The Mirage Factory

According to writer Lenore Coffee, Hollywood in the early 1920s “was like a carnival; or the way one feels when the circus is coming to town, only the circus was always there. Actors walked about in heavy grease-paint make-up, and out-of-work actors did precisely the same thing, hoping to create the impression that they, too, were employed.”

According to the investigators’ findings, the brothers had been selling securities owned by depositors without authorization. They had also failed to cancel loans and mortgages that had been paid off months earlier, instead diverting the proceeds into their own financially strapped commercial endeavors and falsifying state banking reports to cover

In August 1921 the San Francisco chapter of the American Medical Association secretly sent representatives to the healing sessions at one of Sister McPherson’s Oakland revivals. After witnessing several sessions and examining the beneficiaries of her ministrations, they issued a report approving of the evangelist’s work and declaring her healings “

This time, his instincts were right. Broken Blossoms—now regarded as the first true “art-house film”—opened to ecstatic reviews and, thanks to its modest cost, the healthiest profits of any Griffith film since The Birth of a Nation.

That bland entry notwithstanding, Bosworth had actually just made cinema history. In the Sultan’s Power is now regarded as one of the first narrative films to be shot entirely in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It would not be the last.

This change happened very quickly. In 1928 Paramount released seventy-eight films, all of them silent; in 1929 the studio released sixty-seven movies, only twenty of them silent.

It wasn’t only these individuals whose lives were changed. The Birth of a Nation, which earned out its substantial cost in just two months and went on to run continuously for years in many places (reportedly for twelve years straight in certain parts of the South), changed the entire movie industry.

In 1912, after a long-fought lawsuit brought against them under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, Edison and the Motion Picture Patents Company lost their stranglehold on movie production technology, meaning that the independents could now operate without fear of the trust and its stifling license requirements. The number of companies making movies explo

after the Mexican War of 1846–48, when southern California became American, did anyone really start to postulate a grand metropolis in this desert, centered on a narrow, unreliable waterway known optimistically as the Los Angeles River.