Studying Hollywood between the wars

Even as the country went through the prosperity of the Roaring ‘20s followed by the economic woes of the 1930s and on into the outbreak of World War II, Hollywood too went through its own upheavals and transitions during those years -- including the rise of the studios and their power-wielding moguls, the golden era of silent movies and the introduction of sound to motion pictures.

These pivotal decades are the subject of an ambitious two-day conference, “Moguls, Millionaires & Movie Stars: Hollywood Between the Wars, 1920-1940,” which takes place Friday and Saturday at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

A partnership between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the two-day event will feature panels on such moguls as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph P. Kennedy and Howard Hughes; a look at Hollywood and its connection to New York vaudeville; an examination of the early years of the academy; and a retrospective discussion of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.” Friday evening the academy will also screen a new print of the 1937 Technicolor classic “A Star Is Born” at the Linwood Dunn Theater.

Panelists for the two-day event will include such historians and scholars as Taylor Coffman, who is one of the conference’s organizers, Cari Beauchamp, Neal Gabler, Richard Schickel, Leo Braudy and David Thomson. Los Angeles Times columnists Patt Morrison, Tim Rutten and John Horn will be among the moderators.

Huntington-USC Institute Director William Deverell approached the academy about doing a conference on Hollywood. “The academy, Taylor Coffman and myself came to this with a series of overlapping interests,” Deverell says. “I am interested in pulling the history of Hollywood out of what oftentimes can be a fairly internal discussion of Hollywood itself. I am interested in placing the rise of Hollywood in this very interesting inter-war period against the backdrop of the rise of L.A.”

There is currently a lot of new research being done and studies written about this pivotal era in Hollywood history, Deverell says. “It’s an exciting moment where Hollywood history is being pulled apart and explained in all of these different ways,” he says.

One such historian is Emily Thompson, a professor of technical history at Princeton who is participating Friday afternoon on the panel on the academy’s creation. Thompson is working on a book about the transition from silent to sound films. “The academy was founded in 1927, which was right when this transition was beginning to occur,” she says.

“There is this wonderful sort of convergence because the academy wants to be this clearinghouse to bring together these different studios, and sound was this big problem that landed in their lap. It sort of gave them a reason to be -- they had something to offer the film community. The academy was this crucial non-competitive space where different studios and film workers could come together and talk to each other.”

Deverell is expecting about 200 film scholars and students of the medium to attend. “We are building time for the audience to play a role. We are going to DVD the thing. We are going to archive it here at the Huntington and the academy. We want this thing to reverberate.”

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susan.king@latimes.com