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The Cheat (Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, 1915)

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The Cheat: Tori/Arakau Entrance Phil Ethington
Contents of this annotation:
1. The Cheat (Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, 1915)
Haka Arakau (originally Hishituru Tori) played by Sessue Hayakawa Phil Ethington
Contents of this annotation:
1. The Cheat (Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, 1915)
Hayakawa as Tori/Araku in The Cheat (1915) Phil Ethington
Contents of this annotation:
1. The Cheat (Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, 1915)

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Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry, 1895-1920 When the Cinematographe emerged in 1895, the world had already been colonized by images and mass communication. Photography, mass illustrated newspapers, and magazines by the tens of millions daily, were printed and circulated, exposing millions of eyeballs to millions of images. Beyond even that, motion pictures generated a quantum leap in the mass media: offering possibilities for new, hybrid forms of art, entertainment, and political communication. Motion pictures made mass societies possible, eventually reaching hundreds of millions weekly. They rapidly transcended their humble origins as stage entertainment. Before the end of the Great War, the apparent power of motion pictures was so awe-inspiring that world leaders prized movies as key geopolitical assets.

Although it came to global dominance, Los Angeles was by no means the original city of cinema. Lyon, Paris and New York City are the birthplaces of cinema proper (see below) and its earliest nurseries. The institution of cinema was transplanted from these nurseries and took root in Los Angeles as early as 1910. Then "Hollywood" almost instantly rose to predominance, shaking the world market with the feature films and comic shorts of Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith, Lois Weber, Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, and Mabel Normand by 1915. It not only defined the metropolis of Los Angeles, but reshaped global society, so any historical account of Los Angeles will need to dwell carefully on the early years of this institution, inscribed so deeply into Southern California, and into the minds of humankind.

Pre-Cinematic Visual Arts
When speaking of origins, it is useful to draw a vague line between "pre-cinematic visual arts" and "cinema." Historian Vanessa Schwartz and others have shown that a wide range of visual "devices of wonder," like the image-animating Zoetrope, mass spectacles of life-like wax museums, dioramas, and photography itself, from roughly the years 1840s onward, contained major elements of what cinema merged together in the 1890s. Possibly the single most famous event in the emergence of cinema was its John the Baptist, announcing the arrival of the Messiah: the British-born California immigrant Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge took photographic training in London before migrating to San Francisco, from which base he produced some of the finest early images of Yosemite Valley, published in fine editions. Suddenly a lion of San Francisco's emerging artistic community in the 1870s, Muybridge caught the attention of railroad magnate Leland Stanford, who had made a rich-man's parlour bet with a friend, that he could prove the answer to an ancient puzzle: Do all four of a horses' hooves leave the ground during a gallop? This question remained open during the entire five-thousand year era of human horse travel because the human eye and mind cannot process visual information fast enough to detect very short sequences of time. Muybridge developed a photographic means to unlock this mystery. He positioned 12 separate cameras in a long row and exposed them sequentially while the horse galloped the length of a field, using fine strings laid across the horse's path to trip the shutters. The results were conclusive by 1872: on one frame all four hooves were clearly off the ground. Muybridge learned to "dress" his expansive set, as filmmakers would later do. Perfecting his technique by 1878 in The Horse in Motion, he erected a pure while, calibrated background behind the galloping horse, against which the horse and rider were seen in silhouette.

Muybridge's work created a global sensation, so he threw himself into massive studies of Animal Locomotion, expanding his fame through the 1880s, based by that time at the University of Pennsylvania. His work was framed as scientific, but also received as aesthetic. His studies of Animal Locomotion (photographing both human and non-human animals, all just as naked) were so suggestive of a working cinema, that they practically seduced cinema into existence. He himself early on, arranged his stills inside the cylinder of a Zoetrope to experience the animated effect. But Zoetropes, like Stereoscopes, are limited in commercial value because they must be viewed by only one person at at time. To make cinematic art a "mass"medium, would require some method of projection, so hundreds, and then thousands, could view a moving image at simultaneously. Muybridge later arranged his photographic stills on a disk to achieve cinematic projector, which he called the "zoopraxiscope" and is considered a major step forward in cinematic technology. Indeed, he exhibited zoopraxicope projections to audiences on the Midway Plaisance at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, giving him the credit for the first commercially successful motion picture. However, the fact that his images were exposed with separate cameras as stills, and because his projection device did not use continuous film, this achievement is appropriately understood as "late pre-cinematic."

Muybridge also founded cinema in two additional ways. First and possibly foremost, he portrayed bodies in motion: naked bodies of beautiful men, women, horses, and bison. Cinematic art has from its earliest origins been an erotic, sensual art. Human fascination with its own kind, and the freedom to see, and re-see, unlimited detail and scrutiny the entire body, has never ceased to supply the seductive heart of the cinematic arts. Secondly, Muybridge developed his motion-capture technique in California. And while it was Northern California, to be sure, this still played a major role in the later emergence of Hollywood, because it proved from the very beginnings of cinema that California, with its long seasons of cloudless skies and balmy weather, was an ideal place for cinematic production.

But cinema would need first to grow up far to the east, in the great metropoles of Europe and the United States, where the needed concentrations of advanced technological sectors (mechanical, optical, and chemical engineering especially), financial institutions, artists, and not least, audiences were concentrated. Only then could cinematic production move back to California.

Cinema Proper (1895)
Auguste and Louis Lumière invented, in 1895, the Cinématographe (a combined camera and projector), and shot, and exhibited the first motion picture as we know the genre today: one that is shot on a continuous strip of film and projected, using the same film stock, on a screen and viewed by many people simultaneously. Let that first movie, La Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon (Workers leaving the Lumière Factory), introduce the essence of this new culture industry. Auguste and Louis chose first to film their own workers on whom the industry is based. My account of motion pictures follows these workers through the workshops and landscapes that they inhabited.

Early U.S. production arose close to the origins of the industry, the vaudeville venues of immigrant New York City and the hotbed of inventors and skilled artisans, and production facilities in Greater New York and New Jersey. The Biograph Company, among the leading producers in the embryonic stages of the industry, made most of its films from 1908 to 1912 in its New York City “studio,” a brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street. The leading director of those films was D. W. Griffith (1875-1948). Griffith and his contemporaries produced an endless stream of “one-reelers,” silent sketches of every imaginable subject matter, from slapstick comedies to class conflict dramas about the injustices of the capitalist system like A Corner in Wheat (Biograph (New York City, 1909).[1]

Considering their meteoric rise to the very highest social and political circles of the United States, the humble origins of the movie moguls is a story as fantastic as any tale that they put on the screen. In 1883, fed up with the pogroms and lured by stories of fantastic opportunity, 26year-old Benjamin Warner (1857-1935, originally Varna or Varnerski?)[2] left the tiny Polish village of Krasnashiltz to gain a foothold in America. A cobbler by training, Ben saved enough by the end of his first year repairing shoes on the streets of Baltimore to send for his wife Pearl (1858-1934) and their two children Anna (1878-1958) and Hirsch (later called Harry, 1881-1958). Pearl eventually bore twelve children, nine surviving to adulthood. Ben, a tireless entrepreneur, sought fortune wherever he learned of a potential customer base. He and Pearl also created an extraordinary family culture of love and economic solidarity. As soon as each child was old enough to do something productive, they became part of single diversified company, each always proudly waving the Warner banner. By 1899, the family had sold pots and pans to railroad workers in Bluefield, Virginia, tramped the woods of Canada trading furs (Jacob, called Jack, 1892-1978, was born in London, Ontario), and finally settled in Youngstown, Ohio catering to the huge Polish immigrant steelworker population. Part of the family ran a combined shoe repair shop and grocery store, while the enterprising older sons Harry and Albert (called Abe, 1884-1967), ever excited by new consumer technologies, ran a bicycle sales and repair store.

But at $30, the market for luxury goods like bicycles was necessarily limited. The hottest new consumer product was the motion picture, shown for just five cents in “nickelodeons.” The Warners watched with awe as thousands of patrons left their nickels at the box office each day in the tiny theaters in Youngstown. One day in 1904 the boys learned of a Kinetoscope movie projector available for $1000, complete with a copy of Edwin S. Porter's pathbreaking The Great Train Robbery (1903). The aggressive family threw their meager fortune at the opportunity (even after hocking Ben’s prized gold watch and “Bob,” the horse that had dragged them around Canada, they only came up with $950, which was accepted by the seller).[3]

Exhibiting in a tent, the Warners chased carnivals around Ohio, wearing out The Great Train Robbery and the audiences at the same time. By 1905 they sold the bicycle shop to rent a theatre, called “The Cascade,” in New Castle, Ohio, limiting the seating to 99 to avoid fire regulations. The enterprising Warners quickly realized that much more money could be made distributing films. With characteristic chutzpah, Abe and Sam (1888-1927) approached the theatre magnate Marcus Loew, and talked him out of several trunks full of movies for $500. With this capital stock, they established the Duquesne Amusement Company in 1907. “Harry sent Sam and Abe to Pittsburgh to manage the exchange while he kept control of their New Castle theatre for security. Jack was to remain in Youngstown” cutting leather for shoes.[4]

That same year, 1907, a twenty-two year old Louis B. Mayer also entered the movie business, when he and his wife Margaret took possession of “The Gem,” a grimy burlesque theatre in Haverhill Massachusetts known to neighbors derisively as “The Germ.” Painting over the spit stains on the walls, the Mayers renamed the homely venue “The Orpheum” and the observant Jewish couple began showing wholesome films (for an overwhelmingly gentile audience), beginning with Pathé’s 1903 Life and Passion of Jesus Christ.[5] The Mayers were so successful that only a year later they had persuaded a local investor to pump $28,000 into a complete remodeling of the ex-Germ. The 900-seat New Orpheum signified the both small-time origins of the entire industry, the business strategy of establishing movies as “respectable,” and the enormous profit potentials involved. Marcus Loew converted Brooklyn’s Cozy Corner to the “Royal” while in Chicago, Carl Laemmle remade amusement-zone nickelodeons into upscale “White Fronts,” and A.J. Balaban and Samuel Katz created a chain of theaters that tapped into the massive vaudeville and legitimate theatre audiences: the working- and middle-class population of that city.[6] Later, by the 1920s, Balaban and Katz theaters were renowned for the highest quality mixed-genre movies and shows on the same stage as the movie screen. The Four Marx Brothers, like Ginger Rogers, rose through Balaban's matrix of vaudeville-theater-movie production. Their shows morphed from state to screen as easily as they improved on the stage of huge exotic movie palaces. Balaban's theaters held to a single ticket price, even for continuous shows, to the upscale glamor of the venues was also mass-based and democratic. Neat and disciplined ushers made every patron feel like class.

