The Rise and Fall of America's Original Hollywood: Jacksonville, Florida

[00:00:00]By 1916, Jacksonville, Florida had more working film studios than any city in America outside New York. Over 30 of them. The company that would become MGM was founded there. The first featurelength technicolor motion picture was shot there. Oliver Hardy started his career there, cranking out a 100 films in three years. [music] And then in a single mayoral election, the city voted the entire industry out. Within a few years, every major studio had relocated to a small, unremarkable district of Los Angeles that most Americans had never heard of. They called it Hollywood. This is the story of how one city built the American film industry from scratch and then deliberately, consciously, by popular vote, gave it away. It begins, as so many American stories do, with a fire. On the afternoon of May 3rd, 1901, workers at the Cleveland Fiber Factory on the corner of Beaver and Davis Streets in downtown Jacksonville left for their noon break. They had laid out piles of Spanish moss to dry in the sun.

[00:01:06]The moss was the raw material for mattresses, one of dozens of small industries that kept Jacksonville humming at the turn of the century.

[00:01:15]While the workers ate, a spark from a nearby chimney landed in the moss.

[00:01:20]Someone tried a few buckets of water. It wasn't enough. A brisk wind caught the flames and carried them east, leaping from one wooden building to the next with, as one newspaper put it, [music] the rapidity that a man could walk. By the time 16-year-old George Hodan pulled the fire alarm at box number 57 on the corner of State and Davis Streets at about 12:35 in the afternoon, the blaze was already out of control.

[00:01:48]Jacksonville's firefighters riding horsedrawn carts heavy with water discovered that most of the city's streets weren't paved. The wheels bogged down in sand and dirt [music] while the fire raced ahead of them. The city had been suffering a prolonged drought. The wooden buildings with their dry shingle roofs caught like kindling. Families began emptying into the streets, running east toward Hogan's Creek with whatever they could carry. By 3:00, the entire downtown was burning. By 7, firemen made a last stand at Laura Street, saving a 12 block section near the river, [music] but the rest was gone. At 7:30, the wind finally died. By 8:30, it [music] was over.

[00:02:35]146 city blocks were gone. Over 2,300 buildings were ash. churches, hotels, mills, factories, the offices of the Florida Times Union, the Afroamerican Insurance Association, which had been the first insurance company in the state. 10,000 people, nearly a third of the city's population, were homeless.

[00:03:00]Seven [music] were dead. The smoke was visible from Savannah, 200 m north. The damage was estimated at $15 million, which in 1901 was a staggering sum for a city whose entire annual municipal budget was a fraction of that. Governor William Jennings declared martial law and sent in the state [music] militia.

[00:03:22]The stunned residents of Jacksonville slept in parks, in churches that had survived, in the yards of neighbors east of the creek. And then the very next Monday morning, they started to rebuild.

[00:03:34]The speed of it was extraordinary. The first building permit was issued on May 6th, just 3 days after the fire, to a man named Rudolph Grunthal, for a temporary structure at the corner of Maine and State Streets. [music] Within weeks, committees had organized for everything from feeding the displaced to surveying the ruins. [music] Within months, new construction was underway all across the burned district. And then something unexpected happened. A 28-year-old architect from Breeze, Illinois, read about the fire in the New York Times, and saw something no one else had thought to see. He saw a blank canvas. Henry John Cluo arrived in Jacksonville in 1901 and never left. He had studied in New York, had been influenced by the work of Louis Sullivan and the young Frank Lloyd Wright, and was committed [music] to a radical new architectural movement that would eventually be called the Prairie School.

[00:04:29]Clean horizontal lines, reinforced concrete, buildings that breathed light.

