HOLLYWOOD TIMELINE

While researching for the Garden of Allah novels, I created a timeline of what was going on in Hollywood, Los Angeles, the U.S. and the world at large with a specific focus on the events that would affect the lives of my characters living and working in Hollywood. The references at the end of each entry refer to the page number of the book I found the information. (So “2/15” refers to page 2 of book 15 listed on my bibliography page.) Readers of these pages will note the occasional inconstancy – that is due to conflicting sources from which this information was taken. All this is my long-winded way of saying that I am NOT presenting this information as a professionally-research, definitive, you-can-take-it-as-gospel history of Hollywood. It ain’t. It’s just a huge pile of info I’ll pulled from a wide variety of books, websites, magazine articles. Take it, like it, lump it or leave it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

1881 to 1933

1879 Louis B. Mayer sees his first movie when the movies come to Saint John. (P26/148)

04DEC1881 L.A. Times, founded by Harrison Gray Otis, puts out its first edition. (2/15)

1880-1900 Most of the streets in Hollywood are named. (1/15)

1885 A cable car system, fashioned after the one in San Francisco, begins serving an area west of downtown and the 1400 building lots plotted there by the system’s owners. (51/67)

1887 Harvey Henderson Wilcox and wife Daeida founds Hollywood. Harvey favors the name “Figwood” however Daeida chooses ‘Hollywood’ taken from the name of a home of a woman Daeida met on a train going east.

01FEB1887 The name “Hollywood” first appears officially on Harvey Wilcox’s subdivision map filed with the county recorder on Feb 1, 1887. (6/7) Harvey Wilcox subdivided his 160 acres of Hollywood into a grid of streets and avenues, with Franklin Ave at its northern perimeter, Sunset Boulevard to the south, Gower to the west and Hudson to the east. (66/7)

1892 Colorado miner Edward Doheny strikes oil a few blocks west of downtown at Glendale Boulevard and Second Street. (51/75)

23APR1893 The first program of motion pictures in the United States was screened at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York. (p10/107)

1896 Thomas Edison’s motion pictures (first developed in the 1870s) is first publicly exhibited at a NY vaudeville house – Koster and Bial’s. (16/25)

1896 Colonel Griffith J. Griffith donates 3000 acres to L.A. in 1903 he is convicted of attempted murder of his wife. (2/15)

1900 Charles Seeberger redesigned Jesse Reno’s escalator and invented the modern escalator. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

MAR1901 The Third St Tunnel opens to the public in downtown Los Angeles. It was unpaved and unlit. The gutters weren’t installed until 1902.

1901 The Angels Flight funicular opens next to the Third Street tunnel shuttling passengers between Hill and Olive Streets
1969 – Angels Flight closes for the redevelopment of Bunker Hill
1996 – Angels Flight reopens mid-block between 3rd and 4th Streets connecting Hill Street and California Plaza
2001 – Angels Flight closes after a fatal accident
15MAR2010 – Angels Flight opens again
10JUN to 05JUL2011 – Angels Flight closes temporarily
05SEP2013 – Angels Flight is closed down after minor derailment leads to an investigation that discovers potentially serious safety issues
31AUG2017 – Angels Flight opens again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_Flight

1901 King Camp Gillette invents the double-edged safety razor. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

1902 Edwin S. Porter begins to piece together several strips of film containing different scenes so he could tell a little story that movies begin to come to life. (50/165)

1902 TL Talley opens his Electric Theater at 262 South Main St, Los Angeles. He advertises: “An Hour’s Amusement and Genuine Fun for 10 CENTS ADMISSION. Evenings 7:30 to 10:30” (p2/141)

1902 By this year, movies had become so popular in urban areas that special theaters were built exclusively for film exhibition. (16/25)

1902 The birth of the Teddy Bear. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

DEC1902 Hollywood Hotel opens at 6811 Hollywood Blvd. It becomes a phenomenal success and Thursday night become the social night. (40/7) It is later owned by Myra Hershey, a member of the Pennsylvania chocolate family. (14/45) Mrs. Margaret Anderson was the first manager who, in 1912, moved to the brand new Beverly Hills Hotel. (41/153) A couple of years after the opening, 104 rooms were added. (108/56)

14NOV1903 …it was decided by a slim vote of it citizens (88 for/77 against) that his little farming community should officially be incorporated as the new City of Hollywood. (66/7)

1903 The brothers Warner open their first movie show at the Cascade theater in New Castle, Pennsylvania, showing The Great Train Tobbery.

1903 Hollywood Hotel opens. It becomes a phenomenal success and Thursday night become THE social night. (40/7)

1903 The American movie as narrative was invented with the premiere of “The Great Train Robbery”, a movie that lasted an entire reel. (116/p5)

1903 1903 – The Los Angeles Examiner (later the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) is founded by William Randolph Hearst. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1904 Hollywood High School opens. (25/37)

14MAY1904 Sunset Boulevard is completed from downtown L.A. to Laurel Canyon. A grand opening is held for the public. (p28/130)

1904 Teabags invented by Thomas Suillivan. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

1905 Buildings in Los Angeles limited to a height of 150 feet. (Not for earthquake safety, but aesthetics.) (51/59)

1905 The first nickelodeon opened near Pittsburgh in 1905. Within three years, they were thousands of Nickelodeons, attracting millions of customers eager to see something new every day. (p10/107)

1905 Hollywood gets its first store, the Hollywood Cash Grocery at the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga. (41/1) (p28/130)

1905 The electric trolley between Los Angeles and Hollywood starts running every 15 minutes – this same year, Hollywood gets its first electricity, piped water, and telephone service. (p28/130)

1905 Entertainment industry trade paper Variety starts, founded by Sime Silverman (1/195)

15APR1905 The ‘Hollywood Club’ starts, changing its name in 1914 to the ‘Woman’s Club of Hollywood’. http://www.womansclubofhollywood.org/aboutus.html

04JUL1905 Abbot Kinney officially opens Venice, California. (25/22)

1905 & early 1906 An oil syndicate headed by Charles Canfield, Burton Green and Max Whittier paid $670,000 for the Hammel-Denker ranch hoping to find exploitable deposits under the bean fields. They drilled over 30 wells but didn’t find appreciable oil except in the SW edge, near today’s Century City office towers. But they’d paid too much money, so they decided instead to turn the ranch into a real estate development. They hired Wilbur David Cook Jr. to design a master plan for the development of Beverly Hills. (p81/130)

1906 In 1906 Hollywood was just still a large ranch. The area had been divided by the Spanish Vogernment; to the west was Rancho La Brea and the east Rancho Los Feliz. The Ranchos were subdivided and sold in the 1880s. Most of Rancho La Brea was purchased by Daeida and Horace Henderson Wilcox in 1886. He was a millionaire real estate developer from Ohio, a religious fanatic, and a Prohibitionist. He devised a grid plan for his large track and in 1887 began selling his version of a Christian community with a Methodist, Prohibitionist church on every block. (9/96)

1906 Alexandra Hotel opens at 501 South Spring Street, corner of Fifth. (25/139) With its ornate lobby and thick rug (called the “Million Dollar carpet: because of the deals that transpired on it) It became the afternoon meeting place. The bar offered cocktails and free sandwiches so many out-of-work actors ended up there hoping to make contacts and free food. (40/8)

1906 William Kellogg invents Cornflakes. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

1906 The first fossils are excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

28NOV1907 Louis B. Mayer’s first theater, the Orpheum opens on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1907, in Haverhill, MA. The first feature to be shown was The Passion Play at Christmas time, accompanied by religious slides with the organist playing hymns. The Passion Play was a hit. (P32/148)

1907 The Selig Company of Chicago complete The Heart of a Race Trout which is considered the first “story” film ever completed within the Los Angeles area. (41/1)

1907 Leo Baekeland invents the first synthetic plastic called Bakelite. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

1907 Developed first as an oil field by Edward Doheny, Charles A. Canfield, Burton Green and Max Whittier in the 1910s, Beverly Hills is later developed as real estate, designed by Wilbur Cook. By 1920, the area has a population of about 630. (14/53) Before acquiring the name Beverly Hills, the few locals called it ‘Morocco Junction’. (9/96) Green borrowed the name from his Beverly Farms in Massachusetts. (10/96) Green broke ground in late 1907. His first model home still stands, unchanged at 515 Canon Drive. (10/96)

1907 In search of mild weather, sunshine and an ocean beach to complete the filming of a one-reel melodrama called The Count of Monte Cristo, the Selig Polyscope film company dispatches a director and cameraman from Chicago to Los Angeles. (51/79)

11OCT1908 Max Factor opens a tiny shop at 1204 South Central Ave on the edge of downtown L.A. The sign above the entrance reads, “Max Factor’s Antiseptic Hair Store. Toupees made to order. High-grade work.” Three months later, he founds Max Factor and Company. (p21/121)

1906 In 1906 the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago send an expedition to California to silm scenes for films produced primarily in Chicago. When ocean scenes were needed for Monte Cristo in 1907, the company returned and decided to use southern California for future films. (108/31)

LATE1908 In search of mild weather, sunshine and an ocean beach to complete the filming of a one-reel melodrama called The Count of Monte Cristo, the Selig Polyscope film company dispatches a director and cameraman from Chicago to Los Angeles (51/79) making them the first filmmakers to shoot scenes in California. (Laguna Beach) (p32/130)

1908 Philippe’s restaurant opens. It will later invent the French dip roast beef sandwich. See also: Cole’s (no one knows for sure which restaurant actually gets credit for creating the now-famous menu item). https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1908 California’s (as against Hollywood’s) first movie studio is established by Selig Studios star Francis Boggs in a converted Chinese laundry at 8^th and Olive. (42/4) The first film they shot was The Heart of the Race Tout which was the first film completed completely in California. (66/13)

1908 Henry Ford announces: “I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for. (56/29)

1908/9 William N. Selig is not widely remembered today, but he is considered to be one of the pioneers of Hollywood and the motion picture industry. Among his accomplishments are the production of the first cliff-hanger serial The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913-1914), the first film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910)… and, perhaps most importantly, the construction of the first permanent film studio in Los Angeles in 1909 for the Selig Polyscope Company, which had moved from Chicago.
But before building the studio, in late 1908 or early 1909, Selig had rented a mansion that stood at 751 South Olive Street in downtown Los Angeles. It is believed that he initially began motion picture production at this house – building the first movie sets in the backyard. The mansion was torn down long ago, and the land has been a parking lot since the ’20s. http://hollywoodlostandfound.net/locations/seligfirststudio.html

In 1908 director Francis Boggs filmed scenes on a Main Street rooftop in Los Angeles and later moved his productions to the yard of Sing Lee Laundry on Olive Street. At this site, the Selig Company filmed some scenes for The Heart of a Race Trout (1909), the first dramatic motion picture filmed on the West Coast. Col. William Selif decided to build California’s first motion picture studio at Edendale, north of Los Angeles. (108/31)

1909 The National Board of Censorship is set up. It will be renamed The National Board of Review in Films in 1921. (50/181)

1909 Hollywood’s Magic Club is built by banker Rollin Blane (2/29)

1909 Instant coffee invented by G. Washington. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

17JUN1909 In the Sultan’s Power made by Selig is released. It is the first movie filmed in Los Angeles. (p44/141) IMDB says it was “the first dramatic film shot on the American West Coast.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000611/trivia

23MAY1910 The premiere of Ramona, the first film with a California history theme, starring Mary Pickford. (116/p35)

24JUL1909 The lines of parked automobiles blocking Main and Spring Streets in downtown Los Angeles made front-page news in the L.A. Times, with the paper saying there was hardly room for any cars to pass through the narrow lane between the vehicles on the curb and the streetcar track. The incident marks LA’s first traffic jam.

19OCT1909 The town of Colegrove (directly south of Hollywood) is annexed into the city of Los Angeles. When that happens, Weyse St (which was named in honor of Harvey and Daeida Wilcox’s business partner Otto Günther Weyse) is renamed Vine St.

1910 The city of Hollywood’s ever-vigilant Board of Trustees bans all movie theaters in Hollywood. (p36/130)

1910 California State law bans betting on horse racing in 1910. In 1915, Mexican government legalizes gambling, giving US gamblers a place to go, which eventually leads to Agua Caliente racetrack and golf course opening in Tijuana in 1928.

1910 D. W Griffith’s Biograph Studio arrives, renting a large vacant lot at the corner of Grand Ave and Washington St. (10/96)

In 1910, Griffith shots scenes in the Hollywood Hills and in the Cahuenga Pass for In Old California, making it the firs dramatic film shot in Hollywood proper. (108/31)

1910 Carl Laemmle, head of the IMP studio, bows to public pressure and for the first time, the name of a leading actress is publicized – Florence Lawrence

Late 1910 …or early 1911, Hollywood’s first theater established at 6525 Hollywood Blvd – the Idyl Hour Theater. Name change to Iris Theater in 1913, moved to 6514 Hollywood Blvd in 1914 and again to a 1000-seat theater at 6508 Hollywood in 1918

Early 1910s Prospect Ave is renamed Hollywood Boulevard. (14/58)
1910 116/p5 says: Hollywood and Los Feliz officially were annexed to the city of Los Angeles in 1910 in order to ensure an adequate water supply. Along with the annexation, Prospect Ave’s name officially changed to Hollywood Boulevard, except for a short stretch east of Vermont Ave.

1910 Dominguez Field in Los Angeles is host to the world’s first air meet. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1910 Residents of the municipality of Hollywood vote to join the city of Los Angeles, partially to have access to Los Angeles’ water rights. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1911 An ordinance is passed prohibiting any building taller than thirteen stories (150 feet) to give the city “hamonious lines” and because “people come to Los Angeles to get away from the dark, walled-in streets of Eastern cities.” (108/9)

OCT1911 Hollywood’s first movie studio opens at 6101 Sunset in a tavern and barn, the Nestor Film Company (2/7). The first movie filmed there was The Law of the Range. (6/12) Although 66/18 says that it was Her Indian Hero.

1911 The Janes house was built at the turn of the century for Herman and Mary Janes and their daughters. From 1911 until 1926, Misses Carrie, Mabel and Grace operated the Janes School for the children of film industry figures such as Douglas Fairbanks and Cecil B. DeMille. It is now Hollywood Boulevard’s last remaining residential structure. http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html

FEB1911 Vitagraph Studio head J. Stuart Blackton launches the nation’s first publication devoted entirely to motion pictures: Motion Picture Magazine. (16/30)

1911 The first film production company to come into the Los Feliz area is Vitagraph Studios who established themselves at 4151 Prospect Ave at Talmadge Street. Vitagraph was founded in 1897 and initially relocated from New York to a small studio in Santa Monica in 1910. Vitagraph is generally credited with the first “feature length film” in 1909-1910 The Life of Moses, a 5-part serial that clocked in at 90 minutes. Eventually, the studio was sold at great profit to Warner Bros. in 1927 and the site became their East Hollywood annex. (116/p7)

1911 Nestor Film Company rents an empty saloon on the corner of Sunset and Gower and converts it to a movie studio. (51/80) …in the former Blondeau Tavern. (108/31) The actual address is 6100 Sunset (116/p7)

1912 Zukor had begun the Famous Players Film Corporation in 1912 and had a great success with Sarah Bernhardt in Queen Elizabeth, which led to him to sign Mary Pickford and set up an entire company [Artcraft] solely for the release of her pictures. Zukor always had expansionist instincts, and soon merged Famous Players with the Jesse L Lasky Feature Film Company. (P44/148)

1912 After building up a film exchange in Baltimore and in Pittsburgh Harry Warner sells them in 1912 for $100,000 to the General Film Company. The Warner boys take their money and go to California, renting a studio on Sunset Boulevard. Sam and Jack make the movies, Albert distributes them, and Harry runs the overall operation. (P58/149)

12JUN1912 Louis B. Mayer, residing at 2½ Merrimack Street in Haverhill, MA becomes a citizen of the United States of America, sealing a fervent love affair that would never die. (p35/148)

1912 The Famous Players Film Company is founded by Adolph Zukor, Daniel Frohman, and Charles Frohman. Through mergers, the studio would evolve into Paramount Pictures by the end of the decade.
http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

02MAY1912 L.A.’s first country club – the Vernon Country Club – opens at 49^th and Santa Fe. Nothing much more than a roadhouse set in a beets field, it gave birth to Hollywood nightlight and was a complete success until it burned down in MAR’29. Before he hit it big, Valentino was a $35-a-week taxi dancer. (40/11)

30APR1912 The Universal Film Manufacturing Company is founded in New York by Carl Laemmle. It would evolve into Universal Studios and move to Hollywood in 1915.
http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/
1912 In 1912, the newly formed Universal Film Manufacturing Company of New York opened its first studio across the street from Nestor (corner of Sunset and Gower). Three years later they moved into the Valley. (108/31) (p16/129)

1912 Adolph Zukor presents “Queen Elizabeth” starring the renowned stage actress Sarah Bernhardt and film acting starts to become respectable. (116/p6)

1912 Photoplay magazine begins publication. (16/30)

1912 Motorized movie cameras invented, replaced hand-cranked cameras. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

1912 Clarence Crane created Life Savers candy in 1912. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

MAR1912 Motion Picture Story magazine rates Frances X. Bushman as the country’s most popular actor.

12MAY1912 Beverly Hills Hotel (a.k.a. the Pink Palace) opens at 9641 Sunset, built by oilman Burton Green also the founder of Beverly Hills (2/43) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Hills_Hotel
Margaret Anderson, proprietor of the Hollywood Hotel before Mira Hershey took over the hotel’s management with a $250,000 mortgage. She spent another $125,000 furnishing the hotel, which becomes an immediate landmark and social center for the new community. The hotel’s dining was also the only restaurant in town. (p86/120)

1912 First gas station in Los Angeles opens. http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi01f.htm

1912 The Magic Castle built as a residence by Rollin Lane at a cost of $12,000, (14/269)

1912 Although first introduced in 1983, zippers are now starting to be widely used in the flies of men’s pants. (60/30)

JAN1913 In January 1913 the Louis B Mayer company is incorporated “to conduct general amusement business in New York City, US and Canada…Purchase, lease, license, sell, produce, manage, operate and exhibit plays, dramas, operas, musicals.” The company’s name would be changed to Louis B Mayer productions, Inc., as of November 1920, before it was resolved dissolved in June 1926. (P37/148)

1913 The Centaur Film Company became the first studio to relocate everything from the East Coast to downtown Hollywood. The company paid $40 a month to rent the dilapidated Blondeau Tavern Barbershop at the corner of Sunset and Gower. (11/96)

1913 Adolphe and Eugene Bernheimer two Oriental-art importers complete a Japanese mountain palace at 1999 North Sycamore Street, on a 7-acre estate in the hills just west of the Cahuenga Pass. (p37/130)

24NOV1913 Traffic in Souls opens. Made for a mere $5,700.00 and tackling the lurid subject of white slavery, this (Universal’s first feature length release) earned a whopping $450,000.00 and it put the company squarely on the map. (p18/141) (IMDB)

SEP 1913 Charlie Chaplin joins the Keystone Studio at a salary of $150 per week which was twice what he was earning with the traveling Vaudeville troupe, Karno. (66/20)

LATE1913 The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, headed by fledgling director Cecil B. deMille heads west from New York to film The Squaw Man in Arizona. But dust storms sent them on to L.A. then Hollywood. (51/80) Filming on the first important feature film made in California commenced on DEC 29. (50/67)(65/10)(108/31) DeMille rents half a barn on the southeast corner of Selma Ave and Vine Street from Jacob Stern. DeMille has high hopes for The Squaw Man and hangs a sign on the barn that reads “Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company Studio.” (p31/130)

05NOV1913 The Los Angeles Aqueduct begins delivering water from the Owens Valley. It was the largest municipal water system in the nation and transformed the San Fernando Valley. http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi01f.htm (66/14)

1913 Formica was invented in Cincinnati in 1913 by two young men, Herbert Faber and Daniel O’Conor. http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/formica.html

1914 Having figured out there was more money in production than distribution, in 1914, William Fox begin production of his own films in New Jersey. In 1916, he leased a studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Edendale, then opened his own on the corner of Sunset and Western Ave. In 1916 William Fox bought 100 acres in West Los Angeles and opened what he called the Fox Hills studio in August of that year. (P62/149)

Early 1914 Laemmle purchases the 230-acre Taylor Ranch on the north side of the Hollywood Hills at a cost of $165,000. (47/2)

1914 Beginning in 1914, both Lasky and Famous Players released their films through a start-up company, Paramount Pictures Corporation, organized early that year by a Utah theatre owner, W. W. Hodkinson, who had bought and merged several smaller firms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Studios#Early_history

18FEB1914 The Lasky Feature Player Company’s first feature – The Squaw Man – holds its premiere screening at the Longacre building on W. 48^th St in NY. LBM is in attendance.
It becomes the movie industry’s first nationwide box-office success, costing $15,000 to make and earning over $225,000. (p34/130)

10MAY1914 First official Mother’s Day. http://www.foe.com/history/mothers.html

21DEC1914 The premiere of Tillie’s Punctured Romance, the first full-length American comedy. It starred Charlie Chaplin and Marie Dressler. (116/p35)

1914 Beverly Hills votes to become an independent city. (90/130)

1914 Hearst Metrotone News (renamed News of the Day in 1936) was a newsreel series (1914–1967) produced by the Hearst Corporation. Hearst produced silent newsreels under the titles of Hearst Newsreel, International Newsreel, and MGM News before settling on the generic title Hearst Metrotone News. From January 1919 to July 1929, International Newsreel was produced by Hearst’s International News Service and released by Universal Studios. Hearst began to release sound newsreels in September 1929 under an agreement with Fox Film Corporation using the Fox Movietone sound system. Hearst dissolved its agreement with Fox in October 1934, and released its newsreels through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from then until 1967.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Metrotone_News

1914 William Randolph Hearst opens the offices of his Los Angeles Examiner newspaper at 146 W. 11th Street, downtown LA. The Examiner was Hearst’s morning newspaper. In the afternoon, Angelenos read the Herald-Express which was headquartered where the Convention Center is now. The papers were merged as the Herald-Examiner in 1962. The new afternoon daily was published from this building.

1914 Photoplay Magazine (established in 1911 covering the legitimate stage) starts to also write about the movies – their circulation explodes from 10,000 copies to over 500,000 in a month. (43/96)

23FEB1915 The Supreme Court rules that movies were “a business pure and simple” and lacked the constitutional protection of free speech that books, magazines and newspapers possessed. (And therefore subject to censorship.) (50/182)

Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio is decided by the United States Supreme Court. In a 9-0 decision, the court rules that films are not protected by the 1st Amendment and are not considered free speech. The movement condones the institution of state censorship boards that will eventually become the bane of Hollywood and lead to the institution of the Production Code. The Supreme Court’s rationale: “The exhibition of motion pictures is a business pure and simple.” http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

JAN1915 In January 1915 from the ashes of the failed Alco films a meeting in Parlor B at the Claridge Hotel in New York, the Alco shareholders reorganized as the Metro Pictures Corporation. Richard Ryland was chosen as president, Louis B. Mayer secretary, and the council was J Robert Ruben who had was representing the creditors of Alco. Metro subcontracted with independent producers for their supply of motion pictures. Metro’s plan was to release a feature per week costing between $15,000 and a $20,000. The companies first picture, Satan Sanderson, was released in May 1915. (P43/148) The primary metro studio was on the 61st and Broadway, a cavernous, 200-foot-long space over a garage. The stage was in the middle of the room, while offices circled the walls. Louis B. Mayer’s office was on West 45th St. (P45/148)

Circa mid-1910s The Van de Kamps first started selling ‘Saratoga Chips’ (Potato Chips) from a tiny stand with a Dutch ‘cleanliness’ theme at 2nd & Spring Sts in downtown Los Angeles. According to the Homestead Museum, Theodore Van de Kamp and his brother-in-law Lawrence Frank opened their first stand in 1915 on Spring St after moving from Milwaukee. They opened four more potato chip stores in 1915. They pivoted to bakeries in 1919 because WW1 made potatoes expensive and hard to get.

