by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Previous posts here in the “That’s A Wrap” series dealing with the film industry prior to 1930 and focusing on issues of NOW, the bi-monthly magazine issued by West Coast Theatres, a large chain of venues that was purchased by motion picture studio owner William Fox, have noted that West Coast rose to be the largest such entity in greater Los Angeles during rapid expansion in a burgeoning industry through the Roaring Twenties.
In summer 1925, Fox, who began his namesake corporation a decade prior and then went into the theater sector, purchased a large block of West Coast stock and hoped to merge the two enterprises. As sound was being developed, including Fox’s own Movietone system, which debuted with the 1927 picture, Sunrise and included the first sound newsreel, Fox-Movietone News, he intensified his efforts and secured the joining of West Coast and Fox in early 1928. In the fall, Fox completed a new studio, called Movietone City or Fox Movietone City.
By early 1929, Fox’s massive investments and confidence in the future were such that, when it came to the theatre side, the 21 January 1929 edition of NOW had, as its front cover image, a striking green and black image of a Fox West Coast venue rising from the planet and the statement “WEST COAST THEATRES SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD.”
The ebullience of the cover was reinforced in the “Personal Talks” page of Fox President Harold B. Franklin (1889-1941), who began his entertainment industry career in 1914 and operated theaters in his native New York City, including for the Publix/Paramount chain for Adolph Zukor. In 1927, he relocated to Los Angeles to take over the operation of West Coast. His contribution to this issue tied the growth of the chain to that of the region:
The Pacific slope is the new country, the county of growing organizations, the country of youth . . . West Coast Theatres is growing with the Pacific Coast—side by side—step by step . . . The eyes of the world are on the Pacific slope, not of America alone, but the entire world . . . With the true pioneering spirit, it has been necessary for West Coast to erect theatres in many communities strategically and in anticipation of the future. We must chart a course for ourselves where progress, vigilance and resourcefulness are the watchwords. The position that West Coast Theatres holds on the Pacific coast imposes a sense of responsibility and it must continue to be our purpose to interpret the public demands for entertainment, guided by the best practices.
For Franklin, it was essential that the chain grow in tandem with that of the coast, including examples such as Boulder Dam and his assertion that “there is more colonization” there than elsewhere in the nation. He avowed “that we have grasped the coming of talking pictures and recognized their worth to the public,” with this being evidence of flexibility and that West Coast was “capable of changing when changed are vital.”
While the onset of sound film was determined to be “dramatic,” Franklin added that this was no more so “than have been the truly magic changes that have come to our home—the Pacific Coast—during the last comparatively few years.” Along with other broader “sweeping developments,” he declared that “the map of West Coast Theatres will be altered in keeping with” those changes. He continued that “no city, state or section of the country inhabited by live, aggressive people—ever stands still” as was the case with any person or organization of like qualities.
This said, he proclaimed,
Together we will march on to greater good and glory—the Pacific Coast and West Coast Theatres. Truly we are sitting on top of the world!
The highlighted post at the beginning of this one, featuring an October 1928 edition of NOW, briefly mentioned a sales campaign comprised of selling scrip books to West Coast patrons for their use at businesses and stores near theaters during the Christmas holiday season. In this issue, prizes were announced for those theaters and their managers who were most successful in meeting quotas before the promotion ended on the 5th.
It was reported that the Southern California Division, headed by Harry C. Arthur, Jr. who’d worked with West Coast under its previous ownership with the Gore brothers and Sol Lesser before Fox, and also led theaters in the Pacific Northwest, “made a clean sweep of the five major prizes in the circuit-wide Scrip sales campaign.”
Originally, $1,000 in prizes were established for this incentive program, but Franklin added $250 to the pot, and the five theatres that took top honors were, in order, the California in Venice; the Criterion in Santa Monica; San Bernardino’s California; the Metropolitan in Hermosa Beach; and Bakersfield’s California, with monies ranging from $250 down to $100. Eleven other venues earned prizes ranging from $100 to $25, with three each in San Francisco and Los Angeles, two each in Portland and Seattle and another in Southern California.
