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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Imagine That
- Sprache: Englisch
The most intriguing stories from the history of cinema are the tales of what might have been, those seemingly insignificant incidents that would have had the largest unforeseen effects. Imagine That… The farmers of southern California revolt against plans for an aqueduct … and Chicago becomes the new home of American cinema Casablanca's writing committee takes total control … and the film's greatest moments are whitewashed from history Disney decides against collaborating with Hitler's former engineer … and the USA never wins the 'Space Race' Engaging, contentious and compulsively readable, each book in this new series takes the reader on a historical flight of fancy, imagining the consequences if history had gone just that little bit differently.
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Seitenzahl: 126
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Contents
Imagine that …
Some of history’s greatest stories are the tales of what might have been. The agonising missed chances, the harrowingly close shaves, the vital complications that affected a major outcome – the course of history is a precarious one. Seemingly insignificant incidents can have the largest unforeseen impacts.
Scientists have pondered whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings on one continent could lead to a tornado on another, and these chains of cause and effect remain fascinating to us. In this book and the others in the series I take a look at those moments where the smallest tweak would have caused history to pan out very differently.
Hence the title, Imagine That …
Michael Sells
Chapter 1
Imagine that … The farmers of southern California revolt against plans for an aqueduct … and Chicago becomes the new home of American cinema
Perfectly formed and immaculately decorated, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Hollywood hills were part of an elaborate set design. They have provided the backdrop to many a film, becoming more famous than the works produced in the studios of the city below. The world of shattered flashbulbs, cemented hand prints and red carpets has long dominated the landscape of downtown Hollywood, but this has not always been the case. Before cinema was king and Hollywood became synonymous with glamour and success, the Gabrielino tribe roamed the cactus-covered expanse that was La Nopalera.
With no overarching town planning, the future form of La Nopalera (Spanish for ‘the cactus patch’) was uncertain. The undeveloped terrain could just as easily have become a small, condensed town as the sprawling metropolis it is today. In fact, when in 1887 the area was officially renamed Hollywood, a small town was what this picturesque spot seemed destined to become. As was commonplace during the settling of America, the unpopulated land had been divided into plots, or ranchos, and sold off to willing buyers. Mr H.H. Wilcox purchased a large rancho upon which he planned to build a holiday home for himself and his wife. Mrs Daeida Wilcox named the house ‘Hollywood’ but the term soon came to refer to the entire rancho. Daeida raised the required funds for key town amenities including churches and schools, and before long the rancho had become a thriving town.
Of course Daeida Wilcox did not raise funds for a colossal movie business. The town’s defining feature came almost entirely by chance. The climate and glorious surroundings of the region made it an ideal location for American film crews. In 1907, forced west by the grey skies of home, a Chicago-based production company struggling to complete a weather-stricken shoot stumbled upon the Wilcox rancho. The hills did not yet bear the iconic Hollywood sign and the city centre was still an understated suburban stretch, but the revolution was set to begin.
Within five years Hollywood was home to a wealth of film companies. It offered a relative haven compared to New York and other major cities which were subject to increasingly oppressive equipment regulations. Filmmaking at the time was dominated by Kinetoscope technology. This system of capturing pictures was devised by Thomas Edison’s General Electric and was subject to surprisingly lax patenting, in a lapse of commercial thinking uncharacteristic of the inventor. A complete lack of overseas patents meant foreign inventors and manufacturers were able to upgrade and improve upon Edison’s design before selling it back to the American market on import. However, once Edison realised his oversight, he began to threaten legal action against those film crews using his designs. The East Coast was leading the way in cinema at the turn of the century with New York as its driving force, but with Edison based in New Jersey and growing increasingly litigious, the region soon became untenable for filmmakers and a mass exodus began.
As Hollywood emerged as the new home of cinema, the diminutive town found itself swelling with a creative new populace. Suddenly, Hollywood was no longer agricultural land but rather a bustling town complete with some of the finest restaurants and clubs in the whole of America. However, the transition was far from seamless; the area’s farming community revolted against the shift in the town’s make-up, feeling that the new residents were being unfairly prioritised. The town’s authorities did little to assuage their concerns. As the opportunity to become the home of American cinema grew more apparent, plans were swiftly devised to grasp the chance by making the town more accessible. In 1908, a year after the Chicago film company first happened upon Hollywood, blueprints for the Owens Valley Aqueduct were drawn up and construction began immediately. The project was completed in 1913, signalling the beginning of the end for Hollywood’s farmers.
The construction of the aqueduct created thousands of jobs but, when the work was completed, those jobs disappeared along with thousands more. The water that filled the aqueduct had been diverted from the Owens Valley, sapping vital resources and vastly reducing the farming capacity of the land. Local outrage was palpable and enduring, culminating in a dynamite attack on the controversial structure in 1924. The long-running unrest came to be known as the California Water Wars. By the time of the disgruntled residents’ explosive act of sabotage it was already too late; the town’s film industry was booming and agriculture was forever destined to take a back seat. The landmarks of Tinseltown were beginning to take shape.
With nearby Los Angeles growing at an equally rapid rate, real estate in southern California was serious business. Prime locations and neighbourhoods were marked up and sold with ease. The sector was as intensely competitive for sellers as it was for potential tenants, so agencies and developers took to increasingly inventive sales techniques to compete. In 1923, Messrs Tracy Shoults and Sidney Woodruff, a pair of Los Angeles property developers, constructed an exciting new hillside community for aspirational Californians. Very much in the mould of a Mediterranean village, the idyllic complex would have been attractive all on its own. Shoults and Woodruff, however, felt the need to make everyone aware of their new venture. They erected an eye-catching sign; thirteen letters, each one 45 feet tall, on the side of the Hollywood hills. They simply spelled out ‘HOLLYWOODLAND’.
