Made In America Read Free Page B

In 1912 a studio called Essanay invited fans to come up with a better name. The winning entry was photoplay. It never caught on as a word for the pictures, but it did become the name of a hugely successful magazine. 9 (Hollywood’s curious disdain of the word movies is reflected in the decidedly inflated title of its most vaunted institution: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)
    As movies became increasingly sophisticated they developed an argot to describe the new production techniques – close-up (1913), to pan (1915), fade-in and fade-out (1918), dissolve (1920), trailers (early 1920s), and captions (1907), subtitles or titles (1913) for the frames of dialogue or explication that were inserted into the film at intervals to explain the action. Some were used so often that they passed into the language as stock phrases, notably ‘comes the dawn’ and ‘meanwhile back at the ranch’. 10 Trailers were so called because in the early days they followed, or trailed, the main film. Many other movie words were taken from the stage. Slapstick was a vaudeville term. It described two sticks that were literally slapped together off-stage to accentuate an onstage pratfall ( prat being an old slang term for the buttocks). Ham actor, first recorded in 1875, alludes to the practice of lesser performers having to use ham fat rather than cold cream to remove their make-up. Soon a second-rate actor was known as a hamfatter; by 1902 he was just a ham. Grips, the term for scenery shifters, was also originally a theatrical term.They were so called because they gripped the sets and props when they moved them.

    By 1925 the movies had become not only America’s most popular form of entertainment, but its fifth biggest industry, and people everywhere dreamed of making it big in Hollywood. How a dusty, misnamed southern California hamlet that never had much to do with the making of movies became indelibly fixed in the popular consciousness as the home of the entertainment industry is a story that takes a little telling.
    Let’s start with the name. Hollywood never had any holly or even much wood to speak of. Originally called Cahuenga Valley, it was principally the site of a ranch owned by a Mr and Mrs Harvey Henderson Wilcox. The more romantic name came after Mrs Wilcox, on a trip back east, fell into a conversation with a stranger on a train and was so taken with the name of her new acquaintance’s summer home, Hollywood, that she decided to rename the ranch. That was in 1887, and in the general course of things that would very probably have been that. Hollywood would have been an anonymous piece of semi-arid real estate waiting to be swallowed up by Los Angeles.
    But between 1908 and 1913 something else happened. Many small independent film companies began moving to southern California, among them the Selis Company, the Nestor Film Company, Biograph and Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios (from which of course would eventually come the Keystone Kops movies). Partly they were drawn by the weather, which would permit year-round filming without a lot of expensive lighting. (Early ‘studios’, if it’s not too much to call them that, were mostly in the open air, with even interior scenes shot on stages that had backdrops but no roofs.) More crucially, they were also trying to escape the threats, legal and physical, of the Motion Pictures PatentsCompany, a consortium of eight studios led (inevitably) by Thomas A. Edison. The MPPC had been trying for some years to gain monopoly control of the movie business and had developed increasingly aggressive tactics to encourage competitors to join the consortium and pay its hefty licensing fees. Its idea of exploratory negotiations was to send in a party of thugs with baseball bats. Hence the appeal of a locale two thousand miles away on another coast.
    Only one of the studios actually set up in Hollywood, the Nestor Film Company in 1911. Locals were so upset at the sudden appearance of