University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVI

CALIFORNIA AND AMERICA

The moving picture captains of industry,
like the California gold finders of 1849, making
colossal fortunes in two or three years, have the
same glorious irresponsibility and occasional
need of the sheriff. They are Californians
more literally than this. Around Los Angeles
the greatest and most characteristic moving
picture colonies are being built. Each photoplay
magazine has its California letter, telling of
the putting-up of new studios, and the transfer
of actors, with much slap-you-on-the-back personal
gossip. This is the outgrowth of the fact
that every type of the photoplay but the intimate
is founded on some phase of the out-of-doors.
Being thus dependent, the plant can
best be set up where there is no winter. Besides
this, the Los Angeles region has the sea,
the mountains, the desert, and many kinds of
grove and field. Landscape and architecture
are sub-tropical. But for a description of

California, ask any traveller or study the background
of almost any photoplay.

If the photoplay is the consistent utterance
of its scenes, if the actors are incarnations of
the land they walk upon, as they should be,
California indeed stands a chance to achieve
through the films an utterance of her own.
Will this land furthest west be the first to capture
the inner spirit of this newest and most
curious of the arts? It certainly has the opportunity
that comes with the actors, producers,
and equipment. Let us hope that every region
will develop the silent photographic pageant in
a local form as outlined in the chapter on Progress
and Endowment. Already the California
sort, in the commercial channels, has become
the broadly accepted if mediocre national form.
People who revere the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620
have often wished those gentlemen had moored
their bark in the region of Los Angeles rather
than Plymouth Rock, that Boston had been
founded there. At last that landing is
achieved.

Patriotic art students have discussed with
mingled irony and admiration the Boston
domination of the only American culture of
the nineteenth century, namely, literature.

Indianapolis has had her day since then,
Chicago is lifting her head. Nevertheless
Boston still controls the text-book in English
and dominates our high schools. Ironic feelings
in this matter on the part of western men
are based somewhat on envy and illegitimate
cussedness, but are also grounded in the honest
hope of a healthful rivalry. They want new
romanticists and artists as indigenous to their
soil as was Hawthorne to witch-haunted Salem
or Longfellow to the chestnuts of his native
heath. Whatever may be said of the patriarchs,
from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Amos Bronson
Alcott, they were true sons of the New England
stone fences and meeting houses. They
could not have been born or nurtured anywhere
else on the face of the earth.

Some of us view with a peculiar thrill the
prospect that Los Angeles may become the
Boston of the photoplay. Perhaps it would
be better to say the Florence, because California
reminds one of colorful Italy more than of
any part of the United States. Yet there is a
difference.

The present-day man-in-the-street, man-about-town
Californian has an obvious magnificence
about him that is allied to the eucalyptus

tree, the pomegranate. California is a
gilded state. It has not the sordidness of gold,
as has Wall Street, but it is the embodiment
of the natural ore that the ragged prospector
finds. The gold of California is the color of
the orange, the glitter of dawn in the Yosemite,
the hue of the golden gate that opens the sunset
way to mystic and terrible Cathay and Hindustan.

The enemy of California says the state is
magnificent but thin. He declares it is as
though it were painted on a Brobdingnagian
piece of gilt paper, and he who dampens his
finger and thrusts it through finds an alkali
valley on the other side, the lonely prickly
pear, and a heap of ashes from a deserted campfire.
He says the citizens of this state lack
the richness of an æsthetic and religious tradition.
He says there is no substitute for time.
But even these things make for coincidence.
This apparent thinness California has in common
with the routine photoplay, which is at times
as shallow in its thought as the shadow it
throws upon the screen. This newness California
has in common with all photoplays.
It is thrillingly possible for the state and the art
to acquire spiritual tradition and depth together.

Part of the thinness of California is not only
its youth, but the result of the physical fact
that the human race is there spread over so
many acres of land. They try not only to
count their mines and enumerate their palm
trees, but they count the miles of their seacoast,
and the acres under cultivation and the
height of the peaks, and revel in large statistics
and the bigness generally, and forget how a few
men rattle around in a great deal of scenery.
They shout their statistics across the Rockies
and the deserts to New York. The Mississippi
Valley is non-existent to the Californian. His
fellow-feeling is for the opposite coast-line.
Through the geographical accident of separation
by mountain and desert from the rest of
the country, he becomes a mere shouter, hurrahing
so assiduously that all variety in the voice
is lost. Then he tries gestures, and becomes
flamboyant, rococo.

These are the defects of the motion picture
qualities also. Its panoramic tendency runs
wild. As an institution it advertises itself
with the sweeping gesture. It has the same
passion for coast-line. These are not the sins
of New England. When, in the hands of
masters, they become sources of strength, they

will be a different set of virtues from those of
New England.

There is no more natural place for the scattering
of confetti than this state, except the
moving picture scene itself. Both have a genius
for gardens and dancing and carnival.

When the Californian relegates the dramatic
to secondary scenes, both in his life and his
photoplay, and turns to the genuinely epic
and lyric, he and this instrument may find their
immortality together as New England found
its soul in the essays of Emerson. Tide upon
tide of Spring comes into California through
all four seasons. Fairy beauty overwhelms
the lumbering grand-stand players. The tiniest
garden is a jewelled pathway of wonder. But
the Californian cannot shout "orange blossoms,
orange blossoms; heliotrope, heliotrope!" He
cannot boom forth "roseleaves, roseleaves" so
that he does their beauties justice. Here is
where the photoplay can begin to give him a
more delicate utterance. And he can go on
into stranger things and evolve all the Splendor
Films into higher types, for the very name of
California is splendor. The California photoplaywright
can base his Crowd Picture upon
the city-worshipping mobs of San Francisco.

He can derive his Patriotic and Religious Splendors
from something older and more magnificent
than the aisles of the Romanesque, namely:
the groves of the giant redwoods.

The campaign for a beautiful nation could
very well emanate from the west coast, where
with the slightest care grow up models for all
the world of plant arrangement and tree-luxury.
Our mechanical East is reproved, our
tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged
every time we look upon those garden paths
and forests.

It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of
the motion picture as our national text-book in
Art as Boston appropriated to herself the
guardianship of the national text-books of
Literature. If California has a shining soul,
and not merely a golden body, let her forget
her seventeen-year-old melodramatics, and
turn to her poets who understand the heart
underneath the glory. Edwin Markham, the
dean of American singers, Clark Ashton Smith,
the young star treader, George Sterling, that
son of Ancient Merlin, have in their songs the
seeds of better scenarios than California has
sent us. There are two poems by George
Sterling that I have had in mind for many a

day as conceptions that should inspire mystic
films akin to them. These poems are The
Night Sentries and Tidal King of Nations.

But California can tell us stories that are
grim children of the tales of the wild Ambrose
Bierce. Then there is the lovely unforgotten
Nora May French and the austere Edward
Rowland Sill.

Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented
the new printing. The state that
realizes this may lead the soul of America,
day after to-morrow.