Lucky me to be offered the opportunity to speak at sundry design conferences. I loved exploring topics that I hoped listeners would enjoy and it was fascinating to think about researching the design world of Hollywood. There were countless topics and opportunities, literally box office gold just waiting for me. I hope you think so and like Hooray for Hollywood. – SY
There was a village out West where they built dreams that promised you…. gasp… escape???
Casaba field in West Hollywood. 1918
Surely this patch of Earth could not be be the site for a new megalopolis with an advanced species?
Are you serious??? You bet I am! Listen to their spiel———Hear Ye! Hear Ye!
Come on in folks, join our cavalcade of serendipitous tales and meet the ‘bees knees’!
For a few nickels and dimes we can make your worries vanish.
Mosey on in, take a chance on us and your imagination will soar, your heart will palpitate as far as you dare it to go!
We promise to bestow upon you exotica, fantasy, intrigue, sophistication, comedy AND, of course the flame of true love which in this village conquers just about anything and everything. You will love our gleaming satins and silks, our lavish sets, our sophisticated stars and our surreal who-dun-its.
We dare you to flee from your everyday run-of-the-mill reality, that’s our sincere contract to you… and then… in that village out West, the film was rolling. It was a new era!
HURRAY FOR HOLLYWOOD
In the theatre, there is little detail. Everything is visualized from one set angle. But when we watch movies the details can become the catalyst of an emotion with camera movement and close-ups. It is the camera that refines and enlarges with subtle adjustments.
Initially movie sets were painted by theatre scenic artists, there were no budgets and each mood was simply a painted background filmed with a stationary camera. It would take the pioneering wizardry of the illusionist and showman Georges Melies in the early days of cinema to invent methods of trick photography. Georges built a movie studio in 1896 outside Paris with a glass roof and glass walls. His glass building allowed Melies to film throughout the daylight hours in natural light.
Georges Melies Glass Box
He transformed and created movie magic with his 1902 movie,”Trip To The Moon.”The film had enormous success in France and around the world with Georges playing the chief scientist. The background was a painting and the foreground a stage set where his actors and props appeared and disappeared through trapdoors, chutes and revolving panels.
There was always a great sense of fun with his marvelous effects of fantasy and illusion. In this lift-off scene, a lady chorus-line honor guard offers a rousing sendoff—— aka a 1902 pin-up, if you will!
Georges used 30 sets showing a pockmarked moonscape, laboratories and launching pads. The movie lasted 14 minutes and was the first movie to be shown internationally.
The moon was balanced on wires enabling it to move forward toward the space capsule holding the four explorers.
(Film producers in the United State made illegal copies of the film creating large sums of money for themselves prompting Georges to open an office in New York city that pursued counterfeiters and pirated copies. (Interestingly one of those producers who illegally copied this film was Thomas Edison.*)
Continuing his successful eponymous trick films, Melies has a group of tourists attempt a trip to the sun using diverse methods ot transportation, partially following another Jules Verne storyline. Film historians still consider this Impossible Voyage movie as exceptional movie making.
The Impossible Voyage 1904
Melies was the first director to plan his films and shoot them in logical order where each scene was packed with details. It showcased his trademark visual effects and he used color tints in all of his films. Melies success continued eventually creating nearly 500 movies until 1913.
In time, other foresighted producers/directors rose to the forefront of the fast moving film world and Georges was left behind.
Although always highly-respected, by the late twenties Georges had no viable income and eventually became impoverished for the rest of his life. He and his second wife spent long hours selling candy and small toys at a stand in the Montparnasse train station. Later, friends found rooms for them in a cinema retirement home.
Georges Melies was awarded the French Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur in 1931
A 1914 landmark film was created in Italy telling the early life story of Cabiria, a young girl who survives a major earthquake only to be captured and sold into slavery. Spectacular pageantry includes larger-than-life gold elephants supporting a Roman roof.
Cabiria 1914
Cabiria, a young girl, (also the title of the movie) arrives in Carthage during the Punic Wars where she is to be sacrificed to the Child-eating Statue Kronos.
“Kronos”, the Child-eating Statue. This film had no shortage of lavish costumes, gigantic sets and grandiose special effects. Different landing and stair levels allowed the actors to move between battle scenes. Fires were lighted and blazed not only to portray the eruption of Mt Etna, but the burning of the Roman fleet, Hannibal crossing the Alps, religious rituals and epic rescue scenes. Cabiria is saved and is freed as a young adult. The actual statue of Kronos is in the Cinema Museum in Turin.
**Available on Home Video. 2000 DVD edition—Kino International on Video
The futuristic film Il Perfido in Canto 1916 features avant-garde design using bold, graphic geometric shapes, swirls and spirals. It is the story of a dazzling enchantress seducing married men.
She seduces the husband of her best friend. Her friend dies by suicide thus completing her downfall as…
she then commits her own suicide.