The hundreds of small-time entrepreneurs like the Warners and the Mayers spread the new medium faster then anyone had expected, least of all its principal inventor, Thomas Edison. In 1908 Thomas Edison, resenting that millions were being made from his patented invention, created the Motion Picture Patents Company and persuaded the early production studios (U.S.-based Selig, Essanay, Kalem, Lubin, Vitagraph, and the French companies, Gaumont, Pathé, and Méliès) to join. The “Edison Trust,” backed by a federal court ruling, set out to eliminate all independent producers and distributors. By 1910 they caught up with the Warners, buying out the Duquesne Amusement Company for $10,000. By 1912 Harry decided to join forces with Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company, and dispatched Sam to Hollywood to open a new exchange.[7] In the early days of small-scale production, it was a short step for the Warners to start producing movies of their own. Bringing the Great War home to the U.S. audiences proved profitable; newsreels and films projected "Over There," over here. in 1917 they opened their first big hit in New York City. The patriotic My Four Years in Germany, based on U.S. Ambassador James W. Gerard’s book by the same title, grossed $800,000. For the Warners, this was only the beginning.[8] Ten years later, in 1928, Harry borrowed $100 million from Goldman, Sachs and Hayden and Stone and Company to buy First National Pictures and the Warner Brothers were producing eighty-six feature films a year. Their stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange for $130 a share.[9]

Light is the indispensable raw material for this intrinsically photographic industry. Light is more indispensable even than actors. Southern California, supplying an average of 300 cloudless days each year, made Los Angeles an obviously attractive production location. The Biograph Company had maintained a branch studio in Los Angeles from 1910. Thomas Ince-credited with founding the industrial character of the business--headquartered his production in Los Angeles in 1913 and developed the “central producer system,” which “shifted control from the individual director units making films to a single producer who now oversaw several productions simultaneously.”[10] Recasting the movie business to the industrial model of centralized mass production, Ince found ample movie factory space in 1919 at 9336 West Washington Blvd in the newly incorporated suburb of Culver City. There he built the most venerable studios in the industry: some buildings still in use, after changing many hands, in the twenty-first century. “It later became known as DeMille Studios, RKO, Pathe, RKO-Pathe, Selznick, Desilu, Culver City Studios, and Laird International.[11]

Movie production in the teens took root primarily in the former city of Hollywood but it was still rather dispersed across the Los Angeles metropolis and conducted by a bewildering array of now-forgotten studio companies. One of these was the Robert Brunton Studios, Inc., at 5341-5601 Melrose Avenue. A rental studio, it provided “seven covered stages, 300,000 props, and thirty acres of land available for exterior scenes. Twenty production companies could operate there at one time.” This lot eventually became the home of Paramount Pictures.[12]

Another important early site of production was the Selig Mission Studio, operated by “Colonel” William N. Selig, a Chicago-based traveling magician and minstrel show actor who was an early founder of the industry. Selig began making movies in Chicago in the 1890s and operated a major studio there through 1910, but began shifting his operations to Los Angeles beginning in 1909. By 1911 he had built a self-contained studio and laboratory complex opposite Eastlake Park on Mission Road. This was the facility used by Louis B. Mayer’s first production company until 1924.[13] Selig also supplied a major raw material to the motion picture industry when he and “Big Otto” shipped a trainload of wild animals to Los Angeles from Jacksonville Florida. By 1915 the Selig Jungle Zoo had grown to be one of the largest collections of wild animals in the world, with 700 animals on thirty-two acres. In that year, Carl Laemmle opened his Universal City studios in North Hollywood (a term that evolved to designate the lower San Fernando Valley just over the Cahuenga Pass from the original Hollywood. On its 250 acres, Universal City not only included its own zoo, but also a fire station and a city hall.[14]

While it is fascinating to watch the rise of such large-scale production facilities, it is very important for understanding how the industry evolved, to remember that the early movie industry was emphatically demand-driven, as evidenced by exhibition origins of the major production companies. By 1916 the theatre-chain magnate Adoph Zukor (1873-1976) and impresario Jesse L. Lasky (1880-1958) had established Paramount Pictures as a production company, built from Famous Players Film Company (1912), the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company (1913), and the “Paramount Pictures Corporation” (established strictly as a distribution company in 1914). Cecil B. DeMille, who produced one of the first feature-length movies in Los Angeles, The Squaw Man (1914) for Jesse Lasky, became Paramount’s most important creative asset.[18] Marcus Loew, who had amassed a giant theatre network, was also driven by the need for a supply of films. In 1924 he created the General Motors of the motion picture industry by merging Metro Pictures Corporation, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, and Louis B. Mayer’s independent company. The new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio arose on the former Goldwyn lot in Culver City to dominate the industry in scale, aesthetic standards, and political culture.

From these stories, we can see that until at least the end of the Great War in 1918, there were many options still open for what the "Hollywood" motion picture industry could and would produce. Pioneering work by film historians has established a range of options. The social message approach drew on the mass movements of the so-called "Progressive Era," in the labor movement, feminism, race relations, immigrant rights. The circus-show approach, drawing also on Vaudeville, was explored by William Selig and his spectacular zoo. The rise of factory-like production studios was well underway before the Armistice of 1918, and its slow-but-steady focus on the "bottom line" would, we can see in retrospect, take the upper hand by the 1920s. But several formulas concerning the content of the films--their message-- were still in stiff competition in the mid-teens. One was an ideological approach that advanced visions from the left, including feminism, in dramas and tragedies, an approach well represented by the woman director Lois Weber. Another was the ideological approach that advanced conservative moral and social values, staged on a spectacular, propagandistic scale, and approach nearly solely occupied by D.W. Griffith. Griffith advanced a Victorian code of ethics grounded in the long-gone social world of the slave plantation. With Wagnerian ambition, Griffith took bold uncompromising moral positions and invested heavily in giant productions, as if swaying the masses required a gigantic visual scale. A third, and eventually winning approach--also ideological--was to forswear social change in favor of existing class and gender relations, but to focus on audience response to those of sexual and materialistic sensualism: a celebration of consumer lifestyles that had broad appeal. Cecil B. DeMille emerged as master of this approach. Let us consider each of these options, which came head-to-head in the year 1915, with exemplary films by Weber (The Hypocrites), Griffith (Birth of a Nation), and DeMille (The Cheat).

Prior to the triumph of the great factory-model of centralized studios in Los Angeles by the early 1920s, the creation of motion pictures left open a remarkable range of opportunities for women, who were prominent as writers, directors, and producers during the early silent era. Alice Guy Blaché began as an assistant to the French industry founder Leon Gaumont, eventually rising to director of the Gaumont studio until 1907, when she came to the United States, where she and her husband formed the Solax Company, where she was “director-general.” Solax’s movies were impossible to distinguish from movies made my men, but Lois Weber, one of the most prolific and accomplished directors of the silent era, made womanhood a major theme of her filmmaking. Weber, a former street evangelist for the Church Army Workers, “used film as a platform from which to explore a range of social issues—political corruption, poverty, birth control, capital punishment, and religious and social hypocrisy.”[15] In the years before Hollywood’s corporate capitalization and active suppression of leftist content, “message” films were part of the mainstream of movie culture, as Steven Ross has shown. 'In motion pictures, I can preach to my heart’s content,’ Weber told one interviewer.” "Preaching" was one major trend in movie-making, to be sure. D.W. Griffith attempted preaching on a grand, spectacular scale, while more subtle artists like Weber did so in less heavy-handed ways. Weber's The Hypocrites (1915) boldly filmed the actress Margaret Edwards entirely nude as an allegory for 'The Naked Truth,' which exposes the hypocrisy of the lustful churchgoers who shun a naked statue.[16] This film provoked widespread debate, censorship rulings, and even angry crowds--rather pointedly reinforcing its message. The rapid disappearance of women from leadership in the motion picture industry by the end of the 1920s is in part an answer to the question put by numerous magazine articles in the early 1920s, with such titles as “Will Women’s Leadership Change the Movies?”[17] According to the gendered ideologies of the era, women were expected to bring either elevated morals or erotic pleasure to the screen. Weber was the exemplar of the former. Her beautiful nude actress was not intended to arouse sexual passion, but to expose a moral challenge. Much simpler, and more direct, was the more obvious approach: make those women leads objects of desire, affection, role models for fashion or rebelious behavior, escape to fantasies that were otherwise out of the reach of most audiences.

The aristocratic, or goddess-like female "star" of the “star system” emerged around the script and market value of exemplary, talented beauties, and Mary Pickford became the archetype When Mary Pickford negotiated a $10,000 per week contract (and a $300,000 signing bonus, plus 50% of film profits) with Adolph Zukor in 1916, she became one of the most highly paid women in the world. As an advocate of women’s suffrage, shown in advertisements with a cigarette, Pickford thrilled girls and young women as a role model for the New Woman then emerging. Naughty and independent, she easily grabbed the headlines. But politically, Pickford, along with her husband Douglas Fairbanks, was a right-wing Republican who came to promote Benito Mussolini's fascism. She quite opposed to leftward social change. The exaltation of women stars became part of the studio system, which required huge profit margins and wide distribution to justify such lavish salaries. The star system not only elevated some men and women to the status of aristocracy, and even goddess/god-like reverence, thereby establishing impossible standard for beauty and behavior. It also reinforced class inequalities by rewarding just a tiny symbolic few, leaving the masses of women and men actors struggling in the reserve army of labor that gathered in the fiercely anti-union territory of Open Shop Los Angeles.

David Wark Griffith (1875-1948) "was the teacher of us all," according to Cecil B. DeMille, whose movies and fatherly-autocratic persona was nearly synonymous with Hollywood from its earliest years through the 1950s. Among all of the "inventors" of the motion picture industry, Griffith is usually given the highest credits, having first synthesized a credibly coherent cinematic language and showcasing that language in his spectacular 1915 epic, Birth of a Nation. It is possible, however, to admit that Griffith deserves "founder" status, and at the same time, to say that the the Hollywood he founded deserves more blame than praise. Besides its artistry, the other distinguishing characteristic of Birth of a Nation is its fascist racism.

I use the word "fascist" with great deliberation, as elaborated in a companion essay. Griffith's role as exemplar of cinematic technique has, if anything, been exaggerated. Other great directors were developing the same techniques almost as quickly, so if by change Griffith had either died or fell out of the industry before Birth, it is extremely unlikely that the movie industry would have failed to develop all the filmic techniques for which Griffith has been given so much credit. While filmic art ultimately would have thrived without Griffith, white supremacy and patriarchal power owe a far greater debt to the Master. I argue at greater length in a companion essay that Griffith deserves first of all to be remembered as the founder of America's version of fascism, several years before Mussolini coined the term in Italy.

The sheer audacity and widespread impact of Griffith's project to film an epic about the U.S. Civil War, in which Southern Confederate slaveowners and the terrorist Ku Klux Klan are cast as the heroic saviors of the United States against blacks and non-whites, cannot be exaggerated. Griffith's vaunted filmic technique is employed primarily as manipulative propaganda, and really became the model for cinematic propaganda ever after, serving the needs of governments in mass democracies and autocracies.
the achieved not only artistic but commercial and even political success. It was praised and endorsed by U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, himself a white supremacist, as "history written with lightening." It became the template for selling elaborate, expensive movies to the middle class for higher prices and higher profits. It was the first Blockbuster, and it inspired the mass rebirth of the KKK, which inflicted incalculable damage on American democracy.

Working in parallel to Griffith, along distinctly different principles, was the emergent victor in these battles of 1915-1918 to define the mainstream standards for Hollywood's motion picture production: Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille, like Griffith and most of these early artists, emerged from the theatrical world of the New York stage. Indeed, both DeMille and Griffith were associated with the "Bishop of Broadway," the San Francisco-born playwright and impresario David Belasco (1853-1931). DeMille's relationship with Belasco was much deeper, however" "David Belasco was practically a member of our family," he wrote in his autobiography. [B-3] DeMille's father, Henry, a lay minister who wrote moralistic plays, had co-authored with Belasco and served as dramatist. Among Cecil's earliest memories were his father and Belasco writing plays together. In the 1880s "Belasco and father...wrote and talked, their desks facing each other, for about four hours every day." [B-3]. Belasco's long career dominated and defined New York City's "legitimate theater" with a reputation for exquisite attention to detail and special effects. His was the first stage adaptation of Madame Butterfly, on which Pucini based his opera. Both Cecil and his brother William apprenticed for the stage under Belasco's mentorship, especially after their father Henry's untimely death in 1893 at the age of 40. [B-4]

With his decision to join with Jesse Lasky and make films, Cecil initially earned the scorn of his elder brother William, who wrote to him, saying "You come from a cultivated family...Surely you know the contempt with with the movie is regarded by every writer, actor, and producer on Broadway." [B-5] But Cecil did not need this lecture. He was already on a track to upgrade the movies. When he teamed up with Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldfish (Later Goldwyn), in 1912 to form the Jesse Lasky Feature Motion Picture Company, the plan was to put the standards of the New York stage that DeMille had imbibed from Belasco on the screen. [B-6]

Arriving and setting-up permanently in Los Angeles at almost the same time as Griffith, DeMille focused on more subtle moral dramas and stuck to modest budgets that allowed he and Lasky to produce more films at lower risk to the studio as a whole. A masterpiece from this year is the film he direct and released in the same year as Birth. The Cheat (1915), starring the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, exhibits all of the fine production values and directorial/editorial technique that the famed Birth is composed of: parallel editing, the building of suspense, intricate and imperceptible editing between extreme close-ups, medium shots, eye-level matches, vignettes, and masterful use of light and shadow. But DeMille's film differs from the very first scenes. To begin, DeMille had the audacity to cast a handsome Japanese as the leading man, during a widespread anti-Japanese campaign led by California's leading "Progressive" politicians.

