Bathing beauties and bootleggers: Filmmaker examines Newport Beach during the Prohibition era
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A sold-out crowd of mostly locals filled the Lido Theater in Newport Beach on Tuesday for the premiere of a film that starred the city itself.
“Sin City: Newport Beach,” written and directed by Ed Olen, explores the days during the 1920s and ’30s when the city was a hot spot for illegal gambling, bootlegging and nightlife.
“It wasn’t the glamorous Newport Beach we know now,” Olen said.
The feature documentary is part of the “All About OC” category of the Newport Beach Film Festival. Audience members laughed and applauded as familiar faces popped up on the screen, including Newport Beach Harbormaster Paul Blank, Balboa Island Ferry owner Seymour Beek and Newport Beach Mayor Joe Stapleton.
The film is based on the book “Bawdy Balboa” by Judge Robert Gardner, which contains many of the author’s own personal memories and experiences of growing up in the beach community during Prohibition. Gardner’s daughter, former Newport Beach Mayor Nancy Gardner, is also featured in the film.
“The amount of work and research Ed has done is just phenomenal, [and] the book was just the starting point,” Nancy Gardner said. “He would send me things and I would go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that about my father!’”
Olen is a photographer as well as a filmmaker. He spent years working for the city of Newport Beach. In 2007, he began serving as a cameraman for Newport Beach TV, filming segments like “Pages from the Past.” He also spent 10 years photographing food and fashion for the now defunct local luxury lifestyle publication, Coast magazine. He currently creates content for Visit Newport Beach.
Through the years, his work often put him in connection with community leaders and local residents who had interesting stories about Orange County’s past.
“There were stories that people had that were amazing and I knew they were going to disappear if someone didn’t capture them,” Olen said.
His fascination with the history of Newport Beach led him to Gardner’s book.
“A lot of history books are dry and hard to get through, but Gardner’s book is a must-read because it is so entertaining and paints such a vivid picture of what it was like back then,” he said.
Olen worked closely with Nancy Gardner to bring stories from her father’s book to life on the screen in the documentary that debuted Tuesday night.
In addition to the necessary historical research, Olen conducted on-camera interviews and wrote and rewrote the script using Gardner’s book as the main source material.
The films talks about the “drugless drugstore,” where a wink and nod got you a carton of “cigarettes” that emptied out to hold a single bottle of straight grain alcohol.
“There were a bunch of pharmacies in the area because, back during Prohibition, a pharmacist could get a license to prescribe alcohol legally,” said Olen. “But it wasn’t good alcohol, it was like Everclear alcohol.”
Local restaurants served mixers, like lemon lime soda and grapefruit juice, to make palatable the illegal hooch the customers would smuggle in.
Bathing beauty contests, pirate days and even a short-lived brothel were all part and parcel of Newport Beach in those days.
Since little film footage or photographs exist from the time period, Olen was forced to get creative by staging reenactments using actors, animation, AI technology and even Barbie dolls. He also began buying vintage postcards and photos of Balboa Island from Ebay and collected props like vintage wool men’s bathing costumes from the 1920s.
While some of the stories told in the documentary are a far cry from the picturesque beaches and luxury resorts the city is known for today, Olen said he never considered sanitizing the narrative.
“I don’t want to whitewash the history; it was gritty and it was dirty,” he explained.
A collection of Ken dolls were used in a reenactment of the city’s lone jail, a small holding cell made to fit no more than six cellmates. During the Prohibition era, the illegal straight grain alcohol consumed by the nightlife crowd led to fights and public drunkenness. On a busy Saturday night, the tiny cell could be packed with nearly 30 cell mates, all of them intoxicated.
“Because they were usually in there for alcohol-related issues, people would start throwing up,” said Olen. “And when you are that close and if you smell it and hear it, somebody else does it and then it’s a ripple effect, where everybody is doing it.”
A campy scene of Ken dolls in a jail cell, stuck in a sympathetic vomit loop, elicited chuckles (and some groans) from Tuesday’s audience.
Olen isn’t a stranger to documenting local history. Last year, his film with Celeste Dennerlin, “Newport and Me: Seymour Beek” made a local celebrity out of Beek and his family.
“Some young kids asked him, ‘Seymour, how does it feel to be a movie star?’ And he was like, ‘I love it!’” Olen said. “I knew I had to have Seymour in this movie. All the lines I gave him were the zingers and he delivers them so well.”
While “Sin City: Newport Beach” focuses on the Newport Beach of long ago, Olen said the stories contained within the movie shaped the city we know today.
“All the illegal booze, the illegal gambling, the dance hall, the Sin City aspect of Balboa, that’s what kept Newport afloat during the Depression, when other cities were falling off and going bankrupt,” he added.
The money made from visitors looking for entertainment turned the focus from fishing to resort living and tourism, an economic trend still seen today.
After the film’s premiere, Nancy Gardner shared her praise for Olen’s interpretation of her father’s stories.
“[When it comes to] history, we don’t remember the dates or that kind of stuff, we remember the anecdotes,” she said. “That’s what this film really brought out.”
Beyond Tuesday’s premiere, future screenings are planned at the Balboa Island Museum, and Olen is currently at work on his next documentary film project about Newport Beach’s so-called “Blue-Haired Mafia.”
“It’s going to be about the women who got things done for Newport Beach,” the filmmaker said.
