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by Hilary Hallett


  112. “As a slav,” unnamed critic quoted in “The Transformation of Nazimova,” 672; “Our actresses,” “Hedda Gabler” 60.

  113. Frohman quoted in “Hedda Gabler,” 152. Frohman was a member of the Theatrical Syndicate, which controlled many of the nation’s most important theaters. On Hichens, see Mott, Golden Multitudes, 251–252, 325.

  114. Vanity Fair quoted in Lambert, Nazimova, 150, 158–165; Howe, “A Misunderstood Woman,” 128; “Nazimova Last of Great Stage Artistes.” War Brides (Lewis J. Selznick, 1916).

  115. New York Times quoted in Bodeen, “Nazimova,” 585. On replacing Bara with Nazimova, see Lambert, Nazimova, 190. On Bara’s decline, see Genini, Theda Bara, 79–87.

  116. On her terms with Metro, see Bodeen, “Nazimova,” 587; Lambert, Nazimova, 190. “Revolutionary”: see Howe, “A Misunderstood Woman,” 24–25, 120. “Aristocrat” and “rebel”: see Edwin Fredericks, “The Real Nazimova,” Photoplay (Feb. 1921): 128.

  117. “Superlative”: “Leading Photoplays,” Current Opinion (April 1918): 260. “Feminine sex,” Motion Picture Magazine, quoted in Lambert, Nazimova, 210.

  118. Most of Nazimova’s films have been lost or exist in fragments. I viewed Camille (Metro, 1921) on Warner Home Video; Salome (Nazimova Productions, 1923) on Video Yesteryear; and The Red Lantern (Nazimova Productions, 1919) at Women’s Film History Screening, MOMA, 2011. Other descriptions are taken from Bodeen’s filmography in “Nazimova,” 601–700; “Red Lantern,” Alla Nazimova Files, NYPL-TC.

  119. “The Red Lantern,” Photoplay (June 1919): 38–41, 113. On the film’s acclaim, see “Red Lantern,” Nazimova Files, NYPL-TC.

  120. “Chinese boy”: Howe, “A Misunderstood Woman,” 128; “friends are young girls”: Photoplay (May 1919), quoted in Lambert, Nazimova, 210; protégés: “Plays and Players,” Photoplay (Sept. 1919): 104.

  121. On the open secret of her lesbianism, see Lambert, Nazimova, 199, 249; Leider, Dark Lover, 137–147.

  122. Lawrence Hutton, Plays and Players (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1875), 158. On Camille’s popularity, see Stanton, Camille and Other Plays, xxvi; Hamilton, “The Career of Camille.”

  123. Advertisement, Exhibitors Herald (Nov. 19, 1921): 23

  124. On Germany’s dominance of the art film scene in the 1920s, see Baxter, Hollywood Exiles, ch. 2. By “art film” I mean pictures allied with contemporary movements in other arts, rather than with a film genre. Art films place visual, aesthetic qualities first rather than focusing on story elements and genre associations, as was the case with most American films. The stepdaughter of a tycoon, Rambova spent her adolescence in Paris with her godmother, Elsie deWolfe, studying before entering costume and set design at the Imperial Russian Ballet Company in New York and then traveling with the company to Los Angles, where she went to work for Nazimova. See Michael Morris, Madame Valentino (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991).

  125. Pearl Gaddis, “He, She or It,” Motion Picture Magazine 13.4 (May 1917): 27. See also Anthony Slide, “The Silent Closet,” Film Quarterly 52.4 (1999): 30.

  126. Mathis quoted in Lambert, Nazimova, 201. St. Johns, “Sight-Seeing the Movies.”

  127. St. Johns, Honeycomb, 90–91, 101, 111. Frances Marion describes the parties in Off with Their Heads! 6, 101. Moore dedicated her autobiography, Silent Star, to Adela Rogers St. Johns, “my friend and mentor since my first days in Hollywood.”

  128. St. Johns, Honeycomb, 118; Zukor, The Public Is Never Wrong, 200–202.

  129. St. Johns, Honeycomb, 114.

  130. See the sources cited in note 11 of the part I introduction.

  131. Starr, Material Dreams, 69, 98. See the statistics cited in note 10 of the part I introduction.

  132. “Girls Crave Stardom,” Atlanta Constitution, June 26, 1921; Booth, “Breaking into the Movies,” 76. This monthly serial ran from January to June 1917.

  133. Thompson, Growth and Changes in California’s Population, 48–51, 88–93. In 1920 the city’s sex ratio was 97.8 to 100. On the industry’s size, see Starr, Material Dreams, 98.