Japan's victory over Russia in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War had alarmed racists in the US about an asiatic world takeover. An aggressive anti-Japanese campaign had been underway, propelled by lawmakers who enacted the Alien Land Law of 1913, attempting to prevent successful Japanese from owning property in California. DeMille, playing with fire in this tinderbox, cast Hayakawa as a wealthy, fashionable, sexy figure who was attractive to the upper-class women of Long Island. The original script and release, Hayakawa plays Hishituru Tori, a wealthy Japanese gentleman living on Long Island, a collector of fine carved ivory statuettes. Just a few years later, Japan joined the Allies in the Great War, so Paramount changed Hayakawa's character to Burmese king, named Haka Arakau, and made him an ivory trader (Ivory Traders are among the top five exotic and sinister cast-types in the first half-century of Hollywood).

While usually eclipsed by Birth of a Nation in histories of motion picture origins, The Cheat created a great sensation at the time, hailed among Paris intellectuals and artists as a major breakthrough. In technique both DeMille's directing, Alvin Wykoff's photography, and Sessue Hayakawa's acting all stood out even in comparison with Birth, which had been released several months earlier. The French even coined a new term to describe Hayakawa's presence on the screen: "photogenie," literally photogenic. What mazed critics was Hayakawa's acting by doing nothing or doing things with very little effort. Before Hayakawa, silent screen acting had reached a standard of exaggerated histrionics, as though the lack of sound required actors to wave their hands around like some kind of crude sign language. Hayakawa's acting, with subtle gestures of the face or eyebrows, could communicate even thoughts.[B-7]

Despite these achievements, it is clear after a few scenes of The Cheat that Hayakawa's character conforms to the "exotic" and "sinister" portrayal of Asian men -- undoubtedly a racist script. But DeMille, unlike Griffith, uses race difference to create contradictions. By casting a non-white leading man to be handsome and fashionable, attractive to elite white women, he crossed a line that Griffith could not have contemplated. He frankly acknowledged that inter-racial attraction is real and compelling. Racist propagandists never admit this. DeMille was a racialist, profiting from inequality of difference, while Griffith was an architect of that inequality and difference: a true believer in the cause of white supremacy. That Hayakawa's character was derogatory is easily seen in the protests against the film of the Japanese community in Los Angeles, led by the Japanese-language newspaper Rafu Shimpo, which said the film "distorted the truth of the Japanese people" and agitated for months to ban the film, supporting The Japanese Association of Southern California's petition to the City Council to prohibit its showing. Stung by this reaction, Hayakawa published an apology in the 29 December Rafu Shimpo: "Sincere notice: It is regrettable that the film The Cheat, which was exhibited the Tally theater on Broadway in Los Angeles, unintentionally offended the feelings of the Japanese people in the U.S. From now on, I will be very careful not to do harm to Japanese communities." The reactionin Japan was even more severe, where the film magazine Katsudo no sakai called Hayakawa an "unforgivable national traitor." The stridency of these reactions are indications of the sensitive situation of Japan vis-a-vis the West in these years of Meiji and Taisho international policy. The Japanese people were both widely respected and widely feared by many Western leaders. DeMille's treatment of an elite Japanese man involved with an elite U.S. woman is indicative of that: the Japanese were almost admitted to the club of superior races, but not quite.[B-8]

DeMille ultimately using interracial attraction to reinforce the race boundary in the plot's resolution. By the end of the film, it is clear that the female lead who falls in love with Tori/Arakau has made a huge mistake. Racial boundaries are reinforced at the end, but not before they are called into question. DeMille applied similar formulas to class relations. "Cross-class fantasies," as Ross has termed them, capitalize (quite literally) on the plot potential for a Romeo and Juliet violation of social taboos. While Shakespeare's original ends in tragedy (subverting the taboo), eventually, in the DeMille formula, taboos based on status differences are re-inscribed. Most importantly, DeMille wanted to reinforce the sensual and materialistic norms of an emerging consumer society. As a conservative Republican, he wanted to support that trajectory in social change. "Your poor person wants to see wealth," DeMille declared in 1924: "colorful, interesting, exotic." [B-9]

As film historians such as Ross, Brownlow, Starr, and May have repeatedly demonstrated, DeMille's formula was also a subtle propaganda for patriarchal and consumerist values. He insisted that all of his sets and costumes represent the latest in fashion, so his films can be said to originate product placement. Unlike Griffith, who wanted to change the world with giant propaganda films masquerading as artistic romances, DeMille stuck to core elements of romance and danger, and the exotic consumer fantasy, and steadily produced films of relatively modest scope and scale, that would be sustainable in the fickle world of movie distribution. [B-10]

Initially shunned by Wall Street’s conservatism and the antisemitism of the goyem bankers, the movie industry flourished so spectacularly by 1919 (despite the miserable showing of Intolerance) that New York capitalists could no longer resist. By that year Americans flocked to 15,000 movie theaters, leaving an estimated $800 million at the box office. As historian Steven Ross put it, “The movie industry entered the world of seriously big business in 1919 when several powerful investment banking houses arranged stock offerings of $10 million and $9.5 million...respectively, for Paramount and Loew’s Inc.”[25] The New York Stock Exchange soon listed the stocks of the major studios, and by 1930, the capital invested in the movie industry had reached the staggering figure of $850 million. Capital concentration reorganized the movie industry during the 1920s into eight major studios: Columbia, Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Paramount, RKO, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers.[26] These studios, born largely from exhibition itself, also continued to expand their own theatre chains, controlling not only production but also distribution. They amassed a huge pool of talent, with “stars” locked into long-term contracts and treated as capital stock.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, from its formation in 1924 under the production leadership of Louis Mayer and the “wonder boy” Irving Thalberg, came to dominate “Hollywood” (from their actual location on Washington Boulevard in Culver City). The political-economic geography of the giant studio by the end of the 1920s provides an anatomy of the industry as it crystallized as a regional phenomenon. The Hollywood studios were not branch plants, but they were subject to the financial control of New York City. “Clark Gable may have posed for cameras in Culver City, but his paycheck was signed at 1540 Broadway, across the street from the Camel Cigarette sign blowing smoke rings.” Mayer and Thalberg answered to their employer, Marcus Loew, who lived on Long Island and worked on Times Square. Adolph Zukor’s office was in the Paramount Building on Broadway. The headquarters for Warner Brothers and RKO Radio Pictures were also in New York, kept close by the investors that capitalized them.[27]

But the control from New York was deeply compromised by the regional monopoly on movie production held by the Los Angeles studios. The corporate bosses meddled constantly through budget and product decisions, and through their power to fire the studio chiefs. From 1915 to 1920, “Uncle Carl” Laemmle hired and fired no less than sixteen managers of his giant Universal City studio complex (averaging 4 months tenure), before sending his young assistant Irving Thalberg out to clean the place up (Thalberg later joined M-G-M). But the dense concentration of talent and subsidiary industries in Los Angeles was simply irreplaceable.[28] The financial chieftains wanted only one thing in the end: for the culture industry to supply them with and endless stream of box-office hits. By the end of its first year in operation in 1925, M-G-M was producing one feature film per week. Mayer and Thalberg successfully married quantity to quality, hiring only proven stars, quickly amassing “more stars than there are in heaven.”[29] Before the end of the classic era, these included Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Lon Chaney, Elizabeth Taylor, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, John Gilbert, Ramon Navarro, Jeanette MacDonald. M-G-M’s directors were no less impressive: Todd Browning, George Cukor, King Vidor, W.S. Van Dyke, Vincente Minnelli.

Despite their aura, “stars” were only workers, a small fraction of the thousands who produced movies in the big factory-studios. By the mid-thirties, the 117-acre M-G-M studio had more than 4,000 employees under contract. The sprawling complex of 23 sound stages included its own fire department, studio police, a hospital, commissary, makeup and costume departments, trade shops, a laboratory, and even a school for child actors. The geography of the studio itself was an inscription of the power practiced on a daily basis. Mayer and Thalberg occupied the “Front Office” near the entrance gate; Mayer’s suite decorated in mahogany and traditional furniture; Thalberg’s in stylish Art-Deco. “Adjacent to the Front Office was a low, twostory building that was home for directors and writers, who dubbed it the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory—it was crawling with insects and rodents.”[30] The reference to the most notorious of North American industrial labor disasters (141 women and girls were burned alive or jumped to their deaths in a fire-trap Manhattan sweatshop in 1913) was not an accident. The studio chiefs were grateful allies of the Otis-Chandler anti-union regime. Strikes by studio employees were ruthlessly suppressed until the New Deal’s Wagner National Labor Relations Act of 1935 empowered a breakthrough in labor organizing. One early organizer, fired multiple times, had to meet secretly with employees in Paramount’s moth-proof fur room, ironically muffled by the sumptuous garb of the ruling class, like a rebellious servant in the Great House.[31]

--- --- ---

Endnotes (see Bibliography For White Shadows) for complete references:

B-1 Gregory Black, "Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940," Film History 3 (1989): 167-89.)

B-2 Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, Chapter, "When Hollywood Became Hollywood."

[B-3] (DeMille 1959, p. 21)

B-4 (Higham 1973, pp. 5-8)

[B-5] (Quoted in Higashi, 1994: p. 7).

[B-6] (Higham 1973, 19-49)

[B-7] (Miyao 2007, p. 5; 21-49).

[B-8] Quotes and translations are from: Miyao, 2007 pp. 27-28.

[B-9] Quoted in Ross, 2002, p. 82.

[B-10] Starr, 300, 322.

[1] In 1913 Biograph moved to a new studio in the Bronx, at 807 East 175 Street. Biograph also operated studios in Los Angeles: in 1910 at Grand Avenue and Washington Street; and from 1911 to 1915 at Georgia and Girard Streets. Slide (1986): 39-40.

[2] Although Ben obviously anglicized his surname upon immigration, he and his family successfully kept the original name a secret. It may have been Varna or Varnerski, according to his great-granddaugher Cass Warner Sperling. Sperling and Millner (1998): 20.

[3] Sperling and Millner (1998): 27-8.

[4] Sperling and Millner (1998): 41.

[5] Altman (1992): 2-15.

[6] May (1983): 148.

[7] Sperling and Millner (1998): 53-4.

[8] Sperling and Millner (1998): 59-65.

[9] Sperling and Millner (1998): 150.

[10] Ross (2001): 258.

[11] Slide (1986): 192-3; Quotation is from Culver City Historic Site #7 marker on the property, signed by Culver City Historical Society, February 21, 1986.

[12] Slide (1986): 291.

[13] Marx, (1975): 42-49.

[14] Lahue (1973); Slide (1986): 306-307; Pintar (2001): 322-323; Edmonds (1977).

[15] Mahar (2001): 90.

[16] Ross (1998); Mahar (2001): 91.

[17] E. Leslie Gilliams, “Will Women’s Leadership Change the Movies?” Illustrated World (Feb 1923); Henry McMahon, “Women Directors of Plays and Pictures,” Ladies Home Journal (Dec. 1920), both cited in Mahar (2001).

[18] Slide (1986): 256-7.

