CHAPTER VI
PIONEER DAYS OF THE MOVIES
Tounderstand 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 rimthe 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 theriver, 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 bustlingmining 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 andlawlessness 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 threeprices 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 fellowswith the grub-stake and a thirst for sudden wealth.
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.
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.
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.
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 bytheir 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 offpart 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 roadmakers, 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 photographyis 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 whowas handicapped by knowing little about motion pictures, and the enmity of the fellow whose job he might eventually get, besides. OneSaturday Evening Postcontributor 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 alittle 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-upsthat 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 experimentalmonths, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.