PIONEER DAYS OF THE MOVIES
To understand the movies, and why so many of them are no better than
they are, and why and when and how they are improving, we have to
know something about motion-picture beginnings. And to understand the
beginnings of the movies in the country, in the days when the new
experiment began to grow to the proportions of a real industry, we can
turn to California.
Not to Hollywood, where so many of the movies are made—but to the
Sierras; for in the California gold rush of ’49, and the years that
followed, we find a strange and vivid parallel.
Bakersfield, California, lies in a great bowl of plain, so vast it
seems flat. On one side of the city is the Kern River, with countless
oil derricks dotting the prairie-like country and stretching away
towards the uplands that rim the mountains. To the south, the country
is highly cultivated, flat as your hand, with beautiful shade-trees,
and green fields and irrigation ditches, and growing crops—alfalfa,
melons, grains, and fruits. A gray ribbon of asphalt boulevard
stretches out from the city, straight as an arrow for some sixteen
miles, and then with a single slight angle sixteen miles more, to the
mountains towards Los Angeles, where it climbs up into the Tejon Pass.
Along this strip of boulevard all the cars in the world seem to be
passing; dusty trucks from the desert, the great humming busses of the
El Dorado long-distance stage-line, shiny new touring-cars of the city
people, mud-stained motors from the trans-continental highways, and
innumerable Fords.
Coming into Bakersfield from the south, along that long stretch of
straight perfect boulevard, you get the effect of an established
civilization equal to that found anywhere on the surface of the earth.
Bakersfield itself, showing some signs still of the young, quick-grown
city, is up-to-date, bustling, modern. The oil fields across the
river, with their smoke and grime and activity, testify to the grinding
wheels of industry.
But if you go a couple of miles out of the city, following the Kern
River upstream toward the distant gulch where it leaves the mountains,
you come to the great expanses of rolling plain-like upland, still
almost as it was when only the Indians traversed its seemingly aimless
footpaths, still as it was when the Spaniards jingled across it to
their isolated haciendas, still as it was when the early gold-seekers
invaded the country from north and south, in the days of ’49.
From Bakersfield you can reach the gold diggings either by going to the
nearest mountains direct, or by following up along the Kern River. Once
I drove a machine almost to the top of Greenhorn Mountain, that towers
some five thousand feet out of the blunt Sierra range that overlooks
the plain and the tiny city far below. There, amid the flowers and
grasses that carpet the ground beneath black oak and sugar pine, were
relics of the old days, when men found gold in every hill.
We visited Greenhorn City—once a bustling mining camp, but now only a
ghost-like street of mossgrown ruins among the trees, with new growth
pushing its way through the rotting boards that were once dance hall or
cabin, storehouse or saloon.
Near one clearing, half a mile away, was the remnant of a miner’s cabin
only lately fallen to the ground. The old man who lived there had
buried a sack of gold-dust, and later been unable to find it again.
For years he lived on at the mountain shack; lonely after the others
had gone, searching with a lantern at night for the spot where he had
buried his fortune, until his mind was entirely gone.
From Greenhorn we dropped down to the upper Kern River valley, shut
in the hills, where we found other rough little towns of bygone
days—not yet deserted, because of the valley crops and ranges; Bodfish,
Isabella, and Kernville, all much as they were in the years of Bret
Harte, when men went mad for California gold.
And now, before comparing the early boom days of the film industry to
the rush of a newly discovered gold field, with all its roughness and
lawlessness and glamor and adventure and sudden wealth, let us imagine
ourselves, for a moment, in Bodfish, in the early days.
Gold is being panned in nearly every neighboring stream. Mostly, the
big “strikes” are being made haphazard, according to who has the best
luck. In Foaming Gulch Big Bill, the butcher from Maine, is panning out
a dozen ounces a day. From the far-away Bumpus Basin, the other side of
the range, come reports of a new bonanza, and several of the boys are
pulling up stakes and striking out for Bumpus. No one has ever heard
of Bakersfield yet; there is no such place. Nor has any one thought of
oil; much less of crops. But Buckeye Flat is already famous, because
that is where Razzer Jones, who used to run the National Barber Shop
at Altoona, has taken a fortune from the ford of Buckeye Creek. On the
other hand, the three sky-pilots, Billy Williams, Goose-eye Toney, and
Preacher Wills, have all failed even to find color in Poso Creek, and
are thinking of going back to their chosen calling once more.
Easy come, easy go. Big Bill is paying three prices for everything he
buys, and gambling away nearly all the rest of his dust at the Faro
layout in the Buckeye saloon, also far and favorably known as the
Life-Saving Station and Thirst Parlor.
It’s no unusual thing for the stage to be held up on the River Road,
and about every once in so often there’s an informal but enthusiastic
party among the buckeye-trees on Hang Man’s Hill.