1915 The courts ordered the dissolution of the monopolistic trust, the motion picture Peyton’s company organized by Thomas Edison. (p11/107)

12JAN1915 A Fool There Was opens and makes a star of Theda Bara. (p57/130) By 1918 her “vamping” career is over. In 1921, she marries director Charles Brabin and becomes a Beverly Hills housewife. (p60/130)

08FEB1915 Los Angeles premiere at Clune’s Auditorium of the $100,000-budgeted Birth of a Nation. The picture is such a huge hit, that it makes a millionaire of director DW Griffith and the film’s investors. (p79/113) (p39/130)

15FEB1915 In the case of Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio the Supreme Court dismisses the notion that freedom of speech applies to motion pictures thereby establishing the constitutionality of state censorship. https://aurorasginjoint.com/2016/08/05/fighting-censorship-before-the-code/

1915 Universal City Studio built by Carl Laemmle (2/70) Universal Studios moves from the corner of Sunset and Gower to the San Fernando Valley. (108/31)

15MAR1915 Universal City was dedicated as a municipality. (9/13)

1915 William Fox merges two of his companies, a production studio and a theater chain, to form Fox Films. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

1915 Most of Valley voted to join Los Angeles. Subdividing of Rancho Encino began. http://www.studiocityresidents.org/history.php

1915 By 1915, the Lasky studio covers 10 acres at the corner of Sunset and Vine and a ranch in the Valley. (51/83)

JUL’15/JAN’16 D. W Griffith forms The Triangle Film Corporation with Thomas Ince and Mack Sennett, and took over the Majestic Reliance Studios at 4500 Sunset, renaming it the Fine Arts Studio. (66/20)

p280/107 says that Harry Culver owned eleven acres at La Ballona Creek and convinced the NYMPC (New York Motion Picture Company) to lease it with an option to buy it. The studio officially opened in JAN1916. By 1918 Samuel Goldwyn had taken over the lease.

p132/133 says: The shabby suburb of Culver City, the brainchild of Harry Culver, had appeared in 1915 when Culver brashly offered free land to anyone who would build a motion-picture studio on it. Thomas Ince constructed the first, followed by Sam Goldwyn and Hal Roach.

1915 Douglas Fairbanks arrives in Hollywood and rents a house on North Highland Ave. (p45/130)

1915 Metro pictures Corporation was formed by a group of distributors to provide financing for independent films. It became an umbrella organization for a variety of smaller companies, including Quality Pictures, which Richard Roland and Joseph Engel – Metro’s president and treasurer – set up to make dramatic features in partnership with the great matinee idol of the period, Francis X. Bushman. J. Robert Ruben, and ambitious lawyer who had served as an assistant District Attorney and later deputy police commissioner of New York City, became Metro’s legal counsel. (p11/107)

1915 There are 55,000 cars on the streets of Los Angeles. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1916 D.W. Griffith films Intolerance in a huge set depicting Babylon at the corner of Sunset and Hollywood. (51/83)

1916 The Jesse L. Lasky Company, a Hollywood film production house, merges with Adolph Zukor’s New York-based Famous Players. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1916 Hollywood’s first Studio Club for Actresses established by Mary Pickford and Mrs. CB DeMille opens at 6129 Carlos Ave, then in 1926 moved to 1215 Lodi Place (2/8)

1916 In 1916 the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures changed its name to the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (National Board of Review). While the name change may mean little today the removal of the word “censorship” was key. Not only did the word carry negativity with it, but as it turns out the Board didn’t act as a censorship body. In fact they rejected the idea to a great degree relying instead on the studios to censor themselves. Also created by the studios in New York that year was The National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI). While The National Board of Review stated that scrutinizing the movies was its main objective, The National Association lobbied for the industry and against censorship. https://aurorasginjoint.com/2016/08/05/fighting-censorship-before-the-code/

06APR1917 The US enters World War I. (p31/145)

1917 After a short-lived tenure in Edendale, William Fox moves his Fox Film Corporation to 1401 N. Wester Ave, between Sunset and Fountain. Even after Fox bought the 300-acre Tom Mix ranch just west of Beverly Hills in 1928, he maintained his headquarters at the Western Ave studio unil 1935 when Fox merged with 20^th Century Pictures. (116/p9)

1917 William Randolph Hearst meets Marion Davies, who is a chorine in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1917. (p204/130)

1917 27-year-old Charlie Chaplin signs with First National to make eight 1- or 2-reelers in the next 18 months for $1 million. (p48/130)

1917 In 1917, a group of exhibitors, infuriated by the block booking practices of Famous Players-Lasky, formed their own production and distribution company, which they dubbed First National. For subscribing a given amount, each franchise holder got the rights to the First National pictures in their designated territory. The only way for the company to survive was to make a big splash in a hurry, and that they did, signing Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, thus achieving instant credibility. Mary and Nate Gordon, under the name of Gordon-Mira Film Corp with offices at 35 Piedmont St. in Boston, became of the franchise holder in their area, handling First National films such as Shoulder Arms and Daddy Long Legs not to mention less prestigious titles such as Kiss or Kill and Unpainted Woman. (P49/148)

1917 For a few months in 1917, Mayer also distributed the product of Lewis Selznick’s Select Pictures in New England, but Select was failing, weighed down by more than a quarter million dollars of debt. Mayer didn’t like Selznick’s gambling, he didn’t like Selznick’s drinking, and he didn’t like the way Selznick slept around and neglected his family, including his sons, David and Myron. Mayer got out of the distribution deal and blamed Selznick for the failure of his company. (P49/148)

1917 George Westmore founds the first movie makeup department at the Selig Studio. (p17/120)

1917 The first Forest Lawn Cemetery opens. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1917 Grand Central Market founded at 317 S. Broadway (2/63)

1917 The first L.A. movie tabloid began as an adult humor magazine. By 1920 Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang was dedicated entirely to the movies, with columns like “Movie Hot Stuff”.

1918 The original owners of Ince/Triangle Pictures – D. W Griffith, Thomas Ince and Mack Sennett – break up their company. In October 1918, Goldwyn Pictures purchases the studio facilities for $325,000…later Samuel Goldwyn spends $50,000 to add 23 more acres. (119/17)

JUN1918 In June 1918 while vacationing in Long Island, Henrietta Thalberg urged Irving to do introduce himself to one of her mother’s neighbors, a genial businessman named Carl Laemmle, the unabashedly wealthy founder of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. At five foot one, the elfish Laemmle had to look up at Irving who was five foot six. Laemmle asked the young man’s opinion of the moving pictures that he projected on a bed sheet in his front porch. Irving’s comments were articulate and well received but Laemmle did not offer him a job. When Laemmle next saw Irving, the boy was working in Laemmle’s office at 1600 Broadway as a $35 a week secretary to his assistant, D. B. Lederman. Unlike many of Laemmle’s employees, Irving had secured the job by applying for it, not by virtue of nepotism. Irving made a practice of writing memos to suggest improvements. These memories so impressed Laemmle that Irving became his secretary at $60 a week. (P5/147)

1918 28-year-old art director called Cedric Gibbons starts work at the Goldwyn Company in Culver City. (P73/148)

1918 By the end of World War I, Marcus Loew offered his patrons a 50-50 mix of vaudeville and movies in luxurious thousand-seat theaters in a good neighborhood. He owned 112 theaters, employed at 10,000 people, and owned a corporation with $25 million. Loew believed in the movies, but, even more, he believed in peoples need to be entertained. (p76/148)

1918 With the approximately $2 million he earned from Birth of a Nation, Louis B. Mayer moves to Los Angeles and founds his own production company, Louis B. Mayer Pictures. (18/96)

1918 Louis B Mayer announced he was forming Louis B. Mayer Productions in Los Angeles, with a highly doubtful capitalization of $5 million, and he was planning to sell off his roughly 50 theaters in New England in order to consolidate – and raise money for – his production activities. (P53/148)

1918 Louis B. Mayer moved into a custom-built administration building on the Selig studio lot in Lincoln Park, into a structure that resembles the château at Chenonceau. In addition to offices it had four stages and dressing rooms for several stars. LB wasn’t too sure about automobiles so initially he took a house close enough to the studio to walk. At the new studio, Margaret hovered solicitously, constructing a kitchen and personally cooking LB’s meals. The actors and technicians began asking her to make their lunches too, so Margaret expanded, having a cook and two girls to wait on people. The result was one of the first studio commissaries and Mayer was proud to say that it made a profit. (P55/148)

1918 Actress Alla Nazimova buys a 99-year lease on an eight-room, Spanish-style house at 8150 Sunset Boulevard complete with 3.5 acres.

MID OCT1918 Alla Nazimova, Charles Bryant, and their servants arrived in Los Angeles in October 1918. (Source: “Flashes, Metro-ites Arrive,” Grace Kingsley, LAT, Oct. 12, 1918.)

08NOV1981 In November 1918, a week after Armistice Day ended WWI, Central Park (previously the 6^th Street Park) was renamed Pershing Square, in honor of Gen. John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pershing_Square

29DEC1918 Virtuous Wives, Mayer’s first personal production, opened at the Strand Theater in New York on December 29, 1918. It starred Anita Stewart, and based on a magazine story Owen Johnson for which Mayer had paid about $15,000. The reviews were great, but they weren’t awful either and business was good. Louis had guessed right, as he usually did. (P52/148)

1918 Robert Brunton builds his movie studio on Marathon St near Gower St, Hollywood. (In 1921, Michael Levee, former VP and treasurer of Brunton takes it over an internal hostile takeover and renames it United Studios. In 1926, it becomes Famous Players-Lasky and later again, Paramount.)

1918 Brothers Sam, Jack, Harry and Albert Warner, immigrants from Poland via Pennsylvania, open Warner Bros. Studios on Sunset Boulevard. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1918 The country’s first air-conditioned cinema opens in Chicago.

1918 The Hollywood Hills were still orange groves and vineyards. (1/17)

1918 Charlie Chaplin builds studios at 1417 La Brea (2/10) (22/425)

1918 Sid Grauman opens the Million Dollar Theater (2/63)

EARLY 1919 In early 1919 Louis B. Mayer moved his company to 3800 Mission Rd. in East Los Angeles, renting space from the fading studio called Selig Polyscope, located on the same lot as Colonel William Selig’s zoo, the largest private collection of exotic animals in the country. (P18/147)

EARLY 1919 In early 1919 Goldwyn bought the Triangle Studio lot for $325,000. He then hired a Columbia University graduate named Howard Dietz whose first job was to come up with a logo. Dietz thought about the lion on the masthead of his college newspaper. Sam Goldwyn Studio was soon bearing the proud profile of a lion in repose and the legend Ars Gratia Artis, which was loosely translated as “Art for art’s sake.” (P23/147)

1919 In 1919 Laemmle takes young Irving Thalberg to the sprawling Universal City studios in the San Fernando Valley. Universal was not making enough films, and those it was releasing with poor. Once there, Laemmle demoted a few employees and then suddenly decanted to New York, leaving Irving at the studio with a triumvirate of managers. Having schooled himself in William James’s philosophy of pragmatism, Irving took a look at the loafers who were fighting among themselves and planned his strategy. “I took charge because there was no one left to take charge.’” (P11/146)

1919 Marcus Loew purchases Metro Pictures (established in 1915 by Richard A. Rowland) for $3.1 million with a studio on the corner of Cahuenga and Romaine, in Hollywood (119/18)

1919 Fox produced the Movietone News for several decades in the United States, from 1919 to 1963, although the British version continued until 1979. … Prior to the late 1920s, movies were made without sound. Fox was able to produce its first newsreel with synchronized sound in 1927, revolutionizing the way in which people could see the news. The first Movietone News story with sound was about Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. http://www.ohiokids.org/tellzall/2006/march.shtml

1919 Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith form United Artists and had a tiny studio on the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Formosa, large enough for 3 or 4 pictures to be made at any one time. In 1935 the lot became the Samuel Goldwin Studio and United Artists became a leasing organization. (47/11)

22APR1919 Douglas Fairbanks pays $35,000 for a hunting lodge and surrounding 14 acres at 1143 Summit Drive, in the San Ysidro Canyon. (p91/130) And moves in at the end of the year. (p93/130)

Late 1910s It takes train a week to deliver news cross-country. (55/96)

1919 The American Legion is chartered by Congress in 1919 as a patriotic, mutual-help, war-time veterans organization.

1919 Ownership of Santa Catalina Island passes to the Wrigley family (as in “chewing gum.”) In 1972, members of the Wrigley family established the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation and preservation of Santa Catalina Island. On February 15, 1975, the final step was taken to ensure the protection of the majority of Santa Catalina Island when Mr. and Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley and Mrs. Dorothy Wrigley Offield, through the Santa Catalina Island Company, deeded 42,135 acres of the Island to the Conservancy. With this gift, the conservation and preservation of most of Catalina’s interior and 48 miles of its coastline were given permanent status in perpetuity.

1919 At the Algonquin Hotel in New York, the Algonquin Round Table is established. The first gathering was a luncheon for New York Times theatre critic Aleck Woollcott who had recently returned from WWI. The group included: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood, and Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield. This inner circle, however, referred to themselves as the Vicious Circle. It would reach the peak of its influence in 1925 and disbanded in 1929. Many of these people would later visit or stay at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles.

1919 William Randolph Hearst forms Cosmopolitan Pictures to make Marion Davies’ films and hires Frances Marion at $2000 a week to write scenarios. (p206/130)

1919 Hollywood’s Musso & Frank Grill opens, then moves to 6667 Hollywood Blvd in 1937 and becomes popular with 1930s and 1940s writers such as Faulkner, Chandler, Nathanael West (2/2) http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html

29JUN1919 Prohibition Amendment made law in the United States. A description of the intro of Prohibition in NY is on 27/64

1919 Simultaneous to the founding of United Artists, Douglas Fairbanks leases the entire Clune Studios at 5320 Melrose Ave.

1919 In New York the mammoth Capitol theater opens with seating for 5300, topping 1914’s The Strand, 1916’s the Rialto and 1917’s Rivoli. (51/360)

1919 The pop-up toaster invented by Charles Strite. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

1920

01JAN1920 Film production is conducted on two Fox Film’s Western Avenue film lots – the 8 ½-acre “Comedy lot” on the east side of Sunset Boulevard and the 5-acre “Dramatic lot.” https://centurycitycc.com/fox-studios-historical-timeline/

03JAN1920 Marcus Loew bought Metro Pictures in a deal announced on January 3, 1920. Loew paid $3.1 million for Metro, including the new Metro studio at Romaine St in Hollywood. Of the purchase price, $1.5 million was paid in newly issued Lowe’s stock, $1.6 million through some of the profits from foreign sales of Metro Pictures. In other words, the purchase didn’t cost Loew any cash. (p76/148)

JAN1920 Metro Pictures Corporation is sold outright to the Loew’s theater chain for $3,100,000. With subsequent mergers within the next four years, the company would soon become the powerful Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. (137/112)

JAN1920 Norma Shearer arrives in New York with her mother and sister. Hoping for stardom, she meets Florence Ziegfeld and D.W. Griffith (then filming Way Down East). Both men return the same unflattering verdict: with looks like hers, she’ll never be a star. Undaunted, Shearer begins a regimental fitness routine as well as experimental treatments to help cure a cast in her eye.
http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

16JAN1920 The enforcement of the 18th Amendment begins.
http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

28MAR1920 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks marry in a secret ceremony at the suburban Los Angeles home of Baptist minister J. Whitcombe Brougher. (p99/120)

18AUG1920 The 19th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, and women are given the right to vote.
http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

28MAR1920 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks marry in a secret ceremony at the suburban Los Angeles home of Baptist minister J. Whitcombe Brougher. (p99/120)

29SEP1920 A U.S. Navy C6 hydrogen-filled dirigible, one of the largest in the Naval Air Force, crashes through thick fog into the hillsides east of Laurel Canyon, below what is today Hercules Drive up on Mt. Olympus.

OCT1920 To get cars and commerce moving again through the downtown business district, Los Angeles installed its first automated traffic signals in October 1920 at five locations on Broadway. These early signals, manufactured by the Acme Traffic Signal Co., paired “Stop” and “Go” semaphore arms with small red and green lights. Bells played the role of today’s amber or yellow lights, ringing when the flags changed—a process that took five seconds. By 1923 the city had installed 31 Acme traffic control devices. https://metrosetter.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/a-peep-into-los-angeles-history-traffic-signals/

02NOV1920 The radio broadcasting era itself begins in earnest at 6pm with the broadcast of the Harding-Cox election returns from station KDKA in Pittsburgh. (71/178)

END 1920 By the end of 1920 all the major studios had seen the demonstration of Western Electric’s sound film process. They were not impressed. Sound, they brusquely exclaimed, had been tried several times. It didn’t work. Besides, the audience wasn’t interested. Everybody knew that. Everybody but Sam Warner and William Fox. (P55/149)

1920 80% of the world’s films are shot in California. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1920 The founding of Western Associated Motion Picture Advertisers (WAMPAS) organization made up of publicists who worked within the studios and some freelancers. They needed a publicity gimmick and found it in annually selecting 13 female up and comers with perceived star quality. They called these women “Baby Stars” – the baby referred to their rank as stars in training. To be considered the girl would typically be young under 25, have at least 3 film credits under her belt (according to the original rules of selection, though this was changed later), and was not completely unknown to the public, but had not yet achieved stardom. Every January, the selected actresses would be presented at a big ceremony known as The Frolic, which was held from 1922 to 1934. For a list of each year’s WAMPAS Baby Stars, see https://zestyz.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/the-wampas-baby-stars-an-introduction/

1920 The population of Beverly Hills reaches 634. (p90/130)

1920 By 1920, 40 million Americans were going to the movies each week. (14/87)

1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes first novel, This Side of Paradise. (23/298)

1920 Agatha Christie introduces Hercule Poirot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. (T23/298)

1920 A piano concert by Gertrude Ross and Anna Ruzena Sprotte in 1920 was the first event ever held at the Hollywood Bowl. The duo used an old barn door as the stage. https://ca.meetingsmags.com/20-things-you-didnt-know-about-hollywood-bowl

1920s During the silent movies era, the 2 best addresses in Los Angeles were Hancock Park and Whitley Heights.

1920 Beginning in 1920, Photoplay (founded in 1911 in Chicago the same year that J. Stuart Blackton founded a similar magazine entitled Motion Picture Story) gave out what is considered the first significant annual movie award, the Photoplay Medal of Honor (later Gold Medal). An actual medallion produced by Tiffany & Co., it was voted on by the readers of the magazine and given to the producer of the year’s best film, chosen with an emphasis on (according to Quirk) “the ideals and motives governing its production… the worth of its dramatic message.” Though “Photoplay” only gave the single award for best film, its intentions and standards were influential on the Academy Awards founded later in the decade, and they overlap on Best Picture choices to some extent, though increasingly in the 1930s “Photoplay’s choices reflected its primarily female audience. By 1939 the Medal of Honor had declined in importance and the award was discontinued that year. In 1944 the awards were revived in a new format in which awards for both the film of the year and the most popular stars were determined by the Gallup Poll company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoplay

1920s Marlboros were originally introduced in the 1920’s in an effort to encourage women to smoke. The packaging motto: “Mild as May”–just right for the very feminine women who would not want a “man’s” cigarette, but something more likely to complement her softer, less aggressive style. The product was pretty much a flop, even when it was re-introduced a few years later with an advertising gimmick that bragged the product had replaced its ivory tip with a red one which would be more compatible with a lady’s lipstick. http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.509/news_detail.asp

1920 An Italian immigrant, Simon Rodia begins to build what will become the Watts Towers.

1920 US women get the vote. (10/90)

1920 For the first time, the 1920 census indicated a population in the United States over 100 million people. The 15% increase since the last census now showed a count of 106,021,537. The geographic center of the United States population still remained in Indiana, eight miles south-southeast of Spencer, in Owen County. http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1920.html

1920 The Band-Aid invented by Earle Dickson. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/bandaid.htm says that the brand name “Band Aid” was adopted in 1924.

1920 Water skiing is developed as a sport on Lake Annecy, France. (23/299)

1921

01JAN1921 Ambassador Hotel opens its doors on Wilshire and Seventh with 444 guest rooms and 76 bungalows on 13 acres of land. The grand opening, took place on 18JAN1921. The Los Angeles Herald’s headline read: “THRONGS ENJOY AMBASSADOR OPENING. Nearly 3000 Guests, Many From East Entertained at Big New Hotel.”

FEB1921 Dunlop invents the pneumatic tire.

FEB1921 Zukor presents his 14 points of self-censorship to the leaders of the film industry to head off government interference.
“On a cold night in February 1921, in a private dining room above the main hall, a gathering of some of the most important men in the movie business was taking place. Zukor, of course, presided from the head of the table. His partner, Jesse Lasky, sat as usual on his right. The rest of the gathering included William Fox, Sam Goldwyn, D. W. Griffith, Carl Laemmle, Lewis Selznick, Joseph Schenck, and William A. Brady, president of the national association. Loew arrived late, glad-handing around the table, laughing and joking with the others, until Zukor’s steely eyes stopped him cold. It was time to get serious.” (123/location 1730)

25MAY1921 The Cocoanut Grove opens at the Ambassador Hotel. (41/215)

The Cocoanut Grove begins its ascendancy to fame when the club’s host – Johnny Manos – heard from his friend, Valentino, that a number of the fake palm trees used in The Sheik were available for under $500. … Tuesday nights were the big nights at Cocoanut Grove and the usual evening for special events like Charleston dance contests or Greenwich Village night (when everyone came dressed as an artist, writer or poet. (6/184)

05SEP1921 Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, celebrating a new contract with Paramount that netted him $1 million, throws a party in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. During the festivities, a frail aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe became ill due to a problem with alcohol that inflamed her chronic cystitis. Two days later she was taken to the hospital, where her friend Bambina Maude Delmont, in a bid to shake the actor down for some money, told Rappe’s doctor that Arbuckle had raped her. Rappe died shortly thereafter, setting off a scandal as rumors swirled. Arbuckle was accused of rape in some cases, though the stories soon grew exaggerated and more transgressive as they implied that he either was impotent and had violated her with an object like a champagne bottle or piece of ice, or that he had crushed her to death during intercourse. William Randolph Hearst, seeing the opportunity to make some money, blasted the scandal across the front page of his nationwide newspaper chain, turning Arbuckle from one of the most popular and famous men into one of the most reviled. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

14SEP1921 Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter. (123/location 2655)

NOV1921 Charles See, along with his mother and his wife, Florence, opened the first See’s Candies shop and kitchen on Western Avenue in Los Angeles.

