Before there was the Inceville in Santa Ynez Canyon, or any other movie studio in California, back when Hollywood was still a small town and the film industry had only just been invented, early film crews were on the prowl, looking for locations to make movie magic. The newly created motion picture industry began migrating from the East Coast to the West almost as soon as the commercial potential for the medium was realized in the first decade of the twentieth century. Filmmakers experimented with a variety of locations, including Cuba and Mexico, but they soon gravitated to Los Angeles.
The stretch of coast between Topanga and Santa Monica—there wasn’t a Pacific Palisades yet—was an ideal film location that offered a dramatic backdrop of mountains, an unspoiled expanse of sea and sand, and the picturesque Japanese fishing village known as Maikura, which offered a ready-made location for filming rustic shacks and fishing equipment. There was even a railroad trolley stop at the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon—a remnant from the days when Southern Pacific tried to make the Santa Monica Bay into the Port of Los Angeles. The hulking skeleton of the Long Wharf dominated the view to the east, but the coast stretched away to the west unspoiled and ready to double as the sea coast of England, Scotland, the Mediterranean, or a tropical desert island, depending on the script.
Film historians Karie Bible, Marc Wanamaker, and Harry Medved, authors of Location Filming in Los Angeles, suggest that the first ever commercial film known to have a scene filmed in California—the Selig Polyscope Company’s 1908 costume drama The Count of Monte Cristo—may have been shot near Topanga Beach, although other film historians claim that distinction for Laguna Beach. Either way, the decision to add California location shots to a movie that was otherwise filmed entirely on a stage back east was a bold choice.
The film’s director, Francis Boggs, and his cameraman, Thomas Persons, headed to Los Angeles in 1907 to shoot the scene where the eponymous count, having finally escaped from years of imprisonment, drags himself out of the sea and capers on the beach, a free man at last.
The beach was a destination for up-and-coming film director D.W. Griffith when he traveled to California in 1910, shortly after signing with the Biograph Company. Griffith had filmed several successful nautical-themed shorts at East Coast beaches the year before, and was attracted to the genre of romantic English poetry that pertained to the sea, especially the type that romanticised the lives of fisher folk, shipwrecks, and grieving widows of drowned sailors, and what better place to film stories about fisher folk than the actual fishing village on the coast road to Topanga?
Griffith began his career as an actor in 1907 and only began to direct films in 1908, after Biograph’s main director became ill. What he lacked in experience he made up for with enthusiasm and ingenuity. He was just turning 35 when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1910, and he had already made an astonishing 237 short films. The Unchanging Sea was the fifteenth project shot during that first California trip and the first known motion picture to be shot entirely on a California beach.
Griffith filmed this sad sea saga over the course of two days in March on the beach at what is now Will Rogers State Beach. Some scenes were shot on the open beach, others were filmed on the outskirts of Maikura, just west of the Long Wharf. This footage provides an unexpected glimpse at what life would have been like at this long-vanished village.* It also provides a look at the local beach and the mountains before there were houses, or parking lots, or a paved highway.
The Unchanging Sea is a simple story inspired by a poem by English poet, minister, and novelist Charles Kingsley (best known today for his allegory for children, The Water Babies). The first verse of the 1851 poem summarizes the film perfectly:
Three fishers went sailing out into the West,
Out into the West as the sun went down;
Each thought on the woman who lov’d him the best;
And the children stood watching them out of the town;
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbour bar be moaning.
The location, the weather, and the natural light helped create the perfect atmosphere for what would turn out to be a sort of cinematic tone poem.
The multi-volume Griffith Project is the definitive reference on the filmmaker’s oeuvre and provides some of the most reliable information available on many of the early films. In volume 4, film archivist and historian Eileen Bowser described The Unchanging Sea as, “beautifully simple and simply beautiful,” adding, “We already have seen Biograph seascapes in After Many Years (1908) and Lines of White on a Sullen Sea (1909), yet neither look quite like this newly-discovered California coast.”
