LIVING HISTORY
27
Selznick’s plans excited all of Florida. The Russian-born immigrant
was, after all, a famous pioneer of film production whose advertising
slogan was one of the best-known catch phrases in America:
Selznick Pictures Make Happy Hours. His flamboyant rise to celebrity
had rewarded him with a 17-room apartment on Park Avenue, fawning
servants, Ming vases, and a ritzy Rolls Royce. Like his movies, the
short and stocky mogul’s projected image was bigger than life. Once,
he even had the chutzpah to telegraph Tsar Nicholas II to offer him an
acting job, after he’d been deposed. Which community would be lucky
enough to attract a man like him?
BIRTH OF IDEA
Selznick’s proposal to move Hollywood to Florida didn’t sound
as farfetched then as it might sound now. It was two years before
the talkies hit the theaters, so the Golden Age of Hollywood had not
begun. Perhaps it was not too late for the movie planet to change its
locus of gravity. But so often in life the difference between wild success
and great disaster turns out to be a matter of timing. Forces trumping
imagination were still in play. At the moment when Selznick stood on
the verge of making his biggest production, reality was preparing to
reject his script.
Selznick was confident his strategy would outfox his competition.
Florida was three times closer to New York than California, and New
York was still cinema’s distribution center. Besides, bringing the movie
industry back to the Sunshine State would be like coming home. Less
than a decade before, Jacksonville had housed at least 30 movie companies.
Back then, the city had been known as the Winter Movie Capital
of the World. Oliver Hardy, of Laurel & Hardy fame, got his big break
there. But in 1917, an upstart politician fired up his campaign with
a promise to “tame the motion picture industry.” A growing moral
majority in the city objected to disruptive car chases through their
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WM F. CRARY II COLLECTION
The 1915 Selznick movie, Heart of the Blue Ridge, included
famous silent film star Clara Kimball.
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