A hundred years ago, a 45-foot-tall sign was erected on Mount Lee, overlooking Los Angeles. For the bargain price of $21,000 ($365,000, in today’s dollars), a now iconic billboard promoting a nearby housing development — made if not literally from leftover film sets, then by the same carpenters with the same techniques — flashed “HOLLY-WOOD-LAND” day and night. Originally intended to last just a year and a half, a century later the sign remains, albeit somewhat reduced. In 1949, vandals stole the “H,” and some residents, who began to feel the “ollywoodland” sign was “an eyesore and a detriment to the community,” led a campaign to tear it down. Others disagreed, seeing “the sign as a symbol of the film capital.” Ultimately, they compromised — the “H” was restored and “land” was dropped. The development, with its striking architecture, remains as well, a kitsch evocation of the cottages of medieval Europe, officially dubbed Storybook but sometimes called Fairytale or Hansel and Gretel, mirroring the magic and whimsy of the movies. The style, which narrowly predates Walt Disney’s move to Los Angeles, recalls both the Cottage of the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella’s castle; if rent went up on that shoe, the old woman would fit right in.
With those hodgepodge houses, Hollywood had, for the first time, begun to make something of its past. The same was true onscreen, albeit with a different Hollywood landmark in mind: the dilapidated set of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic, Intolerance. For that high-concept follow-up to his box-office smash, The Birth of a Nation, Griffith had demanded intricate sets to represent Babylon, Judea, Renaissance France, and modern-day American slums. The grandiose backdrops were a four-pronged stab at his critics — who had dubbed both the director and Birth of a Nation racist, and who he imagined would be left speechless when he spent a fortune filming a 2,500-year historiography of human pain to justify his own. Griffith rewrought history — from the fall of Babylon to the Crucifixion of Jesus to the 16th-century St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of thousands of French Protestants, and, finally, to the contemporary humiliation of the working poor — to soothe his own hurt feelings. This was a passion project par excellence, but the man had just directed the highest-grossing film of all time (up to that point), so the carpenters built a vast plywood empire. Griffith got his set, but the producers never got their money. Intolerance flopped and David Wark Griffith’s fantasy of critical word-eating never came to pass. Trying to save money on the back end, the producers refused to dispose of the set (removal being so expensive, real estate so cheap), leaving it to linger on the backlot for years after the film’s release. In his salacious account of Tinseltown drama, Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger rhymes that the moldering Intolerance set was “something of a reproach and something of a challenge to the burgeoning movie town — something to surpass, something to live down.”
Parody lets you acknowledge your influences without risking being dubbed derivative, and permits you to be experimental without being self-important.
One brave man took on that challenge: In 1923, under the auspices of the huge sign, Buster Keaton directed and starred in a slapstick parody of Intolerance. Two hours briefer than its source material, Three Ages only comes up one era short — Keaton’s epoque à trois covers the Stone Age, the Roman Age, and the Modern Age. The craftsmanship is not on par with Griffith’s: Most of the action takes place in static medium shots, abandoning Griffith’s cinematic inventions of the wide and the close. And almost all of it involves Keaton suffering gross bodily harm (to tremendous comedic effect). Three Ages is neither an attempt to surpass Intolerance on its own terms nor any kind of death blow to Griffith’s epic vision. Instead, Keaton gently pokes fun at its conceit. Where Griffith spent a fortune and commanded an army to ensure an absurd level of historical accuracy for Intolerance, Keaton goes out of his way to put the present into the Stone Age and the Roman Age. At its best, Three Ages foreshadows The Flintstones: Buster pulls his carriage up to Ancient Rome only to find a stone tablet declaring “No Postum Exit,” which the camera quickly translates to “No parking.” Buster checks the time on a sundial watch. In the Stone Age, Buster watches a pathetic excuse for a brontosaurus — a bad bit of stop-motion animation — cross the far-off landscape; he is nonplussed. Griffith demanded not one but eight literal white elephants for the set of Belshazzar’s Feast, in ancient Babylon; Keaton’s Stone Age mastodon was the nearest, cheapest elephant (with big curling mammoth tusks taped on).
