What’s this?

BY LAURA WOLFF SCANLAN

Jacksonville, Florida, was the first motion picture capital of the United States, producing approximately three hundred films between 1909 and 1926. “Looking at it today, it’s hard to believe this former cattle crossing in north Florida was once a destination for the booming silent film industry,” writes Shawn Bean in his book The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking. “It’s like telling someone that Wall Street used to be in Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, or Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was originally exhibited at Machu Picchu.”

The place had everything—long stretches of sun, sandy beaches, and easy rail access. Little by little, filmmakers moved off-season production there to escape the harsh northern winter. Oliver Hardy, of the famed Laurel and Hardy comedy team, made his debut film there in 1913. With more than thirty silent film studios established, Jacksonville earned the title “Winter Film Capital of the World.”

Bean writes, “To talk about Jacksonville is to talk about Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Fox Broadcasting Company, Oliver Hardy, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, the Barrymore family, and the advent of Technicolor.”

After two decades of growth, eventually reaching $735 million a year, equal to $13 billion today, Jacksonville’s movie business collapsed. “Jacksonville imploded largely because it was seen as an immoral enterprise,” says Bean. Filmmakers shot Western gunfights in the middle of town on Sunday, a major faux pas in the churchgoing South.

In the 1917 mayoral election, John Martin ran successfully on a platform of moral reform, promising to run the filmmakers out of town. He easily overcame incumbent J.E.T. Bowden, a champion of the film industry and defender of an unacceptable status quo. “In the months immediately following the election,” says Bean, “almost every studio moved out of town, most of them to Los Angeles.”

Bean gives an illustrated presentation chronicling Jacksonville’s rise and fall as a movie capital at the Anderson Price Memorial Building in Ormond Beach on November 7. “It’s important because, always and forever, Hollywood has been the unrivaled monopoly of the movie industry,” says Bean. “For a fascinating, albeit very short, time in U.S. history, Jacksonville and Los Angeles battled to be America’s foremost film town. Both had an endless supply of sunlight: film’s greatest commodity. Both had water, rivers, forests, unlimited parting-shot vistas, and political boosters. Jacksonville is the only town that ever went toe-to-toe with Hollywood. Hollywood won in a landslide, of course. I like to say that the Hollywood sign, built in 1923, was Jacksonville’s gravestone.”