Next, let us turn to the beginnings of the motion picture industry. We
find the same conditions that made possible sudden wealth and sudden
death, hold-ups and hangings in the Kern River valley, seventy-odd
years ago.
Impossible? Let us see.—First, who goes to the gold country, anyway, in
the first mad rush?
Not the fellows with steady jobs, who have already made good in
their own particular field. They have too much at stake. The amateur
prospectors are recruited, first of all, from the ranks of those
who have everything to gain and little to lose—the rolling stones,
the lovers of pure adventure, the gamblers, the fellows with the
grub-stake and a thirst for sudden wealth.
[Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._
WRECKING A RACING-CAR FOR SPORT.
To smash an expensive automobile for motion-picture purposes is
nothing unusual. In this picture, in addition to the two movie
cameras, note the “still” camera at the right. “Stills” are usually
taken of every important scene.]
[Illustration: _Courtesy Goldwyn Pictures Corporation._
GETTING A RISKY BIT OF ACTION.
The dust behind the motorcycle indicates the speed at which it was
going. The actor, a “professional double” accustomed to taking
chances for extra pay, risked his neck in being thrown over the
standing car.]
This may seem a little rough, when we apply it to the great movie
industry, but it is the truth. That is, it is the truth about the movie
beginnings, the first years.
For instance, there were a couple of men who did reporting, off and on,
for a Los Angeles newspaper. They drifted into motion-picture work when
the first studios came into Hollywood—because they had no steady jobs
to keep them from trying out this new gamble. But the star reporters
and the influential “desk” men on the paper didn’t have any time to
fool away on the new wildcat schemes. Only within the last few years
have they been won over, here and there, by big offers.
The first money to be invested in the movies did not come from banks or
bankers, or other leading financiers or investors; for the most part
it came from druggists who had just sold out, or dry-goods clerks who
had laid aside enough to make a little plunge, or shoe salesmen who had
been left a modest fortune by their Aunt Maria and itched to see it
turn to sudden wealth.
The get-rich-quick instinct was at the bottom of most of the early
movie money, just as it was in the golden California of Bret Harte.
Why, you may wonder, if all the early movie investment was so
foolhardy, were so many fortunes won instead of lost?
The answer is that for the most part they were lost, and always have
been, both in the movies and in rushing to new gold fields. One picture
cost three-quarters of a million dollars to produce. The money was
invested by hundreds of little stockholders, to whom the chance of
“getting into the movies on the ground floor” seemed too good to lose.
But the company went bankrupt, and the assets, including the film, were
bought in for $20,000.
Those losses are the things we rarely hear about. It is the successes
that are recounted. Mike Maginnity, who took all his sister’s money
and started for San Francisco in ’49, turned up again, dead broke, ten
years later. He had made one or two little strikes, over a half a dozen
years, and used the money to pay off part of the debts he had already
run up—perhaps at the Buckeye Saloon. That was all—and we never heard
about him.
But we did hear about the big fellows who struck it yellow, and the
piles they made. And you may be sure that, as Mr. Kipling says, the
tales lost no fat in the telling.
Up to the present time, the producers or “owners” in motion pictures
are mostly just the run of little fellows who have happened to land on
their feet, and made the most of it.
And, since in making pictures, as in everything else, the final product
can be no better than the brains at the top of the organization, we
have had to wait for better pictures until, little by little, the movie
game assumed greater stability, and began to attract men of larger
caliber, with better ideas of just what was really worth while, and
what was not.
Don’t imagine for a moment that Bodfish or Isabella was ever run as
well, or had as good a school or as good streets, or as good houses,
or as much real comfort, as your own home town. The best lawyers, and
the best school-teachers, and the best carpenters, and the best road
makers, were still in the East. Even the best saloon-keepers, for the
most part, had not made the journey. Only the best gamblers, and best
prospectors, and some of the best fighters and adventurers, were there.
Just as with the men on the Los Angeles paper, the first writers
to leave the comparatively sure living of their chosen branch of
work—whether newspaper-reporting or novel-writing, or contributing to
magazines—were not the best. Mostly, indeed, far from it. It was the
fellow afraid of being squeezed out who was glad of a chance to pick up
a few dollars at the new movie game—packing his kit, as it were, and
lighting out into the unknown towards the new gold fields.
And as with authors, so with artists.
Photographers were something of an exception, for the motion-picture
camera, from the very first, offered more possibilities than did the
“still” camera previously used.
Accordingly, photography in the movies has been ahead of all other
artistic branches of work; it was the first to reach a comparatively
high level. To-day motion picture photography is uniformly good,
and often exceptionally fine, while the writing end of the game, and
the editing—in fact, nearly all the other essential branches of film
story-telling—are still busy “catching up.”
