Los Angeles before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905 to 1915. By Jan Olsson. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 479 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-9188468-06-2.)

Abstract

Jan Olsson has produced an important book that reconceptualizes the early cultural history of the cinema in the United States. Los Angeles before Hollywood delineates the mutually constitutive relationship of cinema and popular urban journalism as cultural phenomena. Breaking from film historians' traditional reliance on trade papers as source material and their focus on New York in their studies of early film, Olsson draws on mainstream Los Angeles newspapers to examine the development of film culture in Los Angeles and the role of the popular press in defining the social experience of film. Newspaper coverage validated the emerging medium and mediated the cinema's relationships with different publics, from movie audiences to social reformers. In negotiating debates over the role of the cinema in urban life, the popular press became a public forum for cultural contests over modernity. The press not only commented on films and actors but the practices of spectatorship as well. The press policed the cinema and the rituals of cinemagoing by subjecting them to a critical gaze. Olsson describes several successive stages of press interaction with the cinema, each characterized by a different angle of vision. During the first stage, the press reported on the movies as an oddity and spectacle. Later stages were “flaneurian”—reporters sauntering on city streets commented on the practices of nickelodeon spectatorship. There were also regulatory interventions, as when the press turned on the cinema the searching and systematic gaze of the social reformer. The final stage in this period was marked by the emergence of mutually profitable ties between the motion picture industry and the press. Olsson outlines several collaborations between the press and the motion picture industry, including newspapers' distribution of coupons for film showings and a newsreel series that was a joint venture between a film company and the Hearst newspaper chain.