[00:04:35]Jacksonville, level to bare ground, was the largest commission an architect of his generation could hope for. Clu didn't design a building. He designed a city. Over the next decade, Cluo's firm produced one landmark after another. His [music] St. James building, which opened in 1912, was a prairie school masterpiece. the first reinforced concrete high-rise in the American South. [music] He built the public library. He built hotels. He built commercial blocks along Bay Street and Foresight Street that would have looked at home in Chicago or Buffalo. He was the first architect in the region to use waterjetted steel quesons for concrete pilings, a technical innovation that let him build higher and heavier on Jacksonville's sandy soil. The city that rose from the ashes of 1901 was for a brief and remarkable period one of the most architecturally progressive small cities in America. And it was the architecture that brought the movies. In the first decade of the 20th century, the motion picture industry was essentially a New York business. [music] Thomas Edison, who held most of the major patents on film equipment and raw film stock, had formed a cartel called the Motion Picture Patents Company, the Edison Trust in December of 1908. The trust was a consortium of the major studios of the day. Edison, Biograph, Vitigraph, SNA, Celig, Luben, Kalum, and a few others along with Eastman Kodak, which controlled the supply of film stock. If you wanted to make a movie in America, you needed Edison's permission.

[00:06:15]If you didn't have it, you could expect a lawsuit, an injunction, or according to some accounts, a visit from hired men who would smash your camera. But Edison's enforcers were based in New Jersey, and the trust's power was strongest in New York. Filmmakers who wanted to work outside its reach had two options. Go to Southern California, where the distance from New Jersey made enforcement nearly impossible, and the Mexican border offered a last resort escape route, or go south to Florida, [music] where the climate was just as favorable and the rail connections were better. Florida won the first round, and within Florida, one city made the most aggressive pitch. Jacksonville had three things filmmakers needed. The first was light. Early motion picture cameras required enormous quantities of natural sunlight. Artificial lighting existed but was ruinously expensive, [music] and Jacksonville averaged more sunny days per year than almost any city on the east coast. The second was variety.

[00:07:16]Within a day's travel of downtown, directors could shoot on beaches, in swamps, along rivers, in pine forests, on the grounds of old plantations, or against the new skyline of Cluo's gleaming concrete buildings. The St. John's River alone offered a dozen different backdrops, bridges, docks, sandbars, overhanging oaks trailing Spanish moss that made every frame look like a Gothic romance.

[00:07:44]And the third thing Jacksonville had was access. The city sat at the junction of the Seabard Airline and the Atlantic coastline railroads with direct connections to New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. A studio could ship costumes, equipment, and exposed film north to the processing labs and have it back in days. The first company to take the gamble was Calum Studios, a small New York outfit founded in 1907 by three producers whose last names, Klene, Long, and Marian, provided the initials for the company name. In 1908, Calum sent a crew south for the winter and set up operations at the old Rosand Hotel in the Fairfield neighborhood on the east bank of the St. John's River. The Roseland was a three-story wooden hotel on Clarkson Street near Taliand Avenue.

[00:08:37]Originally built in the 1870s as a destination for Gilded Age tourists arriving by the East End Shell Road, one [music] of the first paved roads in the region. By 1908, its best days as a resort were behind it, but it still had rooms. It still had grounds, and it sat right on the river. The cast and crew lived in the hotel. They took the ferry across the St. John's. Two boats, the Dixie Land and the Duval running every 7 and 1/2 minutes to shoot on location in Arlington, where the [music] creeks, old bridges, and massive live oaks draped in moss gave them settings that audiences in New York and Chicago had never seen.

[00:09:20]The director was Sydney Olcott, a Canadian-born filmmaker who understood instinctively that natural locations photographed better than painted sets.

[00:09:31]Calm produced 18 films in its first Jacksonville winter, Civil War adventures, frontier melodramas, and sensational stories about Florida crackers drinking, fighting, and killing. The titles tell you everything.

[00:09:46]A Florida feud. The Seolles trust, the Seol halfbreeds, a slave to drink. The audiences ate them up. Calm had produced the first film version of Benhur and the first adaptation of Dr. Jackekal and Mr. Hyde. So, the company had credibility [music] and its success in Jacksonville sent a signal to the rest of the industry. By 1910, the Seelig Polycope Company out of Chicago had set up shop at Dixie Land Park, a 30 acre amusement park on the south bank of the river that the Florida Times Union had praised on its opening in 1907 as the kind of place Jacksonville has long needed. Celig brought animals, actual lions, actual elephants, an entire traveling circus' worth of creatures acquired when the studio's founder, William Celig, took possession of Big Otto Brightcruits' circus to settle a debt. They began shooting jungle pictures and westerns against the park's grounds. At a screening of one Jacksonville made celig film, Back to the Primitive, a woman in the audience screamed, [music] "My God, will them lions get her?" When the star, Kathleen Williams, was menaced on screen. The lions were real. The danger was at least partly real. The audience had no way of knowing the difference.

