Motion Picture Production Encyclopedia (1950)

PRODUCTION ENCYCLOPEDIA THE MOTION PICTURE COMMUNITY The motion picture community, usually but not accurately called Hollywood, is the 25,000 artists, artisans, executives, clerks, mechanics, laborers and others who work in the studios and allied industries scattered over a 90square-mile area in Southern California. The motion picture community is the studios, each in itself a small community with streets, warehouses, police, firemen, carpenter and machine shops, dressmakers, library, power plants, cafe, barber shop, theaters, hospitals. The motion picture community is where the studios are: Hollywood proper, a Los Angeles urban district, houses Paramount, RKORadio, Columbia, Samuel Coldwyn, Nassour, Monogram, General Service, Motion Picture Center, California, Eagle-Lion, Charlie Chaplin and Fox-Western; Warner Brothers and Walt Disney are in Burbank, 20 miles from Culver City, home of Metro-Coldwyn-Mayer and RKO-Pathe; in West Los Angeles, toward Santa Monica, is 20th Century-Fox, and Universal-International and Republic sprawl on the banks of the Los Angeles River in the San Fernando Valley. The motion picture community is where the people live, in an area more wide-spread than the studios. A film musician lives on his chicken ranch in Chatsworth, 20 miles from Hollywood and Vine. An actress and her architect husband live on a boat on Balboa Bay, 50 miles down the coast. Some live in apartments in the typical city environment of Hollywood; some live in villa-like houses cemented to the faces of nearby hills. Sixty-six per cent live in their own homes. The people of the community are as varied as is possible in a group of this size. For every performer imaged on film, 1 5 non-actors work behind the cameras. The thousands of studio employees have 276 occupations and are affiliated with 43 unions and guilds. Outside the studios are the allied industries, the film laboratories, property houses, trained animal compounds, transportation firms, research agencies, catering companies, camera and lighting equipment makers. Like the people of other communities, the people of motion pictures are rich and poor, clever and ordinary, noble and base, as frail and as strong as any American group. Seventy-nine per cent are married; 70 per cent never have been divorced; 59 per cent have children. More than half have worked in the industry more than 1 5 years. Seventy-five per cent graduated from high school, compared with the national average of 27 per cent. This community is the first place in the world where actors could live in permanent homes, and they work conscientiously at being home-makers and citizens. Within the studios they and their non-acting co-workers raise charity funds through a unique, pioneering agency called the Permanent Charities Committee, and through this agency production employees have contributed more than $1 1 ,000,000 in nine years. In addition to giving this money to national and local agencies, motion picture people support their own welfare organization, the Motion Picture Relief Fund. And a public service organization called the Hollywood Coordinating Committee enlists the talent of screen, stage and radio for free patriotic and charitable events. Outside the studios, picture people are active in the communities in which they live and exercise their citizenship. They work in the PTA. More than 80 per cent of them voted in a recent congressional election. At the Hollywood Presbyterian Church, largest of its denomination in the world, one actor is an active member of the music committee and another is a deacon. At Hollywood Christian Church an actress teaches Sunday school. An actor is a board member of Westwood Community Church, near the campus of UCLA. A survey of a representative group of film employees showed that 61 per cent attended church. The motion picture community started in 1908 in downtown Los Angeles, where Col. William N. Selig converted a mansion into a studio and filmed "In the Sultan's Power," first complete movie made in Los Angeles. The community has grown into the heart of a business enterprise whose 18,000 theaters in this country gross one and a third billion dollars a year. It has spread over the world taking with it the story of America. It has introduced electric refrigerators to Africans and electric heaters to Eskimos. It has shown the samba to the Siamese and the jungle to Flatbush. And it has lowered the walls of the world to take concepts of freedom where freedom had never been known. LXXIX