Cinema History

When D. W. Griffith arrived in the little agricultural village called Hollywood in early 1910, he was not intending to make history—he was simply trying to outrun the East Coast winter. Griffith, then a rising director for the Biograph Company, had taken his cast and crew west on a location-hunting tour, hoping to find warmer weather and fresh scenery for the company’s one-reel dramas.

When sound burst into the movies in 1927, it promised a revolution—and it delivered one. But revolutions, for all their dazzling promise, always have casualties. As audiences flocked to hear voices emerging like magic from the screen, a silent generation of stars discovered that the very industry they helped build no longer had room for them. Some adapted. Some faltered. Others vanished so quickly that their names disappeared between one season’s fan magazines and the next.

HOLLYWOOD - Seventy-five years later, Sunset Boulevard remains as fresh and as incisive as the day it first appeared. A razor to Hollywood’s sanitized balloon. Billy Wilder’s masterpiece is not just film noir, it’s a horror movie in the purest sense — fame rotting into madness, celluloid dreams dying in the California sun.

HOLLYWOOD - It’s impossible to watch Dracula for the first time and not draw breath. It doesn’t happen when the fangs snap or the blood spurt (there’s less of that than you might expect).

The projector hums softly in the dark. A reel begins to turn. And from that trembling beam of silver light, the dead begin to live again.