Dream Factory | Lost LA | Season 2, Episode 4 | KCET

Union Bank is proud to support lost la Los Angeles makes the moving images that in trance of America and the world but who gets to do that work who chooses those powerful images this time on lost la let's sneak through the studio gates for a few untold stories from inside the Hollywood Dream Factory I'm Nathan masters and this is lost la many people see la as a city of the future a place without a past a freeway metropolis that sprang up fully formed in the 20th century but the roots of Southern California history run deep people have called this land home for thousands of years and their stories give us a richer understanding of where we are now and where we're headed in the decades to come so let's look back and uncover some of these forgotten stories in the archives Lost la explores Southern California history by bringing archival materials to life [Music] the early film industry was a creative Wild West open to anyone with the resources or boldness to exploit the new technology of motion pictures for a time that included the female producers directors and writers who see some of the industry's top creative positions but that didn't last long let's investigate what changed the roles of women in Hollywood you when movies began to be popular they weren't necessarily associated with respectability movies at the beginning of the 20th century were a kind of cheap entertainment associated with urban working-class immigrant audiences a lot of the early workers in the film industry are coming out of a theatrical background mostly you know the early directors actors producers whatnot are coming out of a theater background and the theater over the course of the 19th century had actually been a place where women had more than perhaps any other industry been allowed to take on unusual roles as movies became more popular in the 1910s the industry was very invested in earning a kind of cultural legitimacy and earning a kind of respectability and so one of the ways they did this was to court more female viewers part of the film industry's investment in dressing itself so much to a female audience is that they are actively involved in the 1910s in trying to attract more women into the audience because they want to raise its reputation and you see the film industry sort of taking that up a little bit in this fan literature and its willingness to depict itself as the industry for ambitious young women to sort of make their mark and they say this quite directly and you know in that contest you know do you want to be the next screenwriter do you want to be the it's not just do you want to be the next star it's for all these different roles [Music] so somebody like Louis Weber working on the other side of the camera as a married white middle class woman brought a kind of respectability to that side of the camera as well broader respectability to that side of the industry it's amazing to me that whoever is not very well know so many people say to me how could I never have heard of her and it really is amazing that someone who was the first woman accepted to the motion picture Directors Association precursor of the Directors Guild who was mayor of Universal City who was on the first directors committee at the academy who was one of the highest-paid directors in Hollywood who was one of the first directors to form their own production company that nobody knows about her I mean it's just astonishing to me Weber was considered one of the three great minds in early Hollywood alongside DW Griffith success will be DeMille everybody remembers Griffith and Amell as the fathers of American cinema like Griffith and DeMille she was very invested in demonstrating the sophistication of this new art form and ensuring its cultural legitimacy Weber makes a film in 1913 called suspense where she plays a woman who is along with her baby in a villa besieged by attackers and suspense is so ahead of its time in terms of cinematography and shot composition and camerawork it's an astonishing film part of this is like sort of sex stereotyping innocent in a sense because they did firmly believe women could tell stories for women better and so if you wanted women in the theater then you needed to have them coming up with the stories about women's lives whoever was a really commanding director she said that the director has to have absolute authority and I think the fact that she was both a screenwriter and a director that she was directing her own scripts but she had a complete vision for her work for instance shoes her film about urban poverty is told to the story of a young shop girl whose wages are supporting her entire family her father's unemployed she's supporting her entire family that emotional experience of poverty we understand through her and through specifically cinematic devices that where we see inside her mind we see her optical point of view we understand her feelings it's not just visual storytelling it's the kind of identification that audiences can have with fictional characters on screen that cinematic language enables Weber cultivated a persona of a matronly white middle-class married woman so it wasn't just that she was a woman it was that she was a particular kind of woman and that allowed her to take on these really controversial subjects universe was top film in 1916 was a film on abortion birth control written and directed by a woman who was that studio's top director [Music] and critics at the time are recognizing that they'll say she's a filmmaker who's willing to take on topics that others dare not touch and others will often say that it's her her persona I also think it's her gender that allows her to take on those issues [Music] she is then very clearly universals top director she's the top director in 1916 and 1917 and she's making extraordinarily popular and profitable films for them all of the kind of shifts in her career the kind of key moments when she shifts have to do with her wanting more artistic control and