[19] This phrase is given to the period 1909-1916 by Karen Ward Mahar, in Mahar (2001): 81.

[20] The campaign against the film in Los Angeles, led by Charlotta Bass and Frederick Roberts, is detailed in Flamming (2005): 86-9.

[21] According to Lillian Gish, William Clune had become an investor during the filming of Birth, striking a deal with Griffith to hold the premiere. Gish (1971): 52-53.

[22] Rogin (1987): 190-235.

[23] Ross (2001): 260.

[24] Drew (2001).

[25] Ross (2001): 262.

[26] Ross (2001): 262.

[27] Altman (1992): xii.

[28] Marx (1975): 25.

[29] Gary (1981); Marx (1975): 67-76.

[30] Slide (1986): 210; Marx (1975) 51; Quotation from Carey (1981): 144.

[31] Pintar, (2001): 333.
Manufacturing Mass Culture and the Rise of Racial Propaganda in Los Angeles, 1890s-1930s Movies came to Los Angeles in the beginning of the 20th century because it had all essential assets necessary for a successful motion picture industry: light, bodies, talents, technology, and sets. No where else on Earth were each of these assets so optimized, especially after a few successful studios became established. By 1940, movies produced in Los Angeles County held more than 80% of world market share. What happened in Los Angeles, therefore, quite certainly did not stay in Los Angeles. The scial, cultur, and political history of Los Angeles shaped the messages in the films made there.

Because the Los Angeles metropolis was so singularly responsible for the transformative emergence of mass-mediated publics by mid-20th century, this essay seeks to map the pathways of accountability for the way the human world turned-out by the Second World War. Later essays map accountability for the post-World War II era.

Movies are virtual visualizations of bodies reflecting light in real and artificial worlds called "sets." The visual-audio depiction of human bodies as gendered, belonging to races, cultures, to "high" or "low," powerful or subservient, social positions, is intrinsic to motion picture entertainment. And all of that depiction is inseparable from the everyday social experience of the people who write, produce, and work in front of (actors) or behind (everybody else) the camera. The stories told in this essay are about that two-way transfer between mass media and society, about the porous boundary between fiction and reality.

Los Angeles was also a capital city of racial and cultural formation. As the "Hollywood industry" emerged triumphant over alternative cinemas by the mid-1920s, its massive market impact changed the visual worlds of millions around the globe, reaching billions by the 21st century. Hollywood saturated those visual worlds with the bathos and pathos of actual lived experience in a highly diverse immigrant city populated by millions of aspiring migrants from every walk of life, and ruled by white supremacists and right-wing ideologues. It should not be surprising that Hollywood produced and reinforced an ideal "white," Euro-American identity as the standard of beauty and legitimate power, nor that it reinforced and magnified patriarchy. The Hollywood industry also represented and supported American imperialism as the US--and Los Angeles within it--grew to world power. Los Angeles became a world power in its own right by the end of world War II, a new political center for the United States.

Across the spectrum of genres produced by Hollywood (Westerns, romantic comedies, dramas, crime thrillers, action-adventure, etc), all shared in promoting racial and sexual propaganda. This essay praises the achievements of many early movie makers, who, like the director Lois Weber or the actor Sessue Hayakawa, attempted to craft a different vision of mass-market movies than the Classic Hollywood came to impose in the 1920s. It appreciates many of Classic Hollywood's founders of the Big Eight studio system and the artistry of its greatest movies, like Casablanca (1943). The greatness of its films rested on the brilliant artists who were attracted from around the globe to try their hands at movie making: writers, composers, set and costume designers, choreographers, actors, photographers, editors, animators, set designers, engineers, and artisans of all trades, from cosmetologists to carpenters.

This essay appreciates the artistry of many Hollywood movies, and the many stories it tells about the movie-makers, which rival their own plots in romance, intrigue, and tragedy. But it argues that the shameless reproduction of inhumane depictions (from scripts to casting to sets) in the period of its greatest power, 1915-1945, contributed significantly to the genocidal devastation of the Second World War and to the race-ethnic hatreds that plague the Earth today.

From David Belasco's Broadway to DeMillle at the Lasky Barn, 1893-1915
Working in parallel to Griffith, along distinctly different principles, was Cecil B. DeMille, the emergent victor in the battles of 1915-1918 to define the mainstream standards for Hollywood's motion pictures. DeMille, like Griffith and most of these early artists, emerged from the theatrical world of the New York stage. Indeed, both DeMille and Griffith were associated with the "Bishop of Broadway," the San Francisco-born playwright and impresario David Belasco (1853-1931). DeMille's relationship with Belasco was much deeper, however: "David Belasco was practically a member of our family," he wrote in his autobiography. [B-3] DeMille's father, Henry, a lay minister who wrote moralistic plays, had co-authored with Belasco and served as dramatist. Among Cecil's earliest memories were his father and Belasco writing plays together. In the 1880s "Belasco and father...wrote and talked, their desks facing each other, for about four hours every day." [B-3]. Belasco's long career dominated and defined New York City's "legitimate theater" with a reputation for exquisite attention to detail and special effects. His was the first stage adaptation of Madame Butterfly, on which Pucini based his opera.

Both Cecil and his brother William apprenticed for the stage under Belasco's mentorship, especially after their father Henry's untimely death in 1893 at the age of 40. [B-4] With his decision to join with Jesse Lasky and make films, Cecil initially earned the scorn of his elder brother William, who wrote to him, saying "You come from a cultivated family...Surely you know the contempt with with the movie is regarded by every writer, actor, and producer on Broadway." [B-5] But Cecil did not need this lecture. He was already on a track to upgrade the movies. When he teamed up with Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldfish (Later Goldwyn), in 1912 to form the Jesse Lasky Feature Motion Picture Company, the plan was to put the standards of the New York stage that DeMille had imbibed from Belasco on the screen. [B-6] Arriving and setting-up permanently in Los Angeles at almost the same time as Griffith, DeMille focused on more subtle moral dramas and stuck to modest budgets that allowed he and Lasky to produce more films at lower risk to the studio as a whole.

A masterpiece from this founding year of 1915 is the film DeMille directed, The Cheat (1915), starring the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, exhibits all of the fine production values and directorial/editorial technique that the famed Birth is composed of: parallel editing, the building of suspense, intricate and imperceptible editing between extreme close-ups, medium shots, eye-level matches, vignettes, and masterful use of light and shadow. But DeMille's film differs from the very first scenes. To begin, DeMille had the audacity to cast a handsome Japanese as the leading man, during a widespread anti-Japanese campaign led by California's leading "Progressive" politicians.

Japan's victory over Russia in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War had alarmed racists in the US about an asiatic world takeover. An aggressive anti-Japanese campaign had been underway, propelled by lawmakers who enacted the Alien Land Law of 1913, attempting to prevent successful Japanese from owning property in California. DeMille, playing with fire in this tinderbox, cast Hayakawa as a wealthy, fashionable, sexy figure who was attractive to the upper-class women of Long Island. The original script and release, Hayakawa plays Hishituru Tori, a wealthy Japanese gentleman living on Long Island, a collector of fine carved ivory statuettes. Just a few years later, Japan joined the Allies in the Great War, so Paramount changed Hayakawa's character to Burmese king, named Haka Arakau, and made him an ivory trader (Ivory Traders are among the top five exotic and sinister cast-types in the first half-century of Hollywood). While usually eclipsed by Birth of a Nation in histories of motion picture origins, The Cheat created a great sensation at the time, hailed among Paris intellectuals and artists as a major breakthrough. In technique both DeMille's directing, Alvin Wykoff's photography, and Sessue Hayakawa's acting all stood out even in comparison with Birth, which had been released several months earlier. The French even coined a new term to describe Hayakawa's presence on the screen: "photogenie," literally photogenic. What mazed critics was Hayakawa's acting by doing nothing or doing things with very little effort. Before Hayakawa, silent screen acting had reached a standard of exaggerated histrionics, as though the lack of sound required actors to wave their hands around like some kind of crude sign language. Hayakawa's acting, with subtle gestures of the face or eyebrows, could communicate even thoughts.[B-7]

Despite these achievements, it is clear after a few scenes of The Cheat that Hayakawa's character conforms to the "exotic" and "sinister" portrayal of Asian men -- undoubtedly a racist script. But DeMille, unlike Griffith, uses race difference to create contradictions. By casting a non-white leading man to be handsome and fashionable, attractive to elite white women, he crossed a line that Griffith could not have contemplated. He frankly acknowledged that inter-racial attraction is real and compelling. Racist propagandists never admit this. DeMille was a racialist, profiting from inequality of difference, while Griffith was an architect of that inequality and difference: a true believer in the cause of white supremacy. That Hayakawa's character was derogatory is easily seen in the protests against the film of the Japanese community in Los Angeles, led by the Japanese-language newspaper Rafu Shimpo, which said the film "distorted the truth of the Japanese people" and agitated for months to ban the film, supporting The Japanese Association of Southern California's petition to the City Council to prohibit its showing. Stung by this reaction, Hayakawa published an apology in the 29 December Rafu Shimpo: "Sincere notice: It is regrettable that the film The Cheat, which was exhibited the Tally theater on Broadway in Los Angeles, unintentionally offended the feelings of the Japanese people in the U.S. From now on, I will be very careful not to do harm to Japanese communities."[B-8]

The reaction in Japan was even more severe, where the film magazine Katsudo no sakai called Hayakawa an "unforgivable national traitor." The stridency of these reactions are indications of the sensitive situation of Japan vis-a-vis the West in these years of Meiji and Taisho international policy. The Japanese people were both widely respected and widely feared by many Western leaders. DeMille's treatment of an elite Japanese man involved with an elite U.S. woman is indicative of that: the Japanese were almost admitted to the club of superior races, but not quite.[B-8] DeMille ultimately using interracial attraction to reinforce the race boundary in the plot's resolution. By the end of the film, it is clear that the female lead who falls in love with Tori/Arakau has made a huge mistake. Racial boundaries are reinforced at the end, but not before they are called into question. DeMille applied similar formulas to class relations. "Cross-class fantasies," as Ross has termed them, capitalize (quite literally) on the plot potential for a Romeo and Juliet violation of social taboos. While Shakespeare's original ends in tragedy (subverting the taboo), eventually, in the DeMille formula, taboos based on status differences are re-inscribed. Most importantly, DeMille wanted to reinforce the sensual and materialistic norms of an emerging consumer society. As a conservative Republican, he wanted to support that trajectory in social change. "Your poor person wants to see wealth," DeMille declared in 1924: "colorful, interesting, exotic." [B-9]

As film historians such as Ross, Brownlow, Starr, and May have repeatedly demonstrated, DeMille's formula was also a subtle propaganda for patriarchal and consumerist values. He insisted that all of his sets and costumes represent the latest in fashion, so his films can be said to originate product placement. Unlike Griffith, who wanted to change the world with giant propaganda films masquerading as artistic romances, DeMille stuck to core elements of romance and danger, and the exotic consumer fantasy, and steadily produced films of relatively modest scope and scale, that would be sustainable in the fickle world of movie distribution. [B-10]

