Jacksonville's Ten Major Missed Opportunities

2. Hollywood, You Can Have This Rowdy Crowd


Excerpt of original. A one-reel comedy made in 1916 in Jacksonville featuring Oliver Hardy. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida. To see full-length versions of this and other videos from the State Archives of Florida, visit http://www.floridamemory.com/video/.


Entertainment is big business in the United States. The sector as a whole generated 522 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2013. Dubbed the "World's Winter Film Capital" a century ago, early 20th century Jacksonville once had more than 30 studios.

Jacksonville served as the birthplace of Metro Pictures, which later became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM. It was also the location of the first feature-length color film produced in the U.S., and the place where Oliver Hardy launched his career. Jacksonville's life as a major American epicenter for the film industry wouldn't last long due to clashes with locals, war, and increased competition from a new upstart rival in Southern California.

Today, that Southern California community's name has come to be a metonym for the motion picture industry, while it's Florida counterpart ends up on Metro Jacksonville's list of missed opportunities.

"In the early days, Jacksonville prospered because it offered a variety of backgrounds from sandy beaches and tropical jungles to urban scenes. And the railroad stopped here, making it an easy destination for northern filmmakers."

Among the notable Jacksonville films were the 35 one-reelers in the 'Plump and Runt' series made by Hardy and his sidekick Billy Ruge. Many of the films contained Southern, Florida and Civil War stories, including "The Old Soldier's Story" and "The Escape from Andersonville."

When World War I broke out, many actors and technicians joined the armed forces or took jobs at Jacksonville's growing shipyards. The 1918 worldwide flu pandemic struck the city particularly hard.

Filmmakers didn't help their cause, pulling alarms so they could shoot real-life fire trucks rushing to fight blazes that didn't exist. Car chase scenes in town were criticized as reckless. Churchgoers didn't like studios staging bank robberies on Sundays, when the streets were empty.

'Some people felt the filmmakers were taking over the town,' Bean said.

An anti-film mayor was elected in 1917 and by 1930 the city had lost all its major producers."

Source: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/2008-09-05-118465882_x.htm

In the end however, Jacksonville simply did not spend the money or effort to compete with Hollywood, California---an even more anti movie morality town.  While United Artists was spending the money that DW Griffiths had amassed with his incredibly racist "Birth of a Nation" on actually producing films in Hollywood, Southern Industries (which would morph into Paramount) was spending money on controlling distribution and the vertical construction of the Industry.  Spending on Production instead of Distribution led to a glut of talent and technical skills in Hollywood.  Jacksonville was left with a few people generating huge profits with Paramount (check out the Lynch Building and the Florida Theatre history) but that wealth could pick and go anywhere it liked.

It did.

The Cities that benefited were Hollywood and Los Angeles, California.  The film industry employs more than 240 thousand people and contributes 47 billion dollars to the economy of the region every year, according to a recent study covered by the Los Angelese Times.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/20/entertainment/la-et-ct-onlocation-20121120