Photoplay/Volume 36/Issue 3/Revolution in Hollywood

ACROSS the sun-baked hills of Hollywood is sweeping the greatest revolution in the history of public entertainment.

It is a quiet war, as wars go. There are no barricades in the streets, no clatter of machine guns, no bombs bursting in air. Slowly, but as surely as death and taxes, the well-entrenched hosts of the silent drama are giving way before army that bears the banners of a new kind of fun—the talking pictures.

The braver and wiser souls of the old movie horde are going out to meet the talkies, open-minded and ambitious to succeed in the new medium. The die-hards, sticking their heads into ostrich holes, are going down to artistic and business death, to be heard no more.

The war has swept quietly across these sunny hills where the movies of the world are made. So quickly, so softly has come the great offensive that Hollywood itself, whose people live so close to the business of entertaining us, doesn't realize quite what has happened. But to a war correspondent from outside there is a realization of a new world.

For twenty years our friends of the films had lived and worked in this sunny land above the Pacific shore. They fought and played and loved and labored, grinding out their millions of feet of tears and giggles for our daily pleasure.

Hollywood was a close corporation, and picture making was a delicate and certain art, known only to those who had practiced it for years. Amused, the movie makers saw stage stars sweep into the flickers and flop before the demands of the silent drama.

Gradually the photoplay became a Great Art in their minds—a Great Mystery known only to them, and handed down to their children. Salaries ran into the thousands, and egos ran with them. The makers of films, secure in their hills, looked down upon the world and found it pretty good, though not quite up to their own tight little lives.

Then crashed the shot heard round the world!

SOME boys named Warner turned loose a picture called "The Jazz Singer," wherein the colossal Al Jolson actually sang songs and talked to his old gray mammy.

Hollywood tottered.

For months there was panic. Producers ran in circles, chasing their tails. Actors stormed at the talkies, wept, oiled revolvers, took vocal lessons, ran the scales.

And all the time, from the East, writers, actors and directors from the speaking stage began filtering through the trenches of the photoplay, eager to attack the problems of the talking picture.

The revolution was on!

The armies of the silent pictures rallied to repel the invading host.

The hills of southern California saw the encampments of two armies—the brigades of Broadway and the embattled Hollywoodians. The newcomers from the East were shy and a little bit brash and cocky—the picture people were frightened, and covered their fear with brag and bluster.

"What do these stage people know about picture technique?" screamed the Hollywoodians. "They can't make films."

But stage actors, with spotlight dust still on their dinner coats, stepped before the camera and the microphone and gave movie performances to the manner born. Directors from the theater put picture ​people through their paces like photoplay veterans.

And the invasion continued, and for a time it was bloody war, with throats cut and artistic bodies left in alleys.

The wise picture folk hurried to the stage for speaking experience, and the tremendous success of Bessie Love, Warner Baxter, Conrad Nagel and others shows that the real troupers had nothing to fear.

The stupid photoplayers, afraid and hysterical, fell back on The Great Mystery they had made of the art-business of movie-making—they kept on trying to clothe the industry in garments that didn't fit. The bones of those foolish ones are bleaching on the hills over Hollywood today.

The attack from the East pressed on.

Fear and distrust on the side of the old guard, cockiness on the part of the Broadway shock troops—a panic of experiment seizing all hearts and changing a mighty entertainment force, built in twenty years, almost over night. Hollywood will never forget the first ghastly months after speech came to the quiet screen.

Both sides dug in. There was no fraternization—only hate and genuine terror between the silent and the sound. Out of the confusion came nothing good—only enmity and mistrust.

A wise writer from the East stood up before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in solemn conclave assembled.

"LADIES and gentlemen," he said, "I and dozens of my friends left our happy homes in the East and came three thousand miles, across plains filled with bisons and Red Indians, because we thought we had something to give the pictures.

"If we have, let us give it. If we haven't, we'll go back home without one squawk. Dozens of us have already left because we have had nothing to contribute.

"You have persisted in making pictures a great, impenetrable mystery. Now we are solving that mystery you have made. We are here to work as you are. You can't frighten us away. If we can offer something of value to motion pictures, we'll offer it. If we can't, we'll go back home, disappointed, but not heart-broken."

As the great war entered its second year, Hollywood began to understand. The revolution went on, but it was no longer bloody. Benny of Broadway and Harold of Hollywood began speaking when they met on the street, Hollywood grew calmer, less panicky. Those who had gifts found their reward, those who hadn't quietly faded from the scene.

The old line movie people came down off their high hobby horses and shook hands. The Easterners found fine friends and real people in the film colony, and they ceased to carry chips on their shoulders.

Fine actor families from the legitimate stage trekked West, staked out Hollywood claims and became citizens of that weird, wonderful world of make-believe.

People like James Gleason and his wife and son set up tepees—the Gleasons, for many years in and of the theater.

"How does it feel to be an exile from Broadway?" I asked him.

"Exile? I'm no exile. This is home now!" said Jim.

And the old guard of Hollywood?

HAPPIER, too, but still a little dazed by the speed of the revolution.

"I used to know everyone on the boulevard," said one, a little wistfully. "Now I sec mostly strangers."

But for the most part there is happiness in both armed camps—Broadway and Hollywood have joined hands and tomahawks and together are revolutionizing the business of the films.

Few realize—least of all the old Hollywoodians—the extent of that great change.

Our favorite film stars study lines, when they used to lie in the sun. The other day Renee Adoree went to Arrowhead Springs—not to loaf, but to bone up on the dialogue of her next picture!

The once quiet studios now hear our English tongue—not to mention the tooting of tenor saxophones, the bleat of barber shop tenors and the rattle of machine guns.

The great invasion from the East goes on.

A check of the studios shows at least 250 of the theater's best and finest laboring in the studios sacred to the feared photoplay.

A hundred of these are players, and a half a hundred are playwrights. Song writers, ​stage directors, stagers of dances swell the total. Directors of stage and screen work together on pictures without once biting each other. Players of the theater and players of the sunlit stages not only work together in the same cast, but eat, laugh and live together in perfect concord.

AND so the first phase of Hollywood's great change rolls on. The first great advance has been made. The hosts of the stage and screen are gradually living down and fighting off fear and distrust, and are laboring hand in hand to the greater glory of the photoplay.

The truest and finest of the theater and the studio survive, as they always have and will, whatever their medium. The incompetents and drones are perishing, as was inevitable. The great war has done more to shake out the wastrels and two-for-a-nickel reputations of the film world than anything in the history of Hollywood.

Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard meet and shake hands, grinning. They have joined forces, and fight under the same flag.

For when bigger and finer talkies are made, Broadway and Hollywood, allies, and not enemies, will make them!