Initially shunned by Wall Street’s conservatism and the anti-semitism of the Christian bankers, the movie industry flourished so spectacularly by 1919 (despite the miserable showing of Intolerance) that New York capitalists, of any faith, could no longer resist. By that year Americans flocked to 15,000 movie theaters, leaving an estimated $800 million at the box office. As historian Steven Ross put it, “The movie industry entered the world of seriously big business in 1919 when several powerful investment banking houses arranged stock offerings of $10 million and $9.5 million...respectively, for Paramount and Loew’s Inc.”[25] The New York Stock Exchange soon listed the stocks of the major studios, and by 1930, the capital invested in the movie industry had reached the staggering figure of $850 million. Capital concentration reorganized the movie industry during the 1920s into eight major studios: Columbia, Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Paramount, RKO, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers.[26] These studios, born largely from exhibition itself, also continued to expand their own theatre chains, controlling not only production but also distribution. They amassed a huge pool of talent, with “stars” locked into long-term contracts and treated as capital stock.
New York City's Financial Control of Hollywood in the Classic Era, 1920s-1930s
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M), from its formation in 1924 under the production leadership of Louis Mayer and the “wonder boy” Irving Thalberg, came to dominate “Hollywood” (from their actual location on Washington Boulevard in Culver City). The political-economic geography of the giant studio by the end of the 1920s provides an anatomy of the industry as it crystallized as a regional phenomenon. The Hollywood studios were not branch plants, but they were subject to the financial control of New York City. “Clark Gable may have posed for cameras in Culver City, but his paycheck was signed at 1540 Broadway, across the street from the Camel Cigarette sign blowing smoke rings.” Mayer and Thalberg answered to their employer, Marcus Loew, who lived on Long Island and worked on Times Square. Adolph Zukor’s office was in the Paramount Building on Broadway. The headquarters for Warner Brothers and RKO Radio Pictures were also in New York, kept close by the investors that capitalized them.[27]

But the control from New York was deeply compromised by the regional monopoly on movie production held by the Los Angeles studios. The corporate bosses meddled constantly through budget and product decisions, and through their power to fire the studio chiefs. From 1915 to 1920, “Uncle Carl” Laemmle hired and fired no less than sixteen managers of his giant Universal City studio complex (averaging 4 months tenure), before sending his young assistant Irving Thalberg out to clean the place up (Thalberg later joined M-G-M). The dense concentration of talent and subsidiary industries in Los Angeles was simply irreplaceable.[28]

The financial chieftains wanted only one thing in the end: for the culture industry to supply them with and endless stream of box-office hits. By the end of its first year in operation in 1925, M-G-M was producing one feature film per week. Mayer and Thalberg successfully married quantity to quality, hiring only proven stars, quickly amassing “more stars than there are in heaven.”[29] Before the end of the classic era, these included Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Lon Chaney, Elizabeth Taylor, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, John Gilbert, Ramon Navarro, Jeanette MacDonald. M-G-M’s directors were no less impressive: Todd Browning, George Cukor, King Vidor, W.S. "Woody" Van Dyke, and Vincente Minnelli.

Labor Relations

Despite their aura, “stars” were only workers, a small fraction of the thousands who produced movies in the big factory-studios. By the mid-thirties, the 117-acre M-G-M studio had more than 4,000 employees under contract. The sprawling complex of 23 sound stages included its own fire department, studio police, a hospital, commissary, makeup and costume departments, trade shops, a laboratory, and even a school for child actors. The geography of the studio itself was an inscription of the power practiced on a daily basis. Mayer and Thalberg occupied the “Front Office” near the entrance gate; Mayer’s suite decorated in mahogany and traditional furniture; Thalberg’s in stylish Art-Deco. “Adjacent to the Front Office was a low, two-story building that was home for directors and writers, who dubbed it the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory—it was crawling with insects and rodents.”[30] The reference to the most notorious of North American industrial labor disasters (141 women and girls were burned alive or jumped to their deaths in a fire-trap Manhattan sweatshop in 1913) was not an accident. The studio chiefs were grateful allies of the Otis-Chandler anti-union regime. Strikes by studio employees were ruthlessly suppressed until the New Deal’s Wagner National Labor Relations Act of 1935 empowered a breakthrough in labor organizing. One early organizer, fired multiple times, had to meet secretly with employees in Paramount’s moth-proof fur room, ironically muffled by the sumptuous garb of the ruling class, like a rebellious servant in the Great House.[31]
Hollywood's Racial Mode of Production: Bodies, Disguise, and Resistance
Dolores del Río
The future Hollywood goddess Dolores del Río (née María Dolores Asúnsolo López-Negrete) was born into Mexico’s ruling class in 1904. Her uncle Francisco I. Madero, was the first great leader and victim of the Revolution in 1910, but her father was a banker who was forced to flee the armies of Pancho Villa. After reestablishing the family in the capital, her parents educated Dolores in a French seminary, where she learned both French and English. During the first year of the triumphant Obregón administration (1922, the time of the Artes Populares exhibit in Los Angeles), Dolores met the Spanish aristocrat Jaime Martínez del Río y Viñet, who would become the first of her many husbands and lovers. The two became leading figures in the capital’s social scene. Hollywood’s elite also found the brilliant artists and intellectuals of the Revolution attractive, so it should not be surprising that director Edwin Carewe spotted Dolores at a party in the Mexico City house of the official revolutionary artist Adolfo Best Maugard. “Struck by her beauty, he offered her stardom in Hollywood.”[1]

Backed by a wealthy family, Dolores was hardly in a position to be exploited, and made the most of her opportunity. Both her husband and her resourceful but protectful mother accompanied her to the notoriously sinful capital of American cinema. Predictably, Carewe saw del Rio as an ideal actress for Latin parts, casting her first in the romantic tale Ramona, a classic Southern California tale about the tragic fate of a California mixed-race Indian girl and her Native American lover. Del Rio rose rapidly in Hollywood stardom. Carewe next cast her as the title character in Evangeline (1929). Another tragic tale of lovers torn apart by the British expulsion of the French Arcadians from Canada. Filmed with the Vitagraph sound technique (using synchronized 78 rpm records), Evangeline featured del Rio’s marvelous singing voice. By 1932, del Rio was considered one of the three most glamorous female stars, along with Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

It may seem curious that a mexicana would become a major star in a city ruled by an intensely anti-Mexican racial ideology. Indeed, much has been made of the “whitening” of Dolores del Rio, suggesting that her acceptance was achieved by somehow minimizing her mexicanidad, but such portrayals misunderstand race, class, and Mexico. For starters, elite Mexican families had the least indigenous ancestry: typically they are as light-skinned as any European. Second, del Rio was better educated than the vast majority of Americans, so the choice of how to adapt was fully hers to make. Wisely, she took voice lessons to refine her English pronunciation, which aided her extraordinary success in the sound era.[2]

Much more important to Del Rio was the challenge of adjusting to North American culture. Del Rio found refuge among the Hollywood aristocracy, becoming close friends with William Randolph Hearst and his plural wife Marion Davies. But her first husband couldn’t stand the Hollywood scene and eventually left her. After their stormy divorce in 1929, del Rio spoke critically of Latin men’s patriarchal attitudes. Within a year she had remarried to the (Roman Catholic) Cedric Gibbons, M-G-M’s chief art director. After falling in love with the young Orson Welles, however, her illusions were shattered by Welles’ stunning indictment of Hearst in Citizen Kane. A cosmopolitan who never needed to choose between mexicanidad and assimilation, del Rio returned to Mexico in the 1940s and spent many years as a star of Mexican cinema.

Mexican stars of American movies provided a major fascination for Mexican Angelenos, of every class and occupation. The pages of the leading Spanish-language daily La Opinion were crowded with news of Hollywood’s and Mexico’s stars. Del Rio was far from the only Mexican in Hollywood. Lupe Velez, who played opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho (1927), grabbed as many headlines, especially with the news of her romance with Gary Cooper, whom she dumped for Johnny Weismuller. The official Anglo ideology of white supremacy and segregation could hardly hold water when Mexicans could become superstars and intermarry with the Anglos. Given the highly ambiguous racial location of Mexicans, what mattered the most for many immigrants were, in order of importance: marketable skills, fluency in English and their own inclinations.

[Del Rio 1] Author's translation: “Al quedar impactado por su belleza, le ofreció el estrellato en Hollywood.” Krauze (2004): 76.

[Del Rio 2] A very good account is Hershfield (2000).

Ahn Chang-ho, Philip Ahn, Susan Ahn Cuddy
Ahn Chang-ho was born in Pyongyang in 1878 and educated by Presbyterians. A Christian with deep interests in education, Ahn also became a follower of the independence teachings of Philip Jaison, whose activities increased as Japanese in Korean affairs grew in the late 1890s. Seeking to study American educational methods, Ahn honored an arranged marriage to Yi Hyeryon (aka Helen) and left with her to Inchon for Japan, and then to the United States in 1902--reportedly the first Korean married couple to migrate to the United States. In San Francisco and then Los Angeles, Ahn quickly became a leader, forming “the first politically-oriented organization of Koreans in California” on 5 April 1904. Following economic opportunity, the Ahns moved to Riverside and then Los Angeles on 29 March1905 and had their first son, Philip in the Highland Park neighborhood north of Downtown. [1]

Philip Ahn is claimed by the family to be “the first American citizen of Korean parents born in the United States.” His sister Susan Ahn Cuddy, born 1915, was the first female gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy, serving from 1942-1946. As their father became a key leader linking the Korean diaspora in the long struggle for independence, Philip, Susan, and a third sibglin Ralph, absorbed two cultures: an intense Korean nationalism and American popular culture. Philip was fascinated with Hollywood, yearning to become an actor from an early age. He claimed to have met Douglas Fairbanks while observing the set of The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Fairbanks reportedly offered him a job as an extra, but Philip's mother, reportedly, refused to give her permission, and he eventually enrolled in the University of Southern California to study business. But before his father embarked for Korea in 1926 he encouraged Philip to get serious about acting. Chang-ho would never return; he died in a Japanese prison in 1938. Following his father's advice, Philip took cinematography classes and threw himself into stage acting. Hungry for talented Asians who could play exotic and menacing roles, the studios began casting Philip Ahn in 1935, in A Scream in the Night (Ray Kirkwood Productions). Euro-American audiences weren’t very clear on the differences between Asians, so Ahn played minor roles as Chinese characters in such films as The Good Earth (M-G-M, 1937) and Charlie Chan in Honolulu (20th-Century Fox, 1938). By the 1940s, with his kid sister Gunnery Lieutenant Susan Ahn Cuddy blasting the Japanese with Navy artillery, Philip fought alongside her on screen, portraying evil Japanese officers. His family’s political struggles and his acting career merged in the mass-mediated racial politics Los Angeles had perfected. He had become a trans-Asian generalist: Playing Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans as needed. [2]

In Back to Bataan (RKO Radio Pictures, 1945) Ahn provided the hateful enemy for John Wayne’s heroic role. In the postwar years, Ahn continued a successful acting career, appearing in Michael Todd’s 1956 landmark, transnational production, Around the World In Eighty Days (United Artists) and with Elvis Presley in the musical comedy Paradise, Hawaiian Style (Paramount, 1966).[3] Ahn also became a major figure in the Korean American community, and served for two decades as the honorary mayor of unincorporated Panorama City. Philip Ahn’s last major role was the venerable Master Kan in the television series Kung Fu, starring David Carradine (ABC, 1972-5). He died in 1978.

[Ahn 1] Gardner (1979); 10-36, quotation at 35. On the Korean nationalist movement in the United States after the bloody 1919 March 1st Movement, see Choi (2004).

[Ahn 2] Philip Ahn’s younger brothers Philson (b. 1912) and Ralph (b. 1926) also became movie actors, playing the same types of roles as Philip.

[Ahn 3] On the transnational structure of Michael Todd’s production of Around the World, see Schwartz (2007).

Sessue Hayakwa
Sessue Hayakawa (1893-1973) burst onto the Hollywood screen in 1914 -5 while en route from his economic studies at the University of Chicago, to see his parents. He never made it that far. Apparently unhurried, he stayed over the winter in the thriving Japanese immigrant community in Los Angeles, fell in love with the actress Tsuru Aoki, who apparently introduced him to acting. While on the downtown stage, he was scouted by Thomas Ince, who cast him in six known films, each embodying a noble exemplar of a "middle race" between the barbarous colonized peoples, and "white" Europeans. A real sensation, Jesse Lasky at Famous Players Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille brought him over to (what would become ) Paramount. His breakout performance was his 1915 leading role as Hishituru Tori in The Cheat, also one of Cecil B. DeMille's breakthrough box-office hits as director. In precisely the same Hollywood moment that D.W. Griffith produced his racist epic, Birth of a Nation, DeMille and Hayakawa teamed-up to produce a remarkably subversive film--one that ran counter to a massive anti-Japanese movement in California. (note)

To appreciate the audacity of Hayakawa's rise to stardom, we need to take a step back to review the context. Japan's victory over Russia in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War had alarmed racists in the US about an asiatic world takeover. An aggressive anti-Japanese campaign had been underway, propelled by lawmakers who enacted the Alien Land Law of 1913, attempting to prevent successful Japanese from owning property in California. Japanese immigrants had originally concentrated in San Francisco, but the Anti-Japanese movement was so focused on that community, that many moved to Los Angeles, making Little Tokyo, centered at First and Central the primary settlement of California Issei (first generation) and Nisei (second generation) immigrants.

