“most Americans, for whom the phrase “theatrical entertainment†meant performances of stage plays and musicals by live actors. Movies remained a pastime of the inner-city working class—often immigrants who couldn’t afford a ticket to the legitimate theater and for whom silent films presented no language barrier. As such they were regarded as a somewhat disreputable phenomenon. So-called respectable people didn’t go to see them, and movies soon became the target of sanctimonious reformers eager to point out the moral and even medical harm they caused, especially to impressionable children susceptible to the movies’ alleged glorification of sex, crime, and violence. Even stage actors and playwrights—not very high on the respectability scale themselves—were reluctant to enter the new field, applying for work at film studios only when financial desperation set in. When he was seventeen years old and out of school, he decided he wanted to make a life in the theater. His mother disapproved. The Griffith ancestors had doubtless committed “variously assorted villainies†in their day, she told him, “but none is on record as having fallen so low as to become an actor.†Although Los Angeles was the site of the very first dedicated movie house in the country—the Electric Theatre, converted from an old arcade in 1902 by entrepreneur Thomas Tally—this town full of culturally conservative midwestern transplants hardly saw itself as a future movie capital. Some residents actively sought to discourage the industry’s development, as witnessed by the numerous “NO JEWS, ACTORS, OR DOGS†signs that soon appeared in the windows of boardinghouses. According to one early screenwriter, a committee calling itself the Conscientious Citizens had even managed to gather ten thousand signatures on a petition for the city to expel the disreputable movie people. As for Hollywood itself, it was still a quiet suburb of mostly fruit orchards, punctuated by the occasional flower-draped cottage—“a lazy little village,†as Cecil B. DeMille would soon describe it, “in its shining pink stucco dress, dreaming peacefully at the foot of gentle green hills.†Incorporated in 1903 as a dry Christian community, it would vote to annex itself to Los Angeles in 1910 to gain access to the water brought by Mulholland’s aqueduct, still under construction. And although it was already connected to downtown by one of the Red Car lines, Krist, Gary. The Mirage Factory (p. 59). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. Krist, Gary. The Mirage Factory (p. 59). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. Krist, Gary (2018-05-14T23:58:59). The Mirage Factory . Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. Krist, Gary (2018-05-14T23:58:59). The Mirage Factory . Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. Krist, Gary (2018-05-14T23:58:59). The Mirage Factory . Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. ”
