VIII
“INTOLERANCE”
The Griffith lot was at 4500 Sunset Boulevard, on the edge of Hollywood, then a residential suburb, named for one of the earliest homes there. Hollywood residents observed with curiosity, but with no special alarm, the interesting picture-making plants that were appearing here and there in their neighborhood. California has a taste for publicity:
“Ladies and gentlemen, since there seems to be nothing further to be said for the Dear Departed, I should be glad to make a few remarks about California.”
That Griffith, on the very edge of Hollywood, had made the great picture then sweeping the country, was something on which to “make a few remarks,” though it is unlikely that even the most sanguine residents guessed that within a comparatively brief time, their little suburb would become the center of one of the world’s richest industries; a collection of amazing architectural construction; a strange, irrational region, in and about whose environs frail cities and quaint villages, fair palaces and weird ships and oceans, would appear and vanish, beyond the dreams of all the fairylands of time and change; that with these things would assemble an exhibit of feminine loveliness and masculine perfection, of human freaks and human vanities, such as probably no other planet could show.
The change began quickly enough, now. There was money to be made in Hollywood—not only by producers, but by actors. On Broadway, men and women with lean parts, or no parts at all, turned their eyes westward. The exodus set in. The word “Hollywood” began to be passed about like some magic bauble, a talisman. Once more, California held out to men and women a lure of gold.
The little group of players on Sunset Boulevard hardly knew what to make of the first incursion of “real actors” that swept in upon them. They had two ideas about it: they wondered if they would be able to keep their jobs, and if so, would they learn how to act. They realized, presently, that it made very little difference to them. They did keep their jobs, and they did not learn how to act—not in the stage way. It was the newcomers who had to learn—if they stayed.
Most of them did stay—adapted themselves. Producers with new, big undertakings, were all about. Griffith himself, returning from first showings of the “Birth,” began on what promised to be a still more important, more expensive, picture.
It started as rather a small venture, with Mae Marsh and Bobby Harron in the leading parts. It was to be called “The Mother and the Law,” based upon a famous murder case, wherein an innocent man, through intolerance—man’s inhumanity to man—was brought to the foot of the scaffold.
Lillian was not to have a part in this new play. For one thing, she was working in another picture—as Annie, in “Enoch Arden”—one of the best of her early films—and in Richard Harding Davis’ story of “Captain Macklin.” And then, Griffith perhaps did not think it wise to push her forward too fast.