1921 Several members of the Screenwriters Guild of Author’s Guild of America form the Writer’s Club in 1921 and buy a six-room residence at Sunset and Las Palmas to use as a clubhouse. The club later takes in actors, producers, and directors, and acquired a huge membership. The Writer’s Club will eventually evolve into the Writer’s Guild of America, West. (14/102)

1921 The Robert Brunton Studios on Marathon St, Hollywood are taken over by Michael Levee, former VP and treasurer of Brunton, who renames it United Studios. (In 1926, it becomes Famous Players-Lasky and later again, Paramount.)

1921 With the appearance of The Kid (1921), Chaplin’s first feature, which teamed 7yo Jackie Coogan with Chaplin’s Tramp, child stars become a big thing for the first time in Hollywood. (50/119)

1921 Columbia Studios founded by Harry Cohn at 1438 Gower (2/11)

1921 The first Van de Kamp’s Bakery shop on Western and Beverly Boulevards.

1921 The KKK promotes “white supremacy” and seeks to control politics in many southern communities. (23/300)

1921 Valentino stars in his first successful film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (23/300)

1921 DeWitt Wallace founds Reader’s Digest. (23/300) February 5, 1922 – Reader’s Digest is founded and the first issue published by Dewitt and Lila Wallace. http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1920.html

1921 Oil is found on Los Angeles’ Signal Hill

1921 Los Angeles’ first commercial radio stations, KFI, KHJ and KNX go on the air.

1921 Coco Chanel introduces her perfume Chanel No. 5 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanel_No._5

1921 The Rose Bowl is completed.

1921 Marc Connelly publishes his first successful play, Dulcy. (23/300)

1921 John Larson invents the “polygraph” – lie detector. (23/301)

1921 President Harding declares November 11^th “Armistice Day”. (23/301)

1921 Insulin is discovered and used on dogs to treat diabetes. (23/301)

1921 Rorschach introduces his ink-blot tests. (23/301)

1922

Early 1922 By early 1922, Billy Wilkerson is finding success as a film salesman in New York, in the distribution department of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. (p36/145) He would be there until the end of 1923. (p37)

14JAN1922 William Hays resigns his cabinet post as the Postmaster General to become the President of the MPPDA. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

05FEB1922 First issue of Reader’s Digest. (Chronicle) (56/201)
The magazine first became available on newsstands in 1929. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_digest

1922 To shore up the moral damage caused by the scandals over Fatty Arbuckle, Wallace Reid, and the William Desmond Taylor murder, the Studio chiefs organized the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA.) Its president and spokesman, Will Hays, held a press conference to announce that in future the Hollywood community would respect the 10 Commandments, the Golden Rule, and “that sacred thing, the mind of a child.” Elk, Moose, Presbyterian, and Rotarian, Hays was also a shrewd public relations man willing to be privately corrupted for $35,360 a year. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_H._Hays ) He calmed the press, sidestepped demands for national censorship from religious groups, then sat down with the studio choose to work out a double standard. On the screen, so long as six wheels of fornication lead to a change of heart in the seventh, and criminals ended their exciting lives dead or jailed, the public would still dream of “sin” before it woke up to the need for respectability. In theory the private lives of stars were also regulated, for a breach of “accepted moral standards” became a breach of contract; in practice they gave interviews about the sanctity of marriage and took extra care to keep love affairs under wraps. (P48/151)

05MAR1922 The Hollywood moguls and New York moneymen organize their first professional consortium the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America – the MPPDA. To lead the MPPDA, the moviemakers turn to a non-pro: Will H. Hays who received an annual salary of $100,000, plus an extra $15,000 for living expenses. (77/35)

MAR1922 Sam Goldwyn is fired from the corporation bearing his name. He is given $600,000 for his stock and used that money to form the independent company where he would be remarkably successful for the next 30 off years. (p71/148)

11JUL1922 Hollywood Bowl opens http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/about/history.cfm

JUL1922 William H. Hays, ex-Postmaster General and $100,000-a-year Harding Administration appointee to clean up the scandal-ridden Hollywood film industry is given a welcome at the recently opened Hollywood Bowl.

20AUG1922 Harry Cohn (Columbia studios) produces his first feature: More to be Pitied than Scorned, costing $20,000 and was a big success, earning $130,000. (p81/114)

18OCT1922 Sid Grauman opens the Egyptian Theater at 6708 Hollywood Blvd with Douglas Fairbanks Jr movie Robin Hood (2/2) and creates Hollywood’s red-carpet tradition by splashing out a crimson-colored walkway for Hollywood’s the first-ever “Hollywood premiere.” http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/08/red-carpet-history

26NOV1922 The first feature length film in two-strip Technicolor, The Toll of the Sea, is released by Metro Pictures. The movie starred Anna May Wong as a Chinese woman who falls for an American and has his child out of wedlock. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

26NOV1922 New York premiere of Metro Pictures’ The Toll of the Sea. The seventh color feature, the second Technicolor feature, the first color feature made in Hollywood, and the first color feature anywhere that did not require a special projector to be shown. Was the first successful two-color (red and green) Technicolor feature film.

NOV1922 Irving met Mayer at Edwin Loeb’s home on at 815 South Kingsley Dr. in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles in November 1922. Louis gave Thalberg a perfunctory greeting then talked to Loeb then asked for his advice about a troublesome film called Pleasure Mad. Mayer was troubled that its director planned to film naked women cavorting in artists’ lofts. When Mayer asked Thalberg what he should do, Irving addressed Mayer’s problem by citing the system at Universal in which directors were required to respect the script. He explained his procedure in which the script went through a series of story conferences until it was approved by the producer. Only then does it go before the camera. Mayer was impressed by Irving‘s acumen. In subsequent meetings there was smart enough to let Irving do the talking. (P19/147)

1922 Paramount advances Valentino $40,000 to build a home at 6776 Wedgewood Place in the Whitley Heights section of Hollywood. (p191/130)

1922 Hollywood’s first synagogue, Temple Beth-El, opens at 1714 N. Wilton Place. (p124/113)

1922 Woolworth’s arrives to Hollywood Boulevard. (p117/113)

1922 Wireless radios (called “Radio Music Boxes”) for home use start rolling off the assembly line at a cost of between $50 and $150. $11 million worth are sold during that first year. (71/178)

1922 Joyce publishes Ulysses. (23/300)

1922 Christie’s Hotel 6724 Hollywood Boulevard opens. The first of Hollywood’s luxury hotels, the Christie is designed in the Georgian style of architecture-an unusual style along Hollywood Blvd. http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html
108/61 says it opened in 1923 and that it was the first hotel in Hollywood to feature a bathroom with every guest room.

Early 1920s MGM at 1721 Romaine (27/30)

1922 The board of the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation ousts Samuel Goldwyn out of the president’s job. (119/18)

1922 Hollywood’s first radio stations open: KNX, KHJ and KFI. (14/168) KNX broadcast from a Studebaker auto dealership. It was launched mainly to promote the Los Angeles Express newspaper. In 1938 CBS erected a new multi million dollar building at Sunset & Gower and made KNX the West Coast outpost of their network. (66/39)

1922 Gloria Swanson buys first movie star home in Beverly Hills with 3 acres (1/31)

1922 Hollywood’s first murder scandal – 45yo director William Desmond Taylor found murdered and arranged at 404½ South Alvarado (2/60)

1922 Millionaire Alphonzo Bell develops the former Danziger Estate into Bel Air, declaring that no homes could be sold to movie people, which was the case until the Depression. Bell’s home “Capi di Monte” at 801 Bel Air Rd. The first home purchased in Bel Air was by millionaire avocado expert A. Stephen Vavra at 725 Bel Air Rd (2/51)

1922 During the production of Universal’s “Merry-Go-Round”, 21 year old Irving Thalberg stuns the industry when he fires von Stroheim. It signals the end of the power of the directors and the start of the power of the studios. (20/96)

1922 The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America is set up to monitor the content of screen fare as well as to be moral watchdog over the private lives of Hollywood’s celebrated. The code went on to become known as The Hays Code, after Will Hays, the former US Postmaster General. (4/26) However it was not until 1934 that the association gained its real teeth. (2/33) (28/40)

1922 A.W. Ross establishes Wilshire Boulevard as a “shopping” district. http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi01f.htm

1922 Senate begins investigation of the Teapot Dome Scandal. (23/302)

1922 Emily Post publishes Etiquette: the Blue Book of Social Usage. (23/302)

1922 The tomb of Tutankhamen is discovered. (23/302)

1922 The first mechanical switchboard is installed in NYC. (23/302)

1923

01JAN1923 Sister Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple of the Four Square Gospel is dedicated in Echo Park.

18JAN1923 Wallace Reid (aka Good Time Wally, the King of Paramount), a morphine addict, dies in a sanitarium. (p135/130)

15FEB1923 Irving Thalberg leaves Universal joins Louis B. Mayer Pictures as vice president in charge of production, raising his salary from $200 a week to $600. (20/96) Mayer Productions hired Irving Thalberg, creating the post of vice president in charge of production. He is starting salary was $500 a week. “Find your way around,” LBM told Irving. “A man must crawl before he walks and walk before he runs.” One of Thalberg’s first goals for Mayer Productions was to find an actress to groom for stardom in case Anita Stewart should leave. While he was at Universal, Sam Marx, his friend in the New York office had recommended a 20-year-old Canadian girl named Norma Shearer. (P20/146) On February 15, 1923, Thalberg joined the Mayor Company at a salary of $600 per week. After the merger with MGM it was increased by only $50 but the secret to deal with Loew’s Inc. acknowledged his real value by guaranteeing him 4% of annual profit. Another 10% went to Mayer, and 6% to J. Robert Ruben, the negotiating attorney who became secretary of the new company. (P77/151)

FEB1923 Developers Woodruff and Shoults conceive Hollywoodland

FEB1923 With Frank Godsol having replaced Sam Goldwyn, the Goldwyn Company forms an alliance with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions, and began distributing the films of Marion Davies. (P71/148)

EARLY MAR1923 Having signed a five-year contract with Mayer Productions, Norma Shearer and her mother, Edith, arrive in Los Angeles. The taxi driver takes them to the Hollywood Hotel. They then took another taxi to the Mission Road studio to meet Irving Thalberg, who had noticed Norma in a couple of her New York movies and felt she had the prerequisite of stardom: she was watchable. (P19/147)

03MAR1923 Time magazine—a name that Harry Luce claimed had come to him while thinking how long it took to travel home every evening. With Stephen Vincent Benét and Archibald MacLeish as part-time writers, and Roy Larsen as circulation manager, they published their first issue on March 3, 1923. (“Rage For Fame, The Ascent of Clare Booth Luce.”)

31MAR1923 The first 107 acres of the foothill subdivision of Hollywoodland are put on the market.

04APR1923 After two decades of distributing, producing, and financing their pictures independently, the four Warner brothers formally incorporate their film production business as Warner Brothers Pictures.
http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

03MAY1923 The 1st non-stop flight across the US was completed. Army lieutenants Kelly and Macready arrived in San Diego from New York in 26 hours and 50 minutes. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

13JUL1923 The Hollywood sign is officially dedicated

25JUL1923 The L.A. Times uses the term “back lot” – it’s one of the first times the term is used in print to describe part of a movie studio. The quotation marks and space between the words is the L. A. Times’. (119/17)

01OCT1923 The Biltmore Hotel (aka “the host of the coast”) opens at 530 W. 5^th St, downtown Los Angeles. On the night of the gala, 3,000 guests, including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Cecil B. DeMille, and Myrna Loy, were entertained by seven orchestras, surrounded by profusions of sweet-smelling native flowers.

25OCT1923 The Teapot Dome scandal comes to public attention as Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, subcommittee chairman, revealed the findings of the past 18 months of investigation. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

08DEC1923 The newly built Hollywoodland sign is illuminated for the first time. (Los Angeles Herald.)

NOV/DEC1923 The Hollywoodland Sign, advertising an upscale hillside housing development, is erected. It was illuminated for the first time on Saturday 08DEC1923. It would light up in sequence: Holly—wood—land, and then the whole thing would light up. https://ladailymirror.com/2017/01/16/mary-mallory-hollywood-heights-hollywood-sign-built-and-illuminated-november-december-1923/

DEC1923 Marcus Loew instructed his executive officer Nicholas Schenck to meet with Godsol, Rubin, Mayer, and Thalberg about the possibility of a merger. Loew wanted to combine (1) Metro’s small stable of talent and excellent distribution system; (2) Goldwyn’s large stable of talent and immense physical plant; (3) Mayer’s management skills. Loew dissolved Metro, and then paid $4.7 million for the Goldwyn Company and $76,500 for Mayer’s company. To get a clear title to Goldwyn he paid $600,000 to buy out Sam Goldwyn’s stock. P25/146

1923 Due to disagreements with Paramount in the distribution of the Cosmopolitan Pictures in block booking venues, Hearst left Paramount to have his films released by other studios. Starting in 1923, they were distributed or co-produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer until 1934 when a disagreement with Louis B. Mayer over the film Marie Antoinette led Cosmopolitan to go to Warner Bros.

1923 The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum opens. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1923 Beverly Hills becomes an incorporated city. (p200/130)

1923 Population of Hollywood at 150,000 (1/15)

1923 America’s first imported star – Pola Negri – signs a contract with Paramount. (p42/121)

1923 Construction of Lake Hollywood Reservoir commences.

1923 Sardi’s built at 6313 Hollywood Boulevard, becoming a famous destination for breakfast and luncheon, designed by the world-renowned architect Rudolph Schindler. http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html

1923 The 12-story Taft building opens on the southeast corner of Hollywood and Vine. It was built for A.Z. Taft, Jr. (1889–1941), who purchased the Hollywood Memorial Church for US$125,000 and tore it down to make way for the building that bore his name.

1923 Knickerbocker Hotel built at 1714 N. Ivar Avenue. Its Lido Room was host to many parties for Hollywood stars. http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html

1923 Hollywood Legion Stadium opens at 1628 El Centro Ave, and from the 1920s to the 1950s all the big fights were held there on Friday nights. (2/7)

1923 James Bruce Mason Jr. patents the first swivel lipstick. (p71/121)

1923 Perc Westmore establishes Hollywood’s second movie studio makeup department—at First National Pcitures in Burbank, later absorbed by Warner Bros. Perc remains in charge there for the next 27 years. (p51/120)

1923 Burns and Allen begin their weekly radio show. (5/157)

1923 Aimee Semple McPherson’s Four Square Gospel opens (2/60)

1923 A young cartoonist named Walt Disney arrives in Los Angeles with $40 in his pocket. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1923 Pathé sells its United States motion picture production arm which a few years later came under the control of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. who made it part of RKO Pictures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9

1923 City of Tarzana founded by Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs, named after his estate that he bought from L.A. Times founder Harrison Gray Otis in 1919. The estate has SVF’s first swimming pool. (2/70)

1923 Hal B. Wallis starts at Warner Bros in publicity dept in 1923 (at the age of 20), within 5 years he is head of production. Left Warner Bros in 1944 to work as an independent producer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Wallis (47/142)

1923 Hollywood’s first nightclub, the Montmartre Café opens at 6757 Hollywood Blvd (2/1)

1923 Sanka was first marketed in the United States in 1923. At the beginning, it was sold in two “Sanka Coffee Houses” in New York, but soon it also came into retail. With its bright orange label, the package was easily identifiable, and due to intensive advertising campaigns and the General Foods Corporation taking over its distribution in 1928, Sanka became a nationwide sales success in the late 1920s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanka

1923 CB DeMille’s Ten Commandments is released. (23/302)

1923 Garrett A. Morgan invents a traffic signal. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121599a.htm

1923 Time magazine begins. (23/302)

1923 In 1918, the brothers opened the Warner Bros. studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Sam and Jack Warner produced the pictures, while Harry and Albert handled finance and distribution in New York. In 1923, they formally incorporated as Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros. (35/5)

1924

06JAN1924 William Fox buys 99 acres of land located between Santa Monica Boulevard and Pico Boulevard from the Janss Company. https://centurycitycc.com/fox-studios-historical-timeline/

10JAN1924 Columbia Studios comes into being. Originally founded in 1922 as CBC Film Sales is a cheap production studio and is known in the business as “Corned Beef and Cabbage”. On this date studio heads Harry & Jack Cohn and Joseph Brandt changes its name to Columbia Pictures Corp (21/69) For a history of the Columbia Torch Lady: http://www.reelclassics.com/Studios/Columbia/columbia-article-logo.htm

10APR1924 The Metro-Goldwyn studio merger became official when Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg signed a 14 -page contract. (P26/146)

24APR1924 A natural showman, L.B. Mayer arranges for a public ceremony to officially launch the Metro-Goldwyn studio. Hundreds of stars, directors, and other employees assemble on the lawn of the Culver City lot with local dignitaries, including the Admiral of the Pacific Fleet. A naval band provides the music, and congratulations are read from telegrams sent by President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Flanked by two of his most important aides, Harry Rapf (left)and Irving Thalberg (right), Mayer accepts the keys to the kingdom. (P19/107)

26APR1924 After Metro’s merger with Goldwyn Pictures was consummated on April 17^th, MGM comes into being (Originally it was Triangle Studios founded Summer of 1915 by D.W. Griffiths & Mack Sennett & Tom Ince. In 1918 it became the Sam Goldwyn Studios. (2/55) LB Mayer holds a party on the front lawn MC’d by Fred Niblo. (19/77) According to 21/70, the date is 17APR. MGM’s first release is He Who Gets Slapped, starring Lon Chaney, Normal Shearer and John Gilbert which opened 09NOV1924

In APR 1924 Mayer sold his studio to Loew and became the first vice president and general manager of the newly created Metro-Goldwyn (Mayer’s name would be added to the company’s title until late 1925) with Thalberg as 2^nd vice president and supervisor of production. They agreed to produce at least 15 pictures a year or the contract could be terminated. The studio name was Metro-Goldwyn, but in addition to a block of stock to share with Rubin and Thalberg, Mayer was given the right to put on the first title of the film “Louis B Mayer presents”, “Produced by Louis B. Mayer” or “Produced by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation.” (55/173)

Louis B. Mayer Productions was paid $75,000 for its contracts and facilities – less than 2% of Goldwyn’s price, but started with a salary of $1500 a week. Thalberg, as head of production, started at $650 a week, plus each of them participated in profit sharing. (106/15)

In its first year of production, MGM releases movies starring: Renee Adoree, Wallace Beary, Eleanor Boardman, Lon Chaney, Ronald Colman, Jackie Coogan, Marion Davies, John Gilbert, Boris Karloff, Buster Keaton, Adolph Menjou, Mae Murray, Ramon Novarro, ZiSu Pitts, Norma Shearer, Blanche Sweet, and Laurette Taylor. (20/107)

10MAY1924 J. Edgar Hoover becomes head of the Bureau of Investigation, later to be renamed the FBI in 1935. (23/306) http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1920.html

16MAY1924 Marcus Loew married his shaky Metro with an even shakier Goldwyn Company and Mayer’s small but stable company. Loew purchased Goldwyn for $4.7 million and Louis B. Mayer productions for $76,500. The Goldwyn may have been rudderless and in trouble, but it had 40 acres of studio lot as good as anything in Hollywood. Goldwyn was capitalized at $20 million, Metro at $3.1 million, and the stock of Lowe’s was worth $26 million. Louis B. Mayer was named vice president and general manager of Metro-Goldwyn at a salary of $1500 a week; Thalberg became second vice president and a supervisor of production at $650 and Robert Rubin was secretary at $600 a week. The group was obligated to deliver a minimum of only 15 pictures a year, indicating that Loew was indeed starved for product. (p78/148)

19MAY1924 After a run in Philadelphia, the revue “I’ll Say She Is” makes a successful opening on Broadway. The stage show’s success elevates its stars, the Four Marx Brothers, to Broadway from vaudeville. They would star in two more Broadway shows over the next two years, “The Cocoanuts” and “Animal Crackers”, before being signed by Paramount. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

27MAY1924 Jules Stein starts his dance-band booking agency, called MCA. (21/71)

17JUN1924 MGM’s first production, He Who Gets Slapped, starring Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, and John Gilbert goes production. Costing two times more than the average Metro-Goldwyn film, it premiered in November became the studio’s first smash hit. (P42/147)

AUG1924 The Taft office building opens on the southeast corner of Hollywood and Vine. https://www.flickr.com/photos/vokoban/6238356064/in/photostream/

09NOV1924 MGM’s first release (made entirely at the new studio) is He Who Gets Slapped, starring Lon Chaney, Normal Shearer and John Gilbert. (65/96) Made for around $170,000, it makes a profit of $350,000 (36/107)

NOV1924 Eddie Mannix entered the movie business in 1916, managing Joe Schenck’s New York studio. Sent to California by Nick Schenck in November 1924 as a comptroller, Mannix agreed to come out for three months and handle administration while Mayer was in Europe struggling with Ben-Hur. (P130/148)

04DEC1924 Erich von Stroheim’s Greed premieres at William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Theater in New York. The New York Times calls it the “sour creme de la sour creme de la bourgoisie” and Variety says it’s “morbid and senseless from a commercial viewpoint . . .”

12OCT1924 Fred Niblo was a poor choice for boss as he was sarcastic, indecisive, had a bad temper, and we would only lay out one day’s work in advance. However, Mayer couldn’t bring himself to fire a second director and start from scratch a third time. Louis B. Mayer and his family arrived in Rome on October 12, 1924 to inspect the battlefield that was the unfolding disastrous filming of Ben-Hur. While there Mayer’s physical condition deteriorated. In the pre-antibiotic era, abscessed teeth were a serious matter, and spreading dental infection could easily prove fatal. More and more teeth were pulled stable until Mayer had every tooth in his head removed. He hung on, working through the pain, trying to ramrod the production of Ben-Hur into some reasonable pace. (P104/148)

NOV1924 While in Europe, L.B. Mayer was intensely interested in the star of The Atonement of Gosta Berling directed by Mauritz Stiller. The star reminded him of Norma Talmadge. Stiller’s young protégé, Greta Garbo, signed a letter of intent to come to Culver City and work for MGM on a five-year contract starting $400 a week. (P104/148)

16SEP1924 Construction on Hollywood Plaza Hotel begins at 1633 N. Vine St This building was one of four major hotels built in Hollywood in the 1920s and once housed one of the most glamorous nightspots, “Clara Bow’s “It” Cafe named for and operated by the silent film star.

1924 Humorist Will Rogers is at the height of his career. He builds a home in Pacific Palisades. Movie stars and other celebrities visit and play Polo. He later becomes honorary Mayor of Beverly Hills.

