Made In America - Bill Bryson [165]
Beverly Hills, the other southern California name that most of us automatically associate with the movies, and more particularly with movie stars (a term coined in 1919), was likewise named on a whim. It was christened in 1907 by a property developer, who named his 3,200-acre housing development (although it had just one house at the time) Beverly Hills after his hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts. It became especially fashionable with the stars after Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks married in 1920 and moved into a Beverly Hills mansion they called Pickfair.
In 1917 the Motion Picture Patents Company was declared an illegal cartel and ordered to disband. It hardly mattered. By that time, Hollywood (and from here on in I am using the term generically) all but owned the movie business. It is a curious fact that this most American of phenomena was created almost entirely by non-Americans. Apart from Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford (who were in any case both Canadian), the early studios were run by a small band of men who had begun life from strikingly similar backgrounds: they were all eastern European Jews, poor and uneducated, who had left Europe in the same decade (the 1880s), and had established themselves in the New World in mostly lowly trades before they all abruptly – and instinctively, it seems – abandoned their careers in the first decade of this century and became seized with the opportunities to be found in the nickelodeon business.
It is most odd, but consider: Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was a scrap merchant from Lithuania. The Hungarian-born Adolf Zukor of Famous Players Studios was a janitor and later a furrier. Samuel Goldwyn of the Goldwyn Picture Company was a glove salesman from Warsaw. Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, was a German who had run a clothing store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. William Fox (real name Wilhelm Fried) was a Hungarian who worked in the garment industry before founding Fox Pictures. Joseph M. Schenk, creator of Twentieth Century Productions, was a Russian-born fairground showman and pharmacist. The Warner brothers – Albert, Harry, Jack and Sam were from Poland and had worked at various, mostly menial jobs. None had any link to the entertainment industry. Yet in the first years of the century, as if answering an implanted signal, they all migrated to New York City and became involved in the nickelodeon business – some as owners of nickelodeon parlours, some as makers of films. In the second decade of the century, another signal appears to have gone off in their heads and they decamped en masse to Hollywood. Some understandable confusion exists concerning Samuel Goldwyn and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Though his name accounts for the middle initial in MGM, Goldwyn was never part of the company. He sold out to the Metro studios and Louis B. Mayer in 1924, and was astonished to discover that they took his name with them – though that was no more than Goldwyn himself had done. The Goldwyn Picture Company was not in fact named for Goldwyn, but rather he for it. His real name was Schmuel Gelbfisz, though for his first thirty years in America he had called himself – perhaps a little unwisely – Samuel Goldfish. Goldwyn was a portmanteau of the names of the studio’s two founders: Samuel Goldfish and Edgar Selwyn. It wasn’t until 1918, tired of being the butt of endless fish-bowl jokes, that he named himself after his corporation. After the MGM takeover, he had to go to court to win permission to continue making movies under the Goldwyn