The Silent Picture era is, till today, considered the Golden Age of Hollywood. It is hard to believe that there was considerable initial resistance to making pictures longer than one reel. Financial backers were convinced that audiences would get restless watching a picture more than 12 minutes long.Directors like D W Griffith broke the code. He has been called, with considerable justification, the ‘father of the film technique’. He was an indefatigable experimenter in choosing new themes, in the novel use of the camera, in the cutting and editing of a film. In 1914, he began work on what is today considered a landmark film, The Birth of a Nation. Though blatantly racist (which was completely acceptable in 1915), its epic scope and technical virtuosities held audiences spellbound for over three hours. After Griffith, movies were taken seriously by people of status and education.Of course Hollywood also proceeded to turn out cartloads of inconsequential films, both long and short. There were also crudely melodramatic, highly popular cliff-hanging serials (the forerunners to our current soap-operas) like The Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White, which brought millions back to the movie houses, week after week, to see how Pauline had surmounted her newest peril in the previous episode. Cecil B DeMille’s films were also highly popular. He excelled in bedroom and bathroom scenes, and developed a surefire formula for luring in the crowds, religious pictures in which people who sinned went to their implicable doom, but had a lot of fun until doomsday arrived. The thundering success of the silent film gave rise in the star system, floods of publicity about leading performers, torrents of worldwide fan-mail, and the appearance of idolatrous fan magazines, chock-full of fact, fiction and fantasy. Among the favourite stars of that era were Mary Pickford (America’s Sweetheart), the acrobatic Douglas Fairbanks, the glamorous Gloria Swaneon, the Hot Latin Lover Rudolph Valentino and the enigmatic Grota Garbo. Comedy was probably at its best during the silent era. Buster Keaton, ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd captivated audiences with their antics. A young Bitish pantomimist arrived at an audition dressed in baggy pants and a tight little coat. He started swinging his cane, bumping into things, and then stepped to explain what he had in mind. ‘‘This fellow is a tramp, a poet, a dreamer, a loner, always hopeful of romance. He would have you believe he is a scientist, a duke, a polo-player. However, he is not above picking up cigar butts or robbing a baby of its candy. And, of course, if the occasion warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear but only in extreme anger’’. And, of course, Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’ was born. By the 1920’s, the silent film era was at its peak, and Hollywood, a city synonymous with glamour, sex, booze and the glitterati, was one of the most famous places on earth. Selznick and the Czar: Shortly after the overthrow of the Russian Czar in 1917, Lewis J. Selznick, a film mogul who had suffered persecution as a Jew when he was a a boy growing up in czarist Russia, sent a cable to Nicholas II: ‘‘When I was a poor boy in Kiev some of your policemen were not kind to me and my people. I came to America and prospered. Now hear with regret you are out of a job. Feel no ill will what your policemen did so if you will come New York can give you fine jine job acting in pictures. Salary no object. Reply my expense. Regards you and family.’’ IN HEAT: When the script of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was being prepared for Greta Garbo, the producers decided to change the title because they thought a foreign name might confuse audiences. They finally settled on Heat. But screenwriter Frances Marion balked. ‘‘I think that would be a good ad for Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ she cried, ‘but I’d hate to see on the billboards ‘Greta Garbo in Heat’. In the end the film was called Love (1927). LIP SERVICE: In Three Weeks (1924), Aileon Pringle turned in a nice performance as a queen who runs off to spend three weeks with a young British aristocrat. But the Deaf and Dumb society reprimanded her severely. In one scene, when her co-actor picks her up with a tender look on his face, her lips are saying, “if you drop me, you... I’ll break your neck!†NOSE-TALGIA: The dignified D W Griffith sometimes had his ‘off moments’. ‘‘Move those ten thousand horses a trifle to the left,†he ordered an assistance one day, as his finger probed one of his large nostrils. ‘And that mob out there three foot forward,’’ he added, finger still in nose. While his orders were being carried out, he noticed a small boy watching him in fascination. ‘‘Young men,’’ he added, ‘‘when you grow up would you like to be a director?’’ ‘‘Nah,’’ said the youngster, ‘‘my father doesn’t let me pick my nose.’’ (Sohrab Ardeshir is a theatre actor)