1924 Los Angeles population tops one million. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1924 Hollywood Athletic Club opens at 6525 Sunset making it the tallest building in Hollywood. http://golosangeles.about.com/od/laphotogalleries/ig/Hollywood-Photo-Tour/Hollywood-Athletic-Club.htm http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result.php?q1=6525+Sunset+Blvd%2C+los+angeles%2C+ca

1924 Hollywoodland sign constructed at a cost of $21,000

15SEP1924 The first Cosmopolitan production, made for an MGM release, in 1924 was Yolanda. (46/34) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015518/

LATE 1924 Coast-to-coast airmail service is introduced. (55/96)

1924 The bright young man of the Warner Bros. studio was Darryl Zanuck, a strenuously ambitious writer who had been hired in 1924. Zanuck proved it so prolific he had to adopt multiple pseudonyms such as Melville Crossman, Mark Canfield, and Gregory Rogers. (P61/149)

1924 Cooling for human comfort, rather than industrial need, began in 1924, noted by the three Carrier centrifugal chillers installed in the J.L. Hudson Department Store in Detroit, Michigan. Shoppers flocked to the ‘air conditioned’ store. The boom in human cooling spread from the department stores to the movie theaters, most notably the Rivoli theater in New York, whose summer film business skyrocketed when it heavily advertised the cool comfort. Demand increased for smaller units and the Carrier Company obliged. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa081797.htm

1924 An opera company is established in Los Angeles. http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi01f.htm

1924 Hubble determines that stars in the Andromeda nebula are 100,000s of light-years away, beyond the Milky Way, proving that there are other galaxies besides our own. (23/305)

1924 Gotham Deli opens on Hollywood Boulevard and quickly becomes Hollywood’s most popular delicatessen. (p124/113)

1924 Leopold and Loeb trial. (23/307)

1924 Valentino buys Falcon Lair at 1436 Bella Drive in Beverly Hills from realtor George B. Read for $175,000 after his wife Natacha Rambova complains that their 8-room home at 6776 Wedgewood Place just won’t do for a star of his magnitude. (p7/130)

1924 Richard Leo Simon and Max Lincoln Schuster publish their first volume, The Cross Word Puzzle Book, which was also the world’s first collection of crossword puzzles. Simon and Schuster were so concerned the book might fail that they published it under a separate imprint, Plaza Publishing Company, to conceal their identities. They attached a pencil to each copy, vigorously advertised it, and turned crosswords into a nationwide rage. http://www.enotes.com/1920-lifestyles-social-trends-american-decades/fads-crazes

1924 Toluca Lake subdivision begins. http://www.studiocityresidents.org/history.php

1924 There are now 2.5 million radios in the US up from only 5000 in 1920. (23/306)

1924 Although Johnson & Johnson have been making them for 4 years now, they adopt the brand name “Band Aid”. http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/bandaid.htm

1925

JAN1925 In 1924, MGM executive Harry Rapf happened to catch a New York stage production where Lucille LeSueur (as Crawford was then known) was performing as a chorus girl. Rapf arranged a screen test for Crawford, but the results were negative. It would take a couple auditions before Crawford would finally be put under contract. In January 1925, Crawford left New York City for California. She was twenty-one years old. http://dearoldhollywood.blogspot.com/2010/11/joan-crawford-arrives-in-hollywood.html

01JAN1925 She arrived in Culver City on New Year’s Day and spent the next nine months posing for hundreds of photographs and playing bit parts. Then wrap changed your name to Joe Crawford because he thought LeSueur sounded like “sewer.” (P52/147) Joan served as Harry Rapf’s mistress until she had some hit movies under her belt, and deemed herself ready to marry Douglas Fairbanks Junior. (P131/148)

21FEB1925 The New Yorker magazine premieres. (26/145)

03MAR1925 KFWB – L.A.’s 3^rd radio station – starts broadcasting. (35/5)

10MAR1925 Hearst moves Cosmopolitan Pictures to MGM.
At Universal Hearst built Marion Davis a 15-room stucco “bungalow” with an orange tile roof for her dressing room. It was luxurious, with brocade curtains and carpets, sunken bathtubs and two kitchens. On March 10, 1925 her had the 3000 square foot house disassembled and shipped via a caravan of trucks to MGM. Hearst would move the house twice more: when she left MGM in 1934 it went to Warner Bros. and when she left Warner Bros., onto a lot at 910 Benedict Canyon where it still stands. (36/96)

10APR1925 “The Great Gatsby” is published, with one New York paper headlining its review: “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud.”

MAY1925 Fred Esmelton, Edeson, John Sainpolis, George E. Read, Ned Sparks, Robert Schable, Alphonse Ethier, and Warner Baxter meet on May 12, 1925, at Ethier’s house and decide to form an acting club “of love, loyalty and laughter,” which Edeson boils down to the motto, “We Laugh to Win.”

On May 18, the group incorporates under the name “the Jesters.” The group establishes their official birthday as May 25, and by June 1^st, charter members also include Wallace MacDonald, Jack Mulhall, Lew Cody, George Fawcett, Herbert Rawlinson, John Gilbert, George O’Brien, Harry Langdon, Lionel Barrymore, King Baggot, John Ford, Nigel de Brulier, Cedric Gibbons, Fred Niblo, Bert Lytell, Milton Sills, Edmund Goulding, Creighton Hale, Neil Hamilton, and others.

On June 22, 1925, the group meets to choose an official name. Actor Earle Foxe suggests the name, the Masquers, a name employed by several acting organizations at universities and communities around the country, which the group approves.

In the next few months, men such as Ronald Colman, Antonio Moreno, Tom Mix, W. S. (Woody) Van Dyke, Richard Dix, Sid Grauman, Buster Keaton, Hunt Stromberg, Frank Borzage, Edmond Lowe, Joseph Schenck, Ricardo Cortez, Hoot Gibson, Roscoe Arbuckle, Mervyn LeRoy, Irving Thalberg, and Charley Chase joined the group.
The group leases a clubhouse at 6735 Yucca St, Hollywood.

MAY1925 The Scopes Monkey trial (Darwinian evolution V. God) is held in Dayton, TN
July 10, 1924 – The Scopes Trial or “Monkey Trial” begins and would later convict John T. Scopes of teaching Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory at a Dayton, Tennessee high school, which violated Tennessee law. He is fined $100 for the charge. http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1920.html

29JUN1925 An earthquake destroyed much of downtown Santa Barbara, California, causing millions in property damage. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

07JUL1925 Garbo arrives in the US. (21/73) (55/177)

18AUG1925 Lucille LeSeur becomes Joan Crawford. (21/75)

18JUL1925 The first Goodyear blimp used for advertising was Pilgrim, which was also the first blimp to fly with safe helium rather than flammable hydrogen. The unnamed ship made its first flight on June 3, 1925, inflated with hydrogen. On July 17, 1925, it took to the air with helium, and on July 18, 1925, the blimp was christened Pilgrim by Florence Litchfield, wife of Goodyear executive and lighter-than-air advocate Paul Litchfield.

29SEP1925 Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field baseball park opens near Exposition Park south of downtown L.A. Owned by chewing gum magnate, William Wrigley, Jr, it hosted minor league baseball for more than 30 years. Demolished in 1969.

03OCT1925 The celebrated of Hollywood joined throngs of extras in the circus set. At 8am Thalberg was looking up at the crowd of extras in the stadium and asked the studio manager Joe Cohn how many people he had. There were 42 cameras and thousands of extras and little cardboard dummies in the toppers fluttering little paper hands as 12 chariots and 48 horses came thundering bar. Cohn and said there were 3900 people. Thalberg shook his head and said it wasn’t enough and they had to get more. 400 were recruited from the streets of Culver City, west Los Angeles, and Skid Row, but at 11:30 filming could still not begin because a heavy fog had settled over the set. It was near noon when the sun finally broke through. Niblo wanted to break for lunch but couldn’t risk his job and impulsively started the race, braving the possibility that 4000 spectators might riot. (P49/147)

15OCT1925 The Hollywood-Plaza Hotel opens for business at 1637 Vine St, Hollywood, and commences hosting a monthly “Salon,” which featured a wide-ranging assemblage of noted speakers, musical performers, dancers and artists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Plaza_Hotel

05NOV1925 The Big Parade opens and becomes the newly merged MGM’s first blockbuster, running 96 weeks at the Astor in New York, a record that will last for 25 years. (37/107) It establishes the careers of both King Vidor as a director and John Gilbert as MGM’s first home-grown star. Equally important, it validated Thalberg’s production system and his own savvy as an executive. (p36/129)

06NOV1925 William Fox buys the rights to the Movietone sound system, which became Fox Movietone. https://centurycitycc.com/fox-studios-historical-timeline/

NOV1925 Hearst sends Louella Parsons to Hollywood. (21/75) In 1925, Parsons contracted tuberculosis and was told she had six months to live. She moved to Arizona for the change in climate, then to Los Angeles, where she decided to stay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louella_Parsons

LATE 1925 Nick Schenck recognized that executive talent was even rarer then good stars or directors. In late 1925, Mayer’s name was added officially to the studio’s title Metro–Goldwyn. His legal weekly salary jumped $1000 to $2500; Thalberg more than tripled from $650 to $2000. In addition, Loew’s guaranteed a minimum of $500,000 toward the profit-sharing formula split among Mayer, Thalberg, and Rubin. (P56/107)

30DEC1925 MGM’s Ben-Hur opens. Although it makes $9 million, it’s a financial flop for Loew’s because of the high production cost. (32/107)

1925 The Subway Terminal Building (at 417 South Hill Street) served as L.A.’s “Grand Central Station” from 1925 to 1955 when the last of the Red Cars of the Pacific Electric stopped running. Part of one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the country, L.A.’s Red Cars linked, in pre-freeway days, downtown L.A. with the San Fernando Valley. Hollywood, West L.A., Santa Monica. (25/150)

MID-1920s As early as the MID-1920s, there were already 500 entertainment reporters in L.A. (45/96)

1925 In 1925, Loew’s/MGM makes a profit of $4,708,361 in its first year. Early paramount, in business for 11 years, earns more. (p37/107)

1925 Walt Disney and brother Roy open their first studio at 4649 Kingswell (2/23)
116/p6 says: The last silent-era Los Feliz studio was established in 1926. Walt and Roy Disney came to California early in August 1923 and moved in with their uncle at 4406 Kingswell Ave in Los Feliz. A few months later, they signed a contract for a series of cartoon comedies, renting the rear of a small nearby office. . . . In 1925, they bought land at 2719 Hyperion Ave for a new studio and by early 1926, they moved from Kingswell into the new facility. . . . By 1933, the plant had grown from 1600 square feet to 20,000. . . . From the profits of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Disney brothers purchased 51 acres in Burbank in 1938 where they relocated the company in 1939.

1925 The Masquers Club is founded. It is a private club for actors and actresses. Moved in 1927 to 1765 Sycamore (2/28) http://www.masquersclub.org/ (61/31)

1925 Jack’s Steakhouse opened at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Street. It was renamed the Formosa Cafe in 1939 and became a hangout for gangsters. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

1925 Sherman becomes West Hollywood

1925 The Hollywood Studios start building and buying their own movie theaters. (21/75)

1925 Lake Hollywood Reservoir filled with water.

1925 The Charleston becomes the popular dance step. (23/306)

1925 The Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs launches Art Deco into the world. (187/107)

1925 The Rivoli and the Rialto, in New York, are the world’s first air-conditioned theaters. (23/203)

1925 First international radio broadcast made between London and Maine. (23/306)

1925 Crossword puzzles become very popular. (23/306)

1925 The New Yorker magazine is founded. (23/306)

1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby. (23/306)

1925 B. P. Schulberg is appointed general mamnager of West Coast production at Paramount (until 1932), with David O. Selznick as his assistant (1927 to 1930 when Selznick moves to RKO) (p55/114)

mid-1920s Traffic lights start to become installed at Hollywood’s busier intersections. (14/62)

MID-1920s The first motor hotels start cropping up main traveled roads and are soon referred to as ‘motels’. (56/162)

1926

Top Stars: Rudolph Valentino & Norma Talmadge. (21/73)

Top grossing films of 1926

Aloma of the South Seas
What Price Glory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_in_film

25JAN1926 Central Casting Bureau is formally opened. By 1929 more than 17,000 extras have registered. (21/78) It was located in the Taft Building at Hollywood and Vine. (41/95) (43/46) Other sources placed it at 5504 Hollywood Boulevard which places it at the corner of Western. The 1930s “A Star Is Born” showed that it was there. This location would put it in the same building as the Breen Office (77/80). However that building was put up in 1928 (by Louis B. Mayer) so maybe it moved.

02JAN1926 The ground-breaking ceremony takes place on Hollywood Blvd for the Warner Bros Theatre. It’s newsworthy because it this is the first theater in Hollywood to be owned and operated by a major studio. Harry and Jack Warner led the ceremonies viewed by more than 1,000 spectators and a handful of celebrities. Acknowledging the new competition in the neighborhood, Sid Grauman sent a hearse and two mourners with cards that read, “Success to Warner Brothers, Sid Grauman.”

1926 Inaugurating its third season in 1926, MGM used the slogan “more stars than there are in heaven!” (p20/107)

08FEB1926 Greta Garbo makes her American film debut in MGM’s The Torrent, but she doesn’t become a star until Flesh and the Devil. (50/107)

FEB1926 Minor shock waves go through Hollywood when it is announced that Joseph P. Kennedy has bought control of R-C Pictures and Film Booking Office of America. (55/180)
FBO’s studio lot was next door to Paramount on Melrose and later became home to RKO. (55/211)

28FEB1926 The term “documentary” is first coined by John Grierson. (21/78)

23MAR1926 LBM announces that he was throwing open the MGM gates to trainee writers and directors who would be given one picture to prove themselves, at low salaries, and if they made good, would be awarded yearlong contracts. (19/119)

28APR1926 Variety moves its “Pictures” section to the front of the newspaper, ahead of the legitimate theater and vaudeville.

03MAY1926 El Capitan theater opens at 6838 Hollywood Boulevard as “Hollywood’s First Home of Spoken Drama”. In 1942 it becomes a movie house called the Paramount. (2/10) Restored in 1990. http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html
Another source said it was a live theater from 1926 to 1936 when it became a movie theater. In 1941 it held the Hollywood premiere of Citizen Kane

18MAY1926 The Carthay Circle Theater (where Gone with the Wind would later have its West Coast premiere) opens at 6316 San Vicente Boulevard with the premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s “Volga Boatman.”

18MAY1926 Aimee Semple McPherson is spotted swimming off Ocean Park beach near Santa Monica, and then disappears. On 20JUN an all-day memorial is held for her. On 23JUN she turns up in the Mexican town Agua Prieta claiming to have been kidnapped but it comes out later that she’d spent the time in Carmel with her radio station staffer Kenneth Ormiston. (6/118)

24MAY1926 Of all the Warner brothers, Sam was the one who first believed in talking pictures. On May 24, 1926, he put the first Vitaphone short, The Volga Boatman, into production. (P87/149)

MAY1926 Billy Wilkerson moves out to Los Angeles to lay the foundation for his dream of owning a film studio in Hollywood. (p38/140)

20-24JUN1926 The XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress takes place in Chicago during which Joseph Breen kick starts his career. (77/21)

01AUG1926 The wrecking crew arrives at 8152 Sunset Blvd to begin work on converting Alla Nazimova’s home into the Garden of Alla(h) Hotel.

23AUG1926 Valentino dies at 26yo of peritonitis (2/17)

05AUG1926 The first public showing of the outcome of the experiments with Vitaphone shown at the Warner Theater NY. (34/139)

06AUG1926 Warner Bros premieres Don Juan, the first feature film with sound (no dialogue) at the Warner Theater, NY. (21/79)

04OCT1926 David O. Selznick joins MGM as a reader/assistant story editor, later promoted to the manager of the story department. He stays until 1928 when he leaves to go work for Paramount (19/135) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_O._Selznick

08SEP1926 At 1700 Lexington Dr., Beverly Hills (the mansion the Hearst bought Marion Davies for her family to live in) Greta Garbo stands up John Gilbert at a double wedding with King Vidor and Marion’s friend Eleanor Boardman. Gilbert was completely distraught and ran crying into the bathroom, where Mayer happened to be. Mayer slapped Gilbert on the back and laughed, “What’s the matter with you, Gilbert? Don’t marry her. Just fuck her and forget about her?” Gilbert pounced on Mayer, a brawl ensued ending with an apoplectic Mayer screaming at Gilbert “You’re finished! I’ll destroy you if it costs me a million dollars!” Over the next year and a half, it appears that he did. (73/96)

23SEP1926 The heavyweight boxing championship between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney is broadcast on the air from Philadelphia and movie theaters report of precipitous drop in attendance of up to 50%: the era of Radio is born. (61/107)

NOV1926 Louella Parsons becomes motion picture editor of the Hearst United Press Service and Hollywood’s first major gossip columnist. (21/80)

11NOV1926 US Route 66 is established from Chicago to Santa Monica – 2448 miles

25DEC1926 Garbo’s star catches fire with the release of Flesh and the Devil. (53/107)

DEC1926 Late December 1926, the Big Five studios – MGM, Universal, Paramount, First National and Producer’s Distributing Company – meet in secret session and agree that none of them would adopt sound pictures until they all did and, if and when they did adopt it, they would all use the same device. They resolved, piously, that it would not be the one Warner Bros were using. (35/22)

1926 L.B. Mayer hired David Selznick as a reader for producer Harry Rapf and a starting salary of $75 a week. He immediately came up with three usable story ideas, rewrote two scripts, and bombarded his superiors with several memos a day. Then designed a filing system for story ideas and another system that required each writer to increase his weekly output. His salary jumped to $150 a week which soon became $300. In a period of just a year, he became a manager and then head of the writer’s department; he quickly rose from assistant to associate story editor to assistant producer under Harry Rapf, and finally, he became the producer of the Tim McCoy Westerns. Selznick’s spectacular rise was cut short following an altercation he had with Thalberg over the production of White Shadows in the South Seas. Although in general agreement with Selznick’s approach, Thalberg backed his senior producer. After a public confrontation with an enraged Selznick, Thalberg fired him in 1928. Not long afterward, he did replace Flaherty with a van Dyke to finish White Shadows in the South Seas along the lines proposed by Selznick. By that time, so Selznick was already busy turning things upside down at Paramount story department. (P80/107)

1926 Wilshire Boulevard is rezoned from residential uses to commercial development from West Lake (Mac Arthur) Park westerly. Soon thereafter, the Town House, Bullocks Wilshire, the Brown Derby, the Beverly Hills shopping district, the Miracle Mile district and Westwood Village open.

1926 Struggling independent studio Warner Brothers signs a contract with Western Electric and establishes Vitaphone. The recording process would include record disks synced up to movies, making the first talking pictures possible. Initially seen as a way to save costs on orchestra accompaniments for live movies, it soon became clear that talkies changed both the way movies were made and how they were watched irreversibly. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

1926 Central Casting established by the Hays Office in order to bring order to the chaotic nature of freelance employment. (41/92) (Although both http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_casting and 35/45 say it was 1925, and 35/45 say 1925, Central Casting’s website itself also says 1926.)

1926 The Carthay Circle Theater (where Gone with the Wind would later have its West Coast premiere) opened in 1926 with the premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s Volga Boatman. If you look in “Los Angeles: Lost and found”, you will find the picture of exterior of the Carthy Circle Theater. http://cinematreasures.org/theater/1158/

1926 United Studios on Marathon St, Hollywood (formerly the Robert Brunton studios) becomes Famous Players-Lasky and later, Paramount.

1926 Dial telephone service reached the Valley. http://www.studiocityresidents.org/history.php

1926 Los Angeles outlaws horses on city streets during rush hour.

1926 MGM becomes the industry’s most profitable company, netting $6,388,200. (P50/107)

1926 MGM created the brightest light in the history of film, 325 million candle power, for Lillian Gish is The Scarlet Letter. MGM publicity claims the light’s power is so great that, if concentrated, it would allow a person 90 miles away to read a newspaper. (P50/107)

1926 Corner of Hollywood and Santa Monica Blvd is home to the United Artists studios and the enormous set to Douglas Fairbanks movie The Thief of Baghdad dominates the sky. (51/77)

1926 After a series of mergers, Carl Wickman’s bus operations become known as the Greyhound Lines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhound_Lines

1926 Evangelist Bob Schuler is given a radio station as a Xmas present from his congregation setting him on the road to becoming America’s first broadcast evangelist. (6/115)

1926 Hollywood’s first Studio Club for Actresses established by Mary Pickford and Mrs. CB DeMille moves from 6129 Carlos Ave to 1215 Lodi Place (2/8)

1926 Will H. Hays make his most important P. R. gesture – the establishment of the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the promulgation of the first written rules for motion picture content. (77/36)

1926 Pontiac cars go on sale. (7/152)

1926 By 1926, Hearst was locked into his production deal with MGM. (16/107)

1926 The motion picture business is now one of the country’s 6 largest industries. (47/5)

1926 Martha Graham, the American pioneer of the modern-dance revolt, gives her first New York performance, which features 18 barefoot, evocatively costumed dancers. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1926.html

1926 Construction starts on the Warners/Pacific Theater, one of four grand movie palaces on Hollywood Blvd, the Warner was built as the flagship of the Warner Brothers Studio Theaters. The extravagant designs were intended to lure the film patron away from the reality of the street at the earliest possible moment. http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html

1926 Auto antifreeze allows people to use cars year-round. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1926.html

1926 Downtown Los Angeles Public Library at 630 West Fifth Street is dedicated.

1926 Original Brown Derby restaurant opens at 3377 Wilshire by Herbert Somborn (a husband of Gloria Swanson) and Wilson Mitzner a well-known writer. (2/5) (6/166) http://www.latimemachines.com/page25.html

Another source said it was a live theater from 1926 to 1936 when it became a movie theater. In 1941 it held the Hollywood premiere of “Citizen Kane”.

