Screenland (Oct 1923-Mar 1924)

<I How the old California locations see service again and again in filmland's three divisions of life: hickj burg and big. peptic .ions. Our parks must seem to have all been laid out with the same pattern. They must think that American ice buildings, street corners, theatres, apartment houses and railroad stations come in three styles — hick, burg and big, wicked city modes. They must know every step of the Garden Court apartments, that pretentious, gleaming pile out in the higher rent district of Hollywood where live the movie men who never plan to do right by Our Nell until the last reel. The mountain retreats of those fiends in human form, who dabble in porcelains, first editions and debutantes, neglecting their lawful wedded wives, are bound to be filmed in Laurel Canyon which also supplies the artist colony shots with its winding roads and quaint cabins. Since there is hardly a modern picture which can be called complete without at least one railroad station exterior, one would naturally think producers would cast about for something different. But they don't. There is a waiting list, I'll wager, for locations at the vi'lage station at Hynes, a mile and a half from Universal City on Lankershim Boulevard. That is where Our Nell always clambers on the day coach as the honest townspeople wave farewell. If she is going to visit her sister or her cousin or her brother or her aunt at a burg, Nell is cinematized clambering down from the coach at Los Angeles' heritage of the early days, the time-worn Union Pacific station. That brindle depot has been before the camera as much as Clara Kimball Young. d Always h°wever' The celluloid sheiks get their just deserts at Oxnard. The Royal Mounted Police get their man at Truckee. Our Nell waves goodbye from a train at Hynes, Cal., Comedians lose their mustaches in the lake of Westlake Park, and — Those garden fade-outs are shot in the Busch Gardens. Our Nell is going to tempt fate in the big, wicked city, the cameraman will grind on her so we'll later grind our teeth on her emergence, wide-eyed and timorous from the Southern Pacific's Arcade station. Los Angeles' public buildings have been done equally to death. There is not a courtroom nor a jail which has not echoed time and time again to the hoarse directorial voices. Goldwvn Studio Doubles in Brass JL he executive staff at Goldwyn s Culver City studio realizes that because sometime ago a lackey of Lehr, hurrying to the studio in the chill Hollywood nine o'clock dawn, noted the place's resemblance to a jail, a castle, a cathedral, a home for the feeble-minded and a custom house. So when they need any one of those things the Goldwyn companies do not have to journey downtown as the studio carpenters in a busy half-day can slap a false front on the place, a sort of dickey of wallboard and stucco, making it look like anything that is desiied. It was last converted into a gaol entrance for Name the Man, the vehicle for Mae who has been denoted the Burning Busch. High society or costume stuff awakens a sense that something is lacking unless Westlake Park or the Busch Gardens in Pasadena double for the dooryards of the upper crusts of this and yesteryear. Los Angeles' Two-Way Lake estlake Park is a two-way affair. It has a lake into which comedians can be thrown along with the lunch-boxes, banana peels, waxed paper and other debris of the ruminant American tourist. There used to be [Continued on page 103} AiaP^'li '-^mt' 47