At the time this this column was penned, Los Angeles was largely seen as a man-made heaven that smelled of Orange blossoms, however this writer will have none of it; he was dispatched to the nascent Hollywood to interview the inmates of “Pickfair” (the recently divorced movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks) and he found the city to be an unholy mixture of puritans, frauds, posers, hucksters and lousy restaurants – in short, the place was just plain dull and there’s no hope for it’s future (the writer also insisted that the city as film capital was all washed-up). The writer, Karl K. Kitchen, was delighted to expose his colleagues in journalism to be the liars everyone always suspected them to have been – for writing about Hollywood as if it was such an exhilarating and aesthetic utopia:
“Mr. Kitchen speaks of his stay in the [Los Angeles] suburb as the length of his ‘internment’… For just as as an oil-well may be described as a hole in the ground owned by a liar, Hollywood may be described as a collection of bungalows and motion picture studios written about by liars.”
Click here to read more articles about Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