1926 David Selznick arrives in Hollywood and begins as an assistant story editor at MGM. (47/33)

1926 First National Studios built in Burbank (2/70)

1926 Pico Blvd is paved. The largest such project to date. The cost is more than $1 million.

1926 The Book of the Month Club is founded as a United States mail-order business, customers of which are offered a new book each month. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Month_Club

1926 Edna Ferber publishes Show Boat. (23/308)

1926 Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh, the most popular children’s book ever written. (23/308)

1926 NBC becomes the first nationwide radio network. When NBC was established in 1926 it was the first commercial broadcasting network in the world. In its early years, NBC operated two networks, the Red and the Blue. The Blue Network was sold in 1943 and became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/bobhope/radio.html

Negotiations between RCA & AT&T, two pioneers in the creation of networks led in 1926 to the establishment of the National Broadcasting Company which went on the air in NOV 1926. (56/83) Lindberg becomes the first national radio celebrity when he crosses the Atlantic in May 1927. (55/84)

1926 Radio Corp of America & American Telephone and Telegraph & British General Post Office hold the first trans-Atlantic radiotelephone conversation between NY and London. (23/306)

1926 Book-of-the-Month Club starts, with 40,000 enrollments in the first year. (23/306)

1926 Michelson measures the speed of light, at 186,284 miles per second. (23/309)

1927

Top Stars: Tom Mix & Colleen Moore. (21/85)

1927 SONGS

Ain’t she sweet
Me and my shadow
I’m looking over a four-leaf clover
Strike up the band
’S Wonderful
Thou Swell

(71/238)

09JAN1927 Garden of Allah’s 18-hour opening party (1/26) (21/86) (20/292)

In what amounted to an obituary for the Garden of Allah, Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Swinton dug up stories of the hotel’s gala opening just 32 year earlier: The town’s big blast on Jan. 9, 1927 … was the merry marathon at Sunset Blvd. and Havenhurst Dr. It heralded the birth of the Garden of Allah. There was joy afoot, caviar at hand and bubbles in the air — for 18 hours. By midnight, the waiters were harmonizing with the guests and wandering troubadours played madrigals from the middle of the pool. It was climax piled on climax, including a virtual state dinner at which the mistress of the Garden of Allah, Yalta-born Alla Nazimova, dedicated the plush three-acre plot. http://www.wehostar.com/2008/12/29/january-1927-allah-nazimovas-grand-opening-party-for-the-garden-of-allah-hotel/

The grand opening of the new hotel on January 9, 1927, was in the gaudy tradition of the Hollywood première. Greeters in swallowtail coats and striped pants ushered thousands of unabashed gawkers through the rooms and bungalows, while a string quartet played in the lobby of the main building and a platoon of Japanese butlers served tea, punch, and sandwiches. When darkness fell, visitors gasped with wonder as colored lights lit up the grounds, and strolling troubadours in Spanish costumes sang and played beneath the night-blooming jasmine. The theatricality of the opening suggested the make-believe world of the movies, and it was assumed by most visitors—and reported by the newspapers the next day—that the new establishment would appeal most to movie makers. They came in droves, and by the end of the first week the management knew that the Garden of Alla was a hit. Within a few months, common usage by the guests, and references by the Los Angeles newspapers, had permanently corrupted the spelling of the hotel’s name; thereafter it became the Garden of Allah. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1977/5/1977_5_82.shtml

JAN1927 At a meeting at his beach house, LBM with a group of that included Fred Niblo, Conrad Nagel, and another close friend Fred W. Beetson, decided to form an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made up of 275 leading figures of the business who would pay $100 initiation fee each. Douglas Fairbanks would be president; each member would be able to vote for another member to receive an award, the nature of which would not be determined for some time, for his achievements. At least initially, the awards would be restricted to those in the category of director, leading player (male and female) and, perhaps, cameraman and art director. Maybe became obsessed with this new idea. (19/131) (42/71)

14FEB1927 Alfred Hitchcock’s first movie – The Lodger – opens in London. (21/86)

17FEB1927 Paramount, MGM, First National, Universal, and Producers Distributing Corporation signed an agreement to take a year to study the competing sound systems, then jointly select a single system that would avoid the difficult consequences of incompatibility. (P115/149)

01MAR1927 Bank of Italy became a National Bank. California’s laws prohibiting branch banking changed and A.P. Giannini consolidated his banking properties into the Bank of America of California. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

11MAR1927 The Roxy Theatre, aka Cathedral of the Motion Picture, opens at 153 West 50th St, between 6th and 7th Avenues, just off Times Square in New York City. With 5,920 seats, it is the largest movie house in the world.

15APR1927 Norma and Constance Talmadge, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford become the first stars to leave their footprints in cement in front of Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theater (which was built on the site of the former home of Francis X. Bushman). (21/86)

http://www.manntheaters.com/chinese/index.php says it happened 30APR1927

MAY1927 Laurel and Hardy become a comedy team. (21/86)

11MAY1927 At the Biltmore Hotel the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds its first gathering. (21/86)

(72/9) The Academy was organized at a small dinner party given by Louis B. Mayer in the private dining room of the Biltmore Hotel. At that Meeting, Fred Niblo (director of the silent film “Ben Hur”) was chairman, Niblo explained to the assembled guests the genesis of the idea for the association, how one night at Mayer’s house, with actor Conrad Nagel, and Fred Beetson (later president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association), Mayer was playing solitaire while two of his guests were discussing the advisability of all branches of the industry getting together on some basis for the benefit and welfare of the entire production end of motion pictures.

According to Niblo, L.B. looked up from his game of solitaire and said to the two who had been discussing the idea, “Why don’t you get together, then, and try it out?” “So L.B. issued invitations to 36 people and invited them to dinner at the Biltmore. Mayer harangued his guests, convincing them that an organization such as the Academy would be far preferable to any craft organization that was antagonistic to the producers. So the Academy was born and anybody who “had contributed in a distinguished way to the arts and sciences of Motion Picture production” was eligible for membership. The wording was vague enough to assure Mayer that he could keep out whomever he wanted. Functioning actually as a company union, the Academy managed to delay any serious labor organizing in Hollywood for over five years.

18MAY1927 Grauman’s Chinese Theater opens at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard with DeMille’s King of Kings. (2/10) (21/86) http://www.manntheatres.com/chinese/

Filming for the movie commenced 24AUG1926. (51/268)

Unlike the famous story said that Sid Grauman witnessed Norma Talmadge stepping into fresh cement as she got out of her car while visiting the theater isn’t true. The true story, which lacks the glamour of the other tales, is that Sid Grauman walked across the theater’s forecourt when the cement was still wet. After Sid was scolded he asked Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Norma Talmadge to come to the theater at once. However, the cement was nearly dry, causing the impressions too faint. In April, just three weeks before the completion of construction, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were again invited back this time to formally place their hand and footprints and signatures in the center of the theater’s forecourt. A few days later, Grauman had Talmadge make similar impressions next to those made by Pickford and Fairbanks. Knowing that the theater’s grand opening was to occur on May 18, 1927, Norma Talmadge scribbled that date above her signature instead of the actual date she made the impressions. Since then, scores of celebrities have had their hand and footprints and signature enshrined in the famous courtyard. (Facebook, The Amazing Actors of Old Hollywood)

MAY1927 The German police ban the Nazi Party forcing it underground. (107/105)

17MAY1927 Roosevelt Hotel opens at 7000 Hollywood Blvd. It was financed by a group that included Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Sid Grauman.

20MAY1927 Charles Lindbergh takes off to attempt a solo flight across the Atlantic. 33 ½ hours later in lands in Paris France and becomes literally an overnight international celebrity. (23/311)

“Although The Jazz Singer is considered the first motion picture to have sound, in reality, Fox debuted sound in theaters six months earlier in its newsreels,” says Singleton. The first sound newsreel was Lindbergh’s departure for Paris from Roosevelt Field, New York, on May 20, 1927. The following month Fox showed film of President Coolidge greeting Lindbergh at the White House and a film segment of a speech by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. They generated excitement and the new sound became a standard at motion picture theaters.
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2006-03/framebyframe.html

MID 1927 Through some clever maneuvering, Western Electric forced the Warner brothers to capitulate in April 1927 and take a paltry $1.3 million in consideration of their giving up exclusivity and a share of the profits. On May 18, Warner Bros. became a nonexclusive license he was sound picture of technology. By mid 1927, Western Electric had smoothly achieved a virtual monopoly on the manufacture and installation of talking-picture equipment. (P122/149)

13JUN1927 Charles Lindbergh completes the first solo flight over the Atlantic in the “Spirit of St. Louis.”http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

18JUL1927 The Blood Ship opens. Its huge budget was a risk for Harry Cohn. But winning an engagement at the nation’s biggest and most prestigious movie house, the Roy in New York marks a great stride forward for Columbia. (p46/141)

JUL1927 A July 1927 roster of MGM’s principal contract actors shows 8 “stars” and 37 “featured players.” The stars are Lon Chaney, Jackie Coogan, Marion Davies, John Gilbert, Lillian Gish, William Haynes, Ramon Novarro, and Norma Shearer. In September, Garbo moves up to star, and Gish disappears from both lists. (P56/107)

10AUG1927 Work on the gigantic sculpture at Mount Rushmore began. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum would complete the task of chiseling the busts of four presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, fourteen years later. http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1920.html

23AUG1927 Sacco and Vanzetti are put to death in the electric chair of the Charlestown Prison. (56/178)

AUG1927 Al Jolson starts making The Jazz Singer at Warner Bros’ 5800 Sunset Blvd. Studio. (35/32) http://employees.oxy.edu/jerry/wbktla.htm

KTLA Studios (5800 W. Sunset Boulevard) at the SW corner of Van Ness; it’s the oldest TV station in Los Angeles, and was formerly the old Warner Bros Studio, where “The Jazz Singer” was filmed in 1927. http://www.seeing-stars.com/Streets/SunsetBlvd.shtml

http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap&addr=5800+Sunset+Blvd.&csz=Hollywood%2C+CA&Get+Map=Get+Map

SEP1927 Hal Roach moves distribution of Our Gangfrom Pathé to MGM. MGM released its first Our Gang comedy in September 1927. The move to MGM offered Roach larger budgets, and the chance to have his films packaged with MGM features to the giant Loews Theaters chain. … As the profit margins continued to decline due to double features,Roach could no longer afford to produce the series, and sold the entire Our Gang unit (including the rights to the name and the contracts for the actors, writers, and director Douglas) to MGM in May 1938…however The MGM-produced Our Gang shorts were not as well-received as the Roach-produced shorts had been, due to both MGM’s inexperience with the brand of slapstick comedy Our Gang was famous for. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Gang

29SEP1927 Irving Thalberg marries Norma Shearer at Thalberg’s rented Sunset Boulevard mansion in Beverly Hills. (77/96)

06OCT1927 Warner Brothers NY premiere of The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, a partly silent, partly sound film that marks the beginning of the era of the “Talking Picture.” http://www.filmsite.org/jazz.html

http://www.musicals101.com/1927-30film.htm says the NY premiere was on 23SEP.

http://cinematreasures.org/theater/3/ says that the Los Angeles premiere took place at the Criterion late-December 1927 and then moved to the Tower in 1928, however http://cinematreasures.org/theater/1967/ says it was the other way around, when the Criterion was equipped for sound. Further down the page, a posting says this: “ (Dec. 25, 1927)
When “The Jazz Singer” opens at the Criterion Theater Wednesday night…” which would make the opening on Wednesday December 28^th 1927 at the Criterion.

34/143 says 05OCT1927 was the Jazz Singer’s premiere at the Warner Theater.

08OCT1927 Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ is released. There are several sequences depicting topless maidens laying out flowers during a parade that cause a stir. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

OCT1927 By Oct’27 Fox have begun a regular sound newsreel. (35/27)

NOV1927 David Selznick leaves MGM and begins negotiating with Ben Schulberg for a position at Paramount. (p57/129)

29NOV1927 New York premiere of Love. Irving Thalberg changed the title of Anna Karenina to Love so that the marquee could read: “Garbo and Gilbert in Love.” The on-screen passion of an off-screen love affair created a cultural phenomenon. The film grossed $1.67 million, which made it MGM’s highest grossing silent film after Ben Hur ($9.39 million), The Big Parade ($6.13 million), and The Merry Widow ($1.93 million.) (P71/147)

1927 In 37 states, over a 100 bills are introduced regarding the censorship of motion pictures. William Hayes and the MPPDA put together and issue their list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” to filmmakers. The list, consisting of 36 suggestions to filmmakers, is almost immediately ignored since there is no binding reason to obey it; sometimes copies of the rules were sent back to the MPPDA unopened. Resolved, That those things which are included in the following list shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated:

Pointed profanity – by either title or lip – this includes the words “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Christ” (unless they be used reverently in connection with proper religious ceremonies), “hell,” “damn,” “Gawd,” and every other profane and vulgar expression however it may be spelled;
Any licentious or suggestive nudity – in fact or in silhouette; and any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture;
The illegal traffic in drugs;
Any inference of sex perversion;
White slavery;
Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races);
Sex hygiene and venereal diseases;
Scenes of actual childbirth – in fact or in silhouette;
Children’s sex organs;
Ridicule of the clergy;
Willful offense to any nation, race or creed;

And be it further resolved, That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized:

The use of the flag;
International relations (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country’s religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry);
Arson;
The use of firearms;
Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc. (having in mind the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron);
Brutality and possible gruesomeness;
Technique of committing murder by whatever method;
Methods of smuggling;
Third-degree methods;
Actual hangings or electrocutions as legal punishment for crime;
Sympathy for criminals;
Attitude toward public characters and institutions;
Sedition;
Apparent cruelty to children and animals;
Branding of people or animals;
The sale of women, or of a woman selling her virtue;
Rape or attempted rape;
First-night scenes;
Man and woman in bed together;
Deliberate seduction of girls;
The institution of marriage;
Surgical operations;
The use of drugs;
Titles or scenes having to do with law enforcement or law-enforcing officers;
Excessive or lustful kissing, particularly when one character or the other is a “heavy.”

1927 By 1927, 60 million Americans go to the movies each week. (p167/130)

1927 Director Frank Capra arrives at Columbia Studios. (p85/114)

1927 Shrine Auditorium opens at 665 West Jefferson Blvd. As the world’s largest theater able to hold over 6000 spectators. (25/155)

1927 Pig ‘n Whistle built at 6718 Hollywood Blvd http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html

1927 By 1927 Mayer was making $2500 a week and Thalberg $2000, in addition to the percentage agreement that paid them over $500,000 (65/96)

1927 Plans are made and construction started on the 200-acre Mack Sennett studios in the newly-named Studio City at the corner of Ventura and Laurel Canyon. In 1935 the studios become Republic Studios and later CBS Studio Center. http://www.studiocitychamber.com/aboutstudiocity.php

1927 The income brought into Nevada through the divorce business caused a push in 1927 for the Nevada residency to be lowered to three months, and in 1931 the requirement went down to six weeks. http://www.jour.unr.edu/outpost

1927 Eduard Haas III invents PEZ candy

1927 B. H. Dyas Broadway is built at 6300 Hollywood Blvd, becoming the first major department store on the Boulevard. With its lavish interiors, it was a very popular destination. Children could play in an activity room on the top floor while their parents shopped. http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html

1927 Lankershim changed name to North Hollywood. Mack Sennett’s Studioland opened near Ventura and Laurel Canyon boulevards. Many residents wanted the small town to be named Laurelwood, but the budding Chamber of Commerce pushed for Studio City to please the studios. First traffic light installed at Ventura and Lankershim. http://www.studiocityresidents.org/history.php

1927 Josephine Baker becomes a star in Paris. (Chronicle)

1927 The Broadway musical links with opera in Jerome Kern’s revolutionary Show Boat. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1927.html

1927 The 15 millionth Model T Ford is produced and its production is discontinued. (23/206)

1927 Prior to the late 1920s, movies were made without sound. Fox was able to produce its first Movietone newsreel with synchronized sound in 1927, revolutionizing the way in which people could see the news. The first Movietone News story with sound was about Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. http://www.ohiokids.org/tellzall/2006/march.shtml

1927 Transatlantic service from New York to London became operational, transmitted by radio waves. Underwater cables were no longer necessary. http://www.schoelles.com/Telephone/teltimeline.htm

1927 Technicolor invented.

1928

Top stars: Lon Chaney & Clara Bow. (21/91)

Top grossing films of 1928 – 1The Singing Fool…2 Lights of New York…3 West of Zanzibar

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

1928 SONGS: I wanna be loved by you… Let’s do it (let’s fall in love)…Lover come back to me (71/238)

01JAN1928 The first industry-drafted standard movie player contract comes into use. (21/92)

JAN1928 That Certain Feeling, Frank Capra’s first movie at Columbia, opens. (p54/141)

EARLY 1928 The Masquers Club relocates to permanent group home at 1765 Sycamore Ave., Hollywood. http://ladailymirror.com/2014/08/18/mary-mallory-hollywood-heights-the-masquers-club-laughs-to-win/

29MAR1928 Historic broadcast during the Dodge Brother Hour designed to show that the following stars had what it took to meet the challenges of the talking picture: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr, Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith John Barrymore, Delores del Rio, Norma Talmadge and Gloria Swanson.(35/1 & 2)

26APR1928 The Hollywood premiere at the newly-opened Warners Hollywood Theater of early Warner Bros talkie Glorious Betsy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018945/) which was (a) premiered on the West Coast on the same day as the East Coast), and (b) many Hollywood people’s first talkie. Within three weeks of its opening, three major studios – Paramount, United Artists and MGM – had signed up with Electrical Research Products Inc (ERPI), Western Electric’s marketing subsidiary, for the installation of Movietone’s optical-sound and sound-on-DISC system in their studios, and Western Electric amplifiers in their cinemas. (35/58) (66/38)(108/31)

April 29, 1928 Honor Bound is released. The movie, now lost, is probably only now remembered as the first screen appearance of an extra known as Harlean Harlow Carpenter– later to be known more widely as Jean Harlow. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

JUN1928 Work is completed on Edward Laurence Doheny’s Sr.’s manion Greystoke at 501 N. Doheny and gives it to his son, Ned, who doesn’t live in it for very long. On 17FEB1929, he dies of a gunshot wound. (p218/130)

JUL1928 Paramount announces that all of its 1929 features are going to be sound. (35/91)

08JUL1928 Premiere of The Lights of New York, the first-ever all-talking motion picture. (35/68) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019096/

31JUL1928 Premiere of White Shadows of the South Seas – MGM’s first feature synchronized for dialogue (the only word of dialogue heard in the whole picture is “Hello”)F, music and effects. (35/80) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019574/ It’s the first time audiences hear MGM’s mascot, Leo the Lion, roar for the first time. (56/107)

AUG1928 With the advent of the talkies, Sound Waves, a specialized trade publication began publishing in August 1928. The twice a month paper was soon full of classified ads for voice coaches. (P230/149)

14AUG1928 Premiere of Columbia’s first sound feature: Scarlet Lady (35/81)
http://www.vitaphone.org/columbia.html — http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019358/

SEP1928 Warner Bros. buys First National and takes over its Burbank lot. (66/33) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_National

07OCT1928 Our Dancing Daughters New York premiere. Joan Crawford becomes a star in the movie Our Dancing Daughters in which she was cast after she stole the script, went to the producer, Hunt Stromberg and a begged for the role until she was given it. The movie opened to a $40,000 weekend and then to a big Monday matinee. When these figures reached Culver City, Thalberg told Mayer: “We’ve got ourselves another star.” (P80/146)

23OCT1928 RKO Radio Pictures starts. (21/93)
JAN’28 – RCA acquires the theater chains of Keith – Albee – Orpheum as well as the film production company with the tame name of Film Booking Office and merged them to form a new company called RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) (25/44) (55/235)

NOV1928 Film production is at a low ebb. The reason this time was studios holding back starting dates until their films could be all-talking. (35/95)

03NOV1928 Walt Disney debuts Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie at the Colony Theatrer, NY. (21/93)

06NOV1928 Fox Movietone City is dedicated to producing only sound films. Fox builds the first sound stages converted from silent picture production. https://centurycitycc.com/fox-studios-historical-timeline/

14NOV1928 Premiere of MGM’s ambitious part-talkie Alias Jimmy Valentine. (35/119)

17NOV1928 Max Factor moves from downtown L.A. to Hollywood, at 1666 Highland Ave, near the corner of Hollywood Boulevard. (p68/121)

DEC1928 Beginning with the 1928 holiday season, Hollywood merchants transformed a one-mile stretch of Hollywood Boulevard into “Santa Claus Lane” to boost shopping.

08DEC1928 The Hollywood & Western Building, also known as The Mayer Building, opens at 5504 Hollywood Boulevard, built by Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. The building was the first location of Motion Picture Association of America, Central Casting, the Hays Office, and The Ben Hecht Company. (p161/113)

17DEC1928 Metropolitan Airport opens on the 25th anniversary of the Wright brother’s flight. Name change to “Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport” in 1929. Name change to Van Nuys Army Air Field in 1942. Name change to San Fernando Valley Airport in 1948. Name change to Van Nuys Airport in 1957. (6/7)

Late 1920s King Vidor is MGM’s late 20s premiere director (37/131)

Late 1920s to early 1930s The ‘Pansy Craze’ was a period in the late 1920s and early 1930s in which gay clubs and performers (known as pansy performers) experienced a surge in underground popularity in the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansy_Craze

1928 Tenderloin is released – Following The Jazz Singer, the second Vitaphone feature to have talking sequences. A part-talkie, this film contained 15 minutes of spoken dialog. Warner Brothers promoted it as the first film in which actors actually spoke their roles. The film premiered in New York along with a series of Vitaphone short subjects that included “Cugat and his Gigolos”. The feature itself was met with derisive laughter resulting from the hammy acting and stilted dialog. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019453/ (35/48 & 56)

1928 The 13-story Neo-Gothic First National Bank building opens at 6777 Hollywood Blvd on the northeast corner of Highland Ave.

1928 Smith, Kline, and French in 1928 create Benzedrine as a nasal and bronchial decongestant. People soon discovered that it had pleasant, useful, and energizing side-effects, which led to its use by all sorts of people who needed to boost their creative energies. Benzedrine wasn’t made a prescription drug until 1959, but by then the fad was already in decline, partly because people could see the damage that bennies were inflicting on their users.

1928 The Los Angeles City Council selects 640 acres of a former wheat, barley, and lima bean field as the location for the new City of Los Angeles Airport. The property is first named Mines Field for real estate agent William W. Mines who arranges the deal. The airport is composed of dirt strips with no buildings. http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi01f.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_International_Airport#The_.22X.22_in_LAX

1928 The Film Daily’s annual round up of more than 30 industry heavyweights [Laemmle, Schenck, Lasky, Zukor, Mayer, DeMille, etc.] for the purpose of listing their predictions for the coming year, only William Fox, his employee Winfield Sheehan, and Harry Warner mentioned the coming deluge of talkies. (P161/149)

1928 Gambling ships start to appear outside the three mile limit off the coast – first off Long Beach. The first was the Johanna Smith, followed by the Montfalcone, the City of Panama, the Monte Carlo, the Texas, the Showboat, the Caliente, and “whoopee” ship called the S.S. Playa. (40/55)

1928 The Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles opens its new, cavernous ballroom. Originaly called the Sala de Oro, it was later renamed the Biltmore Bowl.

1928 By 1928 Louella Parsons has become a near-permanent fixture at the Brown Derby. (16/114)

1928 The first NAACP convention in the west takes place on Central Avenue. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1928 The Hollywood Women’s Press Club (HWPC) was founded essentially as a luncheon club in 1928 by columnist Louella O. Parsons and eight or nine of her friends who also covered Hollywood as magazine and newspaper writers. Membership was limited to twenty-five professional news writers, any one of whom could be suspended for doing paid publicity. Parsons was elected first president. When the pressure of her work became too demanding, she resigned in 1935 (although her resignation wasn’t accepted). http://www.oscars.org/mhl/sc/hollywood_72.html

1928 William Fox buys the 300-acre Tom Mix ranch just west of Beverly Hills. He maintains his headquarters at the Western Ave studio until 1935 when Fox merged with 20^th Century Pictures. (116/p9)

1928 When Louis B. Mayer meets the executive secretary for Calvin Coolidge’s presidential campaign, Ida Koverman, he hires her as his executive secretary, where she quickly becomes one of the most formidable women in Hollywood. (P136/148)

1928 Daryl F. Zanuck becomes production chief of Warner Brothers. December 1928: Hal Wallis becomes production chief of First National, responsible to Jack Warner and Zanuck (who will take over as production chief of the combined Warner Bros and First National in 1930.) (p57/114)

1928 David Selznick moves from MGM to Paramount where he works for 3 years as BP Schulberg’s assistant before moving to RKO as head of production where he replaced William LeBaron.(47/34 & 51)

1928 After designing costumes for Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille, Adrian is hired by MGM to be their chief costume designer. (p25/122)

12MAR1928 The St. Francis dam collapses. More than 400 die in the resulting flood. City Engineer William Mulholland takes responsibility for the disaster and retires in disgrace.

