The Hollywood Heritage 2024 Part One

 The Hollywood Heritage Museum is a collection that is housed in the Lasky/DeMille barn. 

It sits off of Highland Ave in Hollywood across from the Hollywood Bowl. 

HOLLYWOOD'S FIRST MAJOR

FILM COMPANY STUDIO

ONE-HALF OF THIS STRUCTURE, THEN IN USE AS A BARN, WAS RENTED BY CECIL B. DEMILLE AS THE STUDIO IN WHICH WAS MADE THE FIRST FEATURE-LENGTH MOTION PICTURE IN HOLLYWOOD, "THE SQUAW MAN" IN 1913. IT WAS ORIGINALLY LOCATED AT THE CORNER OF SELMA AND VINE STREETS, AND IN 1927 WAS TRANSFERRED TO PARAMOUNT STUDIOS. ASSOCIATED WITH MR. DE MILLE IN MAKING "THE SQUAW MAN"WERE SAMUEL GOLDWYN AND JESSE LASKY, SR.

REGISTERED LANDMARK NO. 554

PLAQUE PLACED BY CALIFORNIA STATE PARK COMMISSION AND HISTORICAL LANDMARKS COMMITTEE OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY IN COOPERATION WITH PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORPORATION,

DEC. 27, 1956

Paramount Productions Inc. studio lot model

The barn was moved from Paramount in 1979. It was moved to current location in 1983 thanks to Hollywood Heritage Inc.

Cecil B DeMille’s Paramount office circa 1914.

IN CECIL B. DEMILLE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, HE DESCRIBES HIS OFFICE AT THE BARN:

"A partition was set up within the barn to form a small room, a desk was brought in for the director-general and a kitchen table for the secretary, and we were ready for business. The most important article of furniture, however, I found to be the wastebasket. It provided a very convenient refuge for my feet whenever

Mr. Stern washed his carriage and the water ran under my desk.

Our first employee engaged in Hollywood was a secretary - bookkeeper, a little young lady named Stella Stray. She sat behind the kitchen table, perched on a straight wooden chair, with a couple of city directories added so that she could reach the typewriter keys...she was to be an early victim of one of the first of the economy waves which periodically take their rise in the New York offices and sweep over the Hollywood studios.

Someone decided that the salary I was paying

Stella, $15 a week, was much too high. A good male secretary, I was told, could be had for less. Stella was given her choice of taking a cut or taking leave of the company...Stella chose to go...she knew her worth. When she started to leave, she picked the typewriter up off her table and began to stagger through the door with the heavy load in her arms. Only then did I learn that it was her own machine. Economy or no economy, she was rehired on the spot."

"I still keep in my safe a small red covered notebook, whose ruled pages are now gray with age and frayed at the corners. On them, in pencil, are names and notations, some so faint and smudged that they can hardly be read. They are my first record of the actors and extra players and technicians who were called, or sought us out at the barn, to become part of the cast and crew of The Squaw Man."

"In the center of the book, leaping from among the blank pages, large bold black handwriting catches the eye. Heavily inked, the words proclaim:

1 confess to the theft of the Orphan's Fund. Jim is innocent. Henry, Earl of Kerhill.' That was the page we photographed for the climax of The Squaw Man, the confession that cleared Jim Carston of the crime he had taken upon himself to save a fellow-officer's career."

*I still keep on my desk, and use as a paperweight, a small, plain ingot of almost pure silver, one of my graduation prizes from the school of experience. After we took over the film laboratory from Burns and Revier and increased our production to meet Paramount's schedule, we had thousands of feet of film being processed regularly in the large developing and 'fixing' tanks. When a tank of the 'fixing' fluid - 'hypo' as it was called - had served its purpose, it was simply taken out to the street and poured into the gutter. Of this practice the city authorities soon took a forbidding view. We paid the fines and continued to pour the fluid out. Enter a representative of a trucking company with a proposition. He would haul away our old hypo and charge us only $5 a load. I opined that that seemed high. He promptly came down to $4, then $3, then $2. His generosity made me suspicious; there was something here that I did not know. I told him that I would think it over. The trucking company was so anxious to serve us, however, that their man was back in a day or so with an offer to haul away the hypo free of charge.

Now,' I said I know there is something fishy about this. I don't know what you do with the hypo - maybe it's a great cleaning fluid or you use it in paint or distill it for liquor. But I'll make a deal with you. You tell me what it is I don't know about this, how you make your profit out of it, and you can have the hypo if you will split the profit with us 50-50.'

The trucking agent laughed, and explained. In the course of processing film, it was coated with silver. The silver washed off in the hypo tank. The enterprising truckers were making a small fortune extracting the silver from the used hypo, for which motion picture companies were paying them $5 a load just to get rid of.

The ingot on my desk came out of our share of the first silver recovered from our first load of hypo."

1948 calendar and financial records with a movie prop. The writing that reads “ I CONFESS TO THE

THEFT OF THE ORPHAN'S FUND. -JIM IS INNOCENT” and signed by HENRY appears in The Squaw Man (1914). It was Hollywood’s first major film.

Here is a still from the film. (50:28) You can watch the whole film on Wikipedia and YouTube.

1. Production piece from The Ten Commandments (1956). 

2. 35th Anniversary photo celebration of The Squaw Man. Teepee was present as decor for the event.

3. DeMille’s first royalty check for the printed photoplay edition of The Ten Commandments as well as the first payment for productions share of royalties for the same. The information at the bottom states that DeMille received only $0.63 for royalties on the photo playbook version of the movie versus the $351,229.38 for the movie itself in 1926.

Look for part two coming soon!