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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
Owen Moore and Mary PickfordTheir First Role - part 2 of 2At the time that Moore and Pickford met, fell in love and eloped, Hollywood was just beginning to beckon to the film pioneer companies that were based in the Eastern cities. Hollywood slumbered in the scented air of citrus blossoms and pineapple farms that spread out below the coyote dens and wild scrub on a ribbon of hills above. The 3,000 or so residents of this hinterland a few miles west of Los Angeles were aware but unconcerned at the metamorphosis taking place in the neighbouring Los Angeles, transforming itself from the pueblo it had been just a few decades earlier into a metropolis. The farmers of Hollywood tended their orange groves and avocado orchards. Owen Moore didn’t like what he was hearing about the place out West. If all the reports were true that he’d listened to over beer in his favourite bar, Luchows, it was a hot and dusty place much too far away from Broadway to suit his tastes. Moore understood why his acting buddies had allowed themselves to be shanghaied to such a place. If their bosses in the film companies chose to heed the propaganda campaign being directed at the picture business, then who were mere actors to protest? These flickers were paying even the lowliest players five dollars a day and up – more than ‘legitimate’ theatre could offer in the early 1900s. The lines of unemployed actors outside these studios – Biograph, Essenay, IMP and others – told their own story. The great thespians of the day may have looked down their noses at this new entertainment business, but for many an out-of-work actor, the moving pictures were heaven sent. The work was gruelling, long days and nights shut up in tiny studios, churning out three or four flickers a week for a slave master called the motion picture camera – but they were glad to have it. Few of these actors would argue when they were dispatched to California where, according to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, movie makers could exploit a ‘golden sunlight almost year round, open plains, snowy mountains, deserts and wild seashores.’
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