12 - The Southland on screen

Summary

Surely no single city has such a close relationship with motion pictures as Los Angeles, which has appeared on screen in myriad guises for over a century since a film crew employed by Thomas Edison's Edison Manufacturing Company arrived in December 1897. South Spring Street, Los Angeles, California (1898), a twenty-five-second “actuality” film shot by Frederick Blechynden, captured a sense of Los Angeles as a metropolis-in-the-making by presenting a view of pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on that busy downtown commercial thoroughfare. Painters and photographers had long flocked to Southern California for its climate, sunlight, Mediterranean landscapes, and the romantic appeal of its Spanish and Mexican heritage. D. W. Griffith first captured these ingredients on celluloid in Ramona (1910), a fifteen-minute adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel. Offering a utopian image of the region as a combination of flower-filled garden and expansive wilderness waiting to be exploited, Ramona assisted the civic boosters in marketing Los Angeles as an ideal place in which to live and work. Ramona was remade in 1916, 1928, and 1936, while another romantic Mexican legend, that of Zorro, was adapted for the screen in 1920, 1925, 1937, 1946, and 1949.