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"

Back in 1909 when the eighteen-year-old Neilan applied for work at the Glendale California adjunct of the Kalem Company he was almost destitute, in shabby old jacket and derelict pants. He had moved up to Los Angeles from San Bernadino, California, where he was born in 1891 to Irish-American parents. The death of his civil engineer father when Neilan was a baby forced him to take odd jobs from childhood to help support himself and his mother. So when things started to move for him at Kalem and the dollars came rolling in, ‘Mickey’ was ready to enjoy life a little. He signed on as a writer, but within a few months had impressed his bosses sufficiently to get a shot at directing. Neilan’s brilliance was immediately obvious and within a couple of years he was supervis-ing the entire Kalem production operation in Glendale – he was just twenty-two. After Kalem Neilan moved on to the Famous Players Laskey, where he directed Mary Pickford in one of her most enduring classics Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, for which he was paid a reported $150,000. He directed Pickford in another five of her greatest films including Stella Maris and Poor Little Rich Girl.
Other star names that demanded the Neilan directorial touch included Charlie Chaplin, George M. Cohan, John Barrymore, Coleen Moore, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery and Blanche Sweet with whom he shared a short and turbulent marriage. But Neilan’s light quickly failed. His wild parties and bacchanalian lifestyle caught up with him – and as his talent suffered so did his reputation.
He and Owen Moore would often hoist glasses together, two roustabout Irish guys sinking in the bog waters of their own individual destructive cravings. They were a feature of the Hollywood bars and clubs that began springing up around the studios that were spreading over the once quiet citrus groves that cradled La Brea Avenue, Melrose Avenue, and a dusty ‘bridle path’ called Sunset Boulevard.
The beginning of the end for Neilan came when Pickford, unhappy with his work on her latest movie Secrets, closed down production and wrote off a loss of $300,000. He found himself unemployed and broke in the late Twenties.

“This is a great town,” he complained. “One year I made $15,000 a week. The next I couldn’t get fifteen cents.” [Within a year or two Neilan was in bankruptcy court, $190,000 in debt.] “I had to keep up a front. To get a job in Hollywood, you have to keep up appearances,” he told reporters.
Neilan was never to regain the acclaim and talent which had seemingly deserted him. The coming of sound to the movies didn’t help either. The new medium didn’t suit him and just made his slide to disaster all that more rapid. Minor acting and some low budget directorial work kept him barely solvent until World War II when he took a job as an aircraft riveter. A columnist for trade paper Variety, W.A.S. Douglas met the direc-tor on Hollywood Boulevard coming home one day from the factory. Neilan, dressed in overalls and a cap, showed Douglas an ‘E Pin’ which had been awarded him that day at work for ‘excellence on the job.’
&nspb; “I feel better than the night of the preview of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” declared Neilan. He remained in obscurity for the rest of his life, although there was to be just one more brief appearance in Hollywood. In 1957, Marshal Neilan, the man they once dubbed variously ‘the boy millionaire’ and ‘the boy genius’ was an extra in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. He died in Hollywood in 1958 at the Motion Picture Country Home. Mary Pickford headed a contingent of stars who attended his funeral. Almost every newspaper report of the service referred to him as ‘the bad boy’ of Hollywood.
In some respects the ‘O’Kalems’ were in Ireland to film the landscapes and the people as they actually existed – not some early Hollywood back lot fantasy meant to represent that reality. Irish-American documentarian Robert J. Flaherty operated in much the same way when making such monumental works as Man of Aran (1934). It was filmed in a true-to-life fashion that documented the harsh realities of Irish island life, battling the sea in curraghs, coaxing potato crops from barren land, hunting basking sharks to use their oil for lamps. But Flaherty in fact did use cinematic license to create Man of Aran in that he cast the central family of the film from various island families. A film made more than forty years after Flaherty completed his masterpiece claimed that in fact Aran Islanders had not hunted sharks for half a century as O’Flaherty’s film depicted. Nonetheless, the film is still considered a masterpiece of story telling and cinematography and was one of many Flaherty reality films that places him on a pedestal in the history of the cinema.
Flaherty was born of Irish-German parents in 1884 in Iron Mountain Michigan. He spent his early years working as a prospector, working for a railroad company as his father before him had done. At the behest of his employer Flaherty began to take a motion picture cam-era into the wilderness of Hudson Bay to film the wildlife. There he came in contact with the Inuit people and out of that came his first film Nanook of the North in 1922. The reality film depicted the Inuit as they lived and hunted in the frozen north. There followed a contract with Paramount which brought him to Samoa to make yet another reality film about indigenous people entitled Moana. This was a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family.
Robert Flaherty is often hailed as one of the founding fathers of the documentary film, despite his tendency to dramatise reality. His films stand today as masterpieces of story telling and cinematography.

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

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