Thursday 6 April
Robert E. Sherwood publishes a travel piece, ‘Through Hollywood With Gun and Camera’, with a second following a week later.
‘Externally, Hollywood looks exactly like hundreds of other towns that have sprung up overnight from the wilderness,’ he wrote. ‘Everything is spick-and-span and brand-new, and the glistening white buildings glare excessively in the light of the well-known California sun.’ He noticed the presence of ‘a tremendous “H”’ overlooking the city – the first letter of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, finished in 1923.
Sherwood toured the studios, including the Ince studio in Culver City, where he saw ‘a scene of the interior of Westminster Abbey being converted into a Bowery cabaret. This studio, by the way, is the most beautiful of all, resembling from the front a stately Southern mansion, with an imposing, green-liveried Negro butler at the door. There were no mint juleps, however.’ (This kind of semi-quip is typical of the Algonquin round table, and of their forerunner, H. L. Mencken.)
The building Sherwood referred to, modelled on George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, would become familiar to filmgoers when the studio was taken over by David O. Selznick in the 1930s, and the administration building became his company’s ‘ident’, in modern parlance, appearing at the start of Rebecca, the film Sherwood would help write.