It was the name of their attractive community, but came to mean so much more. Initially intended to stand for just over a year, the sign was so popular that it soon became an irreplaceable motif upon the hillside, but it wasn’t cheap. High yearly maintenance costs, for both the sign and the accompanying lighting system, led to a compromise in 1949. The Los Angeles Parks Department promised to take on the duty of maintaining the sign, provided that the last four letters were removed. Having long outgrown the community it was built to promote, it the sign finally stood as an all-inclusive icon for Hollywood and its glamorous exports. It was the icing on the cake, the tinsel on the town, but for the local farmers it was the final insult. What was once just a sales billboard now confirmed the extinction of their trade in the region. Hollywood was the undisputed home of showbiz.
Hollywood, the cradle of American cinema, has become the unrivalled global powerhouse of blockbusters. On the face of it, the formula was simple enough – right place, right time, lots of money. But that’s only scratching the surface of the birth of Hollywood. The home of cinema could so easily have pitched up elsewhere and had it done so, the canon of works that has emerged from the hills would have been altered beyond recognition.
The start of the 20th century was a time of great technological progress and America was shaped by the new methods. The relative youth of the nation meant that cities and states were still forging their identities. Nothing provided a stronger identity, nor higher employment, than unique industries and exports. Natural produce and services came to characterise and define individual communities and states throughout the 1800s; California was known for being rich in fruit fields and assorted crops. The clamour for such an identity, for something to put states ‘on the map’, meant that many other states and cities would have welcomed the movie scene enthusiastically and universally.
The Water Wars had the potential to derail the growth of Tinseltown or even to end it. As was seen in the migration of filmmakers from New York following Edison’s legal threats, film studios felt no real sense of geographic loyalty. While some controversies can be attractive to exciting art movements, agricultural disputes would probably not have been. Had the residents voiced or demonstrated their objections at an earlier stage then it is highly likely that New York’s decamping filmmakers would have given southern California a wide berth and taken up residence in another unsuspecting city.
After Los Angeles, the next most suitable location to provide a home to American cinema was Chicago. Although situated in the eastern half of the country, Chicago was still hundreds of miles from Edison with a buffer zone of several states. What’s more it already boasted an impressive local motion picture industry, second only to New York at the time. In fact, it remained a second home to many film studios even after most had relocated to California. However, Chicago was blighted by legal wrangles of its own. Around the time that Hollywood began to boom, Chicago’s independent film companies set about overthrowing the monopoly of the industry giants, much to the distaste of the established studios. The disputes centred on loopholes in industry agreements which saw independent studios living beyond their means, creating a perceived imbalance in favour of the minor players who faced comparatively lesser sanctions than the larger studios. However, with stricter regulation this might not have been an issue. Had Hollywood not been discovered when it was, the amicable agreement reached by Chicago’s filmmakers in later years would surely have been hurried by the promise of such a boost to the local industry.
It could easily have happened differently; after all, Hollywood was not chosen deliberately but simply stumbled upon by film crews driving west, following the sun. Of course, this was one element Chicago could not have replicated. With cold winters and humid summers, Chicago was a workable destination but by no means an ideal one. Transport routes and methods were improving all the while, and it would only have been a matter of time before the sun-swept hills and beaches of Los Angeles were discovered by film crews. The Hollywood hills would undoubtedly still have played host to some of cinema’s greatest tales due to the reliability of their climate. Yet with the studios settled in Chicago and Hollywood further advanced as an agricultural power, the backdrop to such tales might have been vastly different.
When cinema arrived in Hollywood, it benefited from a relatively blank canvas. The town was built from scratch, giving new tenants and developers the freedom to build expressive and ambitious buildings. But without a vibrant town to attract new buyers, developments like Hollywood-land would never have come into existence, and the hills would have remained unadorned by the now-iconic signage as a result. Within a decade or two, such was the speed of growth in America at the time, the freedom to create would arguably have disappeared beneath the vast, ever-expanding orange groves and the region would have developed far more organically. The Owens Valley would still have been home to a thundering river and the entire ecosystem of Hollywood, La Nopalera or whichever name it might have been known by, would have altered dramatically as a result.
Without the burgeoning movie business and resultant urban overhaul, Hollywood could well have come to resemble the more northerly reaches of the state. One of Hollywood’s most successful directors, Alfred Hitchcock (pictured left), took a shine to northern California when he moved to the area from his native England. Widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers in history, he used San Francisco and the surrounding area as the setting for most of his films. He often declared his love of northern California and its vast vineyards. Canadian actor Hume Cronyn once recounted Hitchcock saying: ‘When the day’s work is done, we go out to the vineyards and squeeze the grapes through our hair.’ His attraction to the area was borne out of far more than just recreational activities.
Perversely, California without the Hollywood film industry could well have provided Hitchcock with a far greater array of possible set locations. The untamed expanses and coastland that featured in so many of his films would have been preserved state-wide. That said, had American cinema been based in Chicago, he might never have had the chance to explore the Californian hills as extensively as he did, robbing him of the iconic settings of his most influential works. His 1963 psychological thriller The Birds has come to be heralded as one of cinema’s finest and most eerie works. Bodega Bay, California, formed the backdrop and played as pivotal a role in the film as the cast or even the birds. Unlike Hollywood, Bodega Bay was commonly swathed in fog, and with bare hillsides surrounding it Hitchcock found a perfectly bleak location for his tale. However, Chicago shares this type of foggy climate and so Hitchcock might well have found himself filming The Birds elsewhere. Such alterations in possible set locations would have affected so many of Hollywood’s great films.
