As New York Grew, L.A. Gazed Back

BROOKLYN, N.Y. —  In the early 1930s, the major film studios were told that California intended to adopt tax legislation unfriendly to the motion picture industry. Should this occur, the moguls let it be known that Hollywood’s circus would fold its tent and relocate to Florida. Or, better yet, the movies would return “home” to their American birthplace, New York.

A reporter eager to gauge industry reaction approached Darryl F. Zanuck, the man who, in such films as “The Public Enemy” and “42nd Street,” had indelibly etched New York City’s image in America’s consciousness. Confronted with having to choose between New York or Los Angeles, the amanuensis of Rin Tin Tin and Shirley Temple explained why Gotham-as-Hollywood would produce a “terrible” outcome: “We’d all start thinking like New Yorkers.” Zanuck knew one key element that shaped American desire was demography. Consider Los Angeles.

The relocation of the film industry to Los Angeles from New York represented a change in the environment out of which popular culture typically emerged. Because film centers in Europe were located in or near their capital cities, the tone and values of their movies were absorbed from contemporary urban culture. But before regular commercial air travel, Los Angeles--five days by train from New York--was somewhat cut off from such contact. The movie colony’s isolation from other centers of public culture (combined with its being an hermetic “company town,” whose rigid pecking order encouraged a narrow world view), seemed to confirm what Gertrude Stein observed of Oakland: There was no “there,” there. This shaped the character of the films made on the West Coast just as, 2,500 miles away, the crowded environment and diverse population of New York molded its first movies.

Distance, alone, did not place Los Angeles at odds with New York. Their natural histories played out distaff versions of America’s master narrative. New York’s identity and growth emerged out of what America was becoming. Forged in a far different crucible, Los Angeles’ increasing size and its cultural authority were fueled by an expiring social force.

Since its creation, the United States had been a white, Protestant society. But from 1880 until the mid-1920s, massive immigration and internal migration changed this, making the country increasingly urban, more ethnic and less denominational. These new arrivals--Catholics, Jews and others--not only made New York less Protestant. Overnight, and everywhere, changes in the nation’s population were accompanied by the wholesale transformation of its popular culture. The exception was Los Angeles.

Though the nation’s fifth-largest city more than quadrupled its population between 1908 and 1930, until well after World War II, Los Angeles’ profile showed a remarkable homogeneity: nine out of 10 residents were of Northern or Central European ancestry. At least 70% were also the following: Protestant; from the Midwest, West or South; disproportionately female, and older. Though the city expanded, grew more populous and powerful, its anomalous demographic vista suggested Los Angeles had accomplished the impossible: While moving ahead, it had somehow managed to stop, even set back, the hands of time.

This paradox--”reactionary growth”--can be explained if we look at the different reasons people came to California. Whether you were bent on maintaining a 19th-century vision, or looked to the future, one of Southern California’s great lures was its perceived polysemicity. People believed that in California you could create--or erase--almost any desired identity.

For many Midwesterners, tired of that region’s flat terrain and brutal winters, ready to try some other version of the American dream, or just prepared to rest after a life’s hard labor, California’s bountiful lures must have been tempting. Uprooted, then resettled, living in familiar-looking houses, surrounded by folk they had known “back home,” these new Californians were nonetheless followed by a sense of ineffectuality and anomie.

Twin forces of American ingenuity and business responded to these nostalgic anxieties. One Midwestern “immigrant,” Nebraska-born Harry Culver, grew rich building planned communities whose architecture and decor answered longings for back-home-again-in-Indiana--but with palm trees and better weather. On Sundays, nativist Midwesterners met for picnics, continuing the mores of home in Southern California.

There is a lesson here: These middle-American values did not triumph through sheer force of numbers, but because their boosters arrived with a sense of culture intact. Intractably anchored, they not only gave local institutions their character, they supplied the foundation of Hollywood’s typical audiences.

The moguls were also immigrants. They shared the crucial experience of being pioneer settlers with “the folks.” But because many were Jewish, they knew they would never belong to that overwhelmingly Christian culture. Desirous of finding a permanent home for the movies (and themselves) amid this population, they studied their neighbors’ behavior. Closely.

Starting in the early 1920s, using systematic means--like test screenings and sneak previews--MGM’s Irving Thalberg led Hollywood’s exploration to first map, then capture America’s taste via the route of the Southern California mind. Though MGM’s parent company, Loew’s, Inc. owned a national theater chain, its previews (and those of the other studios) were almost always held close to home, in Los Angeles.

Analyzing area moviegoers, Hollywood developed a version of the legal system’s “reasonable man”--a normative creature soon called “the average, or typical, [white] middle-class movie patron.” The “traditional” cultural values of this golem held that the very things that made immigrant-transformed New York dominant--in publishing, music and theater--disqualified it as a model in Southern California. Looking at the skewed contours of this audience, the moguls saw that Los Angeles’ demographics offered its residents an antidote not available back East: a sheltering vision of 19th-century Protestant hegemony preserved in amber. Or, on film. The moguls made a version of these values the underpinning of the cinema.

But anointing one population (even through such “scientific” means), treating Southern California as a kind of experimental laboratory for national tastes, was bound to cause problems. Fostering the myth that this atypical population was a synecdoche for the entire country, a representative choice (rather than a cannily strategic move) amounted to a kind of censorship that mainstreamed one set of values at the exclusion, even annihilation, of others.

Most of the revisionist movies immersed in their babbitt taste blithely ignored facts these people simply did not wish to acknowledge: immigration, industrialization, urbanization. In place of the big changes that characterized this era, these films offered ghostly simulacra: idealized memories of small-town Midwestern life (ironically) before the invention of Los Angeles. This legacy gave the American cinema a selective, powerfully nostalgic cultural imprint.

Looking at national demographic patterns in the years between the wars, we would conclude that Hollywood’s vision of America would only have been credible and have thrived in a demographic setting like Los Angeles’. Until the city’s population underwent another seismic shift after World War II, the movies emerging from its industrial and cultural base and the organizational ethos of its intuition-run corporations both manifested, and were formed by, the same dominant regional cultural patterns. Louis B. Mayer’s Andy Hardy and Darryl F. Zanuck’s small-town vaudevillians spoke to Americans in a kind of imaginary movie argot that soon became our representative national voice.

The films that were meant to be monuments attesting to the correctness of this strategy became the greatest advertisement for something else. Hoping to usher in the modern, the movies instead upheld the past. In resurrecting the Protestant culture, they enabled an enfeebled spirit to celebrate a last hurrah. Claiming to be a unifying voice speaking rationally to a fragmented nation, movie culture, California-style, became the screen on which contesting groups forever tried to reconcile cultural discord, a place we went to focus the often incompatible Janus images that constituted American culture: East or West; native-born or immigrant; black or white; city or country; Christian or Jewish; art or commerce; demography or democracy.

And Hollywood’s oracle, Zanuck? Oh, yes. He hailed from Wahoo, Neb.*