Forgotten Hollywood

In his comprehensive history of Blacks in American film, “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks,” Donald Bogle talks about the portrayal of Blacks in early silent films. In 1903, a 12-minute film by Edwin S.

One of the most glamorous stars of the 1930s and 40s in Hollywood, the exotic Merle Oberon had a secret, one she spent her lifetime protecting. In interviews like this one in 1934 with the publication The West Australian, Oberon kept up the fiction of her birth: “I was born in Tasmania but left there when I was a child.

British actor Clive Brook, who came to Hollywood in the 1920s and became a major silent star for Paramount Pictures, said in 1933, “Hollywood is a chain gang and we lose the will to escape; the links of our chain are forged not of cruelties but luxuries; we are pelted with orchids and roses; we are overpaid and underworked. ” More actors from England have achieved stardom in Hollywood than from any other country.

In the 1920s, the average annual salary of an American family was $3,269. 40.

Brawler, hellraiser, hedonist, world-class carouser, indiscriminate lover, drunkard, and drug addict. Errol Flynn was all these things, but he was also a good writer, had a magnetic personality, and was a charismatic actor.

In 1921, after the court case in which actor Fatty Arbuckle was tried for rape and murder (and eventually acquitted), Universal was the first studio to insert so-called ‘morality clauses’ in actors’ contracts. The clause read: “[H]e (she) will not do or commit anything tending to degrade him (her) in society or bring him (her) into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, or tending to shock, insult or offend the community or outrage public morals or decency, or tending to the prejudice of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company or the motion picture industry.

Aside from the glamorous supper clubs on the Sunset Strip, Hollywood had many elegant restaurants that catered to the rich and famous for decades. Three legendary ones were Chasen’s, Perino’s, and the Brown Derby.

ROMANOFF’S In 1945, Time magazine ran a story on restaurateur Mike Romanoff entitled “Life Goes to Mike Romanoff’s restaurant – A Fantastic Ex-Fraud Turned Honest Man Runs a Profitable, Celebrity-Filled Eating Place in Hollywood. ”   The article began: “The man who was the most wonderful liar of the 20th-Century US, and certainly its most successful imposter, turned respectable, almost against his will.

In the 1930s, the building now known as Piazza del Sol, at 8439 Sunset Boulevard, was called the Hacienda Arms Apartments. Its tenants included Jeanette MacDonald, Marie Dressler, and Loretta Young.

In the Prohibition years from 1920 to 1933, patrons had to go to roadhouses and speakeasies in Hollywood for alcohol and entertainment. These illegal clubs were accessed by passwords, and booze, gambling, drugs and prostitution flourished behind secret doors.