Shepherds to Movie Moguls

It’s fun to run into bits and pieces of trivia about a place as legendary as Hollywood.

Did you know, for instance, that Hollywood was still so rural back in 1903, when it was incorporated, that one of its first ordinances strictly forbade driving more than 2,000 sheep at one time down the main boulevard?

Or, that as late as 1885, the present town center around Hollywood and Vine was used mainly as a watermelon patch?

It was not until the arrival of Horace H. Wilcox (for whom Wilcox Avenue is named), that property investment began to be promoted in that sleepy town.

Wilcox’s acquisition and subsequent subdivision of a large tract of the land in 1887 attracted new settlers such as French painter Paul de Longpre whose gardens later offered one of the principal attractions to tourists.

A steam line brought out prospective purchasers for lots but few were sold during Wilcox’s lifetime and he died a poor man. His wife carried on his development plans but Hollywood grew slowly. Until the motion picture industry came west, that is, and the Keystone Kops and wild and woolly cowboys had the run of the town.

The first complete picture ever made in Los Angeles dates from 1908, when Col. William N. Selig rented an old mansion at the corner of Olive and 8th streets in the downtown area, followed in 1910 by the Biograph Co., with D. W. Griffith as director, and a cast that included Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford. But the first film producers to settle in Hollywood itself were David and Will Horsley, who in October of 1911, leased the old Blondeau tavern and barn at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, known today as Gower Gulch.

The movies, in the words of Richard Neutra, “unquestionably affected the architectural character of the Hollywood landscape” with its half-timbered English cottages, adjoining Georgian mansions on 50x120-foot lots, Arabian minareted structures and Mexican adobe ranchos squeezed into equally small sites . . . an eclectic confusion that set tone and style and gilded the perennial myth of that place sometimes referred to as a kingless kingdom.