wanting to do more she leaves Universal in the summer of 1917 to form Louis Weber productions so she leaves Universal at the height of her power and because of her power she's able to negotiate a really lucrative distribution deal with Universal then she switches and gets an even more lucrative distribution deal with paramount at Louis Weber productions she makes 14 films in four years she writes and directs 14 feature films in four years which is extraordinary [Music] by 1920 and you have a Republican president and you have a Republican and controlled both houses of Congress which has not been the case ever suffrage passes in 1920 and it seems like things are moving really fast all of a sudden in terms of gender roles there is a broader backlash in the culture against that and suddenly it isn't so great for the movie industry to be known as a place that's so attractive to women and is supporting women's progress and supporting women doing an unconventional things and there is brewing concern by 1919-1920 that the federal government is going to step in and regulate motion-picture phone content the way that they regulate it liquor for motion picture producers you want entertainment wholesome interesting and vital the main thing that starts to happen in the 1920s that shifts the role of women is that the industry is starting to consolidate as independent as she is it's all about those distribution deals paramount ultimately revokes her contract she makes a film called what do men want in 1921 at Louis Weber productions she was summoned to Paramount offices in corporate headquarters in New York and I told her we can't distribute this under the Paramount banner and dissolved her contract and then it became very difficult for her her production company to survive [Music] when Weber's production company collapses in 1921 it's a real kind of watershed moment in Hollywood history it's a moment when a lot of major studios are consolidating power Studios whose names still dominate our entertainment landscape today right are starting to consolidate power and they're buying up theater chains and they're making it very very hard for independent production companies to survive and so Louis Weber is part of a whole generation of independent filmmakers that find it increasingly difficult to get their films distributed in the 20s so there's there's other women there's our african-american filmmakers who suddenly find it very difficult to get distribution contracts as Hollywood becomes essentially another corporate entity and people realize that this is a big business that's going to be around and that there's a lot of money involved and that that's going to remain true for a long time the attitudes the more flexible attitudes towards who does what start to change this is the remaster Lana's ation of the industry and there is at that point a very clear erasure a few of the work of female filmmakers in early Hollywood and Weber was not alone there were hundreds of women directing in Hollywood early Hollywood and yet the early histories of Hollywood only talk about female stars they don't talk about the power of female screenwriters they don't talk about female filmmakers so this erasure happens didn't happen recently it happened early it happened before whoever was even to over her career let alone before she even died that that kind of myth of the history of Hollywood as a as a male industry was was put in place pretty early but I do think that forgetting that history forgetting how crucial women were too early filmmaking has continued to hamper female filmmakers for generations because there's this sense that nobody no women have ever made films before oh could could women ever direct action films well they did a hundred years ago can women ever make popular profitable film I don't know you know they did a hundred years ago so if this forgetting has had monumental consequences and and has carried enormous weight for almost a hundred years now [Music] as early Hollywood began studying its movies and exotic locales it needed diverse actors to make them look authentic to find them the studio's turned toward the city's multi-ethnic population and set up a central casting Bureau to exploit it Charlie Chan was played by Sid Toller Caucasian actor I think my go to hospital because the studios wanted to make money and if they tell a Chinese to play a Charlie Chan I doubt have very many moviegoers would go see it on the movie screen both need time for brewing but those were the sign of the times [Music] one of the reasons that the film industry has settled in Los Angeles was because of its you know sheer topographical diversity [Music] you can pretty much imitate any place in the world that you want within a four or five hour trip from Los Angeles at most from the 20s and 30s Americans have had a bit of a geography lesson when after World War one and so that opens up people's cultural imagination to faraway places that didn't quite exist before it was very popular to have these kind of exotic settings like South Pacific or Africa was a popular setting just set some of the more exotic films so you're gonna have this would have been the terms of the day you know a need for a certain number of background savages is what they were called central casting Bureau was formed in 1925 and it was formed under the auspices of the Hays office will Hays had been appointed by the industry group the NPPD a and there was a lot of concern in the early 20s about the misuse of extras it's really an attempt to standardize how extras get employment make that process safer and more fair the central casting Bureau it was hugely popular I mean tens of thousands of people registered for this service during the 1930s to make extra money my father and I became extras central casting didn't have means of connecting with the Chinese community so they did it through Tom gubbins who spoke Cantonese and had his Asiatic store there so they would take all the Chinese kids who ever could want to work and Tom gubbins arranged