  134. Gertrude Atherton, “The Lot,” Photoplay (June 1921): 92–93; Campbell, “Understanding Traditional and Modern Practices of Consumption,” 49–51.

  135. “Clannish”: Mary Winship, “Oh, Hollywood! A Ramble in Bohemia,” Photoplay (May 1921): 111; “on the edge”: “The Jazzy, Money-Mad Spot Where Movies Are Made,” 71. Edward Soja, Thirdspace (Maiden: Blackwell, 1996), 3, 77, 97–98. “Chameleon City” etc.: from The Strand Magazine. Washington Post, June 20, 1915.

  136. Valeria Belletti to Irma Prina, quoted in Cari Beauchamp, ed., Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 34, 19, 52.

  137. Winship, “Oh, Hollywood!” 110; Willard Huntington Wright, “Los Angeles—The Chemically Pure,” in Burton Rascoe and Groff Conklin, eds., The Smart Set Anthology (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934 [1913]), 90–102.

  138. Allen Cambell, “Bohemia in Los Angeles,” unpublished pamphlet, n.d., n.p., Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

  139. Winship, “Oh, Hollywood!” 110 (italics in the original).

  140. Belletti quoted in Beauchamp, Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary, 119, 19, 69–70.

  141. St. Johns, The Honeycomb, 90–91; Emerson and Loos, Breaking into the Movies, 26.

  142. On this point, see Sklar, Movie-Made America, ch. 8; Hilary-Anne Hallett, “In Motion-Picture Land” (Ph.D. dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center, 2005), ch. 5.

  143. On Bohemia’s relationship to consumption, see Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 [1986]); Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006); Campbell, “Understanding Traditional and Modern Practices of Consumption,” 40–57. On Murger, see Seigel, Bohemian Paris, ch. 2.

  144. Henry Murger, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, trans. Ellen Marriage and John Selwyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), xxxiii; Seigel, Bohemian Paris, 11.

  145. Stansell, American Moderns, 225–308; Seigel, Bohemian Paris, 40–42; Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia, 60–64. Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 91.

  146. Ross, Stars and Strikes, 70–75, 85–86; Anita Loos, A Girl Like I (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 68. For a more indirect discussion of Bohemian Hollywood, see Emerson and Loos, Breaking into the Movies, 26.

  147. Marion, Off with Their Heads! 85; Coffee, Storyline, 57.

  148. “Hollywood Studio Club Building Campaign,” 1925, file 8, box 1, Young Women’s Christian Association of Los Angeles Collection, Hollywood Studio Club, Urban Archives Center, University Library, California State University, Northridge (hereafter Studio Club). On publicity, see “A Studio Club Revue, 1916–1932,” file 26, box 1, Studio Club. On motion picture money, see files 6, 13, and 48 in ibid.; Myrtle Gebhart, “The Studio Club Grows Up,” Photoplay, n.d.; Elizabeth McGaffey, “The Studio Club,” n.d., both in ibid., file 22, box 1, Studio Club; “Notice of Completion,” April 20, 1926, file 36, in ibid.; “House Information, Hollywood Studio Club,” file 8, in ibid.; “Report of the Hollywood Studio Club, Year Ending 1923,” file 4, in ibid. Heidi Kenega, “Making the Studio Girl,” Film History 18 (2006): 134.

  149. See, for instance, Ralph Strong, “One Extra Girl,” Picture Play Magazine 4.2 (April 1916): 54; Rhea Irene Kimball, “The Extra Girls of Essanay Company—Girls, Girls, Girls!” Motion Picture Magazine 10.8 (Sept. 1915): 97; Kitty Kelly, “Hearkening to the Call of the Screen,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 7, 1916, p. 16. The column by Grace Kingsley, “Ella the Extra Girl,” ran in the Los Angeles Times throughout 1919. Contrast this reading with Stamp, “It’s a Long Way to Filmland.”

  150. Winship, “Oh Hollywood!” 20–22, 112.

  151. Fredrickson, “Defends Manners of Hollywood.” See also the editorial “The Real Bohe
mia”; Hampton, “Cattar Lattan, USA.”

  152. “Evil Influence of Motion Pictures,” Petition 2524, Sept. 6, 1921, in “Motion Picture File 2035, to be known as 2723,” and “File 2524,” Los Angeles City Clerk’s Office, Records and Management Division, City Archives.

  153. “A Visit to Movieland”; “The Jazzy, Money-Mad Spot Where Movies Are Made” (italics in the original).