There’s a description of what the location was like written by actress Linda Arvidson, Griffith’s former wife and uncredited production assistant, in her 1925 memoir When the Movies were Young. “At this time there was but a handful of little shacks beyond the pier,” she wrote. “Places rented for almost nothing by poor, health-seeking Easterners. No pretentious Ince studio as yet meandered along the cliffs some nine miles beyond. The road ran through wild country on to Jack Rabbit Lodge where a squatter had a shack that tourists visited occasionally and for twenty-five cents were shown an old Indian burial ground.”
The burial ground was likely at the mouth of Topanga Canyon—or Topango, as it was known in those days. The road was a dirt track that ended at the Malibu Rancho gate at Los Flores Canyon. There were no houses other than a scattering of beach shacks, no street lights, gas stations, or amenities of any kind once one was west of the wharf. Griffith took advantage of the long sweep of unspoiled beach, with the towering Topanga and Malibu mountains for a backdrop, and the waves rolling in from the sea. The success of this short film inspired Griffith to return to the same location the following year.
Bowser wrote, “The extraordinary beauty of The Unchanging Sea made on the earlier trip to the West Coast, was still in everyone’s memory a year later. The company hurried back to the seashore at Santa Monica to try to recapture the magic.”
Griffith returned to California with a bigger crew and a bigger budget. His goal was to film as many projects as he could possibly fit into the winter and spring filming season.
The first project of the new season was the film Fisher Folk. It also appears to have been shot at the Japanese fishing village and along the coast route. This film lacks the poetic resonance of The Unchanging Sea. It doesn’t help that the only print available is assembled in the wrong order, making the narrative hard to follow.
Griffith and his crew were back at the Japanese village in March 1911 to film the costume drama Enoch Arden, an ambitious project based on the sentimental and melancholy poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Enoch Arden featured Griffith’s wife, actress Linda Arvidson, in a starring role. It was the filmmaker’s first two-reel feature, a thrilling innovation that doubled the amount of time a filmmaker had to tell a story from around ten minutes for a single reel, to twenty minutes.
Here’s Linda Arvidson’s account of the filming:
Santa Monica would be the ideal place for this big production; so every day for a week—for a whole week was given to exteriors alone—we motored out to Santa Monica in the cold early morning.
The place had changed little in the year that had passed. The row of tiny shacks was now occupied by Japs and Norwegians who caught and dried fish and fought with each other at all other times.
One friendly Norwegian loaned his shack as a dressing-room for the women. We “shot” the same shack for Annie’s bridal home. The men made up in a stranded horse car of bygone vintage that had been anchored in the sand. We sent out an S. O. S. for a sailing vessel of Enoch’s day, and we heard of one, and had it towed up from San Pedro.”
Enoch Arden may be the first film to feature another long lost local landmark: Castle Rock, opposite what is now the Getty Villa Museum and Sunset Mesa. It wouldn’t be the last.
Griffith returned to the fishing village in 1915, for The Mender of Nets, starring Mary Pickford and Mabel Normand (who would soon trade her role of tragedienne under Griffith for a career in comedy at Keystone Studios. He would oversee another version of Enoch Arden that year, this time starring Lillian Gish, but he didn’t direct it. He was already moving on to the next phase of what would soon become a troubled—and troubling—career.
Griffith made more than 500 films, and remains one of the most influential filmmakers of all time, but his reputation is permanently tarnished by Birth of a Nation, also released in 1915. The film, which glorifies the KKK and vilifies African Americans, caused riots and protests at the time of its release. A hundred years later, film critic Ed Rampell, writing for the Washington Post, described it as “the most racist film ever made.”
That controversy was five years in the future when Griffith arrived on the beach in 1910. His early films shot on location there offer a rare look at a lost chapter in local history. The view out to sea remains the same, but not one single foundation stone from the town of Maikura survives, and even Castle Rock, a landmark so famous and popular that it featured not only in early films but on hundreds of souvenir postcards, is almost completely obliterated, bulldozed to make way for highway widening in the 1940s and again in the 1970s. Both places are lost to time, but live on in some of the earliest movies made in California, at the very beginning of the film industry.
