Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Qhapter V HOLLYWOOD— FIRST DAYS ON THE MOVIE LOT /^^K I STANCE is of small account in a city that owns ( II one car for every two and a half inhabitants, including c^~/ babies, and so the cinema studios have dispersed about the country to cheaper plots of land. Only one important studio, the Paramount, remains in the centre of Hollywood. Most of the others have drifted ten or fifteen miles into the country and have begun to build up centres of their own, such as Culver City round the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or Universal City round the studio of that name. In the widespreading firmament of Los Angeles and Hollywood the studios are comparatively as far apart as the sun from his satellites. Among the unending repetition of flamboyant domestic architecture, among the lodging-houses, bungalow courts, community dwellings, and so on, aping every architectural ingenuity or lunacy from the child's story-book Arabian Nights style to the mere painted wooden shack, the studios can hardly hope to strike any distinctive note. They may cover extensive areas of ground, but their fronts are hardly imposing. The M.G.M., false-fronted with Attic colonnades of plaster Corinthian, is noteworthy, since the Greek style has been little used in this warm corner of the Pacific coast, where perhaps the Greek would have been most in harmony. The De Mille studio, an overgrown colonial mansion, might easily be mistaken for a polytechnic school or an orphan asylum ; Charlie Chaplin's, in Staple Inn style, looks like a communal lodging-house — surely his sense of humour went awry this time — and the Paramount, a Californian develop [67]