Film Historian Answers Old Hollywood Questions

I'm Tony Maietta, I'm a Hollywood historian.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is Old Hollywood support.

Saint-Francis asks alright, Mr. DeMille,

I'm ready for my closeup.

Where is this iconic line from?

It is from a 1950 classic film called Sunset Boulevard,

spoken by Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond,

and it's one of the great last lines in movie history,

directed by Billy Wilder about an aging silent film star

who believes she's ready for a comeback.

And Mr. DeMille is Cecil B. DeMille,

who was a legendary director both in the silent era

and throughout classic Hollywood

and he worked frequently with Gloria Swanson.

So there's kind of meta moments here with this iconic line,

which is probably one of the most famous last lines

in cinema history.

I hear it all the time.

R/AskHistorians asks, how did the US film industry

come to be centered in Los Angeles?

When the film industry came here,

it didn't start out in Los Angeles.

It started out on the East coast in a beautiful little town

called West Orange, New Jersey,

because that's where Thomas Edison was.

Thomas Edison was not only the father

of many, many inventions,

such as the light bulb and the phonograph.

He was also famously litigious and he patented everything.

Now, this wasn't a problem

for the larger film companies in New York, such as Biograph.

They created their own cameras

and they didn't have any need for Edison.

But for the smaller independents, they found that they had

to pay Edison every time they wanted

to use one of his cameras.

Well, this could be quite expensive,

and they tried to get around it.

But Edison had what we we'd like to think of

as the patents men, they were basically henchmen

and they would find these independents

and they would shoot up their cameras

so they couldn't make the movie or they would beat 'em up,

or it was a, it was a real wild west situation.

The best thing to do was to get as far away

from Edison as possible.

So they went to the very edge

of the United States to California.

But when they got to Southern California,

they realized, wow, this is even better

than East Orange, New Jersey.

This is even better than Fort Lee

because we have about 260 days of sunshine,

and within a day's travel, you have everything.

You have the desert, you have the ocean,

you have the mountains, you have the city.

I mean, it was an incredible array

of things at their disposal.

So that's really why the film industry

ended up in Los Angeles and in Hollywood.

Colette, @BurberrySkirt, I like that name,

asks what year do you guys consider to be the beginning

of Hollywood's golden age?

I was thinking either 1927, the arrival of sound,

or 1934, the end of pre-code.

Most people agree, it's probably about the beginning

of the advent of sound,

although silent films certainly qualifies

for some wonderful golden age films up until the end

of the studio system, which is sometime

in the mid to late 60s

is pretty much the golden age that we think of.

But there was also a second golden age, not quite as famous,

but just as interesting that happened after that

from about '68 when the production code was gone.

And these incredible filmmakers like Martin Scorsese,

Francis Ford Coppola, like Alan Pakula,

were making really groundbreaking films

like The Godfather Saga, like Rosemary's Baby,

like What's Up Doc with Peter Bogdanovich

all the way up to about Chinatown with Polanski.

So that was kind of the second golden age,

which ended in about '75.

You referenced the end of pre-codes.

The pre-code era was about four

or five years from about 1929 to 1934

in which films were really crazy, lascivious, salacious

because there was a production code,

which was basically a list of do's and don'ts

that was created in order to prevent censorship.

Hollywood was self-censoring at this time.

They didn't want other people, the government certainly,

to come in and censor their film.

So pre-code really is a misnomer

because there was a code of do's and don'ts and be carefuls

and don't do this and don't do that,

and make sure that kiss isn't longer than five seconds.

It wasn't enforced until 1934

when the Catholic church got involved.

Priests would tell their congregations from the pulpit,

you can go to hell if you watch this film.

And that really scared filmmakers.

So they finally started paying attention

and said, okay, okay, okay, we'll follow the code.

A Reddit user asks, do studios in Hollywood

still own their actors the same way

they did in the 20th century?

They sure as hell don't.

But the studio system ended pretty much in the 60s.

Universal held onto some of their contract players

throughout the 60s.

One of the great things about the studio system

was that this was a great training ground for people.

People like Lucille Ball who came to Hollywood as a showgirl

and learned her craft while she was getting paid

for a studio and then became Lucille Ball.

I mean, this was a wonderful, wonderful training round

for these actors and actresses.

Yes, it was very constrictive and yes,

you could feel like you were being owned.

