by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Early in 1922, the powerful Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, a major force in boosting the development of the Angel City and its environs, launched a monthly magazine called Southern California Business to bring more attention to the region to subscribers and other readers. The Homestead’s collection has six single issues and a bound volume of a dozen spanning from May 1923 to August 1929 and, while we have featured the January 1926 issue before and will certainly look to highlight others in future posts, we are returning to that issue because of a particular article of interest.
It concerns “Why Movies Will Stay in Hollywood” and was penned by Harry D. Brown (1880-1952), president of Cinema Studios Supply Corporation. Brown was a native of the Atlantic City, New Jersey area and long worked as an electrician in the famed seaside resort city, while also serving in the Spanish-American War, achieving the rank of corporal. How he migrated to Los Angeles is not known, but he found work in the rapidly growing film industry and an obituary for him stated “he was credited with being the first to light an indoor set—on a Charlie Chaplin film.”
By 1918, Brown was working for Universal Studios and lived on the Universal City lot, supervising the burgeoning studio’s lighting for filming on set and on location. Being a deputy federal forest ranger and having the requisite training, he was also Universal’s fire chief and oversaw such projects as the dynamiting of a portion of the adjacent Los Angeles River to divert water flow away from vulnerable sections of studio property.
When the local lodge of the Brotherhood of the Protective Order of Elks, of which Brown was a member, hosted Los Angeles’ first electrical pageant, with lighted floats and other elements, in 1921 he was the chair of the event. Also a member of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, known now simply as Shriners International, he oversaw another well-known electrical pageant held by the Los Angeles lodge in 1925 (the year he mounted a failed campaign for the City Council.) For info on a Shriners electrical pageant in 1929, check out this post on this blog.
With his stellar reputation for providing electrical services to Universal and, before that for the Hollywood and Metro studios, Brown and several associates, in March 1923, formed Cinema Studios Supply Corporation specifically to furnish lighting equipment for studio and local filming, as well as arc lights for industry-related events. He appears to have run the business for about four years, but, when he mounted an elaborate electrical pageant featuring Hollywood stars in his native Atlantic City in 1927, he learned that it was a violation of a city ordinance to sell tickets to such an event on the famed Boardwalk and he lost $90,000 on the venture.
Though Brown left the company and found work for Howard Hughes, as the aircraft tycoon formed his film production company, and oversaw the complex lighting for the extravagant premiere of the well-known 1930 picture Hell’s Angels, financial and health issues led Brown to retire in 1935. At his death, the Los Angeles Times referred to him as “one of the pioneers in the development of film studio lighting techniques and electrical apparatus.” Not only was he credited for that Chaplin film set up, but Brown was recognized for establishing Universal’s electrical department.
To begin his article, Brown offered his definition of movies as “a temperamental plant of the specie genus entertainus” with a native in this region, but “found in sparse growths” in Europe and New York City, while it “thrives best under ideal climatic conditions and lives on co-operation.” He equated the connection between film and Hollywood as analogous as diamonds to South Africa, rubber from India, cotton and the southern United States and automobiles with Detroit and he identified four key characteristics as to why the movie industry was wedded to this region: “equipment, brains, climate and habit.” With respect to weather, he noted that a director or producer could set a schedule well in advance because of a relative certainty in the predictability of local conditions.
Jumping to the auto industry, though, Brown wondered about a hypothetical move from the Michigan metropolis, noting the moving of workers and equipment and the construction of many structures, assuming “the cost would make the foreign debt look puny” and asking “would motor cars be cheaper or better?” if such a transition was to take place. He downplayed “all this periodical hullabaloo about the studios moving East or anywhere else” with the same query about whether movies or their manufacturers would be the better for it. He insisted,
The task of moving the film industry would be staggering and the cost appalling. Its reorganization in a new field almost impossible.
Allowing for the fact that the views that there were potential motion picture stars “in every capital and hamlet in the country,” Brown also opined that the “periodical hullabaloo” was also based on “the ever-fascinating lure of easy money,” the “local pride in the scenic grandeurs” of other locales and “the unexampled enchantment” of film.
Returning to his role in the industry, Brown offered that a prime reason why movie-making would stay in the Golden State was because “hydro-electric power . . . supplies the blood that courses through the veins of the great cinema plants” and that “artificial lighting has made the film industry the world’s greatest user of this latent energy.” Southern California, including the increasingly powerful Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles, was “the cheapest and the most reliable source.”
Brown also mentioned “the many hundreds of specialized electricians, trained to the peculiar requirements of the cinema,” while adding that “there are the chief engineers, creatures of motion pictures, and to be found nowhere else in the world.” These latter, moreover, were invaluable because they were “capable of meeting the needs of the most fantastic screen story, be it rain, snow, wind, wrecks or whatnots.”