DeMille, playing with fire in this tinderbox, cast Hayakawa as a wealthy, fashionable, sexy figure who was attractive to the upper-class Euro-American women of Long Island. In the original script and release, Hayakawa plays Hishituru Tori, a wealthy Japanese gentleman living on Long Island, a collector of fine carved ivory statuettes. Just a few years later, Japan joined the Allies in the Great War, so Paramount changed Hayakawa's character to Burmese king, named Haka Arakau, and made him an ivory trader (Ivory Traders are among the top exotic and sinister cast-types in the first half-century of Hollywood). Because Hayakawa's character is crafty and sinister, seeking a forced sexual liason with the socialite wife who falls into his trap, the plot and role are certainly racist. But in this context, DeMille and Hayakawa were mostly manipulating stereotypes of racial difference to achieve dramatic tension. In the process, DeMille, inadvertently or not, created a major Japanese heart-throb and lion of California society. Having already appeared in at least 18 films in 1914, Hayakawa starred or was featured in twenty-six (26) films for Famous Playsers Lasksy / Paramount in 1915 from 1916 through 1918, with such titles as After Five (1915); The Chinatown Mystery (1915), Alien Souls (1916); The Victoria Cross (1916), Forbidden Paths (1917); The Call of the East (1917); Banzai (1918); and The White Man's Law (1918).

Hayakawa first developed the role of handsome, sexually alluring exotic Other. He played the sexy but cunning asiatic with a great passion, putting acting before politics. This was no sideshow. For Lasky he starred with American-Californio Marin Sais in The City of Dim Faces and His Birthright (both 1918), and as his own producer Hayakawa by the early 1920s was among the three top-earning Hollywood stars, along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Starring in hits like The Beggar Prince (1920), he was the forbidden cross-racial fantasy for millions of Euro-American women. For Japanese and other Asian women and men, however, Hayakawa's Hollywood roles were mostly un-attractive. His films from the Lasky period were disliked in his native land, for obvious reasons.

At the end of the Great War in 1918, with the rise of anti-immigration movements and restrictive laws, Hayakawa left Lasky and DeMille behind, rejecting their racialist typecasting, and formed his own independent production company, Haworth, which was very successful, earning him more than $2,000,000 a year as one of the greatest leading men of Hollywood. He drove a notorious gold-plated Pierce-Arrow and threw lavish parties in his mansion, called "The Castle." His work at Haworth his actress wife Tsuru Aoki in such films as The Dragon Painter (1919) was enormously successful.

After the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration by race and nationality and banned all Asian immigration entirely, U.S.-Japanese relations steadily soured, and anti-Japanese politics in California grew stronger. By the late 1920s, Hayakawa moved with his wife Tsuru Aoki, began a peripatetic life, performing on stage and in films in New York, England, France, and Japan. Her made some return visits to Hollywood, starring opposite Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon (1931). He was trapped in Paris with the Nazi Occupation and served in the Resistance. Humphrey Bogart sought him out to play opposite him in his 1949 Tokyo Joe, and her received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his portrayal of Colonel Saito in Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957).
From David Belasco's Broadway to DeMille at the Lasky Barn, 1893-1915 Working in parallel to Griffith, along distinctly different principles, was Cecil B. DeMille, the emergent victor in the battles of 1915-1918 to define the mainstream standards for Hollywood's motion pictures. DeMille, like Griffith and most of these early artists, emerged from the theatrical world of the New York stage. Indeed, both DeMille and Griffith were associated with the "Bishop of Broadway," the San Francisco-born playwright and impresario David Belasco (1853-1931). DeMille's relationship with Belasco was much deeper, however: "David Belasco was practically a member of our family," he wrote in his autobiography. [B-3] DeMille's father, Henry, a lay minister who wrote moralistic plays, had co-authored with Belasco and served as dramatist. Among Cecil's earliest memories were his father and Belasco writing plays together. In the 1880s "Belasco and father...wrote and talked, their desks facing each other, for about four hours every day." [B-3]. Belasco's long career dominated and defined New York City's "legitimate theater" with a reputation for exquisite attention to detail and special effects. His was the first stage adaptation of Madame Butterfly, on which Pucini based his opera.

Both Cecil and his brother William apprenticed for the stage under Belasco's mentorship, especially after their father Henry's untimely death in 1893 at the age of 40. [B-4] With his decision to join with Jesse Lasky and make films, Cecil initially earned the scorn of his elder brother William, who wrote to him, saying "You come from a cultivated family...Surely you know the contempt with with the movie is regarded by every writer, actor, and producer on Broadway." [B-5] But Cecil did not need this lecture. He was already on a track to upgrade the movies. When he teamed up with Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldfish (Later Goldwyn), in 1912 to form the Jesse Lasky Feature Motion Picture Company, the plan was to put the standards of the New York stage that DeMille had imbibed from Belasco on the screen. [B-6] Arriving and setting-up permanently in Los Angeles at almost the same time as Griffith, DeMille focused on more subtle moral dramas and stuck to modest budgets that allowed he and Lasky to produce more films at lower risk to the studio as a whole.

A masterpiece from this founding year of 1915 is the film DeMille directed, The Cheat (1915), starring the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, exhibits all of the fine production values and directorial/editorial technique that the famed Birth is composed of: parallel editing, the building of suspense, intricate and imperceptible editing between extreme close-ups, medium shots, eye-level matches, vignettes, and masterful use of light and shadow. But DeMille's film differs from the very first scenes. To begin, DeMille had the audacity to cast a handsome Japanese as the leading man, during a widespread anti-Japanese campaign led by California's leading "Progressive" politicians.

Japan's victory over Russia in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War had alarmed racists in the US about an asiatic world takeover. An aggressive anti-Japanese campaign had been underway, propelled by lawmakers who enacted the Alien Land Law of 1913, attempting to prevent successful Japanese from owning property in California. DeMille, playing with fire in this tinderbox, cast Hayakawa as a wealthy, fashionable, sexy figure who was attractive to the upper-class women of Long Island. The original script and release, Hayakawa plays Hishituru Tori, a wealthy Japanese gentleman living on Long Island, a collector of fine carved ivory statuettes. Just a few years later, Japan joined the Allies in the Great War, so Paramount changed Hayakawa's character to Burmese king, named Haka Arakau, and made him an ivory trader (Ivory Traders are among the top five exotic and sinister cast-types in the first half-century of Hollywood). While usually eclipsed by Birth of a Nation in histories of motion picture origins, The Cheat created a great sensation at the time, hailed among Paris intellectuals and artists as a major breakthrough. In technique both DeMille's directing, Alvin Wykoff's photography, and Sessue Hayakawa's acting all stood out even in comparison with Birth, which had been released several months earlier. The French even coined a new term to describe Hayakawa's presence on the screen: "photogenie," literally photogenic. What mazed critics was Hayakawa's acting by doing nothing or doing things with very little effort. Before Hayakawa, silent screen acting had reached a standard of exaggerated histrionics, as though the lack of sound required actors to wave their hands around like some kind of crude sign language. Hayakawa's acting, with subtle gestures of the face or eyebrows, could communicate even thoughts.[B-7]

Despite these achievements, it is clear after a few scenes of The Cheat that Hayakawa's character conforms to the "exotic" and "sinister" portrayal of Asian men -- undoubtedly a racist script. But DeMille, unlike Griffith, uses race difference to create contradictions. By casting a non-white leading man to be handsome and fashionable, attractive to elite white women, he crossed a line that Griffith could not have contemplated. He frankly acknowledged that inter-racial attraction is real and compelling. Racist propagandists never admit this. DeMille was a racialist, profiting from inequality of difference, while Griffith was an architect of that inequality and difference: a true believer in the cause of white supremacy. That Hayakawa's character was derogatory is easily seen in the protests against the film of the Japanese community in Los Angeles, led by the Japanese-language newspaper Rafu Shimpo, which said the film "distorted the truth of the Japanese people" and agitated for months to ban the film, supporting The Japanese Association of Southern California's petition to the City Council to prohibit its showing. Stung by this reaction, Hayakawa published an apology in the 29 December Rafu Shimpo: "Sincere notice: It is regrettable that the film The Cheat, which was exhibited the Tally theater on Broadway in Los Angeles, unintentionally offended the feelings of the Japanese people in the U.S. From now on, I will be very careful not to do harm to Japanese communities."[B-8]

The reaction in Japan was even more severe, where the film magazine Katsudo no sakai called Hayakawa an "unforgivable national traitor." The stridency of these reactions are indications of the sensitive situation of Japan vis-a-vis the West in these years of Meiji and Taisho international policy. The Japanese people were both widely respected and widely feared by many Western leaders. DeMille's treatment of an elite Japanese man involved with an elite U.S. woman is indicative of that: the Japanese were almost admitted to the club of superior races, but not quite.[B-8] DeMille ultimately using interracial attraction to reinforce the race boundary in the plot's resolution. By the end of the film, it is clear that the female lead who falls in love with Tori/Arakau has made a huge mistake. Racial boundaries are reinforced at the end, but not before they are called into question. DeMille applied similar formulas to class relations. "Cross-class fantasies," as Ross has termed them, capitalize (quite literally) on the plot potential for a Romeo and Juliet violation of social taboos. While Shakespeare's original ends in tragedy (subverting the taboo), eventually, in the DeMille formula, taboos based on status differences are re-inscribed. Most importantly, DeMille wanted to reinforce the sensual and materialistic norms of an emerging consumer society. As a conservative Republican, he wanted to support that trajectory in social change. "Your poor person wants to see wealth," DeMille declared in 1924: "colorful, interesting, exotic." [B-9]

As film historians such as Ross, Brownlow, Starr, and May have repeatedly demonstrated, DeMille's formula was also a subtle propaganda for patriarchal and consumerist values. He insisted that all of his sets and costumes represent the latest in fashion, so his films can be said to originate product placement. Unlike Griffith, who wanted to change the world with giant propaganda films masquerading as artistic romances, DeMille stuck to core elements of romance and danger, and the exotic consumer fantasy, and steadily produced films of relatively modest scope and scale, that would be sustainable in the fickle world of movie distribution. [B-10]

