Hi Chris - I do not have any direct knowledge of how location filming worked at the time. I have speculated that one reason why Keaton filmed in the skid row part of town was that he might not have been hassled there so much by the police. I don't know if the film-makers at the time had to contact the police, or get a special permit as they do now, or whether they just filmed guerilla style, by showing up, grabbing the needed shots, and leaving. It was a lot easier to do that then, as there was no sound equipment to lug about or set up, nor giant star dressing room trailers, nor union rules dictating that a certain minimum number of people assist with the shot. Conceivably all they needed were the actors, a cameraman, and a few others to supervise. They could all arrive and depart in one car. I simply do not know if they worked around the police, or with them.movieman1957 wrote:I found it interesting about the comment on Lloyd and his permission to film on the building for a limited time. Has any of your research showed what kind of problems, if any, the filming had with local officials? There must have been some good relationships as there were so many outside locations.
Are there other books in the works?
I read somewhere that Mack Sennett had filmed so frequently at Echo Park that their were complaints about damage to the flowers and gardens, but I do not know if that came from the neighbors or from city officials.
The chase at the end of Harold Lloyd's Speedy is interesting because there you can see New York policemen holding back traffic so Harold could race by. So that is one instance where they clearly had cooperation from the police. That reminds me, in many silent comedies filmed on the streets, if you look in the distance a block or two down the street you often see cars piled up beyond a certain crosswalk, waiting to go - did the cops or the film people hold those cars back?
The building permit Harold Lloyd obtained to build a set on a rooftop for Safety Last is interesting to me because it is one of the few tangible examples I know about where city approval was actually obtained before filming. Los Angeles had a building height restriction at the time, and they needed a special building permit to build a temporary set on the roof.
I would love to do a book some day about the Hal Roach Studio, combining Laurel & Hardy, Our Gang, and others. A great many L&H locations have already been discovered, but I know of many locations from their early solo films, and if I covered other Roach Studio films as well, I am certain there would be plenty of material for a full book. These books take 5-7 years to research, write, and produce - it is kind of like a marathon, so I still am out of gas from working so hard on the Lloyd book. It might also be fun someday to do a hard cover book that includes all of the silent comedians together, offering a more global view of Hollywood and Los Angeles as a whole, rather than focusing solely on one film-maker, and without necessarily trying to be complete about identifying all of the locations from each film.