Hollywood movies and ocean front amusement zones enthralled paying customers during the interwar decades. A more fleeting but no less thrilling spectacle, the 1932 Olympics brought worldwide attention to Los Angeles. To varying degrees, all of these types of attractions heralded the arrival of ongoing mass entertainment in the Golden State.
Though beginning on the East Coast in the early 1900s, America’s film industry moved to California to escape the monopoly that Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company wielded and to take advantage of the state’s weather and locations. Nationwide, the industry had become synonymous with Hollywood by the interwar years. In the early 1920s some 250,000 film company employees worked in Los Angeles in what had become a billion-dollar business. Director David W. Griffith’s blockbuster movie, The Birth of a Nation (see Chapter 9) unfortunately helped revive and spread the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan throughout the nation in the 1920s. Thomas Dixon’s novel The Klansmen provided the inspiration and much of the material for the movie, which, for its technical aspects alone set a high standard. By the time sound movies or talkies appeared in 1927, Birth of a Nation had grossed $18 million; a hundred million people had seen it by 1930. Filmed in southern California, this early blockbuster resulted in Hollywood surpassing New York to become the cinema capital of America, a status that this district in Los Angeles has retained. Despite its glaring endorsement of white racism in the post-Civil War South, historian Kevin Starr rightly notes that today The Birth of a Nation is regarded as “among the two or three finest films ever made.”
In the 1920s the American middle class became increasingly enamored of Hollywood movies. The growing public interest was facilitated by the “star” system and the construction of posh theaters. To increase revenues, Hollywood studios selected actors and actresses deemed likely to have mass appeal, and then carefully honed and promoted public images of these “stars,” sometimes by changing their names and invariably by publicizing them in the media, especially in movie magazines. Canadian Gladys Smith, for example, was renamed Mary Pickford; she became known as “America’s Sweetheart” while earning $500,000 a year by 1915. Charlie Chaplin raised film comedy to an art form and in so doing became an international star, earning $10,000 a week in the World War I era. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Crawford, and Greta Garbo were other box-office draws in the early years of cinema. Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, built in 1927, affords a striking example of the luxurious movie houses of the time.
Off to a promising start, the Hollywood film industry was rocked by early scandals involving the off-screen conduct of some of its matinee idols. One of the most sensational of these involved comedian and actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (so called because he weighed nearly 300 pounds) and a young starlet, Virginia Rappe. The two had attended a drunken party held by a group of Hollywood celebrities in early September 1921 in a San Francisco hotel. Accounts of what happened conflict, but one witness testified that she saw a naked, bleeding, inebriated Rappe, who had been sexually ravaged by Arbuckle. Several days after the bash, Rappe died. Arbuckle was arrested, charged with manslaughter, and
Went through three trials before gaining acquittal. News of this scandal and others, usually involving alcohol and/or sexual promiscuity, led to a call from some civic leaders for stricter standards of conduct for the Hollywood set and censorship of movies. To head off possible federal censorship, the newly formed, industry-run Motion Picture Producers and Directors Association appointed a movie czar, Will H. Hays, to see to it that immorality in film scenes led to punishment of the transgressing characters on the silver screen. Self-regulation and an effort to enhance the industry’s respectability took other forms as well. A leading director of the period, Cecil B. DeMille of Paramount Pictures, made movies that brimmed with Judeo-Christian content, such as The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927). According to film historian Carlos Clarens, DeMille insisted that “during production, the actors portraying Christ and the apostles refrain from drinking, gambling, cussing, night-clubbing and even having intercourse with their wives.” Despite Hays’s oversight and DeMille’s rules, scenes of sex and violence still found their way into Hollywood films.
Even during the Depression era, with people’s discretionary spending reduced, Hollywood prospered, largely because Americans sought escape. Momentarily, at least, the antics of the Marx Brothers in such movies as Duck Soup (1933) and the swashbuckling exploits of Errol Flynn in Captain Blood (1935), co-starring the talented Olivia de Havil-land, provided relief from the pangs of distress. Much of the footage for these two movies was shot on location in Pasadena and Laguna Beach, respectively. Escapism was also served when filmmakers chose far-off islands in exotic places, like the vast reaches of the Pacific world, to situate human dramas that could momentarily relieve people’s fears about being able to care for their families. Pacific-themed movies of the time included Treasure Island (1934) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Treasure Island was filmed mainly in California, including the Channel Islands and Laguna Beach (which stood in for tropical Pacific isles), and Hawai’i. It featured major Hollywood stars Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, and Lionel Barrymore. Mutiny on the Bounty was shot in California, including the Channel Islands, and French Polynesia and starred Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. It won the 1936 Academy Awards Oscar for the Best Picture.
Film-producing companies and directors were indispensable to Hollywood’s meteoric rise in the 1920s and 1930s. The major companies included Loew’s (and its Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer subsidiary), Warner Brothers, Paramount, Radio-Keith-Orpheum, and Twentieth Century Fox. Behind these leaders were Columbia, Universal, and United Artists. Included among the successful directors of the time were some women, particularly Elinor Glyn and Dorothy Arzner.
Besides going to movies, Californians and tourists alike spent time and money at the state’s Pacific fun zones. Singly or in combination, these beach venues featured boardwalks, piers, roller coasters, and dance halls. San Francisco’s Playland included several roller coasters, a Fun House with a mirror maze and 200-foot indoor slide, a Ferris wheel, and nearly a hundred concessionaires. Santa Cruz’s Boardwalk comprised a ballroom, plunge, pier, and, after its 1924 opening, the Giant Dipper roller coaster that for 15 cents would hurtle screaming riders up and down its winding course at 55 miles per hour. The coaster appeared in several Hollywood films. In the Southland, Venice Beach advertised itself as “The Coney Island of the Pacific.” Like its New York City counterpart, Venice featured numerous attractions. In 1921 the descendants of Abbot Kinney, the developer of Venice, reportedly invested $3 million in building a new pier extending 1,200 feet in length and 525 feet in width. The so-called Venice Amusement Pier featured three roller coasters, a fun house, dance hall, and other rides. On a much smaller scale, nearby Santa Monica added a carousel and ballroom to its Pacific fun zone in the 1920s.
Besides fun zones, the City of Angels treated the world to a premier athletic spectacle during the 1930s. In the summer of 1932, 37 countries sent 1,300 athletes to compete in the Games of the X Olympiad in Los Angeles. The city’s Memorial Coliseum was expanded to 105,000 seats for the international competition. A hundred thousand spectators attended the opening ceremonies. Hollywood stars, including Charlie Chaplin and Marlene Dietrich, promoted ticket sales through entertainment. Babe Didrikson, arguably America’s best female athlete, won gold medals in the javelin and hurdles. Despite the hard times economically, the Olympics was a success.
World History
