Oakland Park's Studio City ... SOFLA attempts at film industry in the 1920s

Proposed Screen Talent Studios 1922
Florida State Archives

During the 1920s, the film industry flourished in Hollywood, California while South Florida land sales boomed. Some thought movies and Florida would make a good match. In 1922 Miami-based Barkdull Investment Company advertised lots in the Fort Lauderdale Herald (October 3, 1922) for a development that would house Screen Talent Studios. A ten-acre piece of land was purportedly bought for $3,000,000  (not verified) where a “Greenwich Village” was to house a production crew. Many residential lots sold for $50 each but the movie studio didn’t materialize in Oakland Park, now bordered by Fort Lauderdale. South Florida may have rivaled Hollywood in film making … or maybe not.

Tags: film industry Florida, Florida film industry research, early film makers in Florida, film, Fort Lauderdale history, Oakland Park history

Yankees film in Fort Lauderdale - Safe at Home!

The Yankee baseball team held Spring training in Fort Lauderdale during the 1960s after local hotelier Bob Gill encouraged the club’s owner, Dan Topping Sr., to come to the growing city. Stories about team legends Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Whitey Ford abound and firmly claim a place in this city’s celebrity history.

Part of Yankee history includes filming of the kid’s movie Safe at Home! in 1961 in Fort Lauderdale and Pompano. Hollywood, as captivated as the nation was with Roger Maris’s successful bid to break Babe Ruth’s homerun record during the 1961 season, thought a movie with Mantle and Maris would be a hit. (Where the Boys Are also filmed in Fort Lauderdale, was released in 1960).

Local public relations guru, Jack Drury, who played a small part as a police officer, arranged for the film crew to stay at the beach side Trade Winds Hotel (later associated with the wild Candy Store and its wet T-shirt contests).  

Trade Winds Hotel (built 1940)

The movie starred Mantle, Maris, Don Collier, Patricia Barry, William Frawley (of I Love Lucy fame) and Bryan Russell as the kid who told friends he knew the players, but did not. Team Manager Ralph Hauk also appeared. According to Drury who has written about Fort Lauderdale’s celebrity past, it was Frawley’s last feature film.

By all accounts, working on the film provided Spring training diversion for players. Mickey Mantle claimed he forgot a few of his lines but wasn’t concerned because “they didn’t want me for my acting ability.”

Safe at Home!, while not a box office hit, was continuation of a Hollywood tradition featuring sports stars in their productions; Babe Ruth appeared in 10 films, Olympian swimmer Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan in a number of films and the tradition continues …

Safe at Home! Is available to rent or purchase from Amazon. See below.

Sources:

Drury, Jack. Fort Lauderdale, Playground of the Stars (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2008).

IMDB.org

Sun-Sentinel, Apr. 21, 1989

Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, Filmed in Fort Lauderdale, Yankees in Fort Lauderdale, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford William Frawley, film researcher Jane Feehan

Early filmmakers embrace Fort Lauderdale

 

(L to R) Fairbanks, Pickford, Chaplin, Griffith
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fairbanks_-_Pickford_-_Chaplin_-_Griffith.jpg

By Jane Feehan

Long before the movie Where the Boys Are (1960) elevated Fort Lauderdale to a spring break mecca, filmmakers found something special about the city.

French-born Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968), one of the first women to write, direct and produce a film, brought a crew from her New Jersey studio to Fort Lauderdale in 1917 to make Spring of the Year. She chose the city for its tropical, swampy environment. Many of her works have not survived the years. Guy-Blaché is considered by some to be first in the industry to develop narrative films. She was among the first to work with color and with synchronized sound in film before 1910. (Others claim Edwin R. Porter, maker of the Great Train Robbery in 1903 as first to create narrative.)

Alice Guy-Blache
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_Guy

Also interested in Fort Lauderdale for its tropical look was iconic director D.W. Griffith (1878-1948) who came to the city in 1919 to film Idol Dancer, a story set in the South Pacific. It was the first of two back-to-back films set in the Pacific. He chose the New River area as backdrop for the first, but filmed only parts of the second, White Roses, in Fort Lauderdale. He didn’t like the new seawalls on New River; he thought they spoiled its natural beauty. 

Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved. Jane Feehan.

For more history of movies in South Florida, see:

https://janeshistorynook.blogspot.com/2021/04/filmmaker-dw-griffith-and-lauderdale.html

https://janeshistorynook.blogspot.com/2020/11/south-florida-filmmakers-hold-high.html

Sources:

Gillis, Susan. Fort Lauderdale: The Venice of America. Charleston: Arcadia (2004).

Mast, Gerald. A Short History of the Movies. Indianapolis: Pegasus (1971).

www.suite101.com

www.imdb.org

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GriffithDW.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fairbanks_-_Pickford_-_Chaplin_-_Griffith.jpg

Tags: Fort Lauderdale history, New River, Florida film industry research

D.W. Griffith comes to Fort Lauderdale in 1919; nearly lost at sea

Billy Bitzer & D.W. Griffith 1919
Florida State Archives/Florida Memory

 

By Jane Feehan

Famed film director David Llewelyn Wark “D.W.” Griffith traveled to rustic, tropical Fort Lauderdale to film The Idol Dancer in 1919. During that project, he decided to take a boat to Nassau with his company of actors and friends to shoot additional scenes. It turned out to be a dramatic – and dangerous - voyage.

On December 8, the group set out in rough seas from Miami on the 60-foot yacht Grey Duck. Typically the trip would take 12 hours. The boat did not arrive that day or the next, setting off a highly publicized search. The nascent film industry had already generated its celebrities, Griffith being one of them. The search garnered front-page news in the New York Tribune. A reporter wrote that Fort Lauderdale Mayor Will J. Read, “a wealthy real estate operator and his 16-year-old daughter, Marion” were aboard the vessel as well as “A. Reid and 10 men of the crew.”  

The Tribune reported a search party comprised of a “flying boat, a coast guard cutter and a submarine” returned without news of the lost Grey Duck.  A few years before, during war loan drives, Griffith had befriended former Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo. McAdoo got involved in the search for Griffith and requested then Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to ask “navy officials to redouble efforts.”

On December 15, it was reported by the Tribune that a “wireless message had been received from Hotel Lucerne in Nassau” sent by Griffith. It had been a perilous voyage, he wired New York - three days without food and little water. Two people had been swept off the Grey Duck but were rescued. The boat drifted and nearly capsized, though the seas were “only 30 feet.” The pilot was injured but they eventually made it into the Northwest Channel.  A few members of the party were bedridden due to exhaustion. 

Despite the unpleasant adventure, Griffith returned to Fort Lauderdale in 1923 to shoot The White Rose. By that time, the little town lost some of its primitive appearance to development, which included canal sea walls; he completed the film elsewhere. 

Sources:

New York Tribune, Dec. 19, 1919.

Tags: DW Griffith, Fort Lauderdale history, Mayor Will Read, Florida film researcher,  historical researcher