In 2008, the heart of Hollywood isn’t inside the gates of a glamorous studio. It’s actually at the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega boulevards in Beverly Hills, the exact center of the so-called “Studio Zone” that the gilded guilds of Tinsel Town use to calculate their rates. (Circling the southeast corner of Beverly and La Cienega in a 30-mile radius, the “Zone” is also the namesake of TMZ – which is short for “Thirty-Mile Zone.”)
Until 1918, however, another intersection was the heart of motion picture production in Southern California: Alamitos Avenue and Sixth Street in Long Beach. Since 1996 the site of the Museum of Latin American Art, the southeast corner of Alamitos and Sixth is where the Balboa Amusement Producing Company once stood. From 1913 to 1918, from fade in to fade out, Balboa Studios – owned by the brothers H.M. and Edward Horkheimer – cranked out more than 1,000 silents here, including the box-office blockbuster Little Mary Sunshine and the smash serials The Red Circle and Who Pays?
Before Balboa’s screen faded to black in the aftermath of an influenza epidemic that caused American movie theaters to be temporarily closed, the silent studio was one of the largest employers in Long Beach with 250 people on its payroll – a number that could temporarily double during periods of heavy production. Cinematic icons cashing checks cut by the Horkheimers included comedians Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Buster Keaton. (Fun fact: Arbuckle was married, for the first time, on stage at the Byde-A-While Theater in Long Beach.)
Nine decades later, plenty of production is still taking place here in the International City. In FY 2008, the Long Beach Filming Program – part of the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Marine – provided approximately 450 permits, 9 percent for feature films. (Recent releases shot at least in part in Long Beach include Get Smart, Iron Man and License to Wed.) According to the FY 2009 Proposed Budget, that permitting process has resulted in more $2 million in revenue for the City of Long Beach’s police, fire and public works departments over the past five years.
But the numbers reported in budget also indicate that recent trends in Hollywood – including the Writers Guild of America’s strike that lasted from November until February – have impacted the program’s revenue growth. In the next serving of the City Soup, the LBPOST will take a closer look at the state of the movie industry in Long Beach 90 years after the Horkheimers shuttered their Balboa Amusement Producing Company.