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.
By Allan R. Ellenberger for The Hollywoodland Revue
A scene from D.W. Griffith's In Old California (1910) the first film shot in Hollywood
The town he stumbled into was hardly the center of glamour it would one day become; Hollywood was a sleepy suburb of Los Angeles, dotted with citrus groves, dirt roads, and a scattering of wooden houses. But what Griffith saw there—sunlight that seemed endless, landscapes that changed with every turn, and locals who tolerated the odd spectacle of a film crew—convinced him he had found something extraordinary. It was here, on the dusty streets around Sunset and Vine, that he made In Old California, the first narrative motion picture ever filmed in Hollywood.
For decades, confusion persisted about which film truly inaugurated Hollywood’s legacy. Cecil B. DeMille’s 1914 The Squaw Man—the first feature-length film shot in Hollywood—was often credited as the earliest Hollywood production. Its length and ambition overshadowed Griffith’s smaller work, leading some to assume that only a feature could “count.” But history is clear: while DeMille brought the feature film to Hollywood, Griffith brought Hollywood to the film industry. His February 1910 production is the first motion picture created in the place that would soon become synonymous with cinema.
The film itself was a modest melodrama, running barely seventeen minutes, but its subject was steeped in the region’s own past. Griffith set his story in the Mexican era of Alta California, weaving a tale of romance, rivalry, and tragedy in a frontier pueblo not unlike the one that once stood on the very ground where the Biograph players now worked. Actress Marion Leonard played the Señora torn between loyalty and love. Griffith used the village-like setting of old Hollywood—ranch houses, Mission-style buildings, open fields, and undeveloped hills—to evoke a California of the 1800s. Curious townspeople gathered to watch the production, unaware they were witnessing the birth of a new era.
The director and cast of In Old California (1910)
D.W. Griffith
Frank Powell
Marion Leonard
Arthur V. Johnson
Henry B. Walthall
The film was shot quickly, as most Biograph pictures were. Griffith was prolific, directing more than four hundred shorts in the span of a few years, and In Old California was simply another project in his demanding schedule. Yet the experience left a mark. Griffith saw how the climate allowed him to shoot year-round, how the topography offered everything from mountains to beaches within a few miles, and how the local residents—then unfamiliar with the strange business of filmmaking—were accommodating and enthusiastic. To him, Hollywood was a production paradise waiting to be claimed.
When the film was released later that year, it drew no particular acclaim; it was just another one-reeler in the ever-expanding catalog of the Biograph Company. No one at the time realized it had made history. Only later, when Hollywood had transformed into the world’s filmmaking capital, did scholars look back and note that Griffith’s modest frontier drama had been the first motion picture deliberately shot in the area. It marked the moment the industry began its westward migration—a shift that would reshape American cinema and create an entire cultural empire.
In Old California slipped into obscurity as Hollywood exploded in the years that followed. For decades, it was considered lost, another vanished artifact from the silent era. Then, in the early 2000s, a surviving print surfaced, prompting a restoration effort that will eventually return the film to public view. In 2004, Hollywood honored its beginnings by placing a historical marker at 1713 Vine Street, commemorating the spot where Griffith and his Biograph actors shot their unassuming but history-making drama.
Though In Old California may seem quaint today, its legacy is far larger than its running time. Within a decade of its production, Hollywood had become synonymous with the movies, its orange groves replaced by studio backlots and its dusty crossroads reborn as the most famous boulevard in the world. The film stands as a quiet but crucial landmark: the moment a wandering director paused in a tiny village, lifted his camera, and unknowingly founded the future capital of dreams.
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