and later a furrier. Samuel Goldwyn of the Goldwyn Picture Company was a glove salesman from Warsaw. Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, was a German who had run a clothing store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. William Fox (real name Wilhelm Fried) was a Hungarian who worked in the garment industry before founding Fox Pictures. Joseph M. Schenk, creator of Twentieth Century Productions, was a Russian-born fairground showman and pharmacist. The Warner brothers – Albert, Harry, Jack and Sam were from Poland and had worked at various, mostly menial jobs. None had any link to the entertainment industry. Yet in the first years of the century, as if answering an implanted signal, they all migrated to New York City and became involved in the nickelodeon business – some as owners of nickelodeon parlours, some as makers of films. In the second decade of the century, another signal appears to have gone off in their heads and they decamped en masse to Hollywood. Some understandable confusion exists concerning Samuel Goldwyn and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Though his name accounts for the middle initial in MGM, Goldwyn was never part of the company. He sold out to the Metro studios and Louis B. Mayer in 1924, and was astonished to discover that they took his name with them – though that was no more than Goldwyn himself had done. The Goldwyn Picture Company was not in fact named for Goldwyn, but rather he for it. His real name was Schmuel Gelbfisz, though for his first thirty years in America he had called himself – perhaps a little unwisely – Samuel Goldfish. Goldwyn was a portmanteau of the names of the studio’s two founders: Samuel Goldfish and Edgar Selwyn. It wasn’t until 1918, tired of being the butt of endless fish-bowl jokes, that he named himself after his corporation. After the MGM takeover, he had to go to court to win permission to continue making movies under the Goldwyn name.
It would be putting it mildly to say that Goldwyn never entirely mastered the nuances of English. Though many of the expressions attributed to him are apocryphal – he never, for instance, said to a pretentious director who wanted to make a movie with a message: ‘If you want to send a message call Western Union’ – he did actually say ‘I was on the brink of an abscess’, ‘Gentlemen, include me out’, and ‘You’ve bitten the hand of the goose that laid the golden egg’. Warned that a Broadway production to which he had acquired rights was ‘a very caustic play’, he shot back: ‘I don’t give a damn how much it costs.’ And a close friend swore that once when they were walking on a beach and the friend said, ‘Look at the gulls,’ Goldwyn stopped in his tracks and replied in all seriousness, ‘How do you know they’re not boys?’ He had a particular gift for mangling names. He always referred to Mervyn LeRoy as ‘Moiphy’ LeRoy, to Preston Sturges as ‘Preston Sturgeon’ and, to his unending annoyance, to Ernst Fegte as ‘Faggoty’.13
Not just the studio chiefs, but directors, composers, art directors, musicians and actors were as often as not foreigners working in this quintessentially American medium. The 1938 movie The Adventures of Robin Hood, for instance, starred an Australian, Erroll Flynn, and an Englishman, Basil Rathbone, was directed by a Hungarian, Michael Curtiz, scored by a Czech, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and had sets designed by a Pole, Anton Grot. Consider the backgrounds of just a few of those who made Hollywood pulse in its early years: John Ford (born Sean O’Fearna) was Irish, Greta Garbo Swedish, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant and Stan Laurel English, William Wyler Alsatian, Billy Wilder Hungarian, Frank Capra Italian (at least by birth), Fred Zinnemann and Erich Von Stroheim Austrian, and Ernst Lubitsch German. Never has an industry been more international in its composition or more American in its output.
As the years passed studios endlessly formed and reformed. Mutual, Reliance and Keystone amalgamated into the Triangle Film Corporation, which, despite having America’s three leading directors – D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett and Thomas H. Ince – soon went under. RCA and the Keith Orpheum theatre chain teamed up to form RKO. Joseph Schenk’s Twentieth Century Pictures and William Fox’s Fox Film Corporation merged into Twentieth Century-Fox. Many more fell by the wayside: Star, Biograph, General Film and even the Edison Company. But Hollywood itself went from strength to strength, filling the world with a distinctively American mix of glamour, adventure and moral certitude.
If the stars hadn’t changed their names already, the studios often did it for them to make them fit more neatly into the pleasantly homogenized heaven that was Hollywood. Names were changed for almost any reason – because they were too dull, too exotic, not exotic enough, too long, too short, too ethnic, too Jewish. Generally, it must be said, the studio bosses knew what they were doing. Who after all could imagine John Wayne as Marion Morrison or Judy Garland as Frances Gumm or Mary Pickford as dowdy Gladys Smith? Spangler Arlington Brugh is a name for a junior high school woodwork teacher; change it to Robert Taylor and you are already halfway to stardom. Archie Leach might pass muster as the kid who delivers groceries, but if you want a man of the world it’s got to be Cary Grant. Doris Kappelhoff is the 200 lb. chocoholic who baby-sits your little brother; Doris Day dates the quarterback. Even little Mortimer Mouse had his name changed to Mickey just four years after his creation in 1923.