However, many people kind of wish that that system

was still around

'cause it was guaranteed employment if anything.

PageTurner627 asks, was the Mid-Atlantic accent

really just a made up accent used by actors?

Yes, it was.

It wasn't made up by actors,

but yeah, there's no such thing as a Mid-Atlantic accent.

There had to be a standardization of speech

in order for people, the audiences to understand actors,

and remember, sound was brand new.

Talkies were brand new, so they needed every break

they could get.

Mid-Atlantic really is a mixture

of East coast upper class dialects, Atlantic Coast,

that's where the Mid-Atlantic comes from,

and stage talk, stage speech, if you will.

It's kind of that blend.

And that's why actors

and actresses in films from the 30s and 40s

and up until the 50s don't talk like anybody else.

They don't talk like us.

By the 50s when films were becoming a little more,

there was a realism movement after the war,

mostly from foreign films.

You didn't see that as much.

The Mid-Atlantic accent kind of died away.

@BigThuggga asks this, what is so legendary

about Marilyn Monroe, not even being funny.

Was she really a good actress?

Marilyn, one of the most iconic actresses

in the history of cinema.

Here's the thing about Marilyn.

Marilyn had what one of her directors, Billy Wilder,

called flesh impact.

And what he meant by that was the effect

of seeing Marilyn on screen to audiences was visceral.

You could feel her.

She had that kind of force,

and all you gotta do is watch some of her films,

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire,

you get that.

Your eye goes immediately too,

where you cannot look at anybody else

when Marilyn Monroe's on screen.

Marilyn was a natural comedian.

Watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Watch How to Marry a Millionaire.

She's very funny, but it's not overdone, she's very subtle.

When she was the biggest star in the world,

she stopped for a year and went to New York

and joined the actor studio and took classes

on how to become a really good actress from Lee Strasberg.

Now, this is unheard of.

She was already a huge star, but she stopped

because she wanted to get better, and she did.

She, some of her later performances,

particularly in the Prince and the Showgirl

with Sir Lawrence Olivier,

who was no slouch, she pretty much wipes him off the screen.

She was sublime.

Unfortunately, she died at age 36,

so we never really had the opportunity to find out

what her later career would've been like.

But I have no doubt that she would've been

one of the greatest stars.

@Ahgahwa asks, my roommate told me she doesn't know

who Elizabeth Taylor is, and I almost had a stroke.

Elizabeth Taylor, the biggest star of the 50s and 60s.

I mean, Taylor and Burton, not ringing a bell for you?

They call Elizabeth Taylor the last movie star,

because she was one of the last of the generation

that was completely, totally raised at a studio.

She began working in films as a very young child

all up until almost to her death.

I mean, she was trained by the studio, mostly MGM.

She was certainly one of the most beautiful women

in the world.

She famously had violet eyes.

She and her husband, Richard Burton, who she married twice,

were probably the very...

They weren't the first celebrity couple,

but they were one of the biggest celebrity couples

in the 60s.

They met on the set of Cleopatra when she was married

to someone else, and there was a scandal.

The Vatican condemned her.

She was a brilliant actress, she won two Academy awards.

Download Elizabeth Taylor,

because you're going to be stunned

at some of the things she does

and how beautiful this woman really was,

and what a great humanitarian she was.

Elizabeth Taylor said the word AIDS

before anybody else would

because she had so many friends who were dying.

So we owe a great debt to Elizabeth Taylor for that alone.

Istobri asks, what caused the decline

of the classic Hollywood musical film, 1930s to 1940s era?

Musicals were very expensive to make.

You not only had to pay actors, you had to pay musicians,

you had to pay songwriters, you had to pay choreographers.

There were a lot of people on the musical payroll.

Second of all, after the war,

the mood in the country shifted.

There was a sense of innocence about musicals,

because you have to suspend your disbelief

because I mean when you think about it,

how many times have you seen in your daily life

somebody having a normal conversation,

then suddenly bursting into song

or suddenly dancing around the room?

It doesn't happen that often.

After the war, people got a lot more cynical.

There was a great realism movement in films after the wars.

But beyond that, in the 1950s,

there was this little invention called television,

which began peeling away movie audiences by the millions.

Movie studios had to start divesting themselves

of this great pool of talent that they had under contract.

So they didn't have this pool of talent at the ready cheaply

to make these musicals, which were incredibly expensive.