a bus in front of his store and all of us have to report there and get on the bus and they take us to the studio to work we go to the studio they interview us and then they pick certain types and after they pick certain types they would push her hair put a bandana on but a [ __ ] hat on we were either coolies or peasants or work at the laundry or work out in the fields we never look pretty we always look I wouldn't say ugly but look like peasants is what it is a lot of the Chinese in Chinatown and so forth dependent upon central casting for living because being a extra earned them a lot of money that is good and that is bad because that was good in the sense they earn a living that was bad because they were slotted into a category of being asian-american extras and they were happy doing that the central casting had set of forms that you would fill out where you would describe your weight your height you know your look any special talents since bit parts were basically about filling the extra background so if you can imagine if you have a Western we're going to need to have a certain number of background players that look like Native Americans so when you filled out these forms you would indicate you know how you fit into the specific types that when a Hollywood director said I need 40 savages for my latest African film or I need 20 Indians for my latest Western you would go to your lists and you would figure out who were the people that fit into those types [Music] for the most part it was almost impossible for people of color to have a leading role in Hollywood in the Charlie Chan movie I remember the director saying to me in this hospital scene say this place smells too much like medicine and I told all my friends I have a speaking part in Charlie Chan in Honolulu but then when I went to see the movie I could see me holding my nose and shaking my head but my speaking part was on the cutting room for you can't play in the movies just as cliche characters you have to play in principal roles where you are important people citizens of America contributing to the community but they weren't giving any credit for it we weren't doing that extras extras as the changing [ __ ] because they were just servants and and villains and railroad workers that had no rights you know like an Good Earth the major roles went to the Caucasians in the old days what they do is they use Caucasian people tape their eyes and they play as oriental they so great I thought it must show in my face market chief comes to this Butte them sucking me by name interpreter by profession and they put their slanted eyes like this and talk like first and all and it was terrible to me it was a great insult one of the things that Hollywood learns early on is that representing race in American films is a sure way to get into trouble if you have a story line that's about race in many instances southern theatres will just ban it completely so you will just not get that market at all say Birth of a Nation is you know famous example to point to you had a huge amount of outcry from the African American press about the representation of African Americans in that phone you had a huge amount of outcry from white people in America about the fact that they thought that the film was fomenting race trouble initially you know you would have white people actually blacking up to play black roles because there was so much concern about black actors touching white actresses but after a lot of outcry they get rid of that and so you no longer have white people playing black roles by the 1920s 99% of the time the roles for non-whites were easily fulfilled by the central casting Bureau which is to say that those background parts were heavily stereotyped can you tell me what's wrong now I know I mean you know the progressive parts of American culture have been more dormant in some respects reflected in the fact that maybe some of these areas there was a fair amount of change and then that amounted to that it slowed down [Music] you might say in the early times I was playing all serial type parts JJ get us to see mr. Mulwray yeah Oh keep trying like fools ed good pole long they call me snotty you will not come here and somewhere along the line I didn't like that because then you believe yourself as a cliche ISM what we're seeing now in terms of the greater Hall for Hollywood to look at its lack of diversity you know the problem that still exists is trying to open up that dialog again and I think one of the lessons from the past is that for it to succeed we're gonna have to keep it up Hollywood stands accused of having a problem with so-called whitewashing there's so few roles for Asian actors and I would really hope that we would get to play ourselves at the very least we don't accept blackface in any of its forms no in film or television why would we accept yellow face it seems to be happening continually maybe next time you can design me better I can't just be sort of a complaint here and a complaint here that it needs to be a sustained effort you know the social change doesn't happen easily or quickly usually clearly there's still problems with Hollywood's representation and so you know if we want that to change then we have to continue to make sure that that is an important point that's being voiced to the industry I've been in this industry 66 years or something that's a lot of years to make this much progress you know it's just too slow you know in my well your figure in my lifetime went from there to here not very big the Hollywood Dream Factory imagined one version of Los Angeles next time on lost LA we'll look at how to other communities created their own underground versions of the city you Lost la was made possible by the Ralph M Parsons foundation the California State Library and California humanities Union Bank is proud to support lost la

Channel: PBS SoCal

Views: 34,352

Keywords: kcet, southern california

Id: ItDvnaTmyR8

Length: 23min 46sec (1426 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 08 2017