Turning back to the climate and the remarkable geographical diversity of greater Los Angeles and California broadly, Brown observed that “within easy reach of the studios are numerous locations which for sheer beauty or picturesqueness cannot be equaled anywhere.” These included snow-filled mountains that could easily stand in for Alaska or Switzerland; coastline alternately rugged or sandy that could mimic France or Maine; “deserts close at hand where the bleakness of the Sahara may be reproduced;” or plains suitable for westerns with cattle as parts of the plots. He went on to note that:
Within two hours of Hollywood there are small villages, seaside resorts, mountains, parks, lakes, a great city, a Chinatown, a Mexican quarter, magnificent residential sections, humble homes, incomparable boulevards. Within several hours the movie company can find itself “shooting” in old Mexico itself, in picturesque Tijuana, or in the great woods of Sequoia, or one of the many beautiful resorts along the coast, or the naval base of San Diego, or the Oriental splendors of Samarkand, or on the tinted mesas of Arizona, or great cattle ranches.
Beyond the locals, there was the preponderance of “abundant talent,” which Brown characterized as “the greatest aggregation of acting talent in the world” and comprised of those who were “tall and short, fat and slim, old and young, handsome and ugly, black and white or yellow.” With any possible character type available, he commented, “the telephone is the [open] sesame by which” such performers may readily be found “on short notice.”
Aside from humans, there were boundless representatives of the animal kingdom from ranches and farms, “even a farm of ostriches,” this being Cawston’s just outside Los Angeles city limits in South Pasadena, while “trained animals of every description are always and the beck and call of the picture maker,” including dogs, cats, skunks, mice, “and even trained insects” along with the captive residents of “two large zoos here,” these, presumably being Selig’s/Luna Park at Lincoln Park and Gay’s Lion Farm at El Monte.
Important, too, were “several monster prop houses” providing “almost any article of any description,” (see this recent news article on a local book prop establishment in trouble) while the studios maintained “big buildings housing elaborate props,” with his former employer, Universal, cited for possessing “the most unusual collection of firearms on earth” along with “every conceivable weapon in the history of mankind.” Brown further asserted that, with such instances, “even the world’s greatest museums cannot boast of their counterparts.” Studios also had elaborate sets reproducing locales from around the globe and from varied periods.
Whether it was furniture or clothing from varied eras, any kind of structure, and all manner of means of transportation, Brown claimed, “name it and you can find it in Hollywood and environs.” Plenty of airports and flying machines as well as “the greatest system of good roads in the entire world” were important both for material used in movies, as well as ease of access to locations for cost savings.
“Last, and far from least,” Brown predicted in his confidence that “movies will stay in Hollywood” was that “we can never overlook the much abused term—co-operation.” The state and county and city of Los Angeles and their denizens worked “with the makers of the celluloid drama in a manner worthy of the greatest single industry west of Chicago.” Without assistance from fire and police departments, business people, civic and social organizations and others making available buildings, highways and parks, it would be very challenging for the motion picture industry to be successful.
To show its appreciation, he added, with personal experience as noted above:
Charity benefits will always find a dazzling roster of stars, directors and writers on their programs, and the technical departments offer their equipment and their experience to make these performances the most unique and attractive in the world—possible only in Los Angeles.
For further proof . . . I may cite the unprecedented celebration of the Shriners last spring. Thirty-two portable gas-driven electric generators were lent by the industry, more than there is in the rest of the United States. The studios furnished elaborate floats, designed and built at great cost; screen celebrities turned [out] en masse and either worked or personally participated in the Masonic festivities.
After averring that the spectacle likely had no precedent, according to the “history business,” Brown concluded that “if California has the raw material and the natural advantages,” the obvious result was that “the general economic law governs and all is well.” Therefore, there was no doubt that “pictures will always be made here—because they can be made cheaper, quicker and better.” Any relocation would necessarily mean the relocation of a city and “you cannot pick up a city and move it with impunity.”
Brown, of course, could not foresee that the untrammeled growth of greater Los Angeles, increased costs of doing business, and competition from other areas in North America eager to cut into Hollywood’s dominance (even if generous tax incentives did not accrue to the benefit of the cities and states luring film producers), among other factors, weakened the force of his arguments. Atlanta, New York City, New Mexico, Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, and many other locations have siphoned significant business from this region.
Moreover, remarkable technological advances have also had a marked effect in recent years in the production of film, as well as television (another area that Brown likely could not foresee), and consuming entertainment on mobile devices and at home through multiple platforms are among other factors that have considerably affected the industry. As to forecasting where Hollywood and the film industry are heading, management consultant Peter Drucker is said to have uttered: “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”
Still, Brown’s article is an interesting one, though he certainly had no indication that his own personal fortune and future would be fraught with financial and professional challenges that led him to retire in under a decade, at age 55. In any case, we can confidently predict future posts with content from other issues of Southern California Business, so keep a lookout for those.