@Himedzhosh14141 asks, so question for film oomfies,

why is Gone With The Wind

still considered a classic despite everything?

They're talking about the attitude of the filmmakers

towards a very shameful time in our history,

slavery and the Civil War.

Here's the thing about Gone With the Wind.

It's an incredibly made film.

It was a technical feat when it came out.

It stunned everyone

and blew everyone away by its scope, by its size,

by its grandeur, by its subject matter.

It is difficult for audiences to watch today,

but it is still a huge achievement in filmmaking.

You have to put yourself in the mindset, perhaps,

of 1939, 1940, when these attitudes

were much different than they are today

and then hopefully you can enjoy the film for what it is.

Previous-Stickk asks, does anyone have any salacious,

scandalous, shocking tea about old Hollywood stars?

Let's see, Clark Gable was alleged to be a gay hustler

in Los Angeles early in his career,

and actually hooked up with George Cukor,

who later directed him for a time and Gone with the Wind.

Oh, Loretta Young, Loretta Young's great.

So Loretta Young was a very, very famous actress

in the golden age,

and she was also very, very Catholic.

But she was on a film opposite Clark Gable, her co-star,

and they had an affair.

The film was called Call of the Wild,

and at the end of the affair,

Loretta Young became very, very pregnant.

Well, what are you gonna do?

Clark Gable was married.

There was no possibility of getting married.

So Loretta Young left Hollywood for a few months,

had her baby, put the baby in an orphanage,

came back to Hollywood, waited a few more months,

and then adopted that baby, named her Judy,

and raised her as her adopted child

for the rest of her life.

As Judy got older, she started to look more

and more like Clark Gable and Loretta Young,

to the point where she had the Gable ears

that her mother had to have pinned back.

So eventually, after hearing these rumors her entire life,

Judy Lewis confronted her mother

near the end of her mother's life

and asked her if it was true.

And finally, Loretta confessed yes, it is true.

You are a walking mortal sin, Loretta Young.

PurpleLenora asks, when was

the first Academy Award ceremony held?

The first Academy Awards were held in May of 1929,

and they were held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

The tickets cost $5,

and the ceremony was 15 minutes long.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

developed this award as kind of like, oh,

and let's give this award out every year.

They really started to gain steam in the late 30s

and into the 40s.

Once television came in

and they started to be televised in the 50s,

they truly became the the appointment television

that we think of today.

Why is this called an Oscar?

It's one of these legends that no one's really sure

what the real truth is.

My favorite story and the legend that I like the best

is that it was named by Betty Davis because the backside

of Oscar reminded Betty Davis of her first husband,

Oscar Nelson, and she allegedly said, that's an Oscar.

That may not be true, but it's my favorite story.

MacMac360 asks, what happened the night

Natalie Wood died?

There was a lot of speculation.

It happened Thanksgiving weekend in 1981 on a boat

called The Splendor, which was Natalie Wood

and RJ Wagner's boat named after Splendor in the Grass,

one of Natalie Wood's great films.

She and RJ Wagner, Robert Wagner,

and Christopher Walken went out to Catalina for a very cold

and very wet Thanksgiving weekend,

and Natalie Wood ended up Sunday morning

floating in Catalina Harbor.

No one really knows what happened.

The theory that is most accepted

and I think makes the most sense

is that the dinghy was attached to the side of the boat

and it was banging and it was keeping her awake.

And her husband and Christopher Walken were up above

having drinks and she was in the bedroom.

So she went outside in her nightgown and parka

and socks to retie the dinghy,

slipped on the step,

hit her head and fell in the water.

And unfortunately because her parka filled with water

and kept her weight down,

she couldn't get back up into the boat.

And that's usually what people cite as the cause of death

was the fact that she drowned.

DamIts_Andy asks, were there gay bisexual stars

in the 50s and 60s?

Yes, there have always been gay and bisexual stars.

The difference is, is that they weren't out.

You couldn't be out in the 50s and 60s

when you could be arrested for being gay or bisexual

and acting on it in the 50s and 60s.

You could be thrown into a mental hospital,

you could get a lobotomy, lots of horrible things.

Some of the ones who were a little more honest

about who they were were Farley Granger.

To a certain extent, Montgomery Cliff.

Certainly he wasn't out,

but we know now, certainly Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter.

They were afraid that if the public knew

that a star was gay,

that suddenly he wouldn't have the romantic peel.

