Hollywood History

My upcoming book, Close-up to Murder, is a break from historical romance but still has roots in history—if one can call early Hollywood historical. I mean, it was over a century ago, so it ought to qualify.

The basic beginning of Hollywood was the usual real estate development—rich guy failed at farming, subdivided the land, sold empty desert lots to rich people back East, and mansions began appearing. The city was incorporated in 1903 with a post office, markets, livery, and hotel, ready for the railroad to deliver mountains of eastern gold in the form of rich New Yorkers in search of sunshine. It merged with Los Angeles in 1910.

My interest is in the film industry, because it was basically started by conmen and

men avoiding the law even back then. Flim-flammery has a long and noble history in the halls of filmdom, which is why mysteries set with that background made sense to me. The first film completed in Hollywood was the Count of Monte Cristo, although it started in Chicago, where the filmmakers fell afoul of the lawyers for Thomas Edison’s patents. Edison had a bad habit of sending his lawyers out to confiscate cameras on which license fees hadn’t been paid. In California, the filmmakers need only pack up and flee for Mexico to avoid the fines. And since film production was more profitable as a year-round industry, and Florida was prone to hurricanes, California became the new home for film making.

Like publishing today (or last decade), the early film industry was controlled by the “Big Five” movie studios: Warner Brothers, RKO, Fox, MGM and Paramount. They took the industry from penny nickelodeons to huge silent-film productions like D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). They also made popular films with comedians Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, whose antics scarcely needed the translation of speech. By the end of the 1920s, the film industry had become an empire. That Eastern gold multiplied better than the gold rush.

When talkies came along. . . money flowed better than California rivers. By the 1930s, the movie industry was one of the largest businesses in the United States, producing films still known today: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, Jezebel, A Star Is Born, Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights.

With sound came the need for soundstages. Those early barn studios transformed into sprawling empires of stages, prop warehouses, canteens, and housing. Entire blocks might be occupied by the likes of Warner Brothers or Paramount. Scripts filled with dialogue and musicals blossomed. Gangster films, now with the addition of actual gunfire and the crude dialogue of badmouthing criminals, took off. The era of prohibition was rife with gangsters already, but in the movies—no moral code held the producers back. Shocking depictions of sexuality, crime, and moral ambiguity filled the screen, often reflecting the lives of the directors and stars off screen.

And then there were the Westerns! Derived from the Wild West shows that started in the 1870s, they were a huge hit even as silent films. All those strong silent heroes, galloping across dramatic landscapes. . . ideal for the era. The genre continued to grow with the advent of sound, producing our iconic heroes like John Wayne and Gary Cooper, where the good guys always got their man. But the big budget studios dropped the clean-living cowboys as “pulp” fiction, leaving the westerns to smaller studios—until the late 1930s, when a few blockbusters like Stagecoach proved the audience wanted real heroes.

And then the immoral movies crashed to a halt with the passing of the Hays Code in 1934, returning Westerns to the top of the market, riding right into early television. (My heroine calls the hero Clint Eastwood, but I doubt she’s old enough to remember Rawhide!) But the glamorous, often infamous, lives of stars and directors went on.

So my fictional family descended from movie stars and studio owners are steeped in that shady history from a hundred years ago as they move into the 21^st century. Heroes and villains must reconcile the past before they can move forward. . . or like so many other studios, collapse under the weight of former bad decisions.

I know many of you enjoy mysteries, especially with a historical bent, a hint of romance, and no bloodbaths. Will you enjoy ones set in modern California? I do hope so, because I need to stretch my wings and try new horizons occasionally.