Introduction: Flatfeet!

 

 

I HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT THE GENESIS of this story twice, now, once for Going Home Again, my last collection (and while I’m at it, Shuan Tan’s illustration for this story was wonderful—two feet propped up on a desk, candlestick, telephone, calendar on the wall opened to July. Tan was maybe eighteen when he illustrated the book . . .), and again in my first column, “Crimea River” in Eidolon Magazine in 1998, which was more or less a literary mash note to Constance Willis’ story “In the Late Cretaceous,” many of the effects of which I was trying for when I wrote this.

So I won’t go through all that again. (When I wrote this one, it was October of 1994.) Where it started: I was reading a book on the first Red Scare, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the nationwide roundup of anarchists and socialists in 1920, and I suddenly realized it would have been done by guys like these . . . Voilà!

Hollywood is Hollywood because of an attempted American monopoly in 1910. Movies were being made in New Jersey, Philly, Long Island; all along the East Coast and Chicago. About 1910, all the people who owned major patents, and several production companies, got together and formed the Motion Picture Patents Company and said: Anybody who doesn’t pay us for cameras, projectors, movies, etc., will be sued for patent infringement. It was an attempt to control the motion-picture business from raw film stock to the exhibition of the films. (A reverse Join-or-Die movement.) If you paid them, you could make movies; if you didn’t, they’d hound you to the ends of the earth.

Well, almost. It was the last straw for small independent film companies, fed up with crooked distributors, conniving theater owners, sharpies and crooks—and the crummy East Coast weather that only let them shoot 150 days a year. (Arc lights were just coming in—most studios shot outdoors, or in glass-roofed buildings where you had to depend on sunlight—film wasn’t fast enough for low light levels yet.)

The independents took off West. It could have been anywhere. (See “The Passing of the Western” later for another take on that.) As chance would have it, they ended up near Los Angeles—sunshine, cheap (at the time) real estate, plenty of people not doing much of anything. There was a thriving theater scene; vaudeville talent came through often. And, as chance would have it further, a small community (and Dry thirteen years before the rest of the country) called, by that time, Hollywood (and Culver City and Burbank, named for a guy who raised sweet potatoes . . .).

Things weren’t easy at first. Cecil B. DeMille, in his autobiography, talks about having to wear a couple of pistols on his horseback ride each morning from town out to the lot where he was making The Squaw Man, because the Patents people hired guys to take potshots at the renegade filmmakers.

It took till the 1930s to finally kill film production on the East Coast—Coconuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) with the Marxes were filmed on Long Island in the daytime while Harpo, Groucho, Chico, and Zeppo were in plays at night—even though the courts had ruled the MPPCo. was a Trust, and therefore illegal, by about 1915, ending that threat.

So it was, in trying to make millions, the MPPCo. did itself out of billions, and instead of having the thriving metropoli of the East as the centers of motion-picture production in the U.S.—and soon the world—they handed it, unconsciously, but with malice aforethought, to a sleepy crossroads on the edge of nowhere, and made its name stand for motion pictures for all time.