Other content in the publication includes praise heaped upon the Fox production In Old Arizona, which premiered on Christmas Day and which went into general release the day prior to the issuing of the newsletter. The movie, based on a short story by O. Henry, was to have Raoul Walsh, who played John Wilkes Booth in the controversial 1915 The Birth of a Nation, as star and director, but, after shooting some early scenes in Utah, he lost an eye in a traffic accident while returning to Los Angeles to continue work, and was replaced by Irving Cummings, who ended up being nominated for an Oscar.
The picture, which was the first Western sound film and the first talkie to include outdoor locations, garnered other Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture (which it lost) and for lead actor Warner Baxter, whose work as the bandit, the Cisco Kid, led to his reprising the role in four subsequent movies. The film is preserved and went into the public domain as of the first of this year.
The article quoted the industry trade paper, the Film Daily, as observing that the movie “demonstrates that far from having exhausted the potentialities of sound, it is the beginning only that has been touched,” as recording captured music, the lowing of cows and the whip of a stage coach driver.” It was added that “the picture has suspense, comedy, charm, sex appeal, passion that flames” and acting by Baxter and co-stars Dorothy Burgess and Edmund Lowe.
Elsewhere in the issue, it was noted that the film was one that “has a strong appeal to Latin-Americans” and this was emphasized by the reprinting of a flyer in Spanish for the Criterion Theatre in Los Angeles. The promotional piece exhorted viewers “Hear them talk in Spanish!” and claimed that there were stars of New York, Madrid and México City in the production, of which ”22,000 Mexicans and Spaniards have seen it.”
Another short section concerned a card handed to patrons of the Criterion asking what advertising got patrons to see the movie and asked what separated the film from other talkies, with the best 25 answers to that question to get a pair of free passes to In Old Arizona. It was recorded that “returns are interesting” and that, to date, word-of-mouth and newspaper sources were the most common, while “billboards are coming in for their share of honors, too.”
Separately, it was observed that In Old Arizona was a “record-smashing . . . all-talking outdoor romantic drama” that “played to capacity houses, breaking all existing box office figures” in Portland. Moreover, it was stated that a trio of editorials in Oregon newspapers
lauded William Fox for his daring in taking the motion picture camera into new fields, and for the unparalleled success he had in bringing to the public what is regarded as the greatest bit of entertainment every offered.
On 11 January, the Riverside Theatre opened in the city of that name east of Los Angeles as the latest West Coast venue. Two evening shows sold out with reservations made for $2 and it was averred that it “is one of the most beautiful structures in the world” and “fits into its picturesque surroundings as thought it had grown there, too,” along with ubiquitous oranges that made the city famous.
The featured picture was White Shadows in the South Seas, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production starring Monte Blue, who served as master of ceremonies for the debut, and Raquel Torres (born Paula Marie Osterman to a German father and Mexican mother), who played a Polynesian woman. Other notables who attended the theater’s opening were Sally Blane (whose sister was Loretta Young), Don Terry and John Steven McGroarty, author of The Mission Play who was likely included to speak to some historical connection with Riverside with the famous Mission Inn just a block or so away. The venue is now the Fox Performing Arts Center.
Franklin was further highlighted in the issue for his accuracy on predicting the film industry’s development during 1928, with the Fox West Coast leader quoted in Motion Picture News as prognosticating,
The New Year will in all likelihood show great progress in the synchronization of motion pictures and sound, and every important company will probably be engaged in the making of pictures with sound producing devices. Such apparatus will eventually replace questionable music played by orchestras is small theatres where capable instrumentalists are not available.