  154. “Gullible Girls Who Come to Grief Seeking Film Fame,” Literary Digest (July 3, 1920): 63–66. See also “For Those Who Look like Mary Pickford,” Literary Digest (March 6, 1920): 84.

  155. “Movie Myths and Facts As Seen by an Insider,” Literary Digest (May 7, 1921): 38. The article was a condensed version of Benjamin Hampton, “Do You Want to Get into the Movies? Do’s and Don’ts by a Manager for the Girl at Home,” Pictorial Review (April 1921): 5, 49–51 (all italics in the original).

  156. Margaret Sangster, “The Girl Problem and the Pictures,” Photoplay (Sept. 1921): 103–104. See also Margaret Sangster, “Why Girls Don’t Leave Home,” Photoplay (Oct. 1920): 67, 129.

  CHAPTER 4. THE MOVIE MENACE

  1. “Sex War On in Films,” Los Angeles Times (hereinafter LAT), Jan. 30, 1921, pt. 3, p. 1. On the furor the article prompted, see “Overdoing the Sex Motive in Moving Pictures,” Current Opinion (March 1921): 362; “Where the Blame Lies for Movie ‘Sex-Stuff,’ ” Literary Digest, Feb. 12, 1921, pp. 28–29.

  2. “Movie Myths and Facts As Seen by an Insider,” 38.

  3. Benjamin Hampton, “Too Much Sex Stuff in the Movies? Whose Fault Is It?” Pictorial Review (Feb. 1921): 11, 113–116. Typical articles in Pictorial Review in this period include “What’s the Matter with Marriage: Results of the Contest Announced Last June” (Jan. 1921): 25, 48; Genevieve Pankhurst, “ ‘For Better or Worse’; The Advanced Thought of the Entire World Seems to Favor More Liberal Marriage and Divorce Laws” (Feb. 1921): 68–72; Marion Harland, “What Shall We Do with These Young Girls?” (Nov. 1920): 17; Cornelia Stratton Parker, “It’s a New World We Live In: The Woman Who Works; The Third Article in the Series,” Pictorial Review (April 1921): 23, 60–61.

  4. Hampton, A History of the Movies, 290–293. See also “Should American Pictures Be Censored?” Current Opinion (May 1921): 652–655. Hampton here blamed the controversy on his “sensational article.” MacKinnon’s “editor’s note” preceding “Too Much Sex Stuff” supports this claim. Hampton, “Do You Want to Get into the Movies?” This article of Hampton’s was billed as the “second in the series.” Next came Jessie Lasky, “Is There Any Sense in Censorship?” Pictorial Review (May 1921): 11, 40; and Norma Talmadge, “What Do You Mean by ‘Sex Plays’?” Pictorial Review (June 1921): 2, 91. Suggesting that he took his cue from the Eagle crusade discussed later in this chapter, the editor’s note billed Talmadge’s article as the “Fourth Article in the Campaign for Cleaner Movies.”

  5. For coverage that displays the emphasis on Hampton’s status and his role in bringing concerns about movie morality to a boil, see “Sex War On in Films”; “Where the Blame Lies for Movie ‘Sex-Stuff’ ”; “Overdoing the Sex Motive in Moving Pictures”; “Should Moving Pictures Be Censored?”

  6. Hampton, A History of the Movies, 150–169. Hampton served as vice president of the American Tobacco Company and attempted to convince his boss to finance a merger between the distribution company Paramount and the film producers Famous Players–Lasky and VLSE. On his career, see Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 744–747; AFI Catalog of Silent Films, http://www.afi.com/members/catalogue. “Common Sense and the Film Menace,” Ladies’ Home Journal 38 (April 1921): 24.

  7. On the industry’s role in the war effort, see DeBauche, Reel Patriotism, 104–136. Creel, How We Advertised America.

  8. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922); Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Macmillan, 1922). On public opinion in the 1920s, see Hanno Hardt, Critical Communications Studies (London: Routledge, 1992).

  9. Raymond Dodge, “The Psychology of Propaganda,” in Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, eds., Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969 [1921]), 837. On the survey conducted by University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess, see Grieveson, Policing Cinema, 211–212. On the proliferation of these studies, see Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller-Seeley, Children and the Movies.

  10. See Painter, Standing at Armageddon, ch. 12; Wid’s Year Book 1920 (New York: Wid’s Films; Hollywood: Film Folks, Inc., 1920), 333–335. Between 1910 and 1929, more articles were published on “moving pictures and morals” in 1920 and 1921 than in any other two years before or after; see The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature (Minneapolis: H.W. Wilson Co.). Of the 14 articles in the category for 1921, 13 were published before September.

