Film’s Early Blue Period

Moments past sundown on a warm Friday evening, Mark Vieira’s Starlight Studio has suddenly become a beehive of activity.

With classic jazz gently playing just below conversation level and surrounded all around by huge photos by the master photographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, two of Vieira’s assistants scurry up and down stairs and in and out of a darkroom on the first-floor studio space of Starlight’s historic loft, working to complete sales of freshly printed photos. A pair of cats has the run of the place.

On a dark green sofa in the middle of the studio, two thirtysomething photo collectors sift through a paper-handled grocery bag brimming with vintage negatives, now and then hunching over a light box to examine their selections. Vieira paces nearby with a cane, alternately fielding phone calls, sipping a Pepsi and talking to a reporter.

The two main passions in Vieira’s life--vintage Hollywood photography and the classic studio films of the 1930s--resulted in two well-regarded books: “Hurrell’s Hollywood Portraits,” about his friend and mentor George Hurrell’s life and work from 1929 through 1943; and 1999’s “Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood,” a detailed tome on the salacious and adult-oriented “pre-Code” films of the early 1930s. The success of “Sin” prompted Vieira earlier this year to begin a lecture and screening series of these seldom-seen movies on 16mm at his Starlight Studio each Tuesday night through May 7.

Not bad for a guy whose life nearly came to an end near the corner of Sepulveda and Santa Monica boulevards in Westwood on March 28, 2000.

While the photographer was loading equipment into the trunk of his car that afternoon, a speeding car “swerved out of the southbound traffic lane and smashed me into my car,” Vieira recalls. “A good Samaritan stanched the flow of blood after I had lost six units, but as I lay on the street behind my car, my heart stopped.”

A UCLA emergency unit arrived quickly and revived him, but found his left leg had been crushed beyond repair. It had to be amputated, thus beginning a five-week stay for Vieira at UCLA Medical Center and a physical rehabilitation routine that continues. He says, however, he feels that today, almost two years later--the prosthesis, the cane and the wheelchair notwithstanding--he is regaining his pre-accident momentum.

“I feel like my life, my eyes, hands and one leg were spared so I could continue the work I am devoting my life to,” Vieira says. “There’s not much money in it, frankly, but I really love it.”

Around the time of the accident, Vieira had been planning to spin “Sin in Soft Focus” into a touring screening and lecture series featuring the films discussed in the book. Finally realized after two years, his current series highlights more than two dozen Paramount Pictures films made between 1930 and 1934.

It was a time of aggressive boundary-stretching and taboo-breaking in American cinema that, for the first time, gave mainstream audiences frank images of violence, nudity and sexuality, as well as candid depictions of drug use, prostitution and even religious blasphemy.

“These films have a rawness and a kind of energy that you’ve rarely seen since--the best of them are terrifically entertaining movies,” says film critic and noted pre-Code historian Leonard Maltin. “Even [in the 1950s] filmmakers still could not do what they did quite openly and quite boldly in the early ‘30s movies.”

Production Code at

First Was ‘Toothless’

“Pre-Code” is generally defined as the span between March 1930, when the Motion Picture Production Code was adopted (and initially ignored) by the major studios, and July 1934, when the “Hays Office,” as the censorship body was nicknamed after the man who ran it until 1945, Will H. Hays, began a more aggressive campaign to not only stop the production of films that contained what was considered “morally offensive” content, but also to bowdlerize those made before the summer of 1934.

“The Code was fundamentally toothless over its first four years,” Vieira says. When MGM head of production Irving Thalberg optioned the controversial novel “The Divorcee,” the Hays Office instructed the studio not to make it. MGM made it anyway after Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, lobbied assertively not only to have the film produced but also to star in it--a campaign that included scheduling a provocative photo shoot with a talented but little-known 24-year-old photographer named George Hurrell, recommended to her by Ramon Novarro, to prove to her husband and the studio she could play a “bad” girl. Shearer got the role and won an Oscar.

Vieira notes that along with “The Divorcee,” four key films that prompted the Hays Office to step up enforcement are “Red-Headed Woman,” with the occasionally clad Jean Harlow; the violent 1932 Paul Muni vehicle “Scarface”; Cecil B. DeMille’s heretical “Sign of the Cross”; and the notorious “Convention City” with Mary Astor and Adolphe Menjou, about a married conventioneer’s pursuit of sex on a business trip to Atlantic City. “‘Convention City’ got the most cuts of any film in the Code’s history, and is completely unwatchable in its cut form,” Vieira says.

Content from hundreds of pre-1934 films was excised methodically by the Hays Office’s zealous L.A. studio liaison Joseph Breen, beginning in 1934 and continuing well into the mid-’50s, when films began playing on television. In recent years, lost footage has been found and reinserted into many of the “cut” films, but there are close to 100 films still missing footage.

“I grew up in the Bay Area in the ‘50s and would watch these films on local TV stations,” Vieira says. “Although I didn’t know about the cuts, something just drew me to the kinds of worlds these films portrayed, and it fascinated me.”

Vieira says he has seen “a great number” of the pre-Code films either in theaters or on TV since the mid-’50s, but some he will be seeing for the first time in the current series. “I’m really looking forward to ‘From Hell to Heaven’ [April 2] and ‘Guilty as Hell’ [April 9], both from director Erle C. Kenton, who made full use of the early zoom and wide-angle lens technologies during this period. ‘Dancers in the Dark’ [March 12] is supposedly full of wonderful, expressionistic lighting and camera work,” he says. “I can’t wait.”

At the end of this series in May, he plans to move it to the Hollywood History Museum in the Max Factor Building to “share it with an even wider audience.” Continuous with the museum series he plans to conduct a studio-by-studio tour of the pre-Code films at his Starlight Studio, beginning with some of the controversial films he mentioned earlier from the MGM and Fox libraries.

Book Project Looms

in Vieira’s Future

With the 51-year-old Vieira’s past difficulties behind him, the promise of the future seems inspiring once again. On the horizon is the publication a new, large-format book on Hollywood’s horror movies from 1920 through 1968 commissioned by publisher Harry Abrams, for which he is still researching, writing and collecting prints and negatives.

As a reporter prepares to leave, the collectors have selected about three dozen negatives for Vieira to print. One assistant has already left for the weekend, and the friendly cats are nowhere to be found.

“Although I’m much more jaundiced toward materialism and grabbing things, I did have a feeling when my heart stopped on the sidewalk that all these things here in my studio were not going to be appreciated and enjoyed by anyone again,” Vieira says, gesturing to the row of film cans on the floor below the Hurrells, his photo equipment and other rare accouterments of a Hollywood era long past. “That is why I am doubly eager to share all this knowledge I’ve accumulated.”

“Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood Rare Movies and Lectures,” every Tuesday through May 7, 7:30 p.m., the Starlight Studio, 672 S. Lafayette Park Place, Room 48, Los Angeles. $10 donation requested, seating reservations required. www.thestarlightstudio.com. (213) 383-2448.