Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1507937
1 6 P E R S P E C T I V E | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3 Culver City 1919 The First World War devastated the French and European motion picture industries. Capital, materials and manufacturing were diverted to the war effort. Ultimately, the small farming village called Hollywood in Southern California developed into the next and future global center for motion picture production. It was in 1919, while working for Famous Players Lasky, that Maurice Tourneur agreed to relocate his company to Samuel Goldwyn's new studio in California. Ben, now 36, undertook a five-day train journey to Los Angeles. Dropping his bags and family at the hotel, Ben took several streetcars for a long ride out to a small dusty village called Culver City. A land developer's gamble, the new studio had been built in an empty field surrounded by farms and oil wells that extended out to the horizon. The Studio System Ben Carré had again arrived at the epicenter of filmmaking's next significant chapter in a new land where these young and brash film migrants were disdainfully referred to by the locals as "The Movies." Ironically, Hollywood's town charter prohibited factories and industry within its city limits, but this did not forbid motion pictures, which were about to rapidly transition from small independent director-producer film companies into a centralized studio system with large campuses. Over the next seven years, pictures would become a commodity, and their manufacture an industry, dominated by large A. A POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL (1917). BEN CARRÉ, ART DIRECTOR. MARY PICKFORD'S BEDROOM SET. PARAGON- WORLD STUDIO, FORT LEE. PRODUCTION STILL. B. A POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL. MARY PICKFORD'S BED AREA. PRODUCTION STILL. C. THE BLUE BIRD (1918). BEN CARRÉ, ART DIRECTOR. ARRIVAL OF MAGICAL SHIP AT PALACE DOCK. PARAGON- WORLD STUDIO, FORT LEE. PRODUCTION STILL. D. THE BLUE BIRD (1918). CARRÉ'S SKETCH FOR SHIP AND DOCK ELEMENTS. (PEN ON GRAPH PAPER.) A B C D