In the very early days of the movies stars hadn’t had to change their names because they weren’t allowed any, at least not as far as their fans were concerned. Until the second decade of the century actors and actresses weren’t billed at all. For years Mary Pickford was known only as ‘Little Mary’ and Florence Lawrence as ‘the Biograph girl’. Then, as producers realized that audiences were drawn by certain faces and even styles of film-making, they began bil
ling not just the featured players, but also directors and even sometimes cameramen. The first actress to have her name changed for purposes of enhanced aura (sex appeal wouldn’t come into general use until the 1940s) is thought to have been one Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati. Seeking a persona better suited to her dark, exotic looks, someone at the William Fox Company in 1914 played around with the words Arab and death (goodness knows why those two) and came up with Theda Bara. Soon all the studios were at it. Among the stars who found immortality with someone else’s name, we can count the following. (Their original names are on the right.)
Rudolph Valentino Rodolpho d’Antonguolla
Joan Crawford Lucille Le Sueur
Al Jolson Asa Yoleson
Bert Lahr Isidore Lahrheim
Paul Muni Muni Weisenfreund
Gilbert Roland Luis Antonio Damoso De Alonzo
Lauren Bacall Betty Jean Perske
Tony Curtis Bernard Schwarz
Jack Benny Benny Kubelsky
Barbara Stanwyck Ruby Stevens
Veronica Lake Constance Ockleman
Susan Hayward Edyth Marrener
Fredric March Frederick Bickel
Don Ameche Dominic Amici
Red Buttons Aaron Chwatt
Ed Wynn Isaiah Edwin Leopold
Melvyn Douglas Melvyn Hesselberg
Kirk Douglas Issur Danielovitch Demsky
Lee J Cobb Leo Jacoby
June Haver June Stovenour
Rita Hayworth Margarita Carmen Cansino
Ginger Rogers Virginia McMath
Mickey Rooney Joe Yule, jun.
Jane Wyman Sarah Jane Faulks
John Garfield Julius Garfinkle
June Allyson Ella Geisman
Danny Kaye David Daniel Kaminsky
Sterling Hayden Sterling W. Relyea
Rock Hudson Roy Scherer
Cyd Charisse Tula Ellice Finklea
Troy Donahue Merle Johnson
Anne Bancroft Anna Maria Italiano
Jerry Lewis Joseph Levitch
Dean Martin Dino Crocetti
Tab Hunter Andrew Arthur Kelm
Virginia May Virginia Jones
W. C. Fields W. C. Dukinfield
Clifton Webb Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck
Dorothy Lamour Dorothy Kaumeyer
Heddy Lamour Hedwig Kiesler
Walter Matthau Walter Mattaschanskayasky
Boris Karloff William Pratt
And, no, I don’t know why Boris Karloff was thought to be an improvement on Bill Pratt.
In 1926, two new terms entered the language: Movietone from the Fox studios and Vitaphone from Warner Brothers, and sound movies were on their way. Both employed music and sound effects, but not speech. The talkies (often also called the speakies in the early days) would have to wait till the following year and the release of The Jazz Singer, though even it was only partly speaking. The first all-talking film, a gangster feature called The Lights of New York, came in 1928, though such was the quality of sound reproduction that it came equipped with subtitles as well. With sound, movies became not only more popular but immensely more complicated to make.
As the industry evolved through the 1920s and ‘30s, still more words were created to describe the types of films Hollywood was making – cliffhangers, weepies, sobbies, tear-jerkers, spine-chillers, westerns, serials – and to denote the types of roles on offer. A character who wept a lot was a tear bucket. An actress in a melodrama was a finger-wringer. A villain was of course a baddie. Many movie terms, particularly portmanteau words like cinemaestro and cinemactress and fractured spellings like laff and pix, originated or were widely popularized by the bible of the movie business, the newspaper Variety. Many were short-lived. Oats opera for a western, clicko for a success, bookritic, eight ball for a failure and many such others died in infancy. Scores of others have prospered in the wider world, notably whodunit, tie-in, socko, rave (for a review), flopperoo, palooka (a word of unknown derivation), belly laugh, newscaster, to scram and pushover.
Behind the scenes, the development of increasingly sophisticated equipment brought a rash of new terms: scrims, flags, gobos, skypans, inky dinks, century stands, flying rigs, match boxes, lupes and other arcane apparatus. A gobo is a type of black screen (no one seems to know why it is so called), a skypan is a big light, an inky dink a small one, and a match box one smaller still. A scrim is a type of light diffuser. Such sophisticated equipment brought with it strange and intriguing job titles: focus pullers, juicers, Foley artists, gaffers, best boys, supervising drapes, inbetweeners, wranglers, post-punch supervisors, swing-gangs and so on. Gaffer (a corruption of godfather, originally a sarcastic term for an old person) is the head electrician. Best boy is the chief electrician’s chief assistant. Juicers are those who move electrical equipment around. The Foley artist is in charge of sound effects; he’s the one who adds the ‘toosh!’ to punches and the ‘gerdoings!’ to ricocheting bullets. It is named for Jack Foley, one of the great sound recordists. Supervising drape is the person in charge of drapes, rugs and other such inanimate objects. An inbetweener is an animator’s assistant – one who draws the frames between the main action frames. Swing-gangs are those who build or rebuild sets overnight. Wranglers handle the animals, or indeed any living creatures. ‘Cockroach wrangler’ has been recorded in the credits of at least one film. As you will have gathered, often the title is more impressive than the job, and nowhere perhaps more so than with the post punch supervisor, whose responsibility essentially is to look after the photocopying.
