Most film history books and documentaries take the motion picture industry's story from its first days in New York and Chicago directly west to Los Angeles. But throughout a two-decade stretch in the 1910s and 1920s, it was fire-scorched Southern town on the mend that was dubbed the "Winter Film Capital of the World." Now, a new documentary aims to set the record straight.
"Jacksonville's contribution to film history is an amazing but largely forgotten one," says Dr. Nada Ramoutar, PhD, director and producer of Hollywood East: Florida's Filmmaking Legacy. The 30-minute documentary was inspired in part by film students at the Art Institute of Jacksonville, where Ramoutar served as director of digital filmmaking and video production. They had heard the NY-to-LA history but were dumbfounded to learn that the earliest film stars and the founders of production companies that would become today's MGM and Paramount had wintered and worked in their own backyard.
Untold stories come to light
"They wanted to know why this story isn't being told," Ramoutar said of her students. So, they decided to tell it themselves. A crew of some 30 students began researching, interviewing, recording and writing the documentary with producing, directing and editing help from Ramoutar, co-producer Stephanie Borklund and Isaac Brown, an award-winning documentarian and professor. The result is a spectacularly visual account of Northeast Florida's time in the silent filmmaking spotlight and the surprising plot twists that sent filmmakers packing for the West Coast.
Kalem Studios was the first to make its winter home in Jacksonville, Florida's northern-most town on the Atlantic Coast. A disastrous attempt at making a film in the frigid New York outdoors prompted co-founder Frank Marion to send an employee to scout out a new, more production-friendly locale. Weeks later, cast and crew boarded a southbound train to Northeast Florida.
The film industry finds a new home
Among Kalem's group of pioneering filmmakers was actress, screenwriter and director Gene Gauntier (born Genevieve Liggett), who wrote about arriving in Jacksonville in Blazing the Trail, a series of articles for the Woman's Home Companion in 1928-29:
"Within a few hours of our home were quaint negro villages, their unpainted huts set on stilts above the shifting sands. There were wonderful stretches of sand at Pablo and Manhattan Beach, facing the open sea, uninhabited and desolate with their scrubby palmettos which served as a setting for many desert island scenes. There were fishing villages, primitive as even a picture company could wish, quaint old-time Florida houses with their 'galleries' of white Colonial columns, orange and grapefruit groves, pear and peach orchards which gave forth lovely scents when in bloom; formal gardens and Spanish patios; the gorgeous Ponce de Leon hotel and gardens and the picturesque old fort at St. Augustine.
"Plenty of good riding horses were available and even old-fashioned carts drawn by eight yoke of oxen; two wood-burning stoves of 1860 and a Mississippi River steamboat. Add to all this the glorious sun and warmth, the soft breezes in the palm trees, the rich luxuriance of vegetation, the courtesy and cooperation of these gentle southern folks, the crowds of manageable, friendly darkies, the villages of Spanish and Mexicans, and you will see that we had discovered a moving-picture paradise."
Word of this new production paradise spread and soon, more than 30 film studios had set up shop in Jacksonville. Stars like Lilian Gish, Oliver Hardy, John and Ethyl Barrymore and Rudolph Valentino wintered and worked in the area primarily in Jacksonville and nearby St. Augustine. The industry enjoyed two decades in Northeast Florida before a myriad of factors including an ultra-conservative political regime and a patent holder with a bit of a strong arm reputation - none other than Thomas Alva Edison - sent even the last of the East Coast holdouts westward to Los Angeles.
Telling the story
Interviewees featured in Hollywood East include Shawn Bean, author of The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking; Capt. Richard E. Norman, son of late silent filmmaker Richard E. Norman whose Jacksonville film studio complex is being restored; and James Bonner, a 101-year-old Jacksonville resident who tells of seeing silent films in the city's segregated theaters.
"The best aspect of this project is not only being apart of re-discovering North Florida’s silent film history but re-writing film history to include North Florida," says co-producer Stepanie Borklund, co-founder with Ramoutar of Cape and Tiara Productions. "There is nothing more exciting than putting Jacksonville and North Florida on the map and hopefully in the history books regarding the silent film success that North Florida experienced."
Devan Stuart - Devan Stuart is a longtime journalist and five-time Florida Press Association Award winner.
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