Eight years earlier, in 1915 (12 years before the first sound picture, The Jazz Singer), Griffith’s Birth of a Nation ushered in the commercial dominance of the feature film and put an end to many unwarranted fears — for example, that films longer than a couple of minutes caused permanent eye damage. It was Griffith’s second feature film; his first, Judith of Bethulia, was a serious and sincere adaptation of a remote portion of the Bible. Critics raved, but it was a little too arcane to strike a nerve with the public. Arithmetic tells us that feature films had been popular for eight years when the Hollywood(land) sign went up. Eight fruitful years. Adjusted for inflation, Griffith’s first few features grossed in the billions. Per Time Magazine, a ticket for Birth of a Nation, far and away his biggest earner, cost something like $60 in today’s dollars (entry prices topped out at $2 — most films cost a dime or, at a Nickelodeon, half that). According to the Library of Congress, 50 million people (roughly half the country at the time) saw Birth of a Nation in the five years following its release, many going twice. Almost all who went left the theater with strong opinions. The film — which depicts the rise of the KKK during Reconstruction and portrays multiple lynchings in a heroic light — remains controversial, but Birth of a Nation was a phenomenon. It was a lightning rod in the fight for and against segregation, bringing about the ugly rebirth of the KKK, which had been dormant since 1870 and was reformed at a cross burning six months after the film’s release, but also leading to the rise of the NAACP, whose nationwide fight to ban the movie mobilized thousands, setting the context for the feature film as we know it. In 1915, the Toronto Star called Birth of a Nation the eighth wonder of the world. It was, for many years, film’s nonpareil. Today, it is not remembered fondly.
In Steamboat Bill, Keaton dropped a house on his own head but survived by defenestrating himself while standing up.
Two years before he directed Birth of a Nation, Griffith, already an accomplished director, placed a full-page advertisement for himself in the New York Dramatic Mirror. Promoting his trailblazing as a cineaste, he claimed to have invented “close-up figures, distant views … the ‘switchback’ [now known as cross-cutting], sustained suspense, the ‘fade out,’ and restraint in expression.” Summing up the collective achievement of these innovations, Griffith credits himself with “Raising motion picture acting to the higher plane which has won for it recognition as a genuine art.” He was not a humble man.
Griffith’s inventions ran the gamut of direction. Close-ups create emotional identification, distant views show the beauty (or destruction) of nature or civilization, and cross-cutting helps you associate the two (e.g., you, evil-looking man, caused the destruction; you, pure innocent, are the beautiful landscape). Sustained suspense adds the twin elements of terror and time. Restraint in expression refers to the comparatively fewer gonzo demands of screen acting, as opposed to the operatic projections required of a stage actor to reach the nosebleeds. In hindsight, his innovations might not sound groundbreaking, but these new techniques in Griffith’s first few feature films were essential to expanding film from a magic show of shock and titillation — the earliest copyrighted film captured an employee of Thomas Edison’s sneezing on camera for supposed comic effect— into a mature medium for storytelling.
In 1937, the aforementioned rhymer Kenneth Anger (1927–2023) directed his first movie. He was 10 years old. That film, Ferdinand the Bull, is considered lost; Anger, who also stars, played a devious matador. Anger’s last work arrived in 2010: a two-minute ad for the fall line of upscale cardigans from Italian knitwear brand Missoni. He did not act in it, deviously or otherwise. In the middle of his eight-decade film career came Anger’s tell-all, Hollywood Babylon. The book — which Anger claimed was backed up by inside baseball he was privy to from his time as a child actor — by turns exposes and luxuriates in the bacchic excesses of early American filmmaking. And although I’ve already quoted it, over the years nearly every claim in the book has become suspect. (Litigation against Anger has been repeatedly threatened.) As history, it’s beneath contempt. As gossip? Above reproach.
The Babylon in question is literal. It was the setting for Belshazzar’s Feast in Griffith’s Intolerance, the first of several “sort of” apologies Griffith released after Birth of a Nation (including Broken Blossoms, the earliest interracial love story in American film, and Abraham Lincoln, a hagiography of the president who abolished slavery). Intolerance, which takes on epic proportions and strives for universality, is composed of four thematically linked stories spanning centuries and crossing cultures, interspersed with “eternal motherhood” rocking the cradle of mankind under a shaft of light shining down from the heavens. Griffith’s ambitions were biblical; the movie recalls an over-budget Sunday School lesson.
The message of Intolerance, that hatred has a human cost, is widely accepted, and the four historical acts — the fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Jesus, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and the struggle of the working poor in American cities — were not exactly feather-ruffling. Conversely, the undercurrent of the film is both autobiographical and tongue-in-cheek. Griffith felt that many people had been intolerant of Birth of a Nation, the NAACP campaign to ban the movie being the primary example. Not just a big-hearted warning against bigotry, Intolerance was a Janus-faced dare to Griffith’s critics: Like it, and by tacit agreement tolerate Birth of a Nation, or hate it, and take the side of intolerance. What never occurred to Griffith was that instead, his critics, and the American public, might just ignore Intolerance. They did. But even if they skipped the film, no one could miss the massive artifice Griffith’s failed ultimatum left behind.
Remaking and rehashing have been a part of Hollywood since those leftover sets became the Hollywoodland houses. But when does an industry-wide sport of self-reflection become a commitment to redundancy?
