Book Excerpt
The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking
Introduction
Circle of Faith Ministries is a two-story structure with small, picture-frame windows. It is the whitest, brightest building in Arlington, a post-World War II suburb of Jacksonville dominated by mechanic garages, auto detailing shops and car washes.
Inside the church, nine brass chandeliers hang from the ceiling, providing the majority of the sanctuary’s light. The congregation files in for 11a.m. worship, and they’re surprisingly casual. There are sweatshirts, T-shirts and Miami Heat jerseys, but also the occasional eggshell four-button suit and hibiscus-sized brooch with colored gemstones.
The three-hour service never takes a breath–even when things quiet down for a moment, the white noise from the synthesizer’s amplifier fills the room with an audible buzz. The morning begins with forty-five minutes of hand-clapping, savior-shouting praise, followed by a skit announcing the week’s scheduled activities, more praise, tithing, PowerPoint slides that project scripture on the wall, and a rousing sermon by Pastor Joseph McRoy. It’s the type of dramatic, electrically charged service that would make an atheist wonder if the Holy Ghost is more than just adrenalin and answered prayers more than just coincidence.
Many of these churchgoers don’t know that nearly a century ago, this building was home to its own version of drama. Where there are now chairs, hymnals and banners of scripture (the one behind the pulpit is from Romans 8:31: “If God be for us, who can be against us”), there were once Klieg lights, spools of celluloid and artificial backdrops. This was the indoor set building for Norman Studios, one of the thirty-plus film studios that populated Jacksonville during the early twentieth century. As it happens, the Circle of Faith congregation is largely African American, and Richard Norman, the namesake of the film studio, was a white filmmaker who produced black-cast films for black audiences.
But the rabbit holes goes deeper. To talk about Jacksonville is to talk about Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Fox Broadcasting Company, Oliver Hardy, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, the Barrymore family, and the advent of Technicolor. Approximately 300 films were produced in Jacksonville from 1909 to 1926. This was no one-off pit stop. The city was this close to becoming the country’s premier destination for movie production. It’s not that hard to imagine. Jacksonville is plenty big enough to accommodate everyone–at 841 square miles, it is the largest city in the United States. It offers warm weather and beautiful, tropical surroundings, a huge plus if you were a movie producer who lived in the frigid corridors of New York or Chicago, where all the money was at that time. Unfortunately, a number of issues collided and tore it all asunder: greed, world war, racial strife, health epidemics, the judging eye of Reformation, and under-the-table politics. But the biggest obstacle of all was That Other Film Town.
By sheer coincidence, the above-mentioned visit to Circle of Faith Ministries took place on the same day as the 79th Annual Academy Awards. As these words are being written, Ari Sandel is taking the stage to accept the Oscar for Best Live Action Short. His film, West Bank Story, is a farcical musical that trades Jets for Jews and Sharks for Palestinians. Since 1927, the Oscars has been the annual tribute to the world’s most popular trade; more than one billion TV viewers tuned in to watch the event in 2007. And the glitzy affair has always taken place in Hollywood, the movie industry’s mining town. The professionals live in Santa Monica, act in studios in Burbank, edit in the offices of Universal City, promote at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, and take home golden statuettes down the block at the Kodak Theatre, the regal 3,400-seat venue adorned with cherrywood balustrades and silver leafing. These locations are part of a world-famous constellation, connecting the city like the stars in Orion’s sword.
To see Hollywood’s role in moviemaking and Jacksonville’s disconnect from it, one only need to sit and watch the Academy Awards. As the West Coast town is mentioned over and over like a Best Actor nominee, Jacksonville is nowhere to be found. The first and only time Jacksonville had anything to do with the Oscars was in 2002, when Murder on a Sunday Morning won for Best Documentary. Not that the city has much to be proud of: produced by two French filmmakers, Murder on a Sunday Morning chronicles the story of Brenton Butler, a sixteen-year-old black youth who was falsely accused of and tried for murder. According to the documentary, the Duval County police beat the confession out of him.
Hollywood wasn’t always a monopoly. The title The First Hollywood is no hyperbole: the first Jacksonville studio predates the first permanent West Coast studio by three years. In fact, the year of this book’s release, 2008, marks the 100th anniversary of Kalem Studios’ arrival in Jacksonville.
For a brief time Los Angeles and Jacksonville, locales with very similar geographic and meteorological DNA, competed to be America’s filmopolis. Now huge studios and Beverly Hills mansions populate the former, and decaying warehouses and weathered marquees litter the latter. Looking at it today, it’s hard to believe this former cattle crossing in North Florida was once a destination for the booming silent film industry. It’s like telling someone that Wall Street used to be in Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was originally exhibited at Machu Picchu.
The First Hollywood shares this untold story, piecing it together using old newspaper clippings, autobiographies of filmmakers, library archives, first-person interviews and second-hand accounts. But Jacksonville’s silent film industry also requires a look at Jacksonville itself: its history, social and racial makeup, and civic catastrophes. While these issues might seem random or immaterial, the city’s backstory–which includes civil war, segregation, and city-ravaging fires–served as content for the city’s directors and screenwriters. These were the earliest days of narrative, fictional filmmaking, and Jacksonville’s past was a source of inspiration time and again. Conversely, these issues helped define the most necessary cog of moviemaking–the audience–and producers catered to their tastes and prejudices. As a means of comparison, the book also keeps tabs on Hollywood: its beginnings, progress, failures, and accomplishments. This is, quite literally, the tale of two cities.
During Pastor McRoy’s sermon, he repeatedly mentioned a snippet of scripture from I Peter: “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.” Watch the Oscars’ red carpet proceedings, and it is, or at least wants to be, a pageant of the royal, the chosen. To think there was a time when the crown was up for grabs.