Content area
Full text
On the morning of December 10, 1929, a fire broke out during a Pathé production in the Manhattan Studios at 134th Street and Park Avenue. The blaze destroyed the studio, taking the lives of ten employees and performers and leaving more than twenty others injured.1 Although extreme, it was not unusual. Just two months earlier, the trade paper Motion Picture News had suggested widespread acknowledgment of the industry's studio fire hazard by making light of it. Reporting about a "rather serious fire" in a Hollywood studio, the article explains that "the blaze, so the funsters have it, was caused when sixty or seventy 'yes' men rushed up to light Cecil DeMille's cigarette."2 Despite the fire's seriousness, it drolly concludes, "Hollywood chuckles over the story anyway." One senses—indeed hopes for—sarcasm, for these kinds of fires were no laughing matter. At the end of October a huge fire destroyed the Consolidated Film Industries laboratory in Hollywood, killing one employee and injuring six more.3 In late November, another fire consumed a West Coast studio specializing in scenery design.4 And just two weeks later, the Pathé fire capped a devastating end to American film production in the 1920s.5
These and many more studio fires plagued the industry and its employees throughout the silent period and into the early days of sound.6 Although outnumbered and overshadowed in film historiography by fires in theaters—epitomized by the 1897 blaze at the Bazar de la Charité in Paris—studio fires produced a significant form of danger and destruction.7 Like fires in film theaters, studio fires were especially risky because of celluloid's flammability, and they were potentially even more extreme because of the sheer quantities of film at hand, which could easily surpass what would be found in a projection booth. During the silent period, their causes included cigarettes like DeMille's and sparks thrown by film processing machines, heating systems, and especially studio light sources and their electrical wiring. In the 1920s, the wholesale shift to artificial lighting and the introduction of sound made such problems even more acute. The expansion of the electrical systems needed to power studio lights and audio recording systems brought new sources of heat and sparks; arc lamps sold with telling descriptors...