Hollywood

Fülszöveg

If the sun shined all year in New Jersey, the
movie people might never have left for Cali-
fornia. But in 1911 movies needed daylight
and a warm outdoors, summer, winter, and
fall. So that year a company of men and
women—all enthusiastic, some talented,
many extraordinarily beautiful—left for an
obscure suburb of a middling West Coast
city called Los Angeles. They rented a road-
house and dubbed it a studio. In the space
of a single decade New Jersey would still be
New Jersey, but suburban Hollywood would
become the movie capital of the world.
And the men and women from New Jersey
would become idols in a sun-drenched
realm of enchantment, a magic kingdom—
or so the movie-going public was made to
imagine. Nelson H. Evans, a Los Angeles
photographer of the teens and early twen-
ties, saw it rather differently: rambling, ram-
shackle studios cobbled together of planks
and tar paper; frantic directors, cameramen,
and actors making pictures on the ordinary... Tovább

Fülszöveg

If the sun shined all year in New Jersey, the
movie people might never have left for Cali-
fornia. But in 1911 movies needed daylight
and a warm outdoors, summer, winter, and
fall. So that year a company of men and
women—all enthusiastic, some talented,
many extraordinarily beautiful—left for an
obscure suburb of a middling West Coast
city called Los Angeles. They rented a road-
house and dubbed it a studio. In the space
of a single decade New Jersey would still be
New Jersey, but suburban Hollywood would
become the movie capital of the world.
And the men and women from New Jersey
would become idols in a sun-drenched
realm of enchantment, a magic kingdom—
or so the movie-going public was made to
imagine. Nelson H. Evans, a Los Angeles
photographer of the teens and early twen-
ties, saw it rather differently: rambling, ram-
shackle studios cobbled together of planks
and tar paper; frantic directors, cameramen,
and actors making pictures on the ordinary
streets of a sleepy town; Keystone Kops and
bathing beauties; the matinee gods playing
ball on the beach, the goddesses hanging out
the wash or descending the back-porch
stairs; D. W Griffith wolfing oatmeal at a stu-
dio lunch counter; hopefuls posing nude for
the "art" photos they believed might—some-
day somehow—make them stars.
Here are Tom Mix and Douglas Fairbanks,
Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, Gloria
Swanson and Theda Bara, all hard at work
with naive intensity a delighted awareness
that they were the first of the first, adored by
a vast public, and paid (some of them)
awfully well.
Never before published in book form,
these sumptuously reproduced photographs
are a unique testament to the imagination
and skill of one of the first of Hollywood's
legion of photographers. Often exuberant,
frequently haunting, the images here evoke
an industry built upon fantasy and
heartbreak.
Kevin Brownlow, the internationally
famous film historian, sets the scene in his
introduction, which traces Hollywood's story
up to the arrival of the movies and describes
the setting in which the pioneers worked.
John Kobal prefaces each of the book's nine
sections, drawing extensively on the words
of the era's survivors, and provides detailed
captions that illuminate the photographs.
Kobal ends his story with the end of Holly-
wood's innocence: the sensational scandals
that exploded around Fatty Arbuckle and
Mary Miles Mintner, wrecking their careers
and changing the movie capital's image
forever.
Hollywood: The Years of Innocence magi-
cally recaptures the look and feeling of this
moment in movie history, a world that was all
youth and joy where men were transformed
into boyish gods, and where new-made god-
desses wore gingham; where it seemed the
sun would never stop shining.
With 226 illustrations and a map
Jacket photographs: Mary Pickford
(front) and Bessie Love (back). Vissza