  11. Fredrick Boyd Stevenson, “Who Reviewed Photoplay ‘The Penalty’?” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (hereinafter BDE), Feb. 6, 1921, “Music, Art, Theaters, and Women” sec., 1. Many social historians tie the development of middle-class consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century to notions of domesticity, gentility, and conceptions of feminine moral guardianship, suggesting how the deeply gendered complex of ideals associated with “respectability” distinguished the middle class. See Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990); Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion of Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Film scholars who have focused on the strategies employed by the industry during the 1910s to achieve respectability include May, in Screening Out the Past; Tom Gunning, in D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, in “Constructing the Mass Audience,” Iris 17.3 (1994); and Douglas Gomery, in Shared Pleasures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

  12. This was the title of the first film history, Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights. Ramsaye considered anti-Semitism partially responsible for the industry’s postwar troubles, even as he set the mold for viewing producers as good-hearted, Orientalist internationalists spinning tales in a “new Baghdad”; ibid., 482, 833–834. On anti-Semitism’s impact on the industry in the 1930s and 1940s, see Steven Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Gabler, An Empire of Their Own. Gabler considers anti-Semitism an underlying cause for all the major producers’ behavior and the particular vision of America they created. This popular history is very suggestive, but relies mostly on psychoanalytic assumptions. Most strangely, by making Jewish producers seem to control every nuance on screens, his discussion supports the paranoid perception of the time.

  13. LAT, Jan. 6, 1921, pt. 1, p. 3; BDE, Feb. 1, 1921, p. 4.

  14. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 195, 222 (italics in the original); see also chs. 6 and 9.

  15. “Alien Propaganda Defeating Efforts at Americanization,” BDE, Feb. 20, 1921, p. 1.

  16. “Flood”: quoting Senate Immigration Committee chairman Colt, BDE, Feb. 9, 1921, p. 1; “toboggan slide”: quoting Colorado representative Valle, a member of the House Committee on Immigration, LAT, Jan. 16, 1921, p. 1. On the constructions of racial categories in this era, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.

  17. Frank Crane, “The Jew,” Current Opinion (May 1921): 596.

  18. Quoted in Higham, Strangers in the Land, 309. For more on the report, see Robert Fink, “Visas, Immigration and Official Anti-Semitism,” The Nation (May 4, 1921): 870–873.

  19. Fink, “Visas, Immigration and Official Anti-Semitism,” 872.

  20. Senator Dillingham’s report by the Senate Immigration Committee quoted in “New Immigration Measure,” BDE, Feb. 15, 1921, p. 1. For details on the Dillingham Bill, see BDE, “Senate Adopts Bill to Stem Tide of Aliens,” Feb. 20, 1921, p. 1. The bill easily passed both houses, only to meet a pocket veto from the lame-duck Wilson; reported in BDE, “Immigration Bill and Army Budget Get ‘Po
cket Veto,’ ” March 3, 1921, p. 1. The bill became law in May 1921.

  21. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 310.

  22. “Trailing the New Anti-Semitism to Its Russian Lair,” Current Opinion (April 1921): 501.

  23. “Jewry at the End of the War,” The Nation (May 4, 1921): 677.

  24. On the social separation but shared business and political terrain of German Jews and Protestant elites, see Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 80; Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 37, 61–63, 168; William Issel and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 16–17, 204–208.

  25. On these stereotypes and the postwar rise in anti-Semitism, see Albert S. Lindemann, Anti-Semitism before the Holocaust (Edinburgh Gate, UK: Pearson Education, 2000), ch. 4.

  26. The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem, being a reprint of a series of articles appearing in the Dearborn Independent from May 22 to October 1920 (Dearborn: Dearborn Publishing Co., 1920), 1:6, 48. The Independent ran 92 successive articles on “the international Jew.” “Selections” were reprinted in a four-volume set titled The International Jew. See also Jewish Activities in the United States, vol. 2; Jewish Influence in American Life, vol. 3; and Aspects of Jewish Power in the United States, vol. 4 of The International Jew (Dearborn: Dearborn Publishing Co., 1921–1922). Estimates of sales from 1920 to 1922 vary between 250,000 and 500,000. All Ford dealerships were forced to sell the paper, even after boycotts began to hurt the businesses of many. The articles were more widely distributed in the volumes, with an estimated ten million copies sold and distributed in the United States through the 1920s. Ford was not interested in making a profit in the venture. He accepted no advertising and paid for the reprints and translations into other languages. See Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: Stein & Day, 1980), 14; Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, 146.

 

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