An interesting article concerned the “good gag” that was a publicity project called “Great Stage Season” highlighting live performances in West Coast Theatres venues, such as one in Sacramento featuring Mildred Harris, former wife of Charles Chaplin. The piece, however, warned that, even with more elaborate stage productions featuring the well-known team of Fanchon and Marco, theatre managers should remember “BUT DON’T LOSE SIGHT OF THE PICTURE ON YOUR SCREEN!” as being most essential for business.
Despite that, it was also noted that Al Jolson, whose films The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928) were early partial sound movies, was hired to perform for a week in February at Loew’s Warfield Theatre in San Francisco. The Lithuanian-born Asa Yoelson made his name as Al Jolson on vaudeville as both a comedian and blackface singer and was a huge star on Broadway before moving into movies. He deemed himself “The World’s Greatest Entertainer” and his success during the Roaring Twenties seemed to affirm it, though his fame faded during the following decade.
Franklin was quoted as saying that when the performer was at West Coast’s Metropolitan Theatre in Los Angeles “he was known only as a musical comedy star and a phonograph recording artist,” but his spectacular rise in film meant that
Today there is a new Jolson, a Jolson that is known—and loved—by every man, woman and child who attend the movies . . . True it is that there is only one Al Jolson. The American stage has never been able to discover and develop another personality as great . . . Theatregoers, the American people, are interested in Al Jolson; in the actor and in the man, in his doings off the stage and on. Jolson is a personality, an artist and, better still, a seasoned showman.
Another interesting piece in the newsletter concerned a fire that destroyed one of Paramount Studios’ sound stages, with the loss pegged at about $450,000, and the comment of First Vice-President Jesse L. Lasky, who affirmed that “production will continue exactly as scheduled” and added that the studio would “fulfill every contractual commitment made to exchanges and exhibitors.”
Lasky noted that production that was to take place on the newly-constructed stage would be moved to the existing ten stages because “the recording apparatus was housed in another building and was therefore not touched by the flames.” Moreover, he commented, “no negative or film of any kind was in the structure that the flames swept away, as all of this material is kept in the laboratories a mile from the studio.”
Adding that there was no provision for moving production to the Long Island studios where sound recording was recently added, Lasky stated “I was deeply touched during the fire when a delegation of directors and stars approached me and volunteered to work night shifts in order to carry the program through to completion on the older stages.” He continued that “this thoughtful offer” might be accepted “to be doubly sure that we are in a position to deliver all of our product on schedule.”
These included a half-dozen upcoming releases from 21 January to 11 March and including Richard Arlen and Mary Brian in The Man I Love; The Studio Murder Mystery; Buddy Rogers in Young Sinners, directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the few women helming films at the time; Clara Bow in The Saturday Night Kid; and untitled pictures starring George Bancroft (with Josef von Sternberg directing—this became Thunderbolt) and Adolphe Menjou, probably Fashions in Love. Beyond this, eight more talking pictures were to be finished in the first three months of the year for fall releases.
Finally, there was a sidebar noting that Franklin, at a department heads confab, related that, while “the primary aim of the organization is to make profit,” there was also the “obligation to service, because it is a great opportunity to be of service.” Elaborating, that West Coast head noted that “dramatic changes have taken place during the past year in the motion picture industry because of sound.” He asserted that the company “feels that sound in motion pictures is the greatest achievement of the industry since its inception” and he added,
The rapid expansion of sound in motion pictures has in some instances been the cause of some inferior product. However, such recent efforts as William Fox’s production “IN OLD ARIZONA,” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “THE BROADWAY MELODY,” Paramount’s “THE WOLF OF WALL STREET: and Warner Brothers’ “THE SINGING FOOL,” are but a faint indication of what the future holds in store, and all of these are outstanding entertainments and will establish new box office records. We must go forward with a spirit of understanding and co-operation—this is the true road of progress.
These issues of NOW in the Museum’s collection are interesting and informative artifacts relating to both the tremendous growth of the motion picture industry and the theatres which developed in tandem with it. We have a few more of these to share, so look for these as part of the “That’s A Wrap” series.