25MAR1928 William Fox announced that he was discontinuing the production of silent pictures. Playing catch-up, Harry Cohn said that Columbia was also going into the talkie pictures full-time. (P248/149)

1928 RKO Studios comes into being taking over the facilities at 780 Gower, previously called FBO Studios owned by Joseph Kennedy. Howard Hughes bought it in 1948. Lucy & Desi bought it in 1957 and is now a part of Paramount. (2/13)

1928 In 1928, Willis Haviland Carrier developed the first residential ‘Weathermaker’, an air conditioner for private home use. The Great Depression and then WW2 slowed the non-industrial use of air conditioning. After the war, consumer sales started to grow again. The rest is history, cool and comfortable history. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa081797.htm

1928 Brylcreem is created by County Chemicals at the Chemico Works in Birmingham, England. County Chemicals is also noted for ‘Chemico’ – a very popular abrasive kitchen cleaner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brylcreem

26APR1928 Dedication ceremony takes place at the new Los Angeles City Hall at 200 North Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles

1928 At Union Air Terminal in Burbank, daily airline flights began between Los Angeles and San Francisco begin. http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi01f.htm

1928 David O. Selznick moves from Paramount to Head of Production at RKO where he stays until 1935 when he leaves to open Selznick International Pictures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_O._Selznick

1928 Hotel Bel Air Hotel opens at 701 Stone Canyon (2/51)

1928 The second Brown Derby is built at 1620 N. Vine. This Spanish Colonial Revival style structure, designed for Cecil B DeMille, was the second branch of the famous restaurant. The Vine Street landmark was demolished in 1994. http://www.historicla.com/hollywood/hollywood.html

1928 The Agua Caliente racetrack and golf course opens in Tijuana. https://www.sandiegohistory.org/timeline/timeline2.htm

1928 Beverly Wilshire Hotel opens at 9500 Wilshire Blvd. (25/194)

1928 Yo-Yo re-invented as an American fad.

1928 The (Regent) Beverly Wilshire Hotel is at 9500 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. It was constructed by real estate developer Walter G. McCarty on the site of the former Beverly Hills Speedway. It was completed in 1928 (when the city had fewer than 18,000 residents), and was then known as the “Beverly Wilshire Apartment Hotel”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regent_Beverly_Wilshire_Hotel

1928 Station WGY, Schenectady begins scheduled television broadcasts. (23/313)

1928 Baird demonstrates color television. (23/313) by beams a television image from England to the United States. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1928.html

1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. (23/313)

1928 DeSoto cars go on sale. 19,000 are sold in the first year. (71/145)

1928 Plymouth cars go on sale. (7/152)

1928 The “rabbit test” – the first reliable pregnancy test – is developed. (23/313)

1928 Scotch tape patented by 3M engineer, Richard G. Drew. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa122299a.htm

1928 The first coast-to-coast bus line is Yelloway Bus Line with service from L.A. to NY – a 3433-mile trip that takes 5 days and 14 hours. (23/313)

1928 Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin

1928 Bubble gum invented by Walter E. Diemer. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa122299a.htm

1928 Jacob Schick patented the electric shaver

1929

Top stars: Lon Chaney & Clara Bow. (21/96)

Top grossing films of 1929:

Gold Diggers of Broadway
Rio Rita
On With the Show
The Broadway Melody
In Old Arizona
Hollywood Revue of 1929
The Mysterious Island
The Love Parade
Four Feathers
Sally

Books Released in 1929 – http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1929/1929fr.html

The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkne
Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, by Dashiell Hammett
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemmingway
Dear Judas and Other Poems, by Robinson Jeffers
Dodsworth, by Sinclair Lewis
Cup of Gold, by John Steinbeck
Look Homeward Angel, by Thomas Wolfe
Is Sex Necessary?, by E.B. White and James Thurber
Street Scene, by Elmer Rice

SONGS: (71/238)

Am I blue
Stardust
Happy days are here again
Tip Toe through the tulips
With a song in my heart

01JAN1929 The first annual New Year’s Day brunch party held by LBM at the Mayer’s beach house. (19/198)

FEB 1929 Chateau Marmont opens hotel at 8221 Sunset, Tel. OL. 6-1010.

http://www.seeing-stars.com/Hotels/ChateauMarmont.shtml

After having commenced construction in 1939, the Chateau Marmont opens in February 1929 as an apartment house, but high rents and the Depression kept renters away. In 1931 the building was changed to a hotel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chateau_Marmont

FEB1929 Billy Wilkerson buys a half interest in a faltering Manhattan film trade paper, the name of which has been lost to history. He pumped life back into it and in seven months sold it for $20,000. (p52/1245)

FEB1929 Hollywood hasn’t cleaned up its act. Over 50% of the films making it to audiences are censored by state or local boards where movies made 60% of their profit. Rumors are running rampant in Hollywood that William Hearst, the newspaper magnate, is going to put out a call for federal censorship of motion pictures. Iowa Senator Smith W. Brookhart is planning to revive a bill that would place the regulation of the motion picture industry under the FTC. New President Herbert Hoover is rumored to be considering anti-trust action, while women’s groups and religious organizations continued to protest Hollywood’s output. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s profit margins are at an all-time high, with studios who obeyed Hays’ dictates finding smaller audiences as their reward. And, after the prolific failure of the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls”, Hays is unable to interest anyone in a negotiation. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

01FEB1929 Premiere of MGM’s first talkie Broadway Melody (35/135) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019729/
It was the first sound movie filmed at MGM. Cost $275,000, grossed $4 million, won the studio’s first Best Picture Oscar. (80/96) (66/107)

10FEB1929 Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester marry, (21/96)

14FEB1929 St Valentine’s Day Massacre when 6 members of the notorious Moran gang are lined up and shot by a rival Al Capone’s gang. (23/315) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Valentine%27s_Day_massacre

14FEB1929 Vine Street Brown Derby opens at 1628 Vine St and become the most popular place in Hollywood. Second is Lucey’s at 6360 Sunset (2/6)

LATE FEB1929 By late February 1929, sound equipment was being installed in cinemas by Western Electric at a rate of 250 theaters per month. (P242/149)

13MAR1929 The Secret Service is put in charge of the White House police by Presidential order by Hoover after a stranger appeared in the White House dining room wanting to tell Hoover about the terrible unemployment. (51/139)

24MAR1929 Fox announces that it will no longer make silent movies. (35/125)

28APR1929 Carl Laemmle Jr. takes control of Universal Studios, a present for his 21st birthday from his father. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

MAY1929 After taking 14 months to build at a cost of $2 million, Catalina Island’s Casino building is completed.

13MAY1929 Marion Davis footprints ceremony at Grauman’s. http://www.amug.org/~scrnsrc/chinese_theater.html

16MAY1929 First Academy Awards handed out at the Roosevelt Hotel. (21/96)
The first Academy Award ceremony is held in the Blossom Room at the Roosevelt Hotel which was lit by Chinese lanterns and each table was decorated with candles and candy replicas of the newly designed gold statuette. The hosts were Douglas Fairbanks, director William deMille (brother of Cecil (who preferred to spell his name with a capital D). All the awards were presented by Fairbanks. “Wings” wins as best film. (19/164) http://history1900s.about.com/library/weekly/aa030801a.htm

http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/ says it was 26MAY1929

28MAY1929 Premiere of Warner Bros’ first all-color musical On With The Show! (35/183) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020238/ (See below)

03JUN1929 Joan Crawford marries Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. Fairbanks was on the outs with his parents and so was penniless, leaving Crawford to pay for everything. So Mayer again helps her out by lendsing her $40,000 to buy a mansion at 426 North Bristol, in Brentwood. (82/96)

JUN1929 The Norma Shearer movie The Trial Of Mary Dugan, initially passed by the Chicago Board of Censors is later banned outright after bluenose pressure, and then reversed its ban after an outcry from more open-minded constituents

JUN1929 French Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel emerges as the queen of fashion. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1929/1929fr.html

13JUL1929 The first all-talking, all-Technicolor movie – On With the Show! is released. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020238/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_with_the_Show_%281929_film%29

AUG1929 The comedy series Amos & Andy makes its first appearance on NBC radio. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1929/1929fr.html (71/180)

MIDAUG1929 A new law went into effect making it illegal to transport passengers from the shore directly to the gambling barges. To circumvent the law, the Centennial was used an intermediary barge, where passengers were dropped off and picked up by another boat and taken the Monfalcone. The following November, the Monfalcone was moored off the end of “gambler’s row,” some 2.7 miles off Seal Beach on the border between Los Angeles and Orange counties. The new law was ruled unconstitutional and local law enforcement and politicians unsuccessfully solicited the help of US District Attorney to once more declare the Monfalcone as a hazard to navigation at her new position.

07SEP1929 Work starts on Boulder Dam. http://www.lasvegassun.com/history/timeline/

26SEP1929 Bullock’s Wilshire Department Store opens. At the time the venture is considered risky because it is outside the traditional city center.

28SEP1929 Winston Churchill speaks at an MGM luncheon. (91/106)

29SEP1929 Evangeline Adams, the most fashionable crystal-ball gazer of the age, declared that “the Dow-Jones” could climb to heaven.” The following day the great bill market reached 452 on the New York Times share index, which is generally regarded as its historic peak. Thereafter, for about six weeks, stocks traded nervously: there were several sharp falls and partial recoveries. (73/105)

01OCT1929 Martin Quigley, Joseph Breen and Father Daniel Lord meet together to plot an ambition motion picture project centered on Quigley’s idea of a program of motion picture industry self-regulation to be guided by a written contract. (77/42)

23OCT1929 First transcontinental all-air service begins from NY to LA (with one overnight stop). http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1929/1929fr.html

https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

24OCT1929 The New York Stock Market crashes, only a few days before the Los Angeles Stock Exchange is inaugurated. (??) Before the crash, 60% of US citizens had a annual income of less than $2000, estimated as the bare minimum for the “bare necessities of life”. (23/315)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929
http://www.stock-market-crash.net/1929.htm

Nearly thirteen million shares had been traded, a record, and three billion dollars had been wiped off the value of the shares. The New York Times share index had fallen from its 452 peak to 372 and tourists were paying 50 cents for the black day’s historic ticker tape. (74/105)

28OCT1929 Universal Pictures joined with Transcontinental Air Transport to offer moving pictures for air passengers bound for California. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

28/29OCT1929 There was a “nationwide stampede to unload”. Nearly ten million shares were traded and the Times index fell by 49 points, the steepest decline in its history…By the end of the day, 16,383,700 shares had been traded. Many of the investment trusts were wiped out, the New York Times index had fallen 43 points and paper losses amounted to ten billion dollars – almost as much as America had spent on the Great War, substantially more than the entire national debt and twice the amount of all money in circulation throughout the U.S. at the time. (74/105)

01NOV1929 The Teapot Dome scandal comes to a close when Albert B. Fall, the former Secretary of the Interior, is convicted of accepting a $100,000 bribe for leasing the Elk Hills naval oil reserve. He is sentenced to one year in jail and a $100,000 fine. http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1920.html

15NOV1929 Greta Garbo’s final silent film – The Kiss – opens in New York http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020062/releaseinfo

31DEC1929 The New Year’s Eve 1929 gala opening of Jimmy’s Backyard, L.A.’s first openly gay bar, was attended by 300 tuxedo-clad homosexuals. Billy Haines attended the party with an entourage that included fellow actor Lowell Sherman, and homosexual director Edmund Lowe and lesbian wife Lilyan Tashman. (86/96)

1929 Buron Fitts takes over as the District Attorney from the disgraced Asa Keyes. Fitts was more dishonest but was a sympathetic figure. He had a limp as the result of wounds received during WWI and was a director of the American Legion. Veterans kept him in office until 1940. Within six months he moved from a small house at 1217 West Second St into a mansion at 8222 Marmont Ave above Sunset. It was a neighborhood of movie stars. (83/96)

1929 Hangar 1, the first modern air terminal of LA, was completed at Mines Field in Spanish Colonial Revival style. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

1929 Marion Davies makes her beachfront Santa Monica mansion her primary residence from 1929 to 1942, finally selling it in 1947 for $600,000, after which it was converted into a hotel and beach club.

1929 Malibu starts to become popular with the stars. (28/51) (21/109 said it started in Sept 1932)

1929 CBS is founded by William S. Paley. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1929.html

1929 American, Paul Galvin invents the car radio.

1929 The Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles debuts as the cornerstone of the largest Jewish congregation west of Chicago. It’s bankrolled in part by Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of MGM, Movie mogul Irving Thalberg, Carl Laemmle and the Warner brothers. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

1929 German movie Two Hearts in Waltz Time becomes the first foreign language movie to appear with subtitles.

1929 The California Highway Patrol was created. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

1929 By 1929, Louella Parson’s informal gatherings of female newspaper reporters and fan magazine writers who covered Hollywood were now named the Hollywood Women’s Press Club and met each Wednesday at noon at the Vine Street Brown Derby. (16/??)

1929 The Hollywood Bowl is redesigned by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son to take the shape of a series of concentric half-rings. (6/158)

1929 First National Studios in Burbank is bought by Warner Bros (2/70)

1929 The frozen food introduced by Clarence Birdseye. (23/315) 79/76 says it was 1930

1929 Kodak intro’s 16mm color film. (23/315)

1929 Hollywood United Methodist Church built on Highland Ave.
http://www.seeing-stars.com/Churches/HUMC.shtml

1929 Hitchcock directs the first successful British sound film, Blackmail. (23/314)

1929 UCLA moves to Bel Air on the Wolfskill Rancho (2/51)

1929 Leg of lamb is 39 cents a pound; bread is 10 cents a loaf; milk is 16 cents a quart. (71/226)

1929 The Chateau Elysee, Hollywood’s most exclusive hotel/apt in the 1930s and 1940s opens at 5930 Franklin (2/8)

1929 Early experiments in radar. (23/315)

1929 In 1929, Sam Foster, founder of the Foster Grant company sold the first pair of Foster Grant sunglasses on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ. By 1930, sunglasses were all the rage. http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/sunglasses.htm

1929-1932 Between 1929 and 1932 an average of 100,000 people became unemployed each week as the U.S. and world economies collapsed. At the height of the U.S.’s worst financial crisis a quarter of the nation’s workers, nearly13 million men and women could not find jobs. (70/5)

1929 Roosevelt Highway – later renamed Pacific Coast Highway – opens.

08AUG1929 At Heart’s request, the Graf Zeppelin commences its circumnavigation of the world from the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, NJ. The journey was 21,255 miles and was completed in 20 days, 4 hours, 14 minutes. (23/313). It landed at in Los Angeles at Mines Field (now LAX and about eight miles north of Redondo Beach) after flying in from Tokyo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_127_Graf_Zeppelin

1930

Top stars: William Haines and Joan Crawford. (21/99)

Top grossing films of 1930:

Journey’s End
Outward Bound
All Quiet on the Western Front
Lightnin’
5 So This is London
The Rogue Song
The Devil to Pay
With Byrd at the South Pole
Tom Sawyer
The Lady of Scandal

Songs Released in 1930 – http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html

Dreamy Blues,” Duke Ellington (later known as “Mood Indigo”)
“Georgia on my Mind” by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell
“Body and Soul” by Louis Armstrong
“Ain’t Misbehavin” by Fats Waller
“I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You” by George Gershwin
“On the Sunny Side of the Street” by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh
“Life is just a bowl of cherries” Rudy Vallee

Books Released in 1930 – http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
I’ll Take My Stand anthology of writings by Southern authors
Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Bridge by Hart Crane
42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos

SONGS: (71/238)

Body and soul
Embraceable you
I got rhythm
Love for sale
Bidin’ in my time

The 1930s The decade’s biggest stars: Clark Gable, Paul Muni, Janet Gaynor, Eddie Cantor, Wallace Beery, Mae West, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Astaire and Rogers, Claudette Colbert, Dick Powell, W. C. Fields, Joan Crawford, Marie Dressler, James Cagney, Bing Crosby, Jeanette MacDonald, Barbara Stanwyck, Johnny Weismuller, Gary Cooper, Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Veronica Lake, and Katharine Hepburn. Many audiences enjoyed the juvenile company of Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, and Mickey Rooney. There were also a number of British stars in the decade, including Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone (the Sherlock Holmes of the screen), Charles Laughton (an Oscar-winner in 1933 as King Henry VIII), C. Aubrey-Smith, and Leslie Howard.

http://www.filmsite.org/30sintro2.html

The 1930s The Sunset Strip transforms from farmland and bridle paths to a playground for stars. (14/217)

The 1930s Georg Gyssling, the Third Reich’s consul in Los Angeles, had just one real job: to bully Hollywood into portraying Germany and its political regime in the best possible light. The main weapon in his arsenal was Article 15 of his country’s film regulations, which stated that producers whose work cast aspersions on Germany, its government or its people could have their permits to show films in Germany revoked—not just for their “offending” films, but for all their films. This sent shudders through the studios, who feared the loss of this highly lucrative market. http://sistercelluloid.com

The 1930s After Congress passed laws that greatly restricted immigration laws, in the 1930s only about 50,000 immigrants arrived in the country each year in contrast to the one million per year who immigrated in the early 1900s. (79/7)

The cost of living in 1930:

Average cost of a new home – $7,145.
Average annual salary – $1,970.
Average cost of a car – $745.
A gallon of gas – $0.10.
A loaf of bread – $0.09.
Price of a movie theater ticket – $0.10.
The American unemployment rate for the year is 8.7%.
80,000,000 movie tickets per week are sold in America.
http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

JAN1930 The MPPDA in New York and the Association of Motion Picture Producers in Hollywood meet to discuss the Quigley-Lord Code.

Early 1930s By the early 1930s radio serial dramas such as “Ma Perkins” and “The Romance of Helen Trent” designed to attract regular listeners with their continuing stories began to appear. These were often sponsored by domestic product manufacturers and hence scornfully labeled “soap operas”. (56/87)

21FEB1930 Greta Garbo starred in her first talkie, Anna Christie, advertised with the tagline: GARBO TALKS!, and speaking her first line of dialogue with: “Give me a whisky, ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” http://www.filmsite.org/milestones1930s.html

16MAR1930 WEAF in New York City carries first opera broadcast directly from a stage in Europe. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html

19MAR1930 Marion Davies is a bridesmaid at Edith Mayer’s wedding at the Biltmore Hotel. (51/180)

02APR1932 MGM releases Tarzan, the Ape Man, starring Olympic swimmer a champion Johnny Weissmuller, who was signed to MGM with the reluctant permission of the BVD underwear company, where he had an exclusive contract. MGM got Weissmuller released by having all its players photographed in BVDs. (P106/107)

09APR1932 Scarface is released by United Artists. The movie, made independently by Howard Hughes, had faced strong opposition from both censors and the mafia– with Al Capone even sending a few men to Hollywood to shake down director Howard Hawks and assure him that Paul Muni’s Scarface wasn’t based on him. Legal battles had delayed the premiere of the movie for a year, as the wanton display of violence shocked and outraged many civic groups across the country. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

24MAR1930 Scientists name the ninth planet (named Pluto in 31^st May) at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Pluto

31MAR1930 The movie industry adopts the Production Code, formal set of guidelines of what is not acceptable in matters of sex, religion, crime, violence, etc. The advent of sound has motivated the codifying of new standards. (21/100) (28/41) The name of “the Hays Code” is adopted despite the fact that Hays had no hand in writing it but was the nominal head of the office that administrates it. (77/45) No sooner had the Code been adopted than the signatories begin to violate it. (77/47)

05APR1930 Ladies of Leisure, directed by Frank Capra for Columbia opens, and makes a star of Barbara Stanwyck. (p87/141)

15APR1930 Marlene Dietrich arrives in Hollywood and starts work on Morocco.

19APR1930 Warner Brothers releases their first “Looney Tunes” cartoon, “Sinkin’ in the Bathroom”. The cartoon featured the first appearances of Bosko and Honey, who would star in much of the series until 1933. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

28APR1930 The first three Nancy Drew mysteries are introduced to the public; the books are an immediate success. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html

30APR1930 The Divorcée is released by MGM. Violating the Code provision, “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld.”, the film is a daring look at the double standard faced by sexually voracious women. Backed by MGM’s biggest star, Norma Shearer, the film manages a Best Picture nomination and wins Shearer her only Oscar. It is also a box office sensation, leading to several years of copycats, both good and bad. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

15MAY1930 First female flight attendants, on United Airlines. (71/156)

APR1930 Jason Joy, the head of the West Coast office of the PCA, successfully gets the Author’s League to forbid Mae West’s hit stage production of “Diamond Lil” from being available for adaption. The intensity of the PCA’s campaign against Hollywood adapting or even talking to Mae West would scare them off of her and her controversial stories for nearly two years.

MAY 1930 British aviatrix Amy Johnson, of England achieves worldwide recognition when she becomes the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia. (71/156) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Johnson

MAY1930 There was no more popular small kitchen appliance than the classic Sunbeam Mixmaster, from practically the moment it was born for public sale around May 1930.

27MAY1930 Howard Hughes throws the biggest premiere Hollywood has ever seen at Grauman’s Chinese Theater for “Hell’s Angels” ahead of an 18-week run.

28MAY1930 The Chrysler Building officially opens to the public in New York City.

04JUN1930 The Pantages Theater opens at 6233 Hollywood Blvd. Opened by the great impresario, Alexander Pantages as part of the Fox Theater chain. The opening bill was mixed: MGM’s The Floradora Girl, starring Marion Davies, an edition of Metronome News, a Walt Disney cartoon, Slim Martin (“The Maestro of Mirth and Melody”) conducting the Greater Pantages Orchestra and finally, a Fanchon and Martin stage piece, The Rose Garden Idea. http://www.pantages-theater.com/?gclid=CL_5hp-go40CFRAvYAodSwIttw

Pantages Theater The Oscars are held there from 1949 to 1959. Howard Hughes had offices there in the 1950s (2/5)

The MC was Al Jolson. (67/74)

06JUN1930 Frozen food (processed by Clarence Birdseye) hits commercial market for the first time. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html

30JUN1930 Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels premiere (which costs him $40,000) at the most expensive venue in America: Grauman’s. (78/70 – although IMDB says it was 27MAY, and see above)

26JUL1930 Billy Wilkerson forms the Wilkerson Daily Printers Corporation in partnership with Manhattan broker Herbert Sonny, from whom Wilkerson had borrowed $5000 with an option to borrow twice that amount. Wilkerson rents offices at 1606 Highland Ave in Hollywood from which to produce the Hollywood Reporter. (p56/145)

AUG1930 Babe Ruth earns $80,000 a year, more than Herbert Hoover. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html

09AUG1930 The cartoon “Dizzy Dishes” premieres with the first appearance of Betty Boop. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

SEP1930 The Greek Theater is completed. (14/173)

03SEP1930 The Hollywood Reporter debuts, the first daily trade newspaper. (21/101) (22/62)
Offices at 1606 N. Highland Ave., between Sunset and Hollywood boulevards.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/about_us/history.jsp
It began in an empty Hollywood clothing store that he had lost to bankruptcy, his 6^th failed business. Wilkerson’s weekly was banned from MGM premises though Mayer and Thalberg snuck copies inside their briefcases. If Mayer read an unkind piece about MGM he launched into an obscenity-laced tirade against Wilkerson. But strangely Mayer socialized with Wilkerson playing poker with him and Nick Schenck every Thursday night for 20 years – another Mayer contradiction. Wilkerson and Strickling were also close friends. (46/96)

08SEP1930 The comic strip Blondie is first published. (23/316) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondie_(comic_strip)

30SEP1930 The New York premiere of the Eddie Cantor movie Whoopee! marks the dance director debut of Busby Berkeley.

