Hollywood Utopia

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In stark contrast to earlier studies of Hollywood as a Babylon,
Hollywood Utopia is a record of the historical roots and early
connections between Hollywood and theosophy, various views of utopia,
and several related isms. Brown’s breezily written study is framed by
two milestones: Frank L. Baum’s 1900 fantasy, The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz, and the death of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley in November
1963, only “hours after John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas.” Brown
discusses the evolution of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s
theosophy, from its reflection in the Emerald City of Oz, to its
establishment as a colony at Point Loma, California, and its relation to
the Waldorf Schools. From Oz she moves on to describe the rival
settlement of Annie Besant’s Adyar branch of Krotonans “in a
sparsely populated village called Hollywood.” From the deliberations
of this group, she claims, emerged the concept of cinema as the
world-saving universal silent language, a theory subscribed to by the
likes of D.W. Griffith and the New Thought (subsequently New Age) group
of actors led by Rudolph Valentino and his wife, Natacha Rambova, screen
scenarist June Mathis, and Russian actress Alla Nazimova—a group whose
“peculiar vision stands as a foundational stone of Hollywood,” at
least until the disruptive arrival of talking pictures.

Brown continues to track her exposition of theosophist and New Thought
links to the quirky activities of “talkies” personalities like
Charlie Chaplin, and to novelist Upton Sinclair in his run for governor
of California, despite the challenges from media mogul William Randolph
Hearst and his consort Marion Davies, even as they jousted to displace
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford as the uncrowned king and queen of
the celluloid social set. Along the way she reveals stories seldom heard
in more run-of-the mill histories of Hollywood. She ends her book with
an analysis of Huxley’s satire of Hollywood, After Many a Summer Dies
the Swan, and its stinging caricature of Hearst.

“Hollywood has many hidden facets, some of them Utopian in nature,”
Brown writes. “We never know when these will catch the light.” The
hidden facets she has caught are revealed in an entertaining and
readable way.