[00:11:10]The park had a theater, a dance pavilion, a 160 ft bamboo slide called the Dixie Dood Drop, Polite Vaudeville, charging 25 and050 cents for matineese, and now a working film studio, where a young contract player named Tom Mix made some of his earliest pictures. Mix was under contract to Celig from 1910 to 1917 and would go on to become the biggest cowboy star in the history of silent film. His career started in Jacksonville with real Spanish moss for scenery and real Florida sand for dust. By 1912, the Luben manufacturing company of Philadelphia had opened a studio at 750 Riverside Avenue and others were following fast. Edison Studios itself sent crews down. Essa came. Gumont came.

[00:12:04]Every winter the boarding houses of Jacksonville filled up with actors, directors, cameramen, and the small army of carpenters, seamstresses, and prop makers that a working studio required.

[00:12:16]The Florida Times Union ran breathless reports. Silent film stars, recognizable faces in an era before screen credits named them, could be spotted strolling down Main Street or dining at the hotels along Bay Street. Jacksonville earned a new title, the winter film capital of the world. And it was in this atmosphere, a city drunk on its own sudden glamour, that the industry began to produce stars who would define American entertainment for decades. In 1914, a heavy set 22-year-old arrived in Jacksonville from Milligville, Georgia, where he'd been running a movie theater since he was 18. He'd spent three years watching other people perform on screen and have become convinced with the irrational confidence that launches entire careers that he could do better in front of the camera than behind the ticket counter. His given name was Norll Hardy, but he'd changed it to Oliver in honor of his late father, and everyone at the studio called him Babe because of his round, pink, absurdly youthful face.

[00:13:24]Luben's Jacksonville studio gave him his first role in a onereal comedy called Outwitting Dad. He was not the lead. He was barely in the film, but he was in front of the camera and he would stay there. By the time the Luben studio closed in early 1915, Hardy had appeared in more than 65 films, all shot in Jacksonville.

[00:13:50]He moved on to the Vim Comedy Company, which had bought out Luben's Riverside Avenue facilities, and starred in a series of two real comedies alongside Billy Rugg, playing characters called Plump [music] and Runt. The Vim Comedy Company was a factory. They shot a new two- reeler every week, sometimes faster, and Hardy was in nearly all of them. The Vim operation collapsed in 1917 when Hardy discovered that the company's two founders, Lewis Burstein and Mark Dentenfas, had been stealing from the payroll. By then, Hardy had appeared in well over a hundred films, and he left Jacksonville for California, where he would eventually be paired with a thin Englishman named Stan Laurel. The rest of that story is famous. The beginning of it, a h 100red odd comedies shot on the banks of the St. John's River, is almost entirely forgotten.

[00:14:44]Hardy wasn't the only future legend working in Jacksonville. Rudolph Valentino passed through. So did Lionel and Ethel Baramore. So by some accounts did Mary Pikford. [music] The actress Miriam Cooper, who would go on to starring roles in DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, lived at the Rosand Hotel during her Jacksonville seasons with Calum, appearing in a new film every week. Decades later, in her memoir, Dark Lady of the Silence, she would reminisce about keeping a baby alligator as a pet while living in Fairfield.

[00:15:20]The Moving Picture World, an industry trade publication, described her in 1912 as having large, dreamy eyes and being expert in the use of boxing gloves. She needed both for Calum's output. The films demanded heroins who could look wistful in one scene and dynamite a bridge in the next. By 1915, the concentration of talent and capital in Jacksonville was extraordinary. That year, a group of film distribution men, exchange operators from Pittsburgh, Portland, Seattle, incorporated a new company in Jacksonville. They called it Metro Pictures Corporation. Richard A.