OCT1930 Joseph Breen is hired as a publicity man for the West Coast office of the Code Administration. Frustrated with Hays’ desire to please everyone, he quickly makes friends with many influential Catholics. Within three years, his manipulations of the church and his office would see him leading the Production Code Administration. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

05OCT1930 CBS begins live Sunday radio broadcasts of the NY Philharmonic with Toscanini as conductor. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html

11OCT1930 Sinner’s Holiday is released. Based on the Broadway production Penny Arcade, Al Jolson, who’d brought the movie to Warner Brothers, insisted the studio cast two of the costars in the film version, giving James Cagney and Joan Blondell their film debuts. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

25OCT1930 TWA offers one of the first all plane scheduled service from coast to coast — the Lindbergh Route. The route took 36 hours and initially called for overnights in Kansas City. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_World_Airlines#Founding_-_T.26WA

01NOV1930 The Bank of Italy in San Francisco changes its name to Bank of America.

NOV1930 Paul Bern convinces Thalberg to bring Jean Harlow to MGM on loan-out. She appears in The Secret Six and befriends her company-star Clark Gable. (114/96)

NOV1930 Daryl F. Zanuck takes over as production chief of the combined Warner Brothers and First National (until April 1933.) (p57/114)

NOV1930 The Equitable Building on the northeast corner was completed at the end of 1930 and in November the powerful agent, Myron Selznick (brother of David O. Selznick) moved his agency into the building bringing with him such clients as Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Boris Karloff, Carole Lombard, and others.

NOV1930 Modern Screen magazine begins publication. (21/99)

12DEC1930 Karl Landsteiner wins Nobel Prize for Medicine for identifying A, B, AB positive, and O blood types. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1930/1930fr.html

1930 From a population of 634 in 1920, the population of Beverly Hills is now 17,428. (p200/130)

1930 David O. Selznick’s brother, Myron Selznick, opens his talent agency in the Equitable building on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. His roster of stars included Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Boris Karloff, Laurence Olivier, George Raft, Merle Oberon, Carole Lombard, and others. (p189/113)

1930 The area of the original Pueblo of Los Angeles is renovated and opens as Olvera Street. https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles

1930 George Hurrell joins MGM as their head portrait photographer, a position he holds for only two years. In 1932, he has a huge fight with Howard Strickling, head of MGM’s publicity department and quits to open his own freelance studio at 8706 Sunset Blvd., where he did portrait work for all of the studios, including MGM.

1930 Martin J. Quigley merges Exhibitor Herald with Moving Picture World and Motion Picture News and launches Motion Picture Herald. http://www.quigleypublishing.com/AboutUs.html

1930 The Ravenswood is built by Paramount Pictures in 1930, at 570 North Rossmore Avenue in Hollywood, California. The building has been declared a Historic-Cultural Monument (no. 768) by the City of Los Angeles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ravenswood

1930 Openly gay actor Billy Haines opens his small antique business. (141/96)

1930 In 1938 CBS erected a new multi million dollar building at Sunset & Gower and made KNX the West Coast outpost of their network. (66/39)

1930 An average of 90 million people per week went to the movies. (41/ix)

1930 The movie industry began to dub in the dialogue of films exported to foreign markets. http://www.filmsite.org/milestones1930s.html

1930 The Dominguez Wilshire Building Dominguez Wilshire Building on Wilshire is built.

1930 Chinatown starts getting moved to its present location. (2/63)

1930 Burbank Airport is inaugurated and becomes L.A.’s major commercial air terminal up until 1947. (25/281)

1930 Mines Field (the future LAX) is dedicated and opened as the official airport for Los Angeles. http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi01g.htm

Mines Field was dedicated and opened as the official airport of Los Angeles in 1930, and the city purchased it to be a municipal airfield in 1937. The name was officially changed to Los Angeles Airport in 1941, and to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) in 1949. Prior to that time, the main airport for Los Angeles was the “Grand Central Airport” in Glendale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_International_Airport#The_.22X.22_in_LAX

1930 Apple sellers start to appear on every other street corner after the Pacific Northwest apple growers have a bumper crop. A man could buy a crate for $1.75, take in $3.00 in sales and as long as there was no spoilage, would earn $1.25 for the day. Low by the standards of the day, even during the Depression, but better than nothing. (56/225)

1930 “Constantinople” becomes “Istanbul”. (Chronicle)

1930 Dashiell Hammett publishes The Maltese Falcon. (23/314)

1930 Photo flashbulbs replace flash powder. http://www.cinetext.net/timeline/1930.htm

1930 Hearst owns 33 newspapers with a circulation of 11 million. (23/315)

1930 Grant Wood paints “American Gothic”. (23/314)

1930 One in every 5 Americans owns a car. (71/226)

1930s Muscle Beach, California starts. (106)

1930 Hitler’s Nazi party emerges as the majority party in the national election. (23/314)

1931

Top stars: Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor. (21/103)

Top grossing films of 1931

Frankenstein
Ingagi
Mata Hari
City Lights
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Min and Bill
Dracula
The Sin of Madelon Claudet
The Champ
The Public Enemy
Cimarron

Books released in 1931 – http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1931/1931fr.html

The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck
Shadows on the Rock, by Willa Cather
American Humor: A Study of the National Character, by Constance Rourke
The Glass Key, by Dashiell Hammett
Mexico: A Study of Two Americas by Stuart Chase
Newspaper Days, by Theodore Dreiser
Sanctuary, by William Faulkner
Axel’s Castle, by Edmund Wilson…
Collected Poems, by Robert Frost
Only Yesterday: An Informal HIstory of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen

Songs released in 1931

“The Peanut Vendor by Don Azpiazu
Goodnight Sweetheart, by Guy Lumbardo
You Came to Me Out of Nowhere by Bing Crosby
Blue Again by Louis Armstrong
Star Dust by Bing Crosby
My Harp in Beulah Land, by Brothers Wright and Williams
Million Dollar Baby by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians
Marta by Arthur Tracy
Southern Cannonball by Jimmy Rogers
Prisoner of Love by Russ Columbo

25JAN1931 Little Caesar premieres. Though not the first gangster film by any means, the electric performance of Edward G. Robinson and the new sound technology’s ability to bring a level to the reality of the violence sends censors scurrying to trim the picture down. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

30JAN1931 Albert Einstein attends the Los Angeles opening of Chaplin’s City Lights (50/93)

12FEB1931 Dracula is released by Universal. Its star, Bela Lugosi, made less on the picture than his costars because he’d been so desperate to play the part. It would turn him into an icon, though he would be typecast as such for the rest of his life. The movie’s overwhelming response at the box office soon sent all of the Hollywood studios running to make horror pictures, much to the dismay of the censor boards around the country. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

FEB1931 Fiberglass is introduced. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1931/1931fr.html

03MAR1931 The Star-Spangled Banner, by Francis Scott Key, is approved by President Hoover and Congress as the national anthem. The lyrics of the anthem were inspired during the bombing of Fort HcHenry by British ships at the head of Baltimore harbor in September of 1814. http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1930.html

19MAR1931 Nevada (re-)legalizes gambling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada

SPRING1931 MGM star Billy Haines is arrested at the Hollywood YMCA after reportedly being found having sex with a sailor. Mannix was called, Haines was released, no charges were ever filed, and indeed no record of the arrest exists anywhere. But Haines admitted to the arrest in interviews during later years. (90/96)

SPRING1931 Clark Gable and Joan Crawford’s affair is the talk of Hollywood. … After friends caught Gable and Crawford in a passionate embrace behind the bandstand at the Cocoanut Grove as their respective spouses waited at their table, the story got back to Mayer. They were called into a meeting with Thalberg, Mannix and Strickling and were forbidden to see each other. … The affair wold continue until the late 1950s. (99&100/96)

23APR1931 The Public Enemy is released by Warner Brothers. Like Little Caesar, it makes a star out of its lead, here Jimmy Cagney. Though a look at the ugly life of a hoodrat who ultimately pays for his decision to become a criminal, Cagney’s magnetism makes the roller coaster ride through his life impossible to look away from. Cagney became one of Warner Brothers’ biggest box office draws, and he became the icon of the new talkie revolution. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

APR1931 Marion Davies throws a lavish bon voyage gala at the beach house for Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer who are about to sail to Europe for a 3-month vacation. (28/45)

01MAY1931 Construction is completed on the Empire State Building in New York City and it opens for business when President Hoover, at 11.30am presses a button in Washington and switches the lights on in the Empire State Building http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1930.html (83/105) Hoover congratulates the its owner on their “grasp of the needs of the future” but because of the pressures of the Depression, its occupancy rate is only 20% and by 1934 the building is losing a million dollars a year. (84/105)

20JUN1931 A Free Soul is released by MGM. Norma Shearer’s follow-up to The Divorcee is just as sexually frank, though gets trapped more in plot melodramatics as it progresses. Most notably about it is the appearance of Clark Gable as a rough and tumble gangster who becomes sexually obsessed with Shearer’s character. His dynamic and brooding sexual desire sent female audiences into a tizzy. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

01JUL1931 Ice vending machines are introduced in Los Angeles. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

14JUL1931 The MPPDA announces Joseph Breen’s appointment as an assistant to Will Hays and Breen moves to Los Angeles. (77/48)

AUG1931 Joseph Breen, sent to investigate Hollywood’s conduct, is appalled by what he finds. He discovers that members in the industry have no self-censorship, citing incidents such as when a woman declared herself a lesbian to the Los Angeles Times and another story that was floating around town about a studio head caught in bed with one of his studio’s lead actresses, only spared death because his wife forgot to turn off the safety. Joseph Breen sends a letter to Will Hays, and he’s quickly made to take over the West Coast publicity for the MPPDA. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

13SEP1931 The date that most historians consider the true start of WWII. On that day Japan seized Manchuria, a province of China. Japan launched an all out invasion of China in 1937 and by the end of the next year controlled most of its ports and industrial cities. (70/9)

OCT1931 First nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean, from Saishiro, Japan to Wenatchee, WA, completed by Hugh Herndon and Clyde Pangborn in 41 hourse, 13 minutes http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1931/1931fr.html

04OCT1931 Chester Gould’s comic strip Dick Tracy debuts in the Chicago Tribune syndicate. (23/318) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tracy

07OCT1931 Wiltern Theatre first opened its doors to movie crowds.

17OCT1931 Al Capone is sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion in Chicago. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

18OCT1931 Thomas Edison, co-inventor of the motion picture, dies at age 84. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

LATE 1931 On the set of Polly of the Circus (opened 27FEB1932) it didn’t take long for the sparks to fly between stars Clark Gable and Marion Davies. However during filming Gable’s contract came up for renewal. Gable wanted an increase from $650 a week to $2000, but Mayer offered $1250. Gable asked Davies for help and she asked Hearst to intervene. He did so and Gable got $2000, but only on the condition that Gable stop sleeping with Davies. (101/96)

10NOV1931 During a banquet in the Sala D’Oro at the Biltmore Hotel, a spokesman for the movie producers blights the Academy Awards dinner by announcing that because of hard times, all wages would have to be cut by 10 to 25%. (42/71)

Christmas 1931 A madman threatens to kill Mayer and blow up MGM unless Mayer paid him $10,000. (19/197)

04DEC1931 Clark Gable signs with MGM after Darryl F. Zanuck dismisses him as “a big ape with big ears.” Unbeknown to Thalberg, Ida Koverman filled a Glendale theater with female MGM employees who want agog at the new young actor. Sam Marx said “The audience sat bold upright whenever Gable appeared. The next day DEC 4^th, Gable signed with MGM. (97/96)

26DEC1931 Mata Hari is released by MGM. The film again met resistance from censors as several of Greta Garbo’s dances were considered too risque for audiences at the time. Only the censored version of the film survives. Mata Hari is released by MGM. The film again met resistance from censors as several of Greta Garbo’s dances were considered too risque for audiences at the time. Only the censored version of the film survives. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

Late 1931 Wilshire Boulevard was the first street in the City to have tri-light traffic signals. They were installed at the end of 1931. Road users became irritated with the bell gong sound of the Acme semaphores. Also, at this time, some of the other major cities were starting to use tri-light signals, with yellow change intervals. After that, no new signals in the City would be semaphores.

1931 Gambling become legal in the state of Nevada. (115/p76)

1931 During the filming of their third movie together – Possessed, which opened 21NOV – Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, both already married, begin a torrid affair. It becomes so heated that Mayer calls each star into his office separately and tells them to chose their careers or their affair. (100/107)

1931 Warner Bros. consolidates its executive staff into its quarters at the former First National Studio in Burbank, using its Sunset Boulevard facilities, the Warner Ranch and the old Vitagraph plant as auxiliaries. (47/8)

1931 During the making of their second MGM film together – Laughing Sinners – Clark Gable and Joan Crawford start a secret affair which, by the time they make their next movie together, Possessed, that same year, has become red hot. (100/107)

1931 MGM awards Lionel Barrymore a “contract for life”, regardless of whether or not he stays at MGM, which they honor right up until his death in 1954. (100/107)

1931 The famous Dick and Jane books that taught millions of children to read were first published. http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decade30.html

1931 “The Silver Screen” becomes a new phrase. (21/103)

1931 David Selznick moves from Paramount where he’s worked for 3 years as BP Schulberg’s assistant to RKO as head of production where he stays until 1933 when he returns to MGM as the head of his own production unit. (47/34)

1931 Darryl F. Zanuck at 29yo becomes head of production for Warner Bros, where he stays for 2 years before founds 20^th Century Productions with Joseph M. Schenck. (52/285)

1931 Double features emerged as a way for the unemployed and the middle-class to occupy their time. http://www.filmsite.org/milestones1930s.html

1931 The Hollywood Cricket Club is established, founded by C. Aubrey Smith, with members included Cary Grant, David Niven, Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, and Ronald Colman. Errol Flynn played for Aubrey’s team after his 1933 arrival bit his drinking and womanizing got him kicked off. (103/96)

1931 First experimental television broadcasts are made in Los Angeles.

1931 Los Angeles Theater opens at 615 S. Broadway (2/63)

1931 The Wiltern Theater (orig named the Warner-Wiltern) opens with William Powell as MC. (25/96)

1931 First Clifton’s Cafeteria opens, part of a fad for fast and inexpensive food. Clifton’s establishes a “pay what you can” policy which appeals to depression clientele. (???) The 648 Broadway restaurant opened in 1935. (25/136)

1931 The Star-Spangled Banner”is officially made the US anthem. (23/317)

1931 The B.H. Dyas department store on the southwest corner of Hollywood and Vine (6300 W. Hollywood Blvd. & 1645 N. Vine St) becomes the Broadway-Hollywood department store.

1931 Bette Davis signs with Warner Bros. for $400 per week, and does 9 pictures over the next 13 months, none of any real note. (p139/129)

1931 In 1931, the business magazine Motion Picture Herald began publishing the results of an annual poll of movie house exhibitors as to who they thought had been the top box office draws that year. These “top 10“ lists were unscientific, and today are considered highly suspect. Nonetheless, the lists were taken seriously, and can still stand as a strong indication of who is popular with moviegoers and exhibitors. (p155/160)

1931 Gambling becomes legal in Nevada, with most of the action centered around Reno and Carson City. (39/33) The income brought into Nevada through the divorce business caused a push in 1927 for the Nevada residency to be lowered to three months, and in 1931 the requirement went down to six weeks. http://www.jour.unr.edu/outpost

1931 Spain becomes a republic with the overthrow of King Alfonso XIII. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1931.html

1931 Gangster Al Capone sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion (freed in 1939; dies in 1947). http://www.infoplease.com/year/1931.html

1931 General Motors’s Frigidaire makes refrigerators safe for household use. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1931.html

1931 Both the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building are completed. (23/316)

1932

Top stars: Charles Farrell and Marie Dressler. (21/103)

Top grossing films of 1932:

Shanghai Express
The Kid from Spain
Grand Hotel
Emma
Tarzan the Ape Man
Movie Crazy
Strange Interlude
As You Desire Me
The Beast of the City
The Saddle Buster

Books Released in 1932- http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1932/1932fr.html

Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway
Light in August, William Faulkner
1919, John Dos Passos
The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell
Young Lonigan, James Farrell
Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Pulitzer Prize Fiction: The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck

Songs Released in 1932

“Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” Rudy Vallee
”We Just Couldn’t Say Goodnight” Ruth Etting
“All of Me,” Louis Armstrong
“Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” Bessie Smith
“Dinah,” Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers
“Sweet Georgia Brown,” Bing Crosby
“Man From Harlem”, Cab Callaway
“China Town My China Town”
“Mush Mouth,” Claude Hopkins

02JAN1932 Surveying the miserable box office of 1931, Martin Quigley in the Motion Picture Herald and many in the industry blame the pictures. MGM’s Nicholas Schenck famously says, “There is nothing the matter with the picture business that good pictures will not cure.” http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

15JAN1932 Snow falls on Los Angeles. At about the same time, much of the east coast was experiencing an incredibly warm, mild winter. From Jan. 13-15 in Washington, D.C., the high temperatures were 75, 76 and 77 degrees — the last of which was D.C.’s highest January temperature since 1872. http://carole-and-co.livejournal.com/67549.html

28JAN1932 Harry Cohn purchases 25,129 shares from business partner Joe Brandt for $500,000 and becomes head of Columbia.

30JAN1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is first published. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

02FEB1932 Shanghai Express is released by Paramount. The film, starring Marlene Dietrich, would become the highest grossing film of 1932. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

02FEB1932 A Variety headline reads ”Banned From Bathroom By Hays Office, Pictures Hop Into Pansy Stuff.” But, cautions the newspaper, “Hays officials…say the industry won’t stand for more than a dash of lavender.”

FEB1932 Hitler declared Nazi party candidate for presidential elections. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1932/1932fr.html

01MAR1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping in Flemington, NJ (Body found 12MAY)

19MAR1932 Jean Harlow begins work at MGM. (21/107)

29APR1932 One Man’s Family, a long-running American radio-TV dramatic series debuts in Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco and runs for 27 years. (71/200) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Man%27s_Family

Spring 1932 By late Spring of 1932, business in New York’s biggest movie houses was the worst ever recorded. Theaters were playing to fewer admissions than at any time in their existence. The slump spread clear across the country. Within a six-month period, the only films that made any money at all were Garbo’s “Mata Hari”, the Barrymore brothers in Arsene Lupin, Universal’s thriller Murders At The Rue Morgue, with Bela Lugosi and MGM’sGrand Hotel. (28/37)

MAY1932 Joseph Breen, frustrated with the studio mogul’s continued push of sin-filled pictures, writes to Quigley, “the fact is that these damn Jews are a dirty, filthy lot.” http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

02MAY1932 Jack Benny’s radio program airs for the first time. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

JUN1932 Mae West arrives in Hollywood and moves into the Ravenswood Apartmentss at 570 Rossmore where she stays until her death at 87yo in 1980 (2/20) She has left NY with a two-month $5000 a week contract with Paramount. (21/108)

End JUN1932 Attendance at cinemas is down 40% from the 1928 peak. (28/58)

02JUL1932 Paul Bern and Jean Harlow marry at the home of Jean’s mother, at 1353 Club View Drive. Attendees included best man John Gilbert, the Thalbergs, David O. Selznick and Irene Mayer. (115/96)

30JUL1932 The Summer Olympic Games opens in Los Angeles. The US wins 41 gold medals, Italy was 2nd with less than a third of that. Babe Didriksen (21) of Texas wins 2 track gold medals and a silver. Track events in this summer’s Olympics were timed with manual stopwatches. https://timelines.ws/states/CAL1923_1961.HTML

JUL1932 Katherine Hepburn arrives in Hollywood. (21/197)

18SEP1932 Peg Entwistle finally attains fame by jumping off the Hollywood sign.

05SEP1932 Jean Harlow’s husband Paul Bern is found shot dead in his bathroom. (126/96)

SEP1932 Malibu starts to become popular with the stars. (21/109) (28/51 said it started in 1929)

06NOV1932 Twentieth Century Pictures is created in 1932 by Joseph Schenck, the former president of United Artists, Darryl F. Zanuck from Warner Brothers, William Goetz from Fox Films, and Raymond Griffith. Financial backing came from Schenck’s older brother Nicholas Schenck and the father-in-law of Goetz, Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM Studios. Company product was distributed by United Artists, and was filmed at various studios. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Century_Pictures#Twentieth_Century_Pictures

https://centurycitycc.com/fox-studios-historical-timeline/

08NOV1932 Democratic challenger Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats incumbent President Hoover in the presidential election for his first of an unprecedented four terms. The landslide victory, 472 Electoral College votes to 59 for Hoover began the era of FDR that would lead the nation through the vestiges of the Great Depression and the ravages of World War II. http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1930.html

22OCT1932 Red Dust is released by MGM. The first pairing of Gable and Harlow is a massive success, though many of its themes are, of course, objectionable. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

16NOV1932 New York City’s Palace Theater finishes converting to a cinema. It had once been the most famous vaudeville theater in the country, with it being known that if you ‘played The Palace’ you had officially made it. The theater’s conversion is considered the death knell for vaudeville. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

DEC1932 Telephone service established between Hawaii and U.S. http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1932/1932fr.html

1932 With a profit of $8 million, MGM is the only studio that doesn’t lose money in 1932. (106/107)

1932 In 1930, George Hurrell joins MGM as their head portrait photographer, a position he holds for only two years. In 1932, he has a huge fight with Howard Strickling, head of MGM’s publicity department and quits to open his own freelance studio at 8706 Sunset Blvd., where he did portrait work for all of the studios, including MGM.

1932 Bing Crosby starts work at Paramount after having been one of the youths in Mack Sennett’s stable of actors making two-reel short subject. (p93/120)

1932 The word “mobile” was coined to describe the kenetic sculpture created by Alexander Calder. http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decade30.html

1932 Jazz composer Duke Ellington writes It Don’t Mean a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing, a song that presaged the swing era of the 1930s and 1940s. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1932.html

Early 1930s Despite the Hays Office’s careful censorship of new films, Alice Ames Winter, the Carry Nation of the National Catholic Legion of Decency, went after Mae West with a vengeance. (p33/122)

1932 Harry Cohn assumes the presidency of Columbia Pictures Corporation. (p76/141)

1932 In 1932 it took 5 days on 2 trains to get from L.A. to New York. (127/96)

1932 The Spanish Renaissance Revival Beverly Hills City Hall is built. (51/92)

1932 Schwab’s Drugstore opens at 8024 Sunset and Crescent Heights where, at the time, the trolley cars end. Closed 1983. The Schwab brothers (Bernard, Leon, and Martin) opened a pharmacy in this location due to its close proximity to the movie studios. A drugstore had been at this location previously so it required minimal investment on their parts. This was the 2nd location for the Los Angeles based chain. The first was in downtown Los Angeles on 6th Street. Other locations were at 6255 Hollywood Blvd, 430 N. Roxbury Blvd, and 401 N. Bedford Dr.

