L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Then there was the oil. Beginning in 1920, a series of spectacular discoveries just south of the city suddenly made Los Angeles into one of the world’s great oil-production centers. At its acme, Southern California produced 5 percent of the world’s total oil supply. Shipping out of the port of San Pedro exploded. Ordinary Angelenos became obsessive investors in local oil syndicates such as the ones organized by oilman C. C. Julian from his office suite above the palatial Loews’s State Theater on Broadway. It wasn’t Sacramento in 1848; it wasn’t Deadwood in 1876 or the Klondike in 1897; it was bigger. For a child of Deadwood, it should have been familiar terrain. Instead, Los Angeles would prove to be a cruel instructor.

      THE PARKERS settled first in Westlake (today’s MacArthur Park), west of downtown, then one of the most fashionable parts of Los Angeles. Despite having moved to a nice neighborhood, the family’s position was a tenuous one. Support from Deadwood was uncertain. (Mary Parker and Bill’s youngest brother, Joseph, would later move to the immigrant neighborhood of Pico Heights.) In Deadwood, the Parkers had been one of the most prominent families in town. In Los Angeles, Mary Parker was basically a single mother. Moreover, she and her family were Catholics in America’s most belligerently Protestant big city, a place where the Ku Klux Klan’s members at one point included the chief of the LAPD, the Los Angeles County sheriff, and the U.S. attorney for Southern California. Bill Parker did not look like one of the swarthy Mediterranean immigrants that caused Protestant Angelenos such concern. Yet at a time when anti-Catholic views circulated freely, he was in a very real sense a minority.

Parker probably didn’t dwell much on these difficulties. He didn’t have time. At the age of seventeen, Bill Parker was now the man in the family. Although Bill’s father continued to support his family from afar, finances were tight. Bill had to find a job. And so Parker turned to Los Angeles’s—and America’s—fastest growing industry: the movies.

Los Angeles became the home of the movie industry almost by accident. In 1909, Col. William Selig (a minstrel show owner who filched a title from the military and the design of the Kinescope movie projector from Thomas Edison) had sent director Francis Boggs west from Chicago to shoot a western in Arizona. Arizona was hot and dull, so Boggs pressed on to the city he had visited two years earlier, Los Angeles. There he and other itinerant filmmakers found the perfect outdoor shooting environment—a mixture of cityscape and countryside, deserts and mountains, ocean and forest. Its three-thousand-mile distance from New York and the Motion Pictures Patent Company “trust,” which technically (i.e., legally) held the license on the technology used by the industry, was a plus too.

By 1910, the year Los Angeles annexed Hollywood, some ten-odd motion picture companies had set up operations in the area. That same year the director D.W Griffith completed the movie In Old California, the first film shot completely in Hollywood. The following year, the Nestor Film Company moved from New Jersey to the corner of Sunset and Gower Street, becoming the first Los Angeles-based motion-picture studio. Universal, Triangle, Luce, Lasky’s Famous Players (later Paramount), Vita-graph (later Columbia), Metro (later part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM), Fox, and others soon followed. By 1915, Hollywood was synonymous with the film industry, and Los Angeles was producing between 60 and 75 percent of the country’s motion pictures—a little more than a quarter of the world’s total films. The First World War destroyed the foreign competition and made Hollywood the cinematic capital of the world. By 1921, its seventy-plus studios had 80 percent of the world market. In the process, Hollywood became fantastically rich. By 1919, an estimated fifteen thousand theaters in the United States alone were generating roughly $800 million a year in revenues—roughly $10 billion in today’s dollars.

Parker was plankton in the Hollywood food chain. His first job was as an usher at the California Theater, an imposing Beaux Arts theater at the corner of Main and Eighth Streets. He soon switched jobs, moving two blocks north to Loews’s State Theater, a glorious 2,600-seat theater, reportedly Los Angeles’s most profitable movie palace, in the heart of the Broadway movie district. There (for ten to fifty cents a ticket) the public could enjoy entertainment of the most wonderful variety. It wasn’t just the movies. Pit orchestras performed Gilbert and Sullivan—or Beethoven. Opera singers trilling arias shared the stage with acrobats; ballets followed circus animals; elaborate “moving tableaux” gave way to daring stunts. What tantalized audiences most, though, was something new—the femme fatale.