[00:16:00]Roland was president. Louis B. Mayor was secretary. The company would move its production operations to New York and then to Los Angeles, but its corporate origins were on the banks of the St. John's River. In 1924, Metro Pictures merged with Goldwin Pictures and Louis B. Mayor's own production company to form Metro Goldwin Mayor. The M in MGM, the Roaring Lion, the most famous logo in motion picture history, traces its corporate lineage to Jacksonville, Florida. And there was one more milestone ahead. In the spring and summer of 1917, the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation chose Jacksonville as the location for its first ever featurelength color film. The movie was called The Gulf Between, a slight romantic comedy about a girl raised by a sea captain who falls in love with a man above her social station. The story was forgettable. The technology was revolutionary. Herbert Calmas and Daniel Commtock, two MIT graduates, had developed a two-color process using a beam splitter behind the camera lens that exposed two consecutive frames of film simultaneously. One through a red filter and one through a green. It required a special projector. It ran at twice normal speed and it was by all accounts a nightmare to operate. But it worked. It captured color. imperfect limited to reds and greens but color on motion picture film for the first time in an American feature. The Gulf Between premiered at a private screening at Eolan Hall in New York on September 21st, 1917. The moving picture world called it a great advancement. Photoplay praised the approximation of natural colors, but noted that the pallet was limited. The film itself is now lost.

[00:17:53]Only a few frames survive. [music] It was shot entirely in Jacksonville using the city's exteriors as backdrops and it represents one of the great what-ifs of American cinema. The first color movie made in a city that was about to drive the movies out forever. Because even as the Gulf Between was being shot, Jacksonville was turning against the industry it had courted for nearly a decade. The trouble had been building for years. Filmmakers, it turned out, were not easy neighbors. They needed crowds for their scenes, and their methods for assembling those crowds were not subtle. Directors would pull false fire alarms to empty buildings and get people onto the streets. They would stage fake bank robberies in broad daylight, sometimes without informing the police to capture the reactions of genuine bystanders. They would shut down entire blocks of downtown for hours, rerouting traffic, occupying sidewalks, turning the business district into a set. The incident that crystallized the backlash came during the production of a film called The Clarion in 1916, a melodrama about a corrupt patent medicine manufacturer and the crusading newspaper that exposes him. The producers needed a large mob scene in the heart of downtown Jacksonville and hired nearly 1,400 local residents as extras, paying them a small fee to gather in the streets and act out a disturbance. But before the first shot was completed, the directors lost control of the crowd. 1,400 people, many of whom had never been on a film set and had no experience taking direction, turned from a staged mob [music] into a real one. What was supposed to be a simulated disturbance became an actual riot. Storefronts along the downtown streets were smashed. Glass was broken.

[00:19:45]Goods were damaged. The cost ran into thousands of dollars. No one was killed, but the message was clear. The film industry was not merely inconvenient. It was dangerous. for the conservative church-going residents of Jacksonville, many of whom already regarded the filmmakers as outsiders as morally suspect, as people who shot their scenes on Sundays when everyone else was in church. The Clarion riot was the last straw. The backlash found its political champion in a 32-year-old Jacksonville lawyer named John Wellbourne Martin.

[00:20:22]Martin had only about four years of formal education, but he'd studied law on his own and been admitted to the Florida Bar in 1914.

[00:20:31]Three years later, he ran for mayor against the incumbent Jet T Bowden, a two-time mayor who had been a friend to the film industry. Bowden was a showman himself. He'd hosted election night parties with Oliver Hardy as entertainment. He understood what the studios brought to the city, jobs, tourism, national attention. But by 1917, Bowden's association with the movie people had become a liability.

[00:20:57]Martin ran explicitly on an anti-film platform. He promised that his administration would not be ruled by the shady filmmakers. He won easily, becoming the youngest mayor in Jacksonville's history. The dye was cast. Martin took office and made it clear that the studios were no longer welcome. There would be no more blocked streets, no more false alarms, no more riots. The city that had been the winter film capital of the world was now, by democratic choice, closed for business.

[00:21:28]The timing could not have been worse, or depending on your perspective, better.