1932 Perino’s Restaurant opens near the corner of Wilshire and Western. Closes in 1969. (6/169)

1932 The Depression reaches low point: monthly wages are about 60% of 1929, industry operates at half of 1929 volume, more than 5000 banks have closed since 1920; average monthly unemployment is 12 million (as compared to Germany at 5.6 million and GREAT BRITAIN at 2.8 million. (23/319)

56% of blacks and 40% of whites or 13 million Americans are unemployed. Wages plummet to 60% less than that earned in 1929. Hoover cuts his own salary by 20%. (71/227)

1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected President. His “New Deal” program stresses federal support for the economy and for social reconstruction. (23/320)

1932 Polaroid photography invented by Edwin Herbert Land. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa122299a.htm

1932 Two inches of snow fell in Los Angeles in 1932. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles%2C_California#Trivia

1932 A look at the roster in MGM’s writer’s building: Herman Mankiewicz, Robert Benchley, PG Wodehouse (who preferred to work at home), Donald Ogden Stewart, Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, Charles Lederer, and Ben Hecht.

1932 The 10th Olympiad opens in the Los Angeles Coliseum. 37 nations and 1,408 athletes compete. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was enlarged to seat 105,000 spectators. http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi01g.htm

1932 Amelia Earhart is the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland, taking 13½ hours to fly 2026 miles. (23/319)

1932 Western Costume Co. moves from 939 S. Broadway in downtown Los Angeles to 5335 Melrose Ave, where it will stay until 1990 when Paramount purchases the property for studio expansion.

1932 Schwab’s Drugstore opens at 8024 Sunset & cnr Crescent Heights where, at the time, the trolley cars end. Closed 1987 (1/17) Although http://www.latimemachines.com/new_page_43.htm says it opened in 1935, and closed in 1988.

1932 Kodak introduces 8 mm film for home movies. http://www.cinetext.net/timeline/1930.htm

1932 Chevrolets sell for as little as $495. (71/145)

1932 Vitamin C is isolated from lemon juice by Charles G. King. (23/319)

1932 Radio City Music Hall opens in New York City. (23/321)

1932 In 1932 economist John Maynard Keyes was asked if there had ever been anything like the Great Depression. “Yes,” he said, “it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted for 400 years.” (70/5)

1932 The first unemployment insurance law is passed in Wisconsin. (23/318)

1932 WWI veterans gather in Washington DC to ask for their promised pension 10 years early due to the hardship of the Depression. (56/228)

1932 Carl C. Magee invents the first parking meter.

1933

Top stars: Will Rogers, Marie Dressler, Janet Gaynor. (21/111)
Top grossing films of 1933:

I’m No Angel
42nd Street
She Done Him Wrong
Peg o’ My Heart
Going Hollywood
King Kong
Little Women
Design for Living
Dancing Lady
The Private Life of Henry VIII

Songs Released in 1933 – http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1933/1933fr.html

“The Last Round-Up” Guy Lombardo
“Stormy Weather” Ethel Waters
“Sophisticated Lady,” Duke Ellington
“You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me” Bing Crosby
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” Paul Whiteman Orchestra
“Lazybones” Ted Lewis
“Can You Take It” Fletcher Henderson
“Love Is The Sweetest Thing” Ray Noble
“Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?” Harry Resor and His Eskimos with Loretta Clemons
“When the Roses Come Again” The Carter Family

Books Released in 1933 – http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7E1930s2/Time/1933/1933fr.html

God’s Little Acre, by Erskine Caldwell
A Draft Of XXX Cantos, by Ezra Pound
Anthony Adverse, by Hervey Allen
The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein
A Green Bough, by William Faulkner
Lost Horizon, by James Hilton
The Shape Of Things To Come, by H. G. Wells
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Man’s Fate, by Andre Malraux

JAN1933 It comes as a shock when Paramount and RKO declare their theater chains bankrupt and go into receivership. Although the inevitability of a collapse had been carefully camouflaged for years, the economic instability of the motion picture industry becomes apparent. (72/5)

30JAN1933 On the morning of 30 January 1933, in Hindenburg’s office, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor during what some observers later described as a brief and simple ceremony. The Nazis’ seizure of power subsequently became known as the Machtergreifung. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hilter

30JAN1933 The first of 2,956 episodes of The Lone Ranger premieredon radio on January 30, 1933 on WXYZ radio in Detroit, Michigan and later on the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network and then on NBC’s Blue Network (which became ABC). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Ranger

01FEB1933 As the Japanese military pressed its war in China, security concerns caused the U.S. to begin taking defensive measures. On February 1, 1933, the U.S. Navy staged a mock attack on the base at Pearl Harbor as part of a preparedness exercise. The attack “succeeded” and the defense was deemed a “failure”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_harbor#1800-1941

03FEB1933 10 writers met at the Knickerbocker Hotel to discuss the betterment of conditions under which writers worked in Hollywood. Among the attendees were: Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, Samson Raphaelson (who wrote the play The Jazz Singer) John Bright, Edwin Justus Mayer (friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald), Louis Weitzenkorn, Brian Marlow, Bertram Block, Courtnay Terrett. (72/15)

FEB1933 Care Ambulance applies for and is the first ambulance service in California and one of the first in the nation to receive national accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services. http://www.careambulance.net/

17FEB1933 The Marx Brothers Grauman’s ceremony. http://www.amug.org/~scrnsrc/chinese_theater.html

27FEB1933 David O. Selznick resigns from RKO and moves into John Gilbert’s converted dressing room at MGM where he heads up his own production unit. (19/224) (47/34)

MAR1933 Billy Wilkerson rents space at 666 Sunset Boulevard, one block east of the Hollywood Reporter’s offices. In May 1933, he opens his first restaurant, Vendôme. (p72/145)

MAR1933 Louis B. Mayer officially makes Eddie Mannix responsible for all operations at MGM. His assistant was Bernie Thau, formerly the casting director for the studio.

02MAR1933 King Kong premieres in New York City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_in_film

04MAR1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated for the first time. His speech with its hallmark phrase, “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself” begins to rally the public and Congress to deal with great depression issues. His subsequent Fireside Chats, that began eight days later, would continue his addresses with the American public. http://americasbesthistory.home.att.net/abhtimeline1930.html

08MAR1933 The day before Roosevelt’s bank moratorium the studios were unable to meet their payroll, except for MGM, which paid its employees in cash. Universal suspended all contracts; Fox notified its employees that salaries will not be paid; and Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, and RKO, due to meet their payrolls the next day, faced bleak prospects. The produces assembled in conference, awaiting word from New York. For the first time since the studios had formed, a general shutdown in the film industry seemed possible. (72/9)

09MAR1933 A blanket wage cut was imposed. Those receiving $50 or more weekly would get a 50% wage cut. Those getting less would receive at 25% wage cut. The cuts were to last for 8 weeks. (72/9) Louis B. Mayer called an enormous meeting of this stars, writers, directors and department heads in the big Thalberg projection room…L.B. played the role of a man in torment and asked his employees to save the studio…Mayer swore that he would personally see that every penny of the cut would be reimbursed when the emergency was over. The group approved the pay cuts with tears and solidarity. Samuel Marx, at the time story editor, swore that as they walked out of that exhausting, draining meeting, Mayer turned to his assistant Benny Thau and cheerfully asked him, “So! How did I do?” (72/10)

10MAR1933 6.3-magnitude earthquake hits Long Beach. There are 115 deaths and $45 million in damage. (19/225) (21/112)

10MAR1933 An emergency meeting of all the major studio heads was held at the Ambassador Hotel; it was from this conclave that the decision was taken to inflict at 50% cut in salary for all contract executives, performers and creative people still working at the studios. It was an all day meeting, and it happened that on that very day Southern California was shaken by a severe earthquake. (53/155, taken from Ezra Goodman’s “The 50 year decline and fall of Hollywood”)

12MAR1933 FDR makes the first of his “fireside chats” on the radio, the first of 30 broadcasts between 1933 and 1944. (the first one was called “The Banking Crisis”)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireside_Chats

12MAR1933 IATSE refuses to accept the wage cut. (72/10)

13MAR1933 Studio stagehands go on strike, shutting all the Hollywood studios. (19/226)
The day was spent in intense conferences between the bosses and reps of the Academy branches, and finally a solution of sorts was reached: Those earning $50 a week or less would have no cut in salary at all. And those above $50 a week would be reduced on a sliding scale up to 50%, with the “high salaried player to bear the brunt”. It would be in effect for 8 weeks, during which tinme the studios promised to have their books examined and the salary los repaid if they were shown not to be justified. The stagehands alone would be unaffected by the cuts. (55/304)

14MAR1933 The studios reopen. (72/10)

15MAR1933 Production resumes at MGM, RKO, Warner Bros. and Fox. (72/11)

07APR1933 Americans can legally drink beer again (as long as it contained no more than 3.2 % alcohol. (56/233)

19APR1933 Roosevelt takes America off the gold standard. (260/105)

APR1933 King King’s LA premiere was at Grauman’s and featured a giant King Kong head (76)

APR1933 The Screen Writers Guild was established. http://www.filmsite.org/milestones1930s.html (21/112)

1933 Screen Writers Guild established, with John Howard Lawson as 1^st president. By April 1933, 200 have forsaken the Academy for the Screen Writers Guild. (47/340) According to page 76/145, it was Billy Wilkerson who approached screenwriter Howard J. Green and told him that writers should form a union, and that Green suggested reviving the SWG, which had begun in 1921 largely as a social club.

In 1936, a drive gets underway to recruit new members for the Screen Writers Guild, the union that had been formed 4 years earlier but had encountered violent opposition from the studios, who refused to accord it the recognition or bargaining power. Many writers considered unions beneath the professional dignity of so-called artists. (26/257) But it disbands in the summer of 1936 (26/276) but in June 1938 the National Labor Relations Board rules that writers qualify as workers under the Wagner Act. A certification election held that same month allowed them to chose either the Screen Writers Guild or the more conservative Screen Playwrights as their representative. The SWG won by a vote of four to one. (26/277), also (42/73)

The Screen Writers Guild of the Author’s League of America was then reorganized from the Writer’s Club with a new constitution and by laws. At a meeting on April 6, 1933 John Howard Lawson was elected the first President of the new Screen Writers Guild. Frances Marion was elected vice-President, Joseph Mankiewicz (a rising young screen writer and brother of Herman) secretary, and Ralph Block treasurer. (72/21)

MAY1933 The Hollywood Reporter‘s Billy Wilkerson opens his first restaurant, Vendôme, at 666 Sunset Boulevard (p72/145)

MAY1933 The studios begin to give in to Nazi demands that they exclude Jews from their German offices (21/1933)

19MAY1933 The Nazi book burning takes place in Berlin. (77/215)

27MAY1933 Gold Diggers of 1933 becomes Warner Bros. biggest hit of the year and its choreographer, Busby Berkeley, becomes one of the hottest names in Hollywood. (p200/129)

03JUN1933 The wealthy Countess Dorothy di Frasso takes over Billy Wilkerson’s new Vendome restaurant and throws the Old English Costume Ball. The Countess led the way by changing her costume several times until she had worked up to an ensemble that included a stylish wig and an expensive set of false teeth. Director Edmund Golding put his hair up and appeared garbed as an English nursemaid. Lillian Tashman arrived as Gainsborough’s “Duchess of Devonshire” while gorgeous Joan Bennett

06JUN1933 The first drive-in movie theater is opened at the Camden Drive-In in Pennsauken, New Jersey. Its first feature, shows a couple of days later, is Wives Beware, starring Adolphe Menjou. (21/113) http://www.filmsite.org/milestones1930s.html

Richard M. Hollingshead builds a prototype drive-in movie theater in his driveway. http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa122299a.htm

13JUN1933 On 25MAR1933 Thalberg left on an extended trip to Europe. Just afterward, Mayer completed his Thalberg putsch. On June 13 he sent a telegram to Thalberg, with friend Charles McArthur when it was delivered. Thalberg said to his friend, “They knifed me, Charlie, they knifed me.” Mayer told his former partner that he had reorganized the studio and abolished the position of head of production. Thalberg was being removed. … Thalberg returned to L.A. on 19AUG. Mayer had already moved his office into smaller space. Mayer’s sacking of his old friend made Mannix even stronger at MGM. He was running everything anyway, but Thalberg’s ouster made him the official #2 man at the biggest studio in the world. (129/96)

16JUN1933 The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. It authorized the President to regulate banks, and stimulate the United States economy to recover from the Great Depression. To do this it established the National Recovery Administration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Industrial_Recovery_Act (72/4)

30JUN1933 Screen Actors Guild is formed within Actors Equity (which had been formed in 1913 by stage actors in New York. (16/174) (21/113) (47/134)

28JUN1933 After signing with Warner Brothers to appear in a feature film under his real name for the first time since the scandal, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle goes out with friends to celebrate. That night he dies of a heart attack at age 46. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

Before the Code (NRA Motion Picture Code aka Hays Code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Motion_Picture_Production_Code_of_1930) could be put into effect, copies of it were obtained and Beilinson and other shocked representative of Hollywood talent had them circulated. The announcement, in OCT1933, of the salary fixing board (that no salary was to exceed $100,000) caused the actors to join the writers in resigning from the Academy, and a massive meeting was held at the home of actor Frank Morgan. This was an extremely significant event in an industry built on the star system, and every important actor in town was there, among them: Ann Harding, Lee Tracy, Robert Montgomery, Eddie Cantor, Jeanette MacDonald, Fredric March, Paul Muni, George Raft, and Adolphe Menjou. Everyone there resigned in writing from the Academy (including Academy vice-Presidents March, Montgomery and Menjoy) and the infant Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was consolidated, with Eddie Cantor as the new President. (72/29)

Summer 1933 Joseph Breen meets with Catholic leaders, encouraging them to step up their campaign against the film industry. It’s successful, as a Catholic working for Bank of America, A.H. Giannini, ties the bank’s loans to studios with a morality clause. The Catholic Legion of Decency would be founded over the remainder of the year, and became the first major force whose ability to boycott pictures actually hurt the studio’s bottom line. Because of this, the fortunes of the PCA and the Legion of Decency would soon be intertwined as they sought to create mandatory PCA approval for all pictures released– and all movies would have to conform to the Production Code. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

02JUL1933 The Hearst papers announce the separation of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Snr. (55/312) but the divorce won’t become final until JAN1936. (p250/13)

1933 Mary Pickford retires from the screen. (247/130)

SUMMER 1933 Billy Wilkerson receives a handwritten letter from President Roosevelt requesting a subscription to the Hollywood Reporter. Fro then on, the president received a copy every day, airmailed specific delivery to his desk at the White House. It was sweet vindication for the publisher whose paper was routinely slighted as a mere gossip rag. (p80/145)

14JUL1933 Popeye makes his debut in a Paramount/Betty Boop cartoon: Popeye The Sailor (21/113)

4AUG1933 Radio soap opera (Oxydol’s Own) Ma Perkins begins its 27 year run was heard on NBC from 1933 to 1949 and on CBS from 1942 to 1960. Between 1942 and 1949, the show was heard simultaneously on both networks. Oxydol (a laundry detergent) dropped its sponsorship in 1956. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_Perkins

SEP 1933 Daily Variety starts. (14/120) (22/64) (p77/145)
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/about_us/history.jsp

15SEP1933 John G. Bullock – owner of the department store chain dies in Los Angeles of heart attack after trip to Northern California. (L. A. Times obit)

26SEP1933 Machine Gun Kelly is caught and supposedly cried, “Don’t shoot, G-Men! Don’t shoot, G-Men!” as he surrendered to FBI Agents. It popularizes the term G-Men, which is an underground slang term for ‘government men’. (178/99)

28SEP1933 The Evening Herald Express reports a fatal car accident on Sunset Boulevard in which a Tosca Roulien was killed by John Huston. However other facts point to Clark Gable being the driver. (128/96)

29SEP1933 Jean Harlow Grauman’s ceremony http://www.amug.org/~scrnsrc/chinese_theater.html

06OCT1933 I’m No Angel is released by Paramount. Again, West’s film sent religious groups into an uproar. I’m No Angel would go on to be the biggest grossing film of the year, and, with the two West films, Paramount pulled out of receivership. The Mae West penned screenplay is filled with entendres and come-ons. One of the more famous: “When I’m good, I’m very good. But, when I’m bad… I’m better.” http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

OCT-NOV1933 The National League of Decency takes formal shape after Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani speaking at the National Conference of Catholic Charities in New York on the authority of Pope Pius XI denounced “The incalculable influence for evil” exerted by the motion picture screen. (77/57)

16NOV1933 President Franklin Roosevelt ended almost 16 years of American non-recognition of the Soviet Union following a series of negotiations in Washington, D.C. with the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov.

17NOV1933 Duck Soup is released by Paramount. The Marx Brothers’ fifth movie for Paramount struck a sour note with the public and flopped. The group would go to MGM in 1935 and make their classic A Night at the Opera sans Zeppo, but the transition would also see the group losing much of their malicious edge. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

DEC1933 Having proven himself adept at working with (and manipulating) the Catholic church as well as being able to stand up to the studio moguls, Hays names Breen head of the West Coast office of the PCA. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

03DEC1933 James Joyce’s Ulysses is cleared by a District Court to finally be published in the United States. The novel, originally published in 1922, had been banned in the U.S. since its serialization in the journal The Little Review had led to obscenity charges being brought. (The section had included a metaphorical occurrence of masturbation.) The judge in the trial, John M. Woolsey, called the book both “brilliant” and “dull”, allowing its publication because it was clearly dirty, but not pornographic. The United States became the first English-speaking country to allow the book to be published. http://pre-code.com/what-is-pre-code-hollywood/timeline-pre-code-hollywood-era/

05DEC1933 Prohibition repealed.
http://cocktails.about.com/od/history/a/prohibition_4.htm?terms=repeal+of%20prohibition

21DEC1933 Flying Down to Rio – featuring the first teaming of Astaire and Rogers – opens at Radio City Music Hall. (21/1933)

1933 2500 theaters close as the Depression depends. P115/107)

DEC 1933 Mark Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks announce their separation. (40/85) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Fairbanks

1933 The Los Angeles Sentinel, one of the oldest, largest and most influential African-American newspapers in the Western United States commences publication.

1933 Georg Gyssling, Nazi Consul General to Hollywood, arrives in Los Angeles. (VF) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Gyssling says that he held the job until 1941.

1933 to 1941 More than 10,000 refugees from Germany and Austria settle in Los Angeles, in what Kevin Starr called “the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history.” Among those, over 750 had been film industry professionals in their former homelands. (155/p23)

1933 In Los Angeles, oranges were a dime for 3 dozen, lamb chops were 12½ cents a pound, and lines of people waited at the city garbage dumps to swarm over each newly discovered load.

1933 The earliest jukeboxes start appearing. 150,000 of them were made between 1933 and 1937, each held 50 records. (56/205)

1933 Daily Variety establishes its west coast edition. Its offices were on Vine Street, just north of Hollywood Blvd (p87/17)

1933 Esquire debuts as the first men’s magazine. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1933.html

1933 Ecstasy, a Czechoslovak film, shocks audiences when actress Hedy Lamarr is seen naked in the film. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_in_film

1933 The Private Life of Henry VIII becomes the first British film to win an American Academy Award http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_in_film

1933 Hal B. Wallis takes over from Daryl Zanuck as head of production at Warner Brothers. (p53/114)

1933 British gossip columnist Sheilah Graham arrived in New York to accept a position writing for The New York Mirror and The Evening Journal. After two years establishing herself in the entertainment scene, Graham was offered her very own syndicated column, Hollywood Today, with the North American Newspaper Alliance.

1933 By 1933, Paramount was on the verge of going belly up. In March, it filed for bankruptcy, the first major studio to be forced to do so. What reversed Paramount’s death spiral was the timely arrival, not of a foreign director but a homegrown force of nature, the sass-mouthed, hip-swaying multihyphenate Mae West. Her back-to-back smash hits She Done Him Wrong (1933) and I’m No Angel (1933) single-handedly saved Paramount from insolvency. Thanks to West, Paramount ended the year with a $6 million surplus. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/paramount-pictures-studio-hollywood-movies-1235838109/

1933 Laurens Hammond introduces his Hammond organ. http://www.infoplease.com/year/1933.html

1933 The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency is founded by Archbishop of Cincinnati John T. McNicholas as the Catholic Legion of Decency (CLOD) in response to an address given by apostolic delegate Amleto Cicognani at the Catholic Charities Convention in New York City. Cicognani warned against the “massacre of innocence of youth” and urged a campaign for “the purification of the cinema”. Though established by Roman Catholic bishops, the Legion originally included many Protestant and even some Jewish clerics. It was renamed in April of 1934, substituting National for Catholic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Legion_of_Decency

1933 When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, law enforcement officers, afraid of losing all vestiges of control over Hollywood nightlife, flexed their muscles by cracking down more often on Hollywood clubs that welcomed the sexually diverse. They were especially hostile to places that offered floorshows in which “man masqueraded as women, and women pose as men. When Hollywood Vice Squad raided Jimmy’s Backyard, they carted off the female impersonators, who were each sentenced to 6 months in jail. (60/46)

1933 Screen Writers Guild established, with John Howard Lawson as 1^st president. By April 1933, 200 have forsaken the Academy for the Screen Writers Guild. (47/340)

1933 As a result of a documentary called Mussolini Speaks, Harry Cohn from Columbia travels to Italy and meets Benito Mussolini. Cohn is so impressed that he remodels his office at the studio to look similar to Mussolini’s. (p100/141)

1933 One of the shortest strikes in Hollywood history happened when MGM cameraman operators walked of the job and the rushes for Garbo’s “Queen Christina” came in and were disastrous. LBM took one look at them and said, “Settle it! Settle it right away!” The camera operators were given everything they wanted and returned to work.

1933 Dolores Del Rio wore the first two-piece women’s bathing suit ever seen onscreen, in Flying Down to Rio. http://www.filmsite.org/milestones1930s.html

1933 It is announced that in 1932, motion pictures have lost $100 million. (28/71)

1933 Theaters begin to open refreshment stands. http://www.filmsite.org/milestones1930s.html

1933 Religious radio programming had its birth in Hollywood when evangelist William Hogg arrived from TN and was given a half-hour slot on KFAC. (14/170)

1933 Victims of the “Dust Bowl” drought in the Southwest begin migrating to California. Many from Oklahoma are called “Okies,” and will be the inspiration for John Steinbeck’s novel “Grapes of Wrath.”

1933 First Mars bar. http://www.cinetext.net/timeline/1930.htm

1933 Edwin Armstrong invents FM. http://www.cinetext.net/timeline/1930.htm

1933 First singing telegrams. http://www.cinetext.net/timeline/1930.htm

1933 Busby Berkley introduces his precision choreography. (23/320)

1933 After making Secrets, Mary Pickford (all but) retires from the screen.

1933 Mack Sennett Studios goes bankrupt, http://www.cinetext.net/timeline/1930.htm

The Great Depression forced the Mack Sennett Studio (near the corner of Ventura and Laurel Canyon) into bankruptcy. Later it became a studio for independent producers. Mascot Pictures, under the direction of Nat Levine, became one of its more important tenants and for the next two years, the Studio was known as Mascot Studios.

1933 RKO goes bankrupt. http://www.cinetext.net/timeline/1930.htm

1933 Nazi Party wins a majority of seats in the Reichstad. (23/320)

Go to next TIMELINE page – 1934 to 1942 →

Hollywood Timeline