One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley mentioned a new policy at the movie studios:
Public is invited! Tourists and others who have been disappointed by the recent order closing studios to visitors will have a chance to see real stars working before a movie camera tomorrow when John M. Stahl directs Lewis Stone, Helena Chadwick, Mary Carr and William V. Mong in a number of important exterior scenes for his new attraction Why Men Leave Home. The Church of the Sacred Heart, an old landmark at Sichel and Baldwin, will be the scene of the action and the company will work there from noon until evening.
Why Men Leave Home told the story of a couple who get married, drift apart, get divorced, realize their mistake and get remarried. Kingsley didn’t say which marriage was being filmed at the church – maybe it was both.
What’s most interesting about her note is that it seems that people once expected to be allowed to wander around film sets. (I bet the cast and crew weren’t thrilled about Kingsley sending people to gawk when they were on location!) This new no visitors policy at the studios had begun on August 15th, and Kingsley’s co-worker Kenneth Taylor wrote about it under the headline “’No Visitors;’ They Mean It.” He said:
With one fell swoop the tourists’ pet pastime has been completely wiped out. The motion picture studio is barred tight. Unless you are on business—and they don’t consider screen applicants as being “on business,” nor do they allow special privilege to “jewelry salesmen”—you haven’t a chance. The sign that greets you in the front office, to the effect that “all applications to visit this studio are respectfully referred to the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., Frank W. Beetson, secretary” is no joke. Will Hays isn’t kidding.
It’s interesting that the individual companies didn’t just make their own rules about who could be admitted. At first I thought that it helped take the pressure off of them – they weren’t saying no to their beloved customers and distinguished visitors, the mean old MPPDA was to blame.
Taylor asked Beetson for an explanation, and he said: “in his kindly way that it is in the best interests of art, not to mention business.” When pressed further, he said that MPPDA president Joseph Schenck had done a study estimating that each visitor cost producers about $100, due to lost work time (the workers had to answer questions, for example, cameramen explaining why they used two cameras but made only one film) and theft by souvenir hunters.
It make sense to keep the public out (none of the libraries I worked in invited visitors into our back rooms, but then nobody really wanted to go there), but it seemed odd that the producers’ association would be the ones to come up with the rule and to enforce it. Exhibitors’ Trade Review gave more details about how it happened, reporting that the Association “held a meeting and passed such a drastic resolution forbidding tourists, salesmen, friends of actors and employees entering the studio.” ETR even quoted the sign that was put up at most of the entrances:
The studios, who are members of the Producers’ Association, agree that after August 15 no visitors are to be admitted within the studios. This action has been taken because of abuses resulting from admission of visitors, and this notice is to ask the co-operation of all concerned in not inviting anyone to the studio, and in the case of uninvited visitors to receive them in the waiting room.
They also told why it was the MPPDA, which were at the time working very hard to rehabilitate Hollywood’s image, was enforcing it:
This act, it is said, followed the lecture tour of a woman who came here armed with credentials from high officials in the industry admitting her to the studios, and who then went on a lecture tour telling of the “vice and depravity” she found there which of course were untrue.
I’ve been amazed by how much people in Hollywood did to overcome the scandals of the early 1920s, from Rupert Hughes’ film Souls for Sale defending the business to Picture-Play magazine’s series of articles from a visiting fan. They even held an exposition to demonstrate how wholesome they were. They thought of everything. Plus, it took only one lecturer* for such a big reaction from the producers.
It had been a while since just anybody could wander on to a lot, as a passerby who returned Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to his father did in 1919. There were fences, gates and guards – just last month, Kingsley mentioned the gatekeeper at Fine Arts. However, plenty of people got tours, like the King and Queen of Belgium and writer Peter Kyne’s son. The new rule stopped all of that for a time. A year later Exhibitors’ Herald in an article about the many successes of the MPPDA said:
One of the chief time savers effected is the judicious handling of the thousands of tourists who annually come to Los Angeles and who feel it is their right to visit the motion picture studios. Unchecked admission of these hordes of sight-seerers, which was more or less common a few years ago, so seriously interfered with picture making that producers decided to call a halt. Now every studio carries a conspicuous sign in the anterooms that are the portals of the realm of make-believe, advising prospective visitors they must call at the offices of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc., and tell their reasons why they should be admitted to Mr. Beetson. If there are reasons which seem sufficient, Beetson may issue a pass, but the reasons must be more than just curiosity on the part of a visitor.
