Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles

Mark Shiel

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781861899408
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Hollywood cinema and Los Angeles cannot be understood apart. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles traces the interaction of the real city, its movie business, and filmed image, focusing on the crucial period from the construction of the first studios in the 1910s to the decline of the studio system fifty years later.

As Los Angeles gradually became one of the ten largest cities in the world, the film industry made key contributions to its rapid growth and frequent crises in economic, social, political and cultural life. Whether filmmakers engaged with the real city on location or recreated it on a studio set, Los Angeles shaped the films that were made there and circulated influentially worldwide. The book pays particular attention to early cinema, slapstick comedy, movies about the movies and film noir, which are each explored in new ways, with an emphasis on urban and architectural space and its representation, as well as filmmaking style and technique. Including many previously unpublished photographs and new historical evidence, Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles gives us a never-before-seen view of the City of Angels.

one

The Trace

Today the Los Angeles urban region has a population of eighteen million, its economy is the second largest in the United States and sixth largest in the world, its physical footprint is the eighth largest, its society among the most diverse and fractured, and its strategic location in the southwestern corner of the United States allows it to play a globally decisive cultural role not only in North America but in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific. For the last 100 years, a particularly important factor in Los Angeles’ growth and visibility has been its role as the home of the largest motion picture industry in the world – and, more recently, music, television and digital media industries as well. Understanding the sheer presence of such a city is a challenge, and explaining cinema’s contribution to it even more so.

From the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1910s Los Angeles emerged as a city of national importance and a magnet for filmmakers whose activities would lead to ‘Hollywood cinema’. Films of Los Angeles from that era have the special ability today to act as traces of times and places long since erased. But, paradoxically, when they were made and first shown, those same films had the effect, and sometimes the aim, of erasing the traces of previous societies that the modern era had decided were redundant. Four short actuality films by the Edison Company between 1897 and 1901, and three narrative films – Ramona (1910), The Unchanging Sea (1910) and The Squaw Man (1914) – are among the earliest extant films in which Los Angeles and its region are recorded. They also demonstrate that early cinema actively shaped and structured Los Angeles’ history and appearance. This process may be understood by counterpointing the sense of human mortality and the contingency and loss of the past, which the early films convey today, with the long utopian tradition that once imagined Los Angeles as an Eden forged by the heroic struggles of men.

In ‘Some Motifs on Baudelaire’, Walter Benjamin refers to Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, whose narrator was reminded of his childhood in Combray when he happened one day to bite into an ordinary madeleine (a soft butter cookie beloved of children in France) and found that the taste ‘transported him back to the past’.¹ For Benjamin, the mémoire involontaire described by Proust typifies the way people in the modern world relate to the past, which often eludes deliberate efforts to remember but comes upon one fleetingly and movingly from time to time:

It is the same with our own past. In vain we try to conjure it up again; the efforts of our intellect are futile . . . [It lies] somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect and its field of operations, in some material object . . . , though we have no idea which one it is. And whether we come upon this object before we die, or whether we never encounter it, depends entirely upon chance.²

Early motion pictures of Los Angeles conjure up things beyond our control, which no longer exist and have long been forgotten. However, in contrast to Proust’s evocation, the past in these films is not one we have experienced ourselves: most viewers of films of Los Angeles are not natives and have little or no memory of it at all. Rather, as we watch them, that city and the traces of its past emblematize a relationship that each of us has with the city in which we live and have lived our past. This connection between cinema and the urban past is exceptionally intense in Los Angeles where the movie camera has a long and widespread history.

Before Hollywood

The sheer presence of Los Angeles today is, in large part, the expression of a long history of utopian investment that has gained currency there and worldwide because of Los Angeles’ ubiquity as a place in which images are made. The geography and history of this utopian investment, whose apotheosis is ‘Hollywood cinema’, is like a Russian doll, four utopias one inside the other: the American West encompasses California, which contains Los Angeles and Hollywood in turn. From the region to the state, the city, and the district, each was defined in roughly chronological order. Beginning in 1769, what the Spanish called ‘Alta California’ became the site of an ambitious archipelago of Catholic missions running from San Diego north to San Francisco, from which Jesuits and Franciscans spread out to evangelize Native Americans with the zeal of the soldier-saint or the pacifist-pantheist. Indeed, in the early seventeenth century California had been literally mapped as an island off the western edge of the continent, typical of utopias in general in appearing a remote and imaginary place.³

With the establishment in 1781 of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula – in present-day downtown – Los Angeles became a walled colonial city and soon the largest civilian community in Spanish California. After Mexican independence, accounts by visitors were often anything but utopian: in 1842 the English Captain George Simpson described it as ‘the noted abode of the lowest drunkards and gamblers of the country’.⁴ But a rhetoric emerged that saw local supporters lavish the city with high praise: in 1845 Leonardo Cota, a member of its ayuntamiento (city council), declared that Los Angeles ‘is beginning to show its astral magnificence and brilliance . . . it will be a Mexican paradise.’⁵ This ascent continued after the Mexican-American War (1846–8), which saw Alta California ceded to the United States, and the California Gold Rush of 1848, from which Los Angeles profited by supplying miners in the northern part of the state.⁶

