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WHY HOLLYWOOD ? 223
back, they went into the battle with gusto. As ex-owners of a theatre, they knew what the public wanted. They ground out, as cheaply as possible, films crammed with action.
Soon they joined the trek to the Pacific Coast to build their own studio.
And why the Pacific Coast — why Hollywood ?
The explanation is simple — it was as far away from New York and the writ servers of the Patents Company as the independent film makers who were defying the Edison combine could get. It was also conveniently situated in relation to the Mexican border ; if trouble loomed up, then the film makers simply skipped over the border and remained there until it had blown over.
To say that Hollywood was chosen as the film centre because it had an unrivalled record for sunshine is nonsense. The film makers knew nothing, and cared very little, about sunshine. It was safety they were after. When they discovered the sunshine record it only confirmed the wisdom of their decision.
Before it became the established centre of American film making, Hollywood had been discovered twice by roving bands of film makers, first by David Horsley, who turned a wayside hotel into a film studio, and later by the Selig Polyscope Company, which drifted into Los Angeles round about 1907, and stayed to make pictures on a vacant building " lot " behind a Chinese laundry. Hobart Bosworth, American stage veteran, was in the neighbourhood at the time recuperating from a bad illness, and the Selig director, remembering his implied if not implicit instructions to seize whatever opportunities presented themselves, bethought himself that Bosworth might consent to play in a picture, not so much for the money (which was pitifully small in those days compared with New York stage stars' salaries), but to enliven the enforced idleness of his convalescence.
Bosworth turned the offer down almost out of hand ; he reiterated the old assertion that, to a stage star, an appearance in a film was a tacit admission of failure, but the Selig men had become accustomed to receiving no for an answer and then going back later to see if they could get the sentence revised. Accordingly they went back to Bosworth, and, after assuring him that no one who mattered would ever see the film, managed to sign him for a few days' work.
A noble snow-white horse trekked across the Alkali Desert (which did duty for the plains of Egypt) and deposited its imperial Roman rider on the steps of a lavish Eastern temple built of canvas on a plot