Also, to be sure, the principle did not apply particularly to
electricians or carpenters or other laborers, to whom a day’s work
was a day’s work, with a union wage, likely, at whatever odd job it
happened to be.
Can you see the results of this El Dorado process of selection? The
first to enter the field, good, bad, and indifferent, but mostly a
pretty poor average, just as with the gold-seekers, got the experience,
and the best jobs, and here and there the big money. When the game
developed, and assumed enormous and stable proportions, and attracted
the best writers and the best artists and the best editors and all the
rest—as it is beginning to do now—they found all the important jobs
nailed down. It became a slow, uphill job of displacing experienced
mediocrity, the man who could never think or rise above a certain
level, with inexperienced excellence—the fellow who was handicapped
by knowing little about motion pictures, and the enmity of the fellow
whose job he might eventually get, besides. One _Saturday Evening Post_
contributor went around from studio to studio in Southern California at
one time, trying to get a job, writing scenarios. He had a chance to
cool his heels in little ante-rooms for hours together. Finally he gave
up and went back to magazine work. The movie jobs were all taken.
To parallel Big Bill, there is a movie producer here and one there,
striking it comparatively rich—spending the money as it comes in;
sooner or later, much as he makes, he will probably run out of luck and
drop out of the game.
There is a parallel of the three sky-pilots on Poso Flat, in the better
class of investors and purchasers and experimenters, who have come into
motion pictures with the idea of both improving and “uplifting” them,
and eventually lost out. The “League for Better Pictures,” and a dozen
more. The industry wasn’t quite ready for them—and perhaps, too, they
were a little too adventurous themselves, and weren’t quite equal to
the job they were tackling.
There is even a parallel between the old man who buried his dust
and forgot where he hid it, and some of the movie producers. One
motion-picture concern was owned by a man who had been a druggist and
sold out. He invested the two thousand dollars or so he possessed in
making one of the first “Westerns,” and in the great sweep of movie
good-luck that took good and bad alike to success at certain fortunate
periods, saw his $2,000 turn to $20,000. So he invested that again—and
so on. Then, as a millionaire, he had to watch his pictures lose money,
and his fortune dwindle as unaccountably as the money had come in. He
hunted everywhere for new stories and new helpers, and tried this and
that—and still his pictures lost money.
The fact is, he did not have the ability to keep up with the
procession; soon, in a financial sense, he must die, and the shack that
he built fall down and be forgotten.
And there is a parallel between the hold-ups that marked the wild
banditry of the Sierras, and the loose methods of the early movie
producers and workers,—stealing a scenario here, selling worthless
stock there, and all the rest.
And just as in San Francisco, after the gold fever, the Vigilantes
had to come along and try to straighten things out without the old
machinery of the law, so recently we have seen the censorship movement,
that has tried to make the movies clean up, whether they wanted to or
not.
But the most striking parallel of all is in the forgotten towns of the
Kern River valley, and the country now opening up and so wonderfully
fertile and productive around Bakersfield. The old gold rush is over,
for the most part, in the movies as with California and the Klondike.
Greenhorn City, the old mining town of the first gold-seekers, is
hardly more than a memory—as are the old lurid, unreal movie melodramas
of the first years, that drew crowds simply because they showed people
and things in motion. Isabella and Bodfish still survive, but nobody
pays much attention to them any more. At Bakersfield, though, oil has
been discovered and developed, and the great farming country is at last
being really cultivated—just as in the movies the big “better-class”
pictures have at last been found to pay more than the old melodramatic
gold-getters.
We can compare the old-time films, with their impossible situations and
their innumerable “stars” to the old gold nuggets and lawless claims
of ’49; the pictures of Douglas Fairbanks and Griffith, and some of
the rest, correspond to the oil development, let us say, of the second
period; and the final stage of all, the development of the fertile
fields around Bakersfield through good sense and hard work, is even now
only just beginning to come to the movies, in the educational field,
with scientific films, and films for the schoolrooms, and in the really
high-grade product of the new, hard-working, clear-thinking movie
producers who are gradually beginning to force their way into the field.
Now-a-days one can talk with the straightforward business-like
president of a $300,000 concern just formed to make, after a few
experimental months, educational pictures for classroom use; while
Yale University is lending its name and prestige to the production
of historical films that will cost $150,000 or more of as honorable
dollars as can be found in the whole country.
Yes, in the movies, as in the Sierras, Greenhorn City will soon be
hardly more than a memory.
[Illustration: _Courtesy Famous Players._
ACTRESS, OR A VICTIM OF AN ACCIDENT?
Scenes in a well-made photoplay, such as this from “Saturday Night,”
are sometimes almost as realistic as news reels.]
[Illustration: _Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation._
GETTING A REAL “THRILLER.”
Movie actors are called upon to do many nerve-wracking things. Even
though the danger from the approaching locomotive can be reduced by
slow-cranking, there is enough left.]