Thousands of miles away, sunny California would offer sunshine and the natural light needed for outdoor stages where the general approach to movie-making was to build unroofed stages covered with gauze cloth to shield the glare of the sun. 
But it was the constructed set that would drastically change the format of movies when carpenters and artists began building them. Reflectors were often used in early outdoor stages for illumination.
THE WORLD OF W. D. GRIFFITH: “Design should ALWAYS be the background to an emotion because movies are made emotion by emotion, not picture by picture. What is important to the emotional content of the scene is HOW the light arrives and reflects.”
Charlie Chapman called Griffith “the teacher of us all” as he proceeded to develop close-ups and fadeouts, cross-cutting, night photography, subtitles, editing, deep focus and battle-scenes that included staged battle with hundreds 0f extras made to look like thousands in his blockbuster film Birth of a Nation. His 1915 film glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Riots broke out in the North over its violence and racial content.
Birth of a Nation 1915
The three hour film told the story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and two intertwined families bitterly opposed to each other because they are fiercely protective of their own North and South viewpoints. The sons from each family enlist to fight in the Civil War and when one of the Confederate’s son is injured, he is sent to a battle field hospital where his nurse is the sister of the Northern soldier/son.
And lo and behold, true love transpires between more members of both families and despite many heartrendingly great sequences, marriages ensue between the two families.
Griffith Created Dynamic Civil War Action
Not only battle scenes depicted devastation of lives lost, but Northern carpetbaggers and vengeful Union politicians commanded forceful impact.
A renegade Negro tries to impose his will on a Southern daughter thus causing the Ku Klux Klan to be reborn. It was the first 12-reel movie and lasted three hours. A completely original musical score was composed where some theaters used a full orchestra while the rank and file used accompanied music as small as a piano and a violin.
Griffiths was highly criticized for using white actors in black face. Bona fide black players were only used in crowd scenes. It was banned in eight states convincing Griffiths to re-edit portions and even delete some KKK references in 1921. The NAACP came to the forefront to organize demonstrations throughout the country, but yet the film drew massive attendance. Griffith’s film is estimated to have earned $18 million in its first few years.
And that fortune was completely spent on Griffith’s next film Intolerance 1916 where his imaginative concepts emphasized four different stories. But, he did not tell them in sequential order and kept exchanging anecdotes from story to story. Audiences found it difficult to follow his epic visions because the parallel storylines were not only separated by centuries, but by the use of a symbolic image showing a mother rocking a cradle between the different time periods. She was identified as The Dear One.
The Fall of Babylon in 539 BC, (no effort or money spared to create this court)
A Biblical Story in AD 27,——”The Woman Taken in Adultery
A French story of St. Bartholomew’s massacre in France in 1572
and A Modern US Crime Story in 1914 Showing Striking Workers.
In the Babylon story, ramparts were built for chariots to race and there was room for over 3000 extras. Cameramen filmed above the crowd scenes sitting in a tethered balloon. All of his old and many new technical devices were employed. Griffith was hurt and angry that critics derided and attacked Birth of a Nation because he perceived he was treated with intolerance. He hoped to counterbalance his movie Intolerance by telling stories of true intolerance.
United Artists: Dreaming of retaining and taking their own destiny into their own hands, four actors joined together to create a new studio, United Artists. One major change occurred for them when they took control of the distribution of their own films from the monopoly run by the studios in 1919. The four were Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith.
Griffith produced more successful movies throughout the teens and continued carrying on with film making throughout the twenties and early thirties. However his later films never received the acclaim of his earlier successes.
He abandoned film making to live in isolation and was left behind for the rest of his life.
Actor Donald Crisp said, “It was the tragedy of his later years that this active, brilliant mind was given no chance to participate in the advancement of the industry.”
There were numerous posthumous awards for this iconic filmmaker and storyteller. A creator who transformed movies to capture and share the heights of imagination.
Sy’s Salient Points:
Pioneer movie makers included The Lumiere brothers, France 1895.
Thomas Edison developed the cinema camera 1890.
Georges Melies was an early pioneer of special effects.
Robert W. Paul a foremost pioneer in England.
D. W. Griffith created narrative film as we know it today.
When I originally presented Hooray for Hollywood at my first ASID Conference in Baltimore, MD, the web was nonexistent. All my information was referenced through time-consuming research about this storied past using books and magazines, some as far back as the early 1900’s. My slides evolved by first using a stationary camera and then transferring the negatives into slides. Some of the lighter slides in this blog are from that period.
Hooray for Hollywood Lecture, Initially presented at the following varying venues: ASID Conferences Javits Convention Center, New York City, NY, The Mart, Chicago, IL, Atlanta Convention Center, AG, Various Cruise Ship Lines, Various California Universities
Hooray for Hollywood Blog Pictures: Original slides from SY lectures, Wikipedia, Britannica, Varying Websites
Happy St. Patrick’s Day Darling Blaire.
“To be continued…”