Subsequently, as Los Angeles became the most important endpoint for westward migration in the United States, the city grew rapidly with the expansion of agriculture, oil drilling and refining and, later, aircraft and automotive industries. Becoming a capitalist growth utopia, its population rocketed from 11,333 in 1860, to 33,000 in 1880, 170,000 in 1900, and 936,000 in 1920.⁷ Despite this, however, so-called ‘boosters’ – civic and business leaders such as Harrison Gray Otis and the board of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce – frequently sought to promote Los Angeles on the national and international stage by means of Edenic iconography. This emphasized the Mediterranean climate and pastoral fertility of the city and its hinterland – and, by implication, their morality and social order – sometimes evoking the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome or the region’s Arts and Crafts architecture and design.⁸ While characterizing high-density, urban-industrial centres in the East and Midwest as over-populated, ugly, polluted and dangerous, Los Angeles’ boosters pretended its growth left Nature intact, blending urbanism and Arcadia, the modern and the timeless.

The presence of Los Angeles today can be thrown into relief by speculating counter-factually on what it might have become if ‘Hollywood cinema’ had not flourished. As James Miller Guinn explained, ‘[s]cattered at intervals along the highway of California’s march to wealth and progress are the ruins of enterprises that failed’.⁹ Until the last third of the nineteenth century, the raising of cattle was the only industry in Southern California, carried out on vast ranches by the long-established families known as californios. Their activity was fuelled by the Gold Rush but then blighted by drought and famine in the 1860s, after which the californios declined and their ranches were subdivided. A series of business experiments ensued but disappointed one by one: cultivation of silkworms failed because the farmers who took it up were too widely dispersed and lacked a sufficient local market; cotton growing collapsed when the African Americans brought in to work the fields moved away for better pay; and efforts to specialize in sheep, tea, coffee and beans died out for a lack of irrigation and Wall Street money. Instead, in the 1880s, these efforts and their traces were erased by a new economy of citrus fruit cultivation, which encouraged a new iconography of Los Angeles as a ‘Land of Sunshine’ that would define the city’s local and national identity for generations as an ideal place for investment, work and leisure. Agricultural success and self-publicity were aided by the completion of the ‘Sunset Route’ of the Southern Pacific Railroad from New Orleans (1882) and the founding of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce (1888).

Los Angeles grew, although many business leaders continued to worry that it lacked industrial potential because of its low population, physical isolation and need for speculative finance. As late as 1908 a spokesman for the Southern California Edison Company argued to the California Railroad Commission that ‘Southern California will remain largely an agricultural country. We can’t expect any extraordinary development in manufacturing except such as may be for home use – for local consumption.’¹⁰ However, such concerns were gradually displaced by boosters’ descriptions of Los Angeles’ growth in terms of a monumental harnessing of Nature and individual heroic achievement. For example, in Sixty Years in Southern California (1916), Harris Newmark presented an epic memoir of his eventful life from his arrival in Los Angeles by ship from Prussia in 1853 to 1913 when he wrote at eighty years of age.¹¹ One of Los Angeles’ original boosters, Newmark was an important real estate developer and owner of a large grocery concern, who co-founded the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Los Angeles Board of Trade, the Los Angeles Public Library, the California Club, the Los Angeles B’nai B’rith Jewish synagogue, and the nearby city of Montebello. Newmark was also an associate of Phineas Banning, the stagecoach and shipping magnate who founded the Port of Los Angeles, and in Montebello he collaborated with the civil engineer William Mulholland, designer of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which facilitated the city’s massive expansion after 1913. Newmark’s memoirs exemplify the Herculean rhetoric often deployed by boosters to describe the city’s foundation. When he first arrived, it was ‘a sleepy, ambition-less adobe village with very little promise for the future’ but ‘the spirit properly called “Western”’ ensured that ‘within this extensive area it builded [sic] great cities, joined its various parts with steel and iron, made great highways out of the once well-nigh impassable cattle paths, and from an elemental existence developed a complex civilization.’¹² Because of this westward destiny and its now large population and economy, Newmark concludes portentously:

I believe that Los Angeles is destined to become, in not many years, a world center, prominent in almost every field of human endeavor; and that, as nineteen hundred years ago the humblest Roman, wherever he might find himself, would glow with pride when he said, ‘I am a Roman!’ so, in the years to come, will the son of the metropolis on these shores, wheresoever his travels may take him, be proud to declare, ‘I AM A CITIZEN OF LOS ANGELES!’¹³

Los Angeles’ growth was a function of visualization as well as physical effort, as it became a centre of fine art and photography well before motion pictures. Beginning in the 1880s, nearby resort towns such as Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach attracted plein-air painters such as William Wendt to their sublime views of nature and their romantic Spanish and Mexican ruins. These provided subjects for a picturesque impressionism in oil, pastels and watercolours in which the defining element was the play of plentiful sunlight on the shapes and textures of the land and sea – and the human figure, to a lesser extent.

This work was extended by an explosion of commercial and artistic photography that was often notable for formal and technical innovation. In the 1870s photographers such as Carleton Watkins produced clear and detailed landscape views of immense canyons, mountains and lakes, captured by the camera on very large negatives and from distant points of view. Although often beautiful, according to the art historian Joel Snyder these were intended primarily as ‘disinterested reports’, often being made on commission for railroad, mining and lumber companies as advertisements of the West aimed at investors.¹⁴ Photographed during construction of the railroad l...