Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

Photoplay Magazine w^ pick on a nice, refined, law-abiding setllement of retiretl business men, who live in beautiful houses along well-shadeil streets uf pepper trees, for his real estate boom? I'm not much on California histon.', but it's my candid opinion that no botly in particular started Hollywood. It just became. and will no doubt go ilown in history in the movies long after the fellow who invented Raisin Day and Citrus Day in California have p;jssed on to the last rest and after the Chamber of Commerce has suns all the swan songs. It was about the medieval period of lou that Al E. Christie, then directing pictures on Lone Islanii. in Bayonne, New Jersey, and other self respecting communities, began to sigh for new worlds to conquer. Al was tired of making wild west pic tures with a background of Hoboken terminals, el cetera. He passed the statue of Horace Greeley one day and it gave him an idea. He would go West and gri)w up with the country. He would make real moving pictures in the rea rough and western West He would forsake Hoboken. Jersey City and Long Island. No more worn-out hack horses for his painte 1 Manhattan Indians. No more Sahara desert scenes in the salt marshes The only trouble was that Als pwrtner thought the sunshine and the scape were better in Florida. "I'll tell you what we'll do. " said W flip this nickel, and if it falls heads we go to Florida, and if it falls taiU we go to California. It's the last nickel I've got and it feels lucky." They flipped and the nickel fell "tails." Thereby hangs a tale, the tale which made out of Hollywood the motion picture capital of the world, the place toward which tourists, on arriving in Los Angeles, now gravitate as soon as they come to town. It is t there that they expect to see Mary Pickford. her curls flying in the ^y wind, dashing down Hollywood Boulevard in a pony cart: it i there they expect to see Douglas Fairbanks jumping from a church «teep!e to the back of a wild bronc; it is there they expect to see Charlie Chaplin, piloting one of the airplanes ^ in his Catalina fleet, shuffling the gears with his funny feet. Such anil kindred eccentricities are what the tourists expect to see. and as they ride out on the Hollywood trolley line, every pretty girl is a motion picture actress, every handsome man is a hero, and the other men are probably selling scenarios. .\nyw-ay. before all this tourist crop became so numerous and long before Charlie ever thought of owning more than his shoes. Al arrived in Los .\ngeles with a carload of actors and mnvint: picture props. With him were such people as the late Harold Lockwood-— then a leading man at twenty-five dollars the week: Dorothy Davenport, now the wife of Wallace Reid: Russell Bassett. sterling character actor: Henry Otto. Donald MacDonald. .Mice Davenport. Eugenie Forde. Nictoria Forde and others, composing the Nestor company, intent ^mn revolutionizing Western drama and substituting Los Angeles for Flatbush. But they hadn't come to Hollywood yet. In fact. (Continued on page 134) V>\ «\ ^'.lii'/f .itii 1 fj[ til' oiu \rni,T Company, (jkrn in 1911. the fir»t film cfimpjiiy to mal'.* pictiir<-« ui iioiinwooJ. v)pii»-r~\'r, in *ni» picturr«4|u« !(roup of rral pion»-rr«. Al Y.. ("hri»tir, in th« funny oIJ d«Tby. •t.inJinft by thr oamrra aJ ill lrf«, Oti (hr rxtrrmr right, alio in a Jrrby, i« the latr Harold LockwooJ. who aclril in Chri»tic pirturr* (or the munificrni aalars i.f S2.i .> \i<-fli, Dorothy Davrnport, oo«r Mr*. Wallacr Reid. and bcr mothrr, arc at I^ocWwood'* Irft.