The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking
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About this book
Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction Inside the filmmaking industry in Jacksonville before the rise of Hollywood Jacksonville Florida was the center of the infant film industry. Devastated by fire in 1901 rebuilt in a wide variety of architectural styles sharing the same geographic and meteorological DNA as southern California the city was an ideal location for northern film production companies looking to relocate. In 1908 New York-based Kalem Studios sent its first crew to Jacksonville. By 1914 fifteen major companiesincluding Fox and Metro Pictureshad set up shop there. Oliver Hardy D. W. Griffith Mary Pickford and the Barrymores all made movies in the Florida sunshine. In total nearly 300 films including the first Technicolor picture ever made were completed in Jacksonville by 1928. But the city couldnt escape its past. Even as upstart Hollywood boosters sought to discredit Jacksonville the citys influence diminished from a combination of political upheaval simmering racial tensions disease and World War I. Shawn Bean uses first-person accounts filmmaker biographies newspaper reports and city and museum archives to bring to light a little-known aspect of film history. Filled with intrigue backroom shenanigans and missed opportunities The First Hollywood is just the kind of drama weve come to expect from the big screen.