Initially shunned by Wall Street’s conservatism and the anti-semitism of the Christian bankers, the movie industry flourished so spectacularly by 1919 (despite the miserable showing of Intolerance) that New York capitalists, of any faith, could no longer resist. By that year Americans flocked to 15,000 movie theaters, leaving an estimated $800 million at the box office. As historian Steven Ross put it, “The movie industry entered the world of seriously big business in 1919 when several powerful investment banking houses arranged stock offerings of $10 million and $9.5 million...respectively, for Paramount and Loew’s Inc.”[25] The New York Stock Exchange soon listed the stocks of the major studios, and by 1930, the capital invested in the movie industry had reached the staggering figure of $850 million. Capital concentration reorganized the movie industry during the 1920s into eight major studios: Columbia, Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Paramount, RKO, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers.[26] These studios, born largely from exhibition itself, also continued to expand their own theatre chains, controlling not only production but also distribution. They amassed a huge pool of talent, with “stars” locked into long-term contracts and treated as capital stock.
Migrating to the Screen: Racialization of Bodies in Visual Space
Intersections and Identities: Del Río, Ahn, Hayakawa
Dolores del Río
Dolores Del Río, 1922-1932
The future Hollywood goddess Dolores del Río (née María Dolores Asúnsolo López-Negrete) was born into Mexico’s ruling class in 1904. Her uncle Francisco I. Madero, was the first great leader and victim of the Revolution in 1910, but her father was a banker who was forced to flee the armies of Pancho Villa. After reestablishing the family in the capital, her parents educated Dolores in a French seminary, where she learned both French and English. During the first year of the triumphant Obregón administration (1922, the time of the Artes Populares exhibit in Los Angeles), Dolores met the Spanish aristocrat Jaime Martínez del Río y Viñet, who would become the first of her many husbands and lovers. The two became leading figures in the capital’s social scene. Hollywood’s elite also found the brilliant artists and intellectuals of the Revolution attractive, so it should not be surprising that director Edwin Carewe spotted Dolores at a party in the Mexico City house of the official revolutionary artist Adolfo Best Maugard. “Struck by her beauty, he offered her stardom in Hollywood.”[1]

Backed by a wealthy family, Dolores was hardly in a position to be exploited, and made the most of her opportunity. Both her husband and her resourceful but protectful mother accompanied her to the notoriously sinful capital of American cinema. Predictably, Carewe saw del Rio as an ideal actress for Latin parts, casting her first in the romantic tale Ramona, a classic Southern California tale about the tragic fate of a California mixed-race Indian girl and her Native American lover. Del Rio rose rapidly in Hollywood stardom. Carewe next cast her as the title character in Evangeline (1929). Another tragic tale of lovers torn apart by the British expulsion of the French Arcadians from Canada. Filmed with the Vitagraph sound technique (using synchronized 78 rpm records), Evangeline featured del Rio’s marvelous singing voice. By 1932, del Rio was considered one of the three most glamorous female stars, along with Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

It may seem curious that a mexicana would become a major star in a city ruled by an intensely anti-Mexican racial ideology. Indeed, much has been made of the “whitening” of Dolores del Rio, suggesting that her acceptance was achieved by somehow minimizing her mexicanidad, but such portrayals misunderstand race, class, and Mexico. For starters, elite Mexican families had the least indigenous ancestry: typically they are as light-skinned as any European. Second, del Rio was better educated than the vast majority of Americans, so the choice of how to adapt was fully hers to make. Wisely, she took voice lessons to refine her English pronunciation, which aided her extraordinary success in the sound era.[2]

Much more important to Del Rio was the challenge of adjusting to North American culture. Del Rio found refuge among the Hollywood aristocracy, becoming close friends with William Randolph Hearst and his plural wife Marion Davies. But her first husband couldn’t stand the Hollywood scene and eventually left her. After their stormy divorce in 1929, del Rio spoke critically of Latin men’s patriarchal attitudes. Within a year she had remarried to the (Roman Catholic) Cedric Gibbons, M-G-M’s chief art director. After falling in love with the young Orson Welles, however, her illusions were shattered by Welles’ stunning indictment of Hearst in Citizen Kane. A cosmopolitan who never needed to choose between mexicanidad and assimilation, del Rio returned to Mexico in the 1940s and spent many years as a star of Mexican cinema.

Mexican stars of American movies provided a major fascination for Mexican Angelenos, of every class and occupation. The pages of the leading Spanish-language daily La Opinion were crowded with news of Hollywood’s and Mexico’s stars. Del Rio was far from the only Mexican in Hollywood. Lupe Velez, who played opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho (1927), grabbed as many headlines, especially with the news of her romance with Gary Cooper, whom she dumped for Johnny Weismuller. The official Anglo ideology of white supremacy and segregation could hardly hold water when Mexicans could become superstars and intermarry with the Anglos. Given the highly ambiguous racial location of Mexicans, what mattered the most for many immigrants were, in order of importance: marketable skills, fluency in English and their own inclinations. [Del Rio 1] Author's translation: “Al quedar impactado por su belleza, le ofreció el estrellato en Hollywood.” Krauze (2004): 76.

[Del Rio 2] A very good account is Hershfield (2000).

Ahn Chang-ho, Philip Ahn, Susan Ahn Cuddy, 1905-1975
Ahn Chang-ho was born in Pyongyang in 1878 and educated by Presbyterians. A Christian with deep interests in education, Ahn also became a follower of the independence teachings of Philip Jaison, whose activities increased as Japanese in Korean affairs grew in the late 1890s. Seeking to study American educational methods, Ahn honored an arranged marriage to Yi Hyeryon (aka Helen) and left with her to Inchon for Japan, and then to the United States in 1902--reportedly the first Korean married couple to migrate to the United States. In San Francisco and then Los Angeles, Ahn quickly became a leader, forming “the first politically-oriented organization of Koreans in California” on 5 April 1904. Following economic opportunity, the Ahns moved to Riverside and then Los Angeles on 29 March 1905 and had their first son, Philip in the Highland Park neighborhood north of Downtown. [1] Philip Ahn is claimed by the family to be “the first American citizen of Korean parents born in the United States.” His sister Susan Ahn Cuddy, born 1915, was the first female gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy, serving from 1942-1946. As their father became a key leader linking the Korean diaspora in the long struggle for independence, Philip, Susan, and a third sibglin Ralph, absorbed two cultures: an intense Korean nationalism and American popular culture. Philip was fascinated with Hollywood, yearning to become an actor from an early age. He claimed to have met Douglas Fairbanks while observing the set of The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Fairbanks reportedly offered him a job as an extra, but Philip's mother, reportedly, refused to give her permission, and he eventually enrolled in the University of Southern California to study business. But before his father embarked for Korea in 1926 he encouraged Philip to get serious about acting. Chang-ho would never return; he died in a Japanese prison in 1938. Following his father's advice, Philip took cinematography classes and threw himself into stage acting. Hungry for talented Asians who could play exotic and menacing roles, the studios began casting Philip Ahn in 1935, in A Scream in the Night (Ray Kirkwood Productions). Euro-American audiences weren’t very clear on the differences between Asians, so Ahn played minor roles as Chinese characters in such films as The Good Earth (M-G-M, 1937) and Charlie Chan in Honolulu (20th-Century Fox, 1938). By the 1940s, with his kid sister Gunnery Lieutenant Susan Ahn Cuddy blasting the Japanese with Navy artillery, Philip fought alongside her on screen, portraying evil Japanese officers. His family’s political struggles and his acting career merged in the mass-mediated racial politics Los Angeles had perfected. He had become a trans-Asian generalist: Playing Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans as needed. [2] In Back to Bataan (RKO Radio Pictures, 1945) Ahn provided the hateful enemy for John Wayne’s heroic role. In the postwar years, Ahn continued a successful acting career, appearing in Michael Todd’s 1956 landmark, transnational production, Around the World In Eighty Days (United Artists) and with Elvis Presley in the musical comedy Paradise, Hawaiian Style (Paramount, 1966).[3] Ahn also became a major figure in the Korean American community, and served for two decades as the honorary mayor of unincorporated Panorama City. Philip Ahn’s last major role was the venerable Master Kan in the television series Kung Fu, starring David Carradine (ABC, 1972-5). He died in 1978. [Ahn 1] Gardner (1979); 10-36, quotation at 35. On the Korean nationalist movement in the United States after the bloody 1919 March 1st Movement, see Choi (2004). [Ahn 2] Philip Ahn’s younger brothers Philson (b. 1912) and Ralph (b. 1926) also became movie actors, playing the same types of roles as Philip. [Ahn 3] On the transnational structure of Michael Todd’s production of Around the World, see Schwartz (2007).

Sessue Hayakwa, 1914-1957
Sessue Hayakawa (1893-1973) burst onto the Hollywood screen in 1914 -5 while en route from his economic studies at the University of Chicago, to see his parents. He never made it that far. Apparently unhurried, he stayed over the winter in the thriving Japanese immigrant community in Los Angeles, fell in love with the actress Tsuru Aoki, who apparently introduced him to acting. While on the downtown stage, he was scouted by Thomas Ince, who cast him in six known films, each embodying a noble exemplar of a "middle race" between the barbarous colonized peoples, and "white" Europeans. A real sensation, Jesse Lasky at Famous Players Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille brought him over to (what would become ) Paramount. His breakout performance was his 1915 leading role as Hishituru Tori in The Cheat, also one of Cecil B. DeMille's breakthrough box-office hits as director. In precisely the same Hollywood moment that D.W. Griffith produced his racist epic, Birth of a Nation, DeMille and Hayakawa teamed-up to produce a remarkably subversive film--one that ran counter to a massive anti-Japanese movement in California. (note) To appreciate the audacity of Hayakawa's rise to stardom, we need to take a step back to review the context. Japan's victory over Russia in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War had alarmed racists in the US about an asiatic world takeover. An aggressive anti-Japanese campaign had been underway, propelled by lawmakers who enacted the Alien Land Law of 1913, attempting to prevent successful Japanese from owning property in California. Japanese immigrants had originally concentrated in San Francisco, but the Anti-Japanese movement was so focused on that community, that many moved to Los Angeles, making Little Tokyo, centered at First and Central the primary settlement of California Issei (first generation) and Nisei (second generation) immigrants. DeMille, playing with fire in this tinderbox, cast Hayakawa as a wealthy, fashionable, sexy figure who was attractive to the upper-class Euro-American women of Long Island. In the original script and release, Hayakawa plays Hishituru Tori, a wealthy Japanese gentleman living on Long Island, a collector of fine carved ivory statuettes. Just a few years later, Japan joined the Allies in the Great War, so Paramount changed Hayakawa's character to Burmese king, named Haka Arakau, and made him an ivory trader (Ivory Traders are among the top exotic and sinister cast-types in the first half-century of Hollywood). Because Hayakawa's character is crafty and sinister, seeking a forced sexual liason with the socialite wife who falls into his trap, the plot and role are certainly racist. But in this context, DeMille and Hayakawa were mostly manipulating stereotypes of racial difference to achieve dramatic tension. In the process, DeMille, inadvertently or not, created a major Japanese heart-throb and lion of California society. Having already appeared in at least 18 films in 1914, Hayakawa starred or was featured in twenty-six (26) films for Famous Playsers Lasksy / Paramount in 1915 from 1916 through 1918, with such titles as After Five (1915); The Chinatown Mystery (1915), Alien Souls (1916); The Victoria Cross (1916), Forbidden Paths (1917); The Call of the East (1917); Banzai (1918); and The White Man's Law (1918). Hayakawa first developed the role of handsome, sexually alluring exotic Other. He played the sexy but cunning asiatic with a great passion, putting acting before politics. This was no sideshow. For Lasky he starred with American-Californio Marin Sais in The City of Dim Faces and His Birthright (both 1918), and as his own producer Hayakawa by the early 1920s was among the three top-earning Hollywood stars, along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Starring in hits like The Beggar Prince (1920), he was the forbidden cross-racial fantasy for millions of Euro-American women. For Japanese and other Asian women and men, however, Hayakawa's Hollywood roles were mostly un-attractive. His films from the Lasky period were disliked in his native land, for obvious reasons. At the end of the Great War in 1918, with the rise of anti-immigration movements and restrictive laws, Hayakawa left Lasky and DeMille behind, rejecting their racialist typecasting, and formed his own independent production company, Haworth, which was very successful, earning him more than $2,000,000 a year as one of the greatest leading men of Hollywood. He drove a notorious gold-plated Pierce-Arrow and threw lavish parties in his mansion, called "The Castle." His work at Haworth his actress wife Tsuru Aoki in such films as The Dragon Painter (1919) was enormously successful. After the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration by race and nationality and banned all Asian immigration entirely, U.S.-Japanese relations steadily soured, and anti-Japanese politics in California grew stronger. By the late 1920s, Hayakawa moved with his wife Tsuru Aoki, began a peripatetic life, performing on stage and in films in New York, England, France, and Japan. Her made some return visits to Hollywood, starring opposite Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon (1931). He was trapped in Paris with the Nazi Occupation and served in the Resistance. Humphrey Bogart sought him out to play opposite him in his 1949 Tokyo Joe, and her received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his portrayal of Colonel Saito in Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957).

