Edendale, Los Angeles
With clear air and sunshine three hundred days out of the year, conditions are ideal for perfect picture making.
From [Edendale] can be seen the Pacific Ocean, twenty-two miles to the west, and the broad panorama of Southern California, with its fruit and stock ranches, its snowcapped mountains and its tropical vegetation, to the east, north and south.
Within a short distance of Edendale may be found every known variety of national scenery, seemingly arranged by a master producer expressly for the motion picture camera.
"[7] In 1909, the Selig-Polyscope Company established the first permanent Los Angeles motion picture studio at the northeast corner of Clifford and Allesandro in Edendale.
[8] The company was founded by Colonel William Selig in Chicago, and it was his associate, Francis Boggs who first established the Los Angeles studio in Edendale.
The studio was originally completed in 1910, and featured a mission-style façade on the front entrance patterned after the bells at Mission San Gabriel.
"[9] Originally under the management of Fred J. Balshofer, the directorial reins were taken over a couple years later by motion picture innovator Thomas H. Ince.
Charles O. Baumann was elected the first president of Universal Film Manufacturing Company, though he was soon replaced by Carl Laemmle after a lawsuit was filed.
After a rough start in New Jersey, movie maker Mack Sennett and his Keystone Comedies arrived in Edendale in September, 1912, and took up the studio lot that had been left by Bison Pictures when they decamped to Inceville.
Though he started in Edendale with a run-down and mostly vacant lot, he soon achieved great success, and took up 5 acres (20,000 m2) on both sides of the street within a few years.
There, Mack Sennett was the first important producer and director of screen farce, where speed, irreverence, exaggeration, sight gags, and bam-bam-bam delivery defined comedy.
Kids watched them shoot the first fast-moving chases with horses and wagons, automobiles, fire engines, bicycles and baby buggies running wild all over Edendale and into Echo Park Lake.
Dressed in ill-fitting New York policemen's uniforms, they hit fruit stands, popcorn wagons, telephone poles and chicken coops.
They were always called to restore law and order to some impossible, funny scene hurriedly created by the wit of Hollywood's comedy gagmen.
When the crew learned the themes of the story, each one was encouraged to come up with a funny thought or idea that might suggest an additional gag to help the picture get another laugh.
In addition to this are buildings of wood, brick and concrete, housing all the industries to be found in the average city of several thousand population, including a five-story planing mill and restaurant.
All kinds of mechanical devices are made in the machine shops, and in the garage the scores of autos used in the Keystone's activities are housed and maintained.
Separate buildings are maintained for the general offices, scenario and publicity departments and for other activities allied with the manufacture of motion pictures.
By 1916, Selig, having relocated to Lincoln Park, leased out his original Edendale studio lot to film director William Fox.
Tom Mix, a popular and enduring star of early western films, was famous for trick riding, stunts, and flashy clothes.
He started his career with Selig-Polyscope, was taken over by William Fox in 1917, was picked up by FBO (a precursor to RKO) in 1928, and made the jump to "talkies" with Universal in the 1930s.
Mix, managing his own films under Fox, acquired a 4-acre (16,000 m2) parcel of land just north of Edendale's main strip, and built a western set there that became known as Mixville.
From the range of plaster-of-Paris mountains surrounding the village Tom led many a convincing attack on a tribe of warriors, the whole thing looking real when the picture was screened.
Norbig was a rental film studio that provided a home for many director/producers who were getting started (a business model that today would be called an "incubator").
(Roach was well known in this period, and became more famous in the 1920s with hits including the "Our Gang" / "Little Rascals" series, and would build his own studio in Culver City.)
After their release from the penitentiary at McNeil Island in 1914 as political prisoners accused of inciting rebellion, criminal libel and violating neutrality laws, Ricardo Flores Magon and his wife, Maria Talavera, her daughter Lucille Norman, his brother Enrique and Enrique's companion Teresa Arteaga and other PLM members and their families settled on five acres of rented farm land near 2325 Ivanhoe Ave, Edendale in Silver Lake.