[00:21:34]The Edison Trust had already been declared a monopoly by the federal courts in 1915 and ordered dissolved, which meant filmmakers no longer needed to flee New York to escape Edison's [music] patent enforcers.

[00:21:47]The railroads, which the studios depended on to ship film stock and equipment, were being commandeered for the war effort. The United States had entered the Great War in April of 1917.

[00:22:01]And in 1918, a devastating influenza epidemic swept through Jacksonville, making movie goers reluctant to gather in theaters and further depressing the local industry. But the deepest cut was simply this. Los Angeles wanted what Jacksonville was throwing away.

[00:22:19]Hollywood in 1917 was not yet Hollywood as we know it. It was farmland and bungalows, a small residential district northwest of downtown Los Angeles with no particular identity. But it had the same sunshine Jacksonville had. It had varied landscapes, mountains, deserts, ocean, city streets within a short drive. It had cheap land. And crucially, unlike Jacksonville, it had no established business class that viewed filmmakers as a nuisance.

[00:22:53]Los Angeles had no dominant industry of its own. The city fathers saw the studios not as an annoyance, but as an economic engine, and they offered something Jacksonville had withdrawn, a guarantee that the filmmakers could shape the city to their own purposes.

[00:23:10]One by one, the studios packed up and headed west. Calm had already been bought out by Vitigraph in 1917. The Vim Comedy Company collapsed the same year.

[00:23:20]King B Films, which had taken over from Vim, soon relocated to New York and then to California. Edison Studios, Luben, Celig, SNA, they all went west or went under. By 1920, Jacksonville's film industry was essentially dead. The boarding houses emptied out. The stages went dark. The sets were dismantled or left to rot. Today, the site where the Luben and Vim studios once stood at 750 Riverside Avenue is buried under the approach ramps of the Fuller Warren Bridge. The Rosland Hotel in Fairfield, where Calum's actors lived, and Miriam Cooper kept her pet alligator, is long gone. The neighborhood was consumed by industrial yards and the construction of the Matthews Bridge. Dixie Land Park, where Tom Mix made westerns with real lions, is a memory. The spot where Metro Pictures was incorporated, the company that became MGM, is now Metropolitan Park, a public venue on the riverbank that hosts concerts and festivals. There is no plaque. But one studio survived, and its survival is the part of the story that changes the meaning of everything that came before. In 1920, while every other film company in Jacksonville was closing its doors or heading for California, a 30-year-old filmmaker from the nearby town of Middberg, did the opposite. Richard Norman bought the bankrupt Eagle Studios complex, five buildings on Arlington Road, including a two-story production office that had originally been a cigar factory, a small cottage for costume changes, a storage shed, a building housing the original power generators for the cameras and lights, and a large film stage on nearby Commerce Street.

[00:25:08]There was even a swimming pool for aquatic scenes, [music] long since filled in and covered over. Norman turned the whole compound into the headquarters of the Norman Film Manufacturing Company. Norman was white, his actors were black, and the films he made there in the last surviving studio in a city that had thrown away its film industry were unlike anything Hollywood was producing. Norman had been a traveling filmmaker for years, crisscrossing the Midwest, shooting promotional shorts for local towns. In 1916, while still based in the Midwest, he produced a film called The Greeneyed Monster, which found a wide audience. At some [music] point, the exact reason remains unclear, he decided to remake it with an all black cast. He had seen the way Hollywood portrayed African-Ameans, [music] servants, clowns, criminals, caricatures.

[00:26:04]He had also seen with a businessman's eye an enormous untapped market.

[00:26:10]Hundreds of movie theaters across the American South served exclusively black audiences under segregation. And those theaters had almost nothing to show that reflected the lives or aspirations of the people sitting in the seats. Norman set out to fill that gap. The films he made at the Arlington Road Studio were called race films, a term of the era for movies made with all black casts for black audiences. But the label understates what Norman was doing. His films cast black actors as heroes, professionals, aviators, detectives, and romantic leads. At a time when the most celebrated film in America was DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Clan, Norman was producing featurelength adventures in which black men and women were the protagonists [music] of their own stories. He hired nationally known black actors from New York and Chicago and brought them to Jacksonville. His production values were high. His distribution network reached black theaters across the [music] country. He lived with his family on the second floor of the main production building at 6337 Arlington Road. And on weekends, he hosted screening parties in a small theater room upstairs. Norman made at least seven feature films between 1920 and 1928. Most of them are now lost.