In Anger’s words, the Babylon set was “A mare’s nest mountain of scaffolding, hanging gardens, chariot-race ramparts and sky-high elephants, a make-believe mirage of Mesopotamia dropped down on the sleepy huddle of mission-style bungalows amid the orange groves that made up 1915 Hollywood, portent of things to come.” This image, of the massive abandoned set for Belshazzar’s Feast blotting out the sky above Hollywood as an eternal reminder of delusion and madness, is core to the book. It’s also, let’s say, a proportional exaggeration. Although you can visit Griffith’s Babylon in the 1947-set video game L.A. Noire, there wasn’t a screw left by 1919. But though it may have left the corporeal world, the tell-tale heart of the Babylonian backlog has haunted Hollywood passions ever since, from Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) to Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) to Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006).
“Love is the unchanging axis on which the World revolves,” reads the opening intertitle of Keaton’s Three Ages, but where Griffith’s four-part tale of love’s struggle had empathy in mind, Keaton’s notion of love is more physical. Intolerance used vast cultural differences to show what Griffith believed was immutable human truth; all four of his storylines told very different tales, which, when taken together, had a common thematic throughline. Keaton uses the exact same plot in every era. The stories all go something like this: A physically larger man is preferred by an attractive woman, Keaton attempts to steal the woman and is humiliated by her paramour — for Buster is a smaller man. Desperate, he turns to a fortuneteller (in the Stone Age, it’s a primitive “wee-gee” board operated by a turtle, who bites him) and, because Keaton interferes to get the fortune he wants, the results look auspicious for his love life. (While Keaton’s protagonists understand that the process of fortune-telling can be manipulated, it does not occur to them that this might render clairvoyance itself suspect.) Newly confident in his eventual triumph, Keaton returns to his quest for whoopee, this time challenging his rival on the field of physical prowess (a club duel in the Stone Age, a chariot race in the Roman Age, a football game in the Modern Age). Keaton cheats at all of them (in the Roman Age, the chariot race takes place in the snow and he uses sled dogs), gets caught, and is viciously punished (in the Stone Age, he is keelhauled by an elephant). Finally, Keaton triumphs the hard, non-cheating way (in the Stone Age, he is victorious in battle by boulder, in the Modern Age, he finds evidence that his romantic rival has committed bigamy) and wins over the attractive woman.
Keaton’s message was silly and his techniques were amateurish, but his derision was refreshing. Feature films didn’t have to be expensive and long and serious, even if it would take Keaton a few more years to figure out what they would be instead. But making Three Ages was a step in the right direction. The history of parody as innovation is long: from Cervantes lampooning novels of chivalry in Don Quixote to Jane Austen satirizing her gothic predecessors in Northanger Abbey to James Joyce mocking virtually every kind of writing in English (and some French and Italian) in Ulysses. Parody lets you acknowledge your influences without risking being dubbed derivative, and permits you to be experimental without being self-important. When Buster Keaton satirized Intolerance, he managed to both mock its impossible seriousness and to try Griffith’s vision on for size. And when a few years later he made The General, which is something more confident than a parody of Birth of a Nation but evokes it nonetheless, the world saw the fruits of his work. He tried Griffith’s techniques, made money doing it, and then made even more money taking the lessons and doing it his way in such fine movies as 1924’s Sherlock Jr., in which Keaton took on the half-century-old tradition of the detective story and found it lacking (in laughs!), or 1928’s Steamboat Bill, where he dropped a house on his own head but survived by defenestrating himself while standing up.
Remaking and rehashing have been a part of Hollywood since those leftover sets inspired the design of the Hollywoodland houses. But when does an industry-wide sport of self-reflection become a commitment to redundancy? When is it just backslapping? The endless thread of Hollywood narcissism, from 1950′s Sunset Boulevard to Singin’ in the Rain (1952) to The Player (1992), has produced films of varying quality. The past few years alone have given us Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Babylon, The Fabelmans, and Mank. Everyone from Oscar voters to directors who make films that compete for Oscars is obsessed with Hollywood gossip. Maybe I’m being intolerant myself, but any art form’s fertile soil is in technique, not trivia. Anger’s Hollywood Babylon was creative, even if the things he imagined (such as that the Babylon set was a Satanic ritual or the Gish sisters were lesbian lovers) had no basis in reality. Creative misprisions, like Anger’s or Keaton’s, are fun and fresh, whereas films such as the Coen Brothers’ middling Hail, Caesar! — which nostalgically asks the audience banal questions such as “Why don’t people dance in movies anymore?” — are perhaps unambitious. Hollywoodland is a hundred years old. It’s time to stop repackaging leftover sets. ❖
Gideon Leek is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.
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