The Movie Audience and Hollywood: Mass
Culture Creates a New National Community

Inside midtown Manhattan's magnificent new Roxy Theater, a
sellout crowd eagerly settled in for opening night. Outside,
thousands of fans cheered wildly at the arrival of movie stars such
as Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Harold Lloyd. A
squadron of smartly uniformed ushers guided patrons under a
five-story-tall rotunda to some 6,200 velvet-covered seats. The
audience marveled at the huge gold and rose-colored murals,
classical statuary, plush carpeting, and Gothic-style windows. It
was easy to believe newspaper reports that the theater had cost
$10 million to build. Suddenly, a flood of illumination lit up a pit
orchestra of 110 musicians playing "The Star Spangled Banner."
An array of 100 dancers then took the stage, performing ballet
numbers and singing old southern melodies such as "My Old
Kentucky Home" and "Swanee River." Congratulatory telegrams
from President Calvin Coolidge and other dignitaries were
projected onto a screen. Finally, the evening's feature
presentation, The Love of Sunya, starring Gloria Swanson, began.
The grand dream of Samuel L. "Roxy" Rothapfel, the theater's
designer, to build what he called "the cathedral of the motion
picture" was now a reality.

At the time of the Roxy's opening in March 1927, nearly 60
million Americans "worshiped" each week at movie theaters
across the nation. The "movie palaces" of the 1920s were designed
to transport patrons to exotic places and different times. As film
pioneer Marcus Loew put it, "We sell tickets to theaters, not
movies." Every large community boasted at least one opulent
movie theater. Houston's Majestic was built to represent an
ancient Italian garden; it had a ceiling made to look like an open
sky, complete with stars and cloud formations. The Tivoli in
Chicago featured opulent French Renaissance decor; Grauman's
Egyptian in Los Angeles re-created the look of a pharaoh's tomb;
and

Albuquerque's Kimo drew inspiration from Navajo art and
religion. The remarkable popularity of motion pictures, and later
radio, forged a new kind of community. A huge national audience
regularly went to the movies, and the same entertainment could be
enjoyed virtually anywhere in the country by just about everyone.
Movies emerged as the most popular form in the new mass
culture, and the appeal extended far beyond the films themselves,
or even the theaters. Americans embraced the cult of celebrity,
voraciously consuming fan magazines, gossip columns, and news
of the stars. By the 1920s, the production center for this dream
world was Hollywood, California, a suburb of Los Angeles that
had barely existed in 1890.

Motion picture companies found Hollywood an alluring
alternative to the east coast cities where they had been born. The
reliably sunny and dry climate was ideal for the year-round
shooting of film. The unique physical environment offered a
perfect variety of scenic locations--mountains, desert, ocean--and
downtown Los Angeles was only an hour away. Land was cheap
and plentiful. Producers found the political environment attractive
as well. Los Angeles was the leading nonunion, open-shop city in
the country, and lower labor costs provided a powerful incentive
to relocate. By the early 1920s Hollywood produced more than 80
percent of the nation's motion pictures, and the myth of this new
community was already emerging. The physical isolation of the
town, its great distance from the eastern cities, the absence of
traditional sources of culture and learning-- all contributed to
movie folk looking at life in a self-consciously "Hollywood" way.

Hollywood, with its feel of a modern frontier boomtown, was a
new kind of American community. It attracted a young,
cosmopolitan group of people lured by an ideal of upward
mobility and a new way of life. In the 1920s, its untypical
American work force redefined the nation's cultural values around
the consumption ideal associated with the movies and southern
California. Most of the top studio executives were Jewish
immigrants from eastern and central Europe. More than half of
the writers, directors, editors, and actors in Hollywood were born
in large cities of over 100,000--at a time when most Americans
hailed from rural areas or small towns. Two-thirds of the
performers were under thirty-five, and three-fourths of the
actresses were under twenty -five. More than 90 percent of the
writers had either higher education or journalism experience.
Women made up one-third to one-half of this key group. But it
was the movie stars who dominated the Hollywood community. In
the 1920s, Hollywood achieved a mythic power in American life as
its movies came to symbolize the pleasures of leisure,
consumption, and personal freedom. Film stars such as Charlie
Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson,
and Douglas Fairbanks became popular idols as much for their
highly publicized private lives as for their work lives. They were
the nation's experts on how to live well. Movie folk built luxurious
mansions in a variety of architectural styles and outfitted them
with swimming pools, tennis courts, golf courses, and lavish
gardens. Their private lives seemed, in the public eye, every bit as
glamorous as their movie roles. Visitors often noted that
Hollywood had no museums, art galleries, live theater, or other
traditional institutions of high culture. How would the town's
wealthy movie elite spend their time and money? By 1916 Charlie
Chaplin, a working-class immigrant from the London slums, was
earning $10,000 a week for the comedies that made him the most
famous face in the world. He recalled trying to figure out what to
do with his new wealth. "The money I earned was legendary, a
symbol in figures, for I had never actually seen it. I therefore had
to do something to prove I had it. So I procured a secretary, a
valet, a car, a chauffeur." Ordinary Americans found it easy to
identify with movie stars, many of whom had achieved enormous
wealth and status. Unlike traditionally powerful individuals, such
as industrialists or politicians, movie stars had no social authority
over large groups of employees or voters. They, too, had to
answer to a boss, and most had risen from humble beginnings.
But above all, Hollywood, like the movies it churned out,
represented for millions of Americans new possibilities: freedom,
material success, upward mobility, and the chance to remake one's
very identity. Only a relatively few Americans actually realized
these during the 1920s. But by the end of the decade the
Hollywood "dream factory" had helped forge a national
community whose collective aspirations and desires were
increasingly defined by those possibilities.