Emeralds in Tinseltown - The Irish in Hollywood by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill [published by Appletree Press]

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This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press

CHAPTER 3

The "O'Kalems"

The Kalem Company seemed a natural lure for many of the Irish who were turning to the new film business for a living back in the 1910s and Olcott was not short of Irish colleagues, counting among his friends and associates actor Tom Moore, brother of Owen Moore, and the gregarious and self-destructive Irish American director Marshal Neilan. Most of them had come to the company broke and hungry for work. Olcott himself had started out as a newspaper seller on the street corners of his native Toronto before setting out for New York with dreams of becoming an actor. He drifted into the film business, signing on with the Kalem Company in 1907, young and brimming with enthusiasm as a fledgling director. But a little experience in this new business might have saved his new employer a bundle of money. One day Olcott spotted a newspaper advertisement announcing a chariot race that would be held in conjunction with a fireworks display on Long Island.

“I took a cameraman and a couple of actors down to the track and shot the race… and presto, Ben Hur,” recalled Olcott.
But as quick as he could say ‘presto’, the publishers of the classic novel hit them with a lawsuit which cost the film company $25,000. It was a landmark court decision establishing for the first time that films could not be made from copyrighted materials without legal permission. But at least the experience left Olcott with the credit of having made the first screen version of Ben Hur.
Olcott enjoyed an illustrious career in Hollywood, working in the early days with Mary Pickford, and later Rudolph Valentino in Monsieur Beaucaire. Other legendary names who came under his sure direction included Norma Talmadge, Pola Negri, Betty Bronson and Richard Barthelmess.
Around 1927, Olcott abandoned Hollywood and went to England to work for British Lion at the new Elstree Studios. This venture ended up in a lawsuit when he declared that a script the company wanted him to direct was nothing more than a cheap glorification of crime and criminals. He won his case and with a $10,000 court award he returned to the U.S. never to make another movie. Apart from his films, the other great contribution made to America by this son of Irish immigrants was the Motion Picture Actors’ Welfare League for Prisoners that he founded with his actress wife Valentine Grant. He died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-eight on March 12th 1949. A story in a trade paper about the funeral service at the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery reported, ‘About a hundred people turned out, none of them current Hollywood hotshots… Pat O’Brien and Jean Hershot were among the few present-day film folk.’
The Kalem Company was a revolving door for the Irish, but the most permanent Irish fixture for a long time at Kalem was Marshal Neilan, the Irish-American director who did not simply enjoy life… he wallowed in it. He was a buccaneer in Hollywood with a taste for the high life, a tormented genius who became the industry’s highest paid director only to crash and burn in one of Hollywood’s most spectacular riches to rags scenarios.
One sunny day in March 1921 a young writer from the fan magazine Photoplay, Clodagh Saurin, went to interview Neilan on his set. She found him lounging with the Irish-American stars of his movie, Colleen Moore and Pat O’Malley. The three were trading old Irish poems and ballads.

“It’s the most natural thing in the world that we should be here together,” Neilan volunteered when the reporter expressed astonishment at finding an Irish hooly in full jig on the set in mid afternoon. “When you stop to think about it we Irish are the only race in the world that can go anywhere, do anything, belong to other countries and still be ourselves.”
The sing-along was fully in character for the fun-loving director. ‘Of all the personalities who made Hollywood glitter in the Twenties, none was more irresponsible so expensively as Marshal (‘Mickey’) Neilan,’ wrote Hollywood journalist Jack Spears. ‘Handsome, witty, and possessed of instinctive charm, he directed a virtually unbroken string of box-office hits, and squandered the millions he made thereby with an abandon that was often spectacular, sometimes arrogant, and always ruinous. He died in a charity ward – alone.’
The story of 'The "O'Kalems"' concludes with [part 3]

'Emeralds in Tinseltown - The Irish in Hollywood' by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, published by Appletree Press.

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