With so many exotic professions involved it is little wonder that the credits nowadays seem to roll on for ever. The longest credits yet, for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, actually go on for just six and a half minutes. Even so, they managed to salute 763 creative artists, technicians and other contributors – and that was without mentioning Kathleen Turner, the voice of Jessica Rabbit, who opted not to be credited.
Huge amounts of effort and emotion go into deciding the order of billing for movie stars – whether the name goes above the title, whether it is larger than the title and by what percentage and so on. When Paul Newman and Steve McQueen starred in The Towering Inferno, the problem of which of these superstars was to enjoy top billing led to protracted negotiations between agents and producers. Eventually it was decided that Newman’s name would take the left-hand, pole position, but would be positioned fractionally lower than McQueen’s, a practice that has been followed and elaborated on to the point of tedium in movie posters and advertising materials ever since. In 1956, Otto Preminger appalled the Hollywood community by announcing The Man With the Golden Arm as ‘A Film by Otto Preminger’. No one had ever displayed such audacity before, and few have failed to engage in it since. Occasionally a director is so miffed with the handling of a film in post-production that he demands to have his name removed. The Directors Guild hit on the convention of crediting such disowned movies to the fabled and wholly fictional Allen Smithee, who is thus responsible for such classics as Ghost Fever, Student Bodies, Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, City in Fear, a Whitney Huston video and some two dozen other efforts.14 The ultimate in screen credits, though, was almost certainly the 1929 production of The Taming of the Shrew, starring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, which contained the memorable line: ‘By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.’15 Possibly the most choleric credit line appeared on the 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham 123, which concerned the hijacking of a New York subway train and finished with the closing line: ‘Made without any help whatsoever from the New York Transport Authority.’
No discussion of the lexicon of Hollywood would be complete without at least a passing mention of the Oscars and how these golden statuettes got their name. Few terms in any creative field have engendered more varied explanations of an etymology. The most plausible story perhaps is that the figure was named by Margaret Herrick, a librarian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who said upon seeing the prototype, ‘Oh, that re
minds me of my Uncle Oscar’ (whose surname, for the record, was Pierce).16 But it must be said there are many other similar versions to choose from. What is certain is that the figure of a naked man with a long sword standing on a film can originated as a doodle by Cedric Gibbons, the MGM art director, and that the first one was awarded in 1929.
In 1949, after nearly half a century of continuous, seemingly unstoppable success, Hollywood’s executives got a shock when movie attendances slumped from 90 million to just 70 million in a single year. Matters would grow increasingly more fearful for them as the 1950s unfolded and Americans abandoned the movie theatres for the glowing comforts of their own televisions. In desperation the studios tried to make the most of whatever advantages they could muster. One was colour. Colour movies had been possible since as far back as 1917, when a Dr Herbert Kalmus invented a process he called Technicolor. The first Technicolor movie was Toll of the Sea, made by MGM in 1922. But the process was expensive and therefore little used. In 1947, only about a tenth of movies were in colour. By 1954 well over half were. Hollywood studios also responded by forbidding their stars to appear on the new medium, and by denying television networks access to their library of films, until it gradually dawned on them that old movies generated money when shown on television and didn’t when locked in vaults.
But what was needed was some new technique, some blockbuster development, that television couldn’t compete with. In September 1952 the world – or at least an audience at New York’s Broadway Theatre – was introduced to a startling new process called Cinerama. Employing a curved screen, stereophonic sound and three projectors, it provided watchers with the dizzying sensation of being on a Coney Island roller-coaster or whizzing perilously through the Grand Canyon. People loved it. But Cinerama had certain intractable shortcomings, notably distractingly wobbly lines where the three projected images joined, and an absence of theatres in which to show it. It cost $75,000 to convert a theatre to Cinerama, more than most could afford. There was also the problem that the process didn’t lend itself to narrative performances and the few Cinerama movies that were made, such as This Is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday, and Cinerama South Seas Adventure, consisted mainly of a succession of thrills. In 1962, as a kind of last gasp effort to save the process (theatre owners who had invested heavily in the massive screens and projector systems naturally wanted to put them to use) two narrative films were made, How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, but the problem of having to swivel your head to follow a conversation between characters separated by sixty feet of screen was one that audiences failed to warm to.