But if you watch some films of that era,

such as Pillow Talk,

there's some wonderful little sly illusions

to the real sexuality of Rock Hudson

because everybody knew in the film industry,

they just didn't know in Peoria.

They just didn't know in Des Moines.

It's a struggle, it's still a struggle.

There's a lot more gay actors in Hollywood

than are out gay actors in Hollywood.

But we're making progress slowly but surely.

ThePixelPaint asks, why was it so hard for so many actors

to make the transition from silent films to the talkies?

Was it just a matter of voiced acting being more difficult,

or were there other factors at play?

Silent film is a completely different art than talking film.

I think that's what people don't realize.

They think silent films were just films without talking.

No, they were an entirely different art form.

A lot of actors in Hollywood,

particularly big silent film stars, had very heavy accents.

Didn't matter because you weren't talking.

So there were some great silent film stars who just left.

They weren't even gonna try to learn

how to speak this mangled new, a Mid-Atlantic accent there.

Also, a big factor was the fact

that many silent film stars had...

Their personas didn't match their voice.

This happened primarily with an actor named John Gilbert,

who was probably the most famous victim of talkies.

He was the he man, he was romantic,

and he kind of had a light tenor voice, it didn't match.

So that was really one of the big problems

was the persona didn't necessarily match the voice.

There was also a shift in the culture at this time.

Don't forget, not only was there a shift in Hollywood

with sound and talkies, but the Depression happened.

Wall Street fell.

Suddenly, the kind of heroes that were in silent film

were not really relevant in this tough new world we were in.

BaronDestructo asks, how many cigarettes per day

was 16-year-old Judy Garland encouraged to smoke

in order to keep her weight down

during the filming of The Wizard of Oz in 1939?

I wish it was only cigarettes.

Smoking was just what sophisticated adults did.

So MGM had no hand in Judy Garland's cigarette habit.

However, they had a big hand in her drug addiction.

They did encourage her to take pills, amphetamines.

An easy way to lose weight back in the day

was to take amphetamines.

The problem with amphetamines was that it hyped her up.

And so she couldn't sleep at night.

So they then had to give her sleeping pills

to get her to sleep because she had to be up at 5:00 AM

and sparkle, Judy, sparkle.

It became a very, very, very bad habit.

One thing fed the other.

Now, MGM and all the studios

didn't just do this with Judy Garland,

they did it with a lot of stars.

@CalBoDan asks, Shirley Temple is a real person,

thought it was just a drink.

Yes, Shirley Temple was a real person.

She was the biggest box office star in the world

for four years beginning when she was six years old.

She saved 20th century Fox from bankruptcy

because this was the Depression.

So this little girl, all of six years old,

held a studio on her back.

She was later an ambassador in the 80s.

So she had quite a career, and the drink was indeed

named after her because it has no alcohol,

and she was a child.

BlueJester12 asks, when did

the old Hollywood system go away?

Well, I would probably say in the late 60s,

because what happened was, was that the studios were forced

by the Supreme Court to divest themselves

of their theater chains.

Now, back in the 20s and 30s and 40s,

studios owned theaters.

That was really the point for many of these moguls

was they really were more in the real estate business.

They had more theaters,

and then they created these studios

to put product into these theaters.

So there were paramount theaters,

there were Warner Brothers theaters.

MGM had Lowe's, it was decided that this was a monopoly.

It's called vertical integration.

And the studios were forced to divest themselves

of their theater chains.

So they lost an outlet for their product.

They had to drastically cut back on staff,

drastically cut back on the number of films they could make.

And there was this little thing happening

about the same time called television,

which was also eating away at their audience.

And by the 60s, many studios just couldn't survive

as they had during the golden age.

So they had to let go of their contract players,

they had to let go of their contract writers,

all these people that were under contract.

When the studio system really died down,

I think is what most people think of

as the end of Old Hollywood, the end of the studio system.

BrandonMaI asks, worst thing about film school

was having to sit through boring ass black and white movies.

It's a knife in my heart, but no, I'm glad you asked this

because all I can tell you is is that watch a film

from 1933 called Babyface,

which is one of these pre-code films

in black and white.

And I guarantee you,

there ain't nothing boring ass about it.

It is one of the most salacious, lascivious.

Barbara Stanwick plays a woman

who literally fucks her way to the top.

