City of Dreams by Bernard F. Dick
In 1915, studio head Carl Laemmle Sr. opened Universal City on the site of a ranch in the San Fernando Valley. It was home base for Universal Pictures, a mini-Detroit that produced a stream of A and B list films in all of their components. Inside its gates screenwriters toiled on projects that were furnished by costume and prop departments as well as actors. Universal’s films were shot and edited at this self-contained City which boasted its own fire and police departments and a chicken farm that supplied the commissary (and LA restaurants) with high-quality poultry.
Film scholar Bernard F. Dick’s City of Dreams is a briskly paced chronicle of Universal’s founder and his successors at the helm of what became a small but prestigious province in larger corporate empires. From the 1960s onward, Universal was a property traded like a pierce on a boardgame and serves as a distribution-marketing conduit for productions made elsewhere.
The early days are the most interesting. Laemmle counted every penny yet was determined to give audiences a good show and was open to such once marginal genres as horror. Laemmle’s Universal was home to such enduring genre classics as The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Dracula (1931) and The Black Cat (1934). After a while, the pictures mattered less than the profits and the corporate takeovers.
City of Dreams: The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures is out now in paperback from the University Press of Kentucky.