So the ban was still being enforced in 1924, but eventually it was relaxed. However, similar bans happened every few years. In 1927, Exhibitors’ Herald reported that the five biggest studios had excluded visitors again, but this time it was the individual companies’ decisions. Once again they said the cost of delayed shooting was the reason. They gave as an example, “for several years MGM officials have attempted to accommodate a limited number of requests and have allowed tourists to view the inside of the huge plant, but a survey of costs, it is said, involving thousands of dollars weekly, has compelled them to withdraw this courtesy.”
Occasionally they tried to even ban journalists and agents, and they had a new reason to keep people away: lawsuits. According to Motion Picture Herald some people sued because they tripped on a cable. However, as the Herald predicted, the studios forgot about the ban pretty quickly after:
one studio refused to permit its employees to receive publications on the lot, contending they wasted too much time reading…these severe rules in most cases have been softened, one reason being that the general manager of one studio went berserk when his trade papers were held up.
However, Universal Studios did figure out how to monetize tourists’ fascination with Hollywood, but it didn’t last as long as several different places online claimed (shocking, I know: wrong information on the Internet! But I expected better from public TV). In similar wording, they all said that Universal let anyone in for a quarter, and patrons could wander around the stages, collect autographs and visit the zoo until sound came and forced them to stop. That sounded fishy! Why would filmmakers put up with that?
Earlier writers didn’t have the benefit of the Media Digital History Archive to check on this, but I do. In a 1923 article in Picture-Play magazine about the wonders of Universal, from Von Stroheim’s Monte Carlo set to an African jungle, Helen Klumph wrote:
The managers of Universal City aren’t blind to the fascination of all these things. They realize that the public would like to see them, but that can’t be. About seven years ago when Universal City was new, visitors used to be allowed. For twenty-five cents you could go in and see that they really had a hospital and a post office of their own, ask the actors if the make-up hurt their faces and if they didn’t have a lot of interesting experiences traveling around and making pictures. But the crowds got to be so great that they broke through the ropes that were stretched to keep them out of the way. In scenes where the action demanded that someone open a door and rush out, the actor frequently found such a crowd of gaping bystanders just outside the door that he couldn’t get through. And the last straw came when a lion who was supposed to be rearing, tearing wild became so enamored of being petted that he acted like a frolicsome puppy. So, there are no more visitors—that is except favored mortals like newspaper and magazine writers.
The tour as we know it today, with a tram ride and shows just for visitors, began in 1964.
* I tried to find out exactly who the lecturer was, but none of the articles about the new rule named her (no extra publicity for her, I guess) and I didn’t find any obvious vice and depravity speaker listed in the trades.
“Ban on Visitors Put Into Effect; Passes Revoked,” Motion Picture Herald, April 25, 1931, p. 52.
Edwin S. Clifford “Producers Alliance Effects Economies,” Exhibitors Herald, July 5, 1924, p. 59, 138.
“Exclusion Signs Posted on West Coast,” Exhibitors’ Trade Review, September 1, 1923, p. 593.
“Five Studios Close to Visitors to Save Cost Reaching Thousands a Week,” Exhibitors’ Herald, April 2, 1927, p. 29.
Jack Grant, “No Visitors, Please,” Motion Picture, July 1931, pp. 64-5, 114-5.
Helen Klumph, “Around the World at Universal City,” Picture Play Magazine, August 1923, pp. 53-55, 92.
“No Visitors at Coast Studios,” Film Daily, August 15, 1923, p. 1.
“Pacific Studios Closed to Visitors as Result of Producers’ Ruling,” Daily News Leader (San Mateo), August 20, 1923.
“Snub for Los Angeles,” Variety, April 1, 1921, p. 47.
Grace Kingsley's Hollywood 