[00:27:33]Nitrate film stock, the standard material of the era, is inherently unstable, and countless early films have decomposed or been destroyed. But one survived. The Flying Ace, shot in 1926, tells the story of a black World War I pilot who returns home a hero. It was buil as the greatest airplane thriller ever filmed, which was a stretch. The entire movie was shot on the ground using a single airplane photographed from different angles and clever camera tricks to simulate aerial combat. But audiences didn't care. They cheered.

[00:28:12]They laughed. Nearly a century later, screenings of The Flying Ace still draw the same reactions. The film's inspiration came from the headlines.

[00:28:23]Norman had followed the career of Bessie Coleman, the first African-Amean woman to earn a pilot's license, who had become a national celebrity through her barntorming exhibitions. He had spoken with her about making a film of her stunt flying. They never got the chance.

[00:28:38]On April 30th, 1926, the same year The Flying Ace was released, Coleman arrived in Jacksonville for an exhibition flight sponsored by the Negro Welfare League.

[00:28:50]The day before the show, she went up for a practice flight in a Curtis JN4 Jenny biplane with a mechanic named William Wills at the controls. Coleman sat in the rear cockpit, [music] unbuckled, leaning over the side to survey the airfield below for her planned parachute jump. At about 1,500 ft, something went wrong. A wrench that had been left in the engine housing during a hasty repair worked its way into the control gears and jammed the elevator controls. The plane lurched, accelerated, nosedived, and flipped upside down at about 500 ft.

[00:29:28]Coleman, unbuckled, was thrown from the open cockpit and fell to her death.

[00:29:34]Wills crashed with the [music] plane and was killed on impact. A local pilot named Lorie Young inspected the wreckage and found the wrench lodged in the tail.

[00:29:45]Coleman was 34 years old. It is one of those facts that seems almost too neatly ironic to be true. The woman who inspired Norman's most important film died in the same city where he made it in the same year he released it while preparing for the same kind of daring performance his film celebrated. But it happened. Jacksonville, which had thrown away the mainstream film industry, had become the place where both the most radical filmmaker of the silent era and the most daring black aviator in America converged, and where one of them met her end. Norman kept working until 1928 [music] when the rise of talking pictures made his silent film equipment obsolete. He invested in sound technology, [music] but the industry standard shifted to a format his equipment couldn't accommodate. The Norman Film Manufacturing Company transitioned to distribution, then promotion, then quietly closed. Norman stayed in Jacksonville for the rest of his life. The irony of the Norman Studios story is that it exists precisely because Jacksonville rejected the film industry. Had the city remained the winter film capital of the world, the big studios would never have abandoned the Eagle Studios complex on Arlington Road. It would have been bought by Paramount or Fox or some other outfit making the same films they were making everywhere else. Instead, it sat empty until a man from Middberg bought it for a fraction of what it was worth [music] and used it to make the most culturally significant films of Jacksonville's entire cinematic history.

[00:31:24]The city's rejection of the movies is what made room for the movies that mattered most. Hollywood, of course, never looked back. [music] The independents who had fled Edison's trust. Men like Carl Lemley, Adolf Zukor, William Fox became the founders of the studios that would dominate the 20th century. Lemley built Universal.

[00:31:45]Zukor built Paramount. Fox built the company that bore his name. By the mid 1920s, the Los Angeles film industry was generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and the city itself was being reshaped around it. New neighborhoods, new restaurants, new [music] wealth, an entire economy of glamour that fed on itself. The studio system, Metro Goldwin, Mayor, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, Fox, [music] had coalesed into the oligopoly that would dominate American entertainment for half a century. The star system, which the Edison Trust had tried to suppress by refusing to identify actors by name, had produced celebrity on a scale the world had never seen. The Hollywood sign went up in 1923, originally as an advertisement for a real estate development called Hollywood Land. Within a decade, the word Hollywood had become a synonym not just for the American film industry, but for American aspiration itself.

