In these early years, film studios were reluctant to publicize the names of their featured players, fearing that individual billing might empower them to ask for more money. But

“There has never been anything like this before in the history of the human race,” a New York Times writer mused in 1925. “The motion picture is the school, the diversion, perhaps even the church of the future.”

Los Angeles was now the city that boasted the greatest religious pluralism in the country, that served as the center of the world’s most lucrative creative industry, and that was sustained by an ingenious water system not substantially different from what its creator first envisioned half a century before.

Today, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel has over six million members in more than fifty thousand branch congregations around the world.

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.

the film’s cast could not come along. So Boggs intended to hire local talent to play the characters originated by actors in Chicago. Motion pictures were still such a new and makeshift medium that audiences, he figured, would never notice the difference.

Another condescending observer, Irvin S. Cobb, perhaps summed it up best: “At heart, Los Angeles is a vast cross-section of the Corn Belt set down incongruously in a Maxfield Parrish setting.”

Beginning with its conjuring of an oasis in the desert, an achievement itself made possible only through a campaign of deception and elusive intentions, the city had attracted the population it needed by selling another mirage: a lifestyle image of leisure, health, easy prosperity, and spiritual fulfillment, all in a place where it never rains or t

After five years and some 457 films, D. W. Griffith was leaving the studio he had saved from bankruptcy. And he was taking Bitzer and the bulk of his best actors with him.