The History of the Film Industry in California

The History of the Film Industry in California Host: Meet Matthias, he’s a collector of many things books, 78 RPM records, vintage radio gear but most impressive is his collection of memorabilia from the golden age of Hollywood. Male: Charlie Chaplin himself with his brownie snapped this photo of Georgia Hale on location in Turkey for the gold rush in 1925. This is the yearbook that we come out every year. It tells you every theater in the country and the number of seats that are in it. I started nailing signs to the barn like this one that I made when I was five, this was tickets and I started selling tickets, productions in the barn enjoyed by some of the best livestock you’ve ever imagine. Host: Whether a beloved movie palace— [Film Clip] Or hosting classic films for a local TV station, Matthias has always been driven by his life-long love of movies. So it’s probably no accident that he calls Sacramento home. After all, some say the idea for Motion Pictures started right here. Male: Well in the beginning of Sacramento movies really goes with the beginning of photography, because there was a bet between Eadward Muybridge and Lillian Stanford. Host: In the late 1800’s Muybridge became famous for his magnificent panoramas of San Francisco but Stanford lured him to the capital with a mystery. Did all four horses’ hooves ever leave the ground at the same time? Male: Just outside of his Sacramento mansion, they had some stables and they did the initial studies the trip cord to record the horse where they actually hit the ground and a still photo was exposed when the horses hooves tripped the cord. Host: The result was a series of images called the horse in motion capturing what had never been seen with the naked eye. Unfortunately, Palo Alto sort of—thunder since it was at Stanford’s ranch there that Muybridge finally completed the experiment. But if it’s any consolation when motion pictures finally arrived, Palo Alto’s thunder was stolen by a place called Hollywood. Overnight, a sleepy—of orange groves became a place where literally dreams were made. But there were some things that couldn’t be recreated even on the biggest set of backlog, especially where water was scarce but Sacramento have natural resources in abundance. Male: Sacramento was really ideally suited too double on so many locations in various locales which can be anything from a dessert to the snow capped Sierra Nevada, all accessible for minutes from Sacramento and our downtown still enough of a downtown to devil for any major metropolitan city if photograph, cleverly enough to do so. Host: Between 1914 and 1935, more than 40 movies were shot in Sacramento featuring some of Hollywood’s biggest names and directors. Folks like Gary Cooper, Will Rogers and John Ford all came to shoot in our little cow town. So in 1923, some local businessman who wanted to be in on the action and founded the Sacramento Pictures Corporation and its films received nationwide distribution, both of them. But even if local filmmaking never took off, Hollywood were still glad to make the trip off north to take advantage of Sacramento scenery. In fact, two of the greatest comedies of the silent era were shot right here in our region. In the 1920s Charlie Chaplin was said to be the most recognized person in the entire world and none of his films has better known or better loved than The Gold Rush. It’s one classic scene after another, though most of them were shot in his Hollywood studio. But for the opening of the film to recreate the scope of the Klondike Gold Rush, he insisted on filming on location in the Sierra, where Truckie filled in for the infamous Chilkoot pass. Male: A majority of the cast that you see going over the Chilkoot pass were bums that Chaplin picked up by a special training right out of I and 5th Street in 1925 and gave them a pay for a day and a boxed lunch. Host: Probably the most famous movie shot in Sacramento was Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. In 1928 Keaton and his whole crews came up from Hollywood and actually build a very elaborate set across the river on the shores in West Sacramento. Now what appealed to the Hollywood studios was that Sacramento has something they could never have. Authentic paddle wheels like the Delta King that they could use in their production. And as it turns out the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers was the ideal spot to replicate the Banks of the Mighty Mississippi. You have to wonder, did local moviegoers feel proud to see their very own waterfront playing the most famous river in America? Or cheated for paying 10 cents just to see their own backyard? Because 80 years later, there’s no mistaking the Sacramento River front and on occasion you can even spot a landmark that’s still standing, such as good water intake tower that crept into this shot on the Sacramento River. For the sequence where Keaton arrives by train, the crew travelled south down to the town or free port. The buildings are gone now but those tracks are still there on the levy road. It would be nice if some remnant of Steamboat Bill Jr.’s elaborate production remained on the river front. But in typical Keaton fashion, it all came down at the climax of the picture. Male: It’s one of the great comedies of Buster Keaton’s career, one sequence that is so remarkable is the storm scene in which a buster running around with this incredible and high royal, stops in front of this one building and it was here that Keaton performed the most dangerous stunt of his entire career, that façade was real and if you had missed his mark by even a couple of inches, Steamboat Bill Jr. might have been Keaton’s last film. Rumor has it that the cameraman couldn’t even look through the view finder until the stunt was over.