Motion Picture Paradise: A History of Florida's Film and Television Industry

The role and contributions of Florida to American cinema history continues to be underrepresented in film-history texts and related resources, though the state's extensive efforts to establish an industry and challenge Hollywood have affected trends, genres, and practices for 110 years. Florida scholars began publishing books about the unique if tumultuous history of filmmaking in Florida in the late 1980s, while devoted cinephiles, librarians, and historians have tracked down forgotten films produced in the state. As such, it can no longer be claimed that Florida film history is too new to address or that the movies have been lost to time.David Morton's Motion Picture Paradise: A History of Florida's Film and Television Industry makes an excellent resource for understanding the state's film history and its love-hate relationship with establishing an industry. Up-to-date and comprehensive, Motion Picture Paradise begins in 1898 when cameraman William Paley shot the brief but timely Burial of the Maine Victims (which features a funeral procession for the victims of the Navy ship disaster) with the Edison Vitagraph. It concludes in 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a circumstance that threw the Hollywood industry into chaos but created a unique situation in Florida.Motion Picture Paradise respectfully acknowledges and often references the existing work on Florida's film history but does not summarize these sources. While those authors should be commended as pioneers in Florida film scholarship, it is time to recognize that a full filmmaking center exists beyond Hollywood. Morton expands the story of Florida's film history by thoroughly examining it within key contexts, particularly the political and economic landscape of the state as well as social, racial, and cultural moments. Thus, the book deepens the history of Florida cinema beyond superficial nicknames such as “Hollywood East” or “Almost Hollywood.”Morton's history unfolds as a detailed narrative with key players interacting on a broad canvas of politics, culture, and economics. The tone is serious, but the writing style is nonacademic, a smart choice that will boost the book's appeal to a market beyond college libraries and academic historians. The book consists of five lengthy chapters and an intro and outro, titled “Opening Credits” and “End Credits,” respectively. Each chapter begins with a story that foretells or reflects the topic of that chapter, an approach that allows Morton to include some of the colorful figures and unique events in Florida's film history. “Opening Credits” and “End Credits,” for example, highlight John Watzke, the owner of the Ocala Drive-In in Marion County. At the start of the pandemic, the Ocala was the last theater to show new movies and the only theater in America to contribute to the national box office, which landed Watzke in the headlines. Aware of the financial difficulties of his patrons, he kept prices low so that his community could weather the troubled times by escaping to the movies at his drive-in—just like his grandfather had done with his walk-in theater in New Orleans during the Spanish Flu. The result is a charming story, purposefully included to illustrate the impact of local entrepreneurs on Florida's film history.The first chapter chronicles silent film production from 1898, the year the Edison Manufacturing Company arrived in Tampa to film servicemen disembarking for war in Cuba, through Jacksonville's stretch as a filmmaking center in the 1910s. Chapter 2 stands out because of its provocative subject: it traces the sympathetic depiction of Confederate history in films produced in Jacksonville and relates them to the simultaneous rise in white supremacy. In an inexplicable historic irony, the Norman Studios opened in Jacksonville at roughly the same time to produce race films with an alternative representation of African Americans.