Endnotes for Part 1 (see Bibliography For White Shadows) for complete references:

B-1 Gregory Black, "Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940," Film History 3 (1989): 167-89.)

B-2 Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, Chapter, "When Hollywood Became Hollywood."

[B-3] (DeMille 1959, p. 21)

B-4 (Higham 1973, pp. 5-8)

[B-5] (Quoted in Higashi, 1994: p. 7).

[B-6] (Higham 1973, 19-49)

[B-7] (Miyao 2007, p. 5; 21-49).

[B-8] Quotes and translations are from: Miyao, 2007 pp. 27-28.

[B-9] Quoted in Ross, 2002, p. 82.

[B-10] Starr, 300, 322.

[1] In 1913 Biograph moved to a new studio in the Bronx, at 807 East 175 Street. Biograph also operated studios in Los Angeles: in 1910 at Grand Avenue and Washington Street; and from 1911 to 1915 at Georgia and Girard Streets. Slide (1986): 39-40.

[2] Although Ben obviously anglicized his surname upon immigration, he and his family successfully kept the original name a secret. It may have been Varna or Varnerski, according to his great-granddaugher Cass Warner Sperling. Sperling and Millner (1998): 20.

[3] Sperling and Millner (1998): 27-8.

[4] Sperling and Millner (1998): 41.

[5] Altman (1992): 2-15.

[6] May (1983): 148.

[7] Sperling and Millner (1998): 53-4.

[8] Sperling and Millner (1998): 59-65.

[9] Sperling and Millner (1998): 150.

[10] Ross (2001): 258.

[11] Slide (1986): 192-3; Quotation is from Culver City Historic Site #7 marker on the property, signed by Culver City Historical Society, February 21, 1986.

[12] Slide (1986): 291.

[13] Marx, (1975): 42-49.

[14] Lahue (1973); Slide (1986): 306-307; Pintar (2001): 322-323; Edmonds (1977).

[15] Mahar (2001): 90.

[16] Ross (1998); Mahar (2001): 91.

[17] E. Leslie Gilliams, “Will Women’s Leadership Change the Movies?” Illustrated World (Feb 1923); Henry McMahon, “Women Directors of Plays and Pictures,” Ladies Home Journal (Dec. 1920), both cited in Mahar (2001).

[18] Slide (1986): 256-7.

[19] This phrase is given to the period 1909-1916 by Karen Ward Mahar, in Mahar (2001): 81.

[20] The campaign against the film in Los Angeles, led by Charlotta Bass and Frederick Roberts, is detailed in Flamming (2005): 86-9.

[21] According to Lillian Gish, William Clune had become an investor during the filming of Birth, striking a deal with Griffith to hold the premiere. Gish (1971): 52-53.

[22] Rogin (1987): 190-235.

[23] Ross (2001): 260.

[24] Drew (2001).

[25] Ross (2001): 262.

[26] Ross (2001): 262.

[27] Altman (1992): xii.

[28] Marx (1975): 25.

[29] Gary (1981); Marx (1975): 67-76.

[30] Slide (1986): 210; Marx (1975) 51; Quotation from Carey (1981): 144.

[31] Pintar, (2001): 333.
Sessue Hayakwa, 1914-1957
Sessue Hayakawa (1893-1973) burst onto the Hollywood screen in 1914 -5 while en route from his economic studies at the University of Chicago, to see his parents. He never made it that far. Apparently unhurried, he stayed over the winter in the thriving Japanese immigrant community in Los Angeles, fell in love with the actress Tsuru Aoki, who apparently introduced him to acting. While on the downtown stage, he was scouted by Thomas Ince, who cast him in six known films, each embodying a noble exemplar of a "middle race" between the barbarous colonized peoples, and "white" Europeans. A real sensation, Jesse Lasky at Famous Players Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille brought him over to (what would become ) Paramount. His breakout performance was his 1915 leading role as Hishituru Tori in The Cheat, also one of Cecil B. DeMille's breakthrough box-office hits as director. In precisely the same Hollywood moment that D.W. Griffith produced his racist epic, Birth of a Nation, DeMille and Hayakawa teamed-up to produce a remarkably subversive film--one that ran counter to a massive anti-Japanese movement in California. (note) To appreciate the audacity of Hayakawa's rise to stardom, we need to take a step back to review the context. Japan's victory over Russia in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War had alarmed racists in the US about an asiatic world takeover. An aggressive anti-Japanese campaign had been underway, propelled by lawmakers who enacted the Alien Land Law of 1913, attempting to prevent successful Japanese from owning property in California. Japanese immigrants had originally concentrated in San Francisco, but the Anti-Japanese movement was so focused on that community, that many moved to Los Angeles, making Little Tokyo, centered at First and Central the primary settlement of California Issei (first generation) and Nisei (second generation) immigrants. DeMille, playing with fire in this tinderbox, cast Hayakawa as a wealthy, fashionable, sexy figure who was attractive to the upper-class Euro-American women of Long Island. In the original script and release, Hayakawa plays Hishituru Tori, a wealthy Japanese gentleman living on Long Island, a collector of fine carved ivory statuettes. Just a few years later, Japan joined the Allies in the Great War, so Paramount changed Hayakawa's character to Burmese king, named Haka Arakau, and made him an ivory trader (Ivory Traders are among the top exotic and sinister cast-types in the first half-century of Hollywood). Because Hayakawa's character is crafty and sinister, seeking a forced sexual liason with the socialite wife who falls into his trap, the plot and role are certainly racist. But in this context, DeMille and Hayakawa were mostly manipulating stereotypes of racial difference to achieve dramatic tension. In the process, DeMille, inadvertently or not, created a major Japanese heart-throb and lion of California society. Having already appeared in at least 18 films in 1914, Hayakawa starred or was featured in twenty-six (26) films for Famous Playsers Lasksy / Paramount in 1915 from 1916 through 1918, with such titles as After Five (1915); The Chinatown Mystery (1915), Alien Souls (1916); The Victoria Cross (1916), Forbidden Paths (1917); The Call of the East (1917); Banzai (1918); and The White Man's Law (1918). Hayakawa first developed the role of handsome, sexually alluring exotic Other. He played the sexy but cunning asiatic with a great passion, putting acting before politics. This was no sideshow. For Lasky he starred with American-Californio Marin Sais in The City of Dim Faces and His Birthright (both 1918), and as his own producer Hayakawa by the early 1920s was among the three top-earning Hollywood stars, along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Starring in hits like The Beggar Prince (1920), he was the forbidden cross-racial fantasy for millions of Euro-American women. For Japanese and other Asian women and men, however, Hayakawa's Hollywood roles were mostly un-attractive. His films from the Lasky period were disliked in his native land, for obvious reasons. At the end of the Great War in 1918, with the rise of anti-immigration movements and restrictive laws, Hayakawa left Lasky and DeMille behind, rejecting their racialist typecasting, and formed his own independent production company, Haworth, which was very successful, earning him more than $2,000,000 a year as one of the greatest leading men of Hollywood. He drove a notorious gold-plated Pierce-Arrow and threw lavish parties in his mansion, called "The Castle." His work at Haworth his actress wife Tsuru Aoki in such films as The Dragon Painter (1919) was enormously successful. After the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration by race and nationality and banned all Asian immigration entirely, U.S.-Japanese relations steadily soured, and anti-Japanese politics in California grew stronger. By the late 1920s, Hayakawa moved with his wife Tsuru Aoki, began a peripatetic life, performing on stage and in films in New York, England, France, and Japan. Her made some return visits to Hollywood, starring opposite Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon (1931). He was trapped in Paris with the Nazi Occupation and served in the Resistance. Humphrey Bogart sought him out to play opposite him in his 1949 Tokyo Joe, and her received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in his portrayal of Colonel Saito in Bridge Over the River Kwai (1957).

Endnotes for Part 1 (see Bibliography For White Shadows) for complete references:

B-1 Gregory Black, "Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940," Film History 3 (1989): 167-89.)

B-2 Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, Chapter, "When Hollywood Became Hollywood."

[B-3] (DeMille 1959, p. 21)

B-4 (Higham 1973, pp. 5-8)

[B-5] (Quoted in Higashi, 1994: p. 7).

[B-6] (Higham 1973, 19-49)

[B-7] (Miyao 2007, p. 5; 21-49).

[B-8] Quotes and translations are from: Miyao, 2007 pp. 27-28.

[B-9] Quoted in Ross, 2002, p. 82.

[B-10] Starr, 300, 322.

[1] In 1913 Biograph moved to a new studio in the Bronx, at 807 East 175 Street. Biograph also operated studios in Los Angeles: in 1910 at Grand Avenue and Washington Street; and from 1911 to 1915 at Georgia and Girard Streets. Slide (1986): 39-40.

[2] Although Ben obviously anglicized his surname upon immigration, he and his family successfully kept the original name a secret. It may have been Varna or Varnerski, according to his great-granddaugher Cass Warner Sperling. Sperling and Millner (1998): 20.

[3] Sperling and Millner (1998): 27-8.

[4] Sperling and Millner (1998): 41.

[5] Altman (1992): 2-15.

[6] May (1983): 148.

[7] Sperling and Millner (1998): 53-4.

[8] Sperling and Millner (1998): 59-65.

[9] Sperling and Millner (1998): 150.

[10] Ross (2001): 258.

[11] Slide (1986): 192-3; Quotation is from Culver City Historic Site #7 marker on the property, signed by Culver City Historical Society, February 21, 1986.

[12] Slide (1986): 291.

[13] Marx, (1975): 42-49.

[14] Lahue (1973); Slide (1986): 306-307; Pintar (2001): 322-323; Edmonds (1977).

[15] Mahar (2001): 90.

[16] Ross (1998); Mahar (2001): 91.

[17] E. Leslie Gilliams, “Will Women’s Leadership Change the Movies?” Illustrated World (Feb 1923); Henry McMahon, “Women Directors of Plays and Pictures,” Ladies Home Journal (Dec. 1920), both cited in Mahar (2001).

[18] Slide (1986): 256-7.

[19] This phrase is given to the period 1909-1916 by Karen Ward Mahar, in Mahar (2001): 81.

[20] The campaign against the film in Los Angeles, led by Charlotta Bass and Frederick Roberts, is detailed in Flamming (2005): 86-9.

[21] According to Lillian Gish, William Clune had become an investor during the filming of Birth, striking a deal with Griffith to hold the premiere. Gish (1971): 52-53.

[22] Rogin (1987): 190-235.

[23] Ross (2001): 260.

[24] Drew (2001).

[25] Ross (2001): 262.

[26] Ross (2001): 262.

[27] Altman (1992): xii.

[28] Marx (1975): 25.

[29] Gary (1981); Marx (1975): 67-76.

[30] Slide (1986): 210; Marx (1975) 51; Quotation from Carey (1981): 144.

[31] Pintar, (2001): 333.

This page has annotations:

This page is referenced by:

From David Belasco's Broadway to DeMillle at the Lasky Barn, 1893-1915

New York City's Financial Control of Hollywood in the Classic Era, 1920s-1930s

Dolores del Río

Ahn Chang-ho, Philip Ahn, Susan Ahn Cuddy

Sessue Hayakwa

Intersections and Identities: Del Río, Ahn, HayakawaDolores del Río

Dolores Del Río, 1922-1932

Ahn Chang-ho, Philip Ahn, Susan Ahn Cuddy, 1905-1975

Sessue Hayakwa, 1914-1957

Intersections and Identities: Del Río, Ahn, Hayakawa
Dolores del Río