by catherine flanagan
A&E contributor
cflanagan@media.ucla.edu
The Roaring ’20s: a time of glamorous showgirls, nightlife and burlesque scenes brought to life by Old Hollywood glamour and films ““ or so one would think.
Not many outside the film industry would associate it with New York. However, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has done this by putting together a collection of classic films in tribute to the independent New York film industry.
The tribute series, called “Hollywood on the Hudson: Filmmaking in New York 1929-1930,” opens today and runs through Feb. 7 at the Billy Wilder Theater. The series includes 15 films local to the New York area, dating from after World War I.
The program is based on the book, “Hollywood on the Hudson. Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff,” written by Rutgers University Professor Richard Koszarski.
Mimi Brody, a programmer at the Archive, helped design the program with a little push from the author himself.
“(Koszarski) was the one who wanted to bring the program here with cinema text,” Brody said. “I thought it was a great idea. Many of these films were from our own collections, so it was a good way to showcase our collection.”
Brody added that programs based off of Koszarski’s book were originally shown at the Museum of Modern Art and that those shown as part of UCLA’s program at the Billy Wilder Theater will include films from the Museum of Modern Art as well as from UCLA’s own collection.
Koszarski will attend the first two nights of the series today and on Saturday.
In his book, Koszarski describes when major movie production studios (such as Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros.), moved from the East Coast to the West Coast for monetary and weather-related reasons. One benefit of these production companies moving out of New York, as Koszarski points out, was that it made room for more independent films to be produced there.
“Hollywood on the Hudson” contains many of these independent films to which Koszarski alludes. One such film is “The Emperor Jones.”
In a review of the original book, archive director Jan-Christopher Horak called the film one of the first that was independently financed, and that starred a black actor, Paul Robeson.
“Such a film could not and would not have been made in Hollywood, given the status of persons of color in the mainstream industry,” he said.
Brody highlights the milestones these independent and more separated films were able to make for their time.
“These types of films were called “˜race films’ and were unique to New York independent film, especially for the time period with all the discrimination,” she said. “Other ethnic films produced include Jewish and Yiddish films but they are not included in this film tribute.”
As Horak states in his review, limiting film history and thought to Hollywood alone is a serious misconception.
“New York is not only the only other site outside Hollywood to show evidence of continuous film production activity, but also that the city’s cultural climate, its professional workforce, and its technical facilities always offered an alternative vision to the kinds of classical Hollywood narrative inspired film forms being produced on the West Coast.”