It's unfortunate that because these films are not presented

in a way that we're used to, that they get this reputation

of being boring.

You just have to realize it was a different time,

and it might seem a little slow to us

in our instant gratification world,

but sit with it for a while, I guarantee you,

and it'll get interesting.

A Reddit user asks

what movies were the first in their genres,

the real trendsetters of filmmaking?

When you think about screwball comedies,

probably the first screwball comedy,

one of the most famous

is it happened one night starring Clark Gable

and Claudette Colbert.

They both won Oscars for it.

That was definitely the first screwball comedy.

It started the entire screwball comedy genre.

Musicals had been around since talkies.

The Broadway melody of 1929 was not the first musical,

but it's probably one of the very first

and one of the most famous that won the Academy Award.

It was the first musical to do that.

I mean, there were films in the silent era

that you could term horror films.

The big one, the one that really set the horror genre

in motion was Dracula starring Bella Lagosi.

It was a tremendous hit in the early 30s

and started this whole cycle

of horror films from Universal Studios mostly

such as Frankenstein,

such as the Bride of Frankenstein,

such as The Invisible Man.

So you can really point to Dracula

as being probably the very first of those.

There was a silent film star named Harold Lloyd,

who was one of the big three.

Chaplain, Keaton and Lloyd,

the big three comic superstars in silent film.

Harold Lloyd did romantic comedies.

We don't think of romantic comedies necessarily

in silent film,

but he really was a romantic comedy star of his era.

Gangster films were big in the 1930s

because of the Depression,

because of the fact that people were so desperate

and they wanted to see people giving the finger

to this government and this society,

which put us in such dire straits.

Someone from Quora asks, in what major ways

did Charlie Chaplin impact cinema?

Aside from the fact that he was probably the biggest star

in the world during the silent era,

his impact as a filmmaker can be felt.

He was singular in the fact that for the majority

of his great career was his own boss.

He had his own studio.

He financed his own films, he wrote his own scripts,

he cast his films.

Charlie Chaplin was a force in Hollywood.

He was a force in filmmaking.

And Charlie Chaplin was also the last star

to leave silent film and go into talkies.

When you're talking about titans of film history,

Charlie Chaplin is right up there at the top.

One of the amazing things about Chaplain too,

if you ever watch a Chaplain film,

is Chaplain had such incredible control over his body.

He was such an athlete.

He did his own stunts, so did Douglas Fairbanks.

These people did their own stunts.

There was no CGI, there was no manipulation of the camera.

What you see up there, he actually did.

Same thing with Buster Keaton, another great athlete,

silent comic, one of the big three.

These people all did their own stunts.

Many of them directed their own films,

wrote their own films.

They were true auteurs

before the word auteur ever came to existence.

@RadSeed asks, did silent film stars

really bother learning their lines?

There weren't scripts in silent films, there were scenarios.

And very frequently,

especially when you're talking about some of the greats

like Chaplain and like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton,

they created as they went along.

So when you see a silent film

and you see actors mouthing words, yes,

they're kind of getting the general idea

of what the scene is trying to convey,

but it's not like they had to memorize lines.

There's a very famous story about a silent film star

who would actually curse while they were filming

because he didn't think anybody would notice.

Well, there happened to be lip readers in the audience

who could see exactly what he was saying.

You'll see a stray son of a bitch,

or you'll see a stray what the hell are you doing here?

@ORRY111 asks, why everyone's so obsessed with Citizen Kane,

why not Citizen Orry?

A Citizen Kane is kind of universally accepted

as the greatest film of all time.

It's kind of a David and Goliath situation

between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst.

Citizen Kane is remarkable for many reasons.

The technology in particular, the cinematographer,

Greg Toland, created something called deep focus,

which had never been done before

and basically what that means is, is the foreground,

the middle ground and the background are all in sharp focus.

The fact that the moguls got together

on the behest of William Randolph Hearst

and tried to stop the film, tried to squash it.

And so there's a real rebellious spirit behind Citizen Kane,

which I think people admire.

I think people certainly admire the genius

that was Orson Welles.

This film, though it's heralded as a great achievement,

was not a big hit when it was released

because it rarely played anywhere

because there were so many people against it.

So it's certainly grown in stature

and as I said, many people consider it

the greatest film of all time.

Those are all the questions.

Thanks for watching Old Hollywood Support.