[00:32:49]And John Welbborne Martin, the [clears throat] mayor who had chased the studios out of Jacksonville. He rode his anti-movie popularity to the governor's mansion, serving as Florida's 24th governor from 1925 to 1929.

[00:33:04]He never expressed public regret.

[00:33:07]Jacksonville moved on. The city built insurance companies and banking houses and port facilities. During World War II, it became one of the largest military bases on the East Coast. It grew, consolidated with Duval County in 1968, and eventually became the largest city by area in the contiguous United States. It is a city of highways, strip malls, naval stations, and corporate headquarters. a perfectly functional American metropolis that gives almost no outward sign of its extraordinary early 20th century history.

[00:33:46]Henry Cluo, [music] the architect who had designed the city's rebirth after the Great Fire, lived in Jacksonville until his death in 1964 at the age of 91.

[00:33:57]He had spent his later decades watching the buildings he designed be surrounded, overshadowed, and in some cases demolished by structures that had none of his ambition.

[00:34:10]The St. James building, [music] his masterpiece, the first reinforced concrete high-rise in the south, is now Jacksonville's city hall, [music] which is at least a dignified use. But the architectural vision Cluo brought to the postfire city was never fully sustained.

[00:34:29]Later decades filled in the gaps with the usual American inventory, parking garages, [music] office towers, vacant lots. The film industry left behind almost nothing physical. Almost. At 6337 Arlington Road in the old Arlington neighborhood, the Norman Studios complex still stands. The city of Jacksonville bought four of the five original buildings in 2002. In 2004, the state of Florida provided a grant for preservation. The complex was designated a national historic landmark, the only surviving silent film studio in Jacksonville and one of the only preserved race film studios [music] in the country.

[00:35:15]In 2021, the Library of Congress selected The Flying Ace [music] for preservation in the National Film Registry as a work of cultural and historical significance. The museum opens its doors on the first and third Saturdays of every month. Admission is free. About 20 or 25 people come to each open house. They stand in the building where Richard Norman processed [music] his film, where he stored his costumes and generators, where he screened his pictures for neighbors and friends. Most of them, according to the museum's volunteers, say the same thing when they arrive. I didn't know this was here.

[00:35:54]That reaction, genuine surprise that any of this happened at all is perhaps the truest measure of what Jacksonville lost. not just an industry, not just the jobs and the revenue and the tax base that the studios would have generated had they stayed. What Jacksonville lost was the knowledge that it was first.

[00:36:14]Before the Walk of Fame, before the Oscars, before Sunset Boulevard and Groman's Chinese [music] Theater and the entire mythology of Hollywood, there was a city on the St. John's River, where the movies were invented as a business, where the first Technicolor film was shot, where the first comedy factory turned out a 100 pictures in 3 years, where a studio that would become MGM drew up its articles of incorporation, and where one stubborn filmmaker stayed behind after everyone else had left to make the only films that survive. The Spanish moss still hangs from the oaks in Arlington. The same moss that served as backdrop for a thousand silent films.

[00:36:57][music] The same genus of plant that dried in the sun outside a mattress factory on Beaver Street on the afternoon of May 3rd, 1901 and caught a spark and burned a city to the ground and created the blank canvas on which the whole improbable story was drawn.

[00:37:16]The moss doesn't care about any of it.

[00:37:18]It grows on everything. It outlasts everything. It hung there before the fire and after the fire. Before the movies and after the movies, [music] before the election of 1917 and long after the last reel of the last Jacksonville picture was shipped north on the Atlantic coastline. At 6337 Arlington Road, the production building faces the street the same way it has for over a century. The door is where it was when the Eagle Film Company built it.

[00:37:47]The ceiling is where it was when Richard Norman developed his negatives. A plaque by the entrance identifies the building as a national historic landmark. Inside, the rooms are quiet. The cameras are gone, the lights are gone, the actors are gone. What remains is the building itself and the single surviving film [music] and the fact, improbable, irreversible, and still not widely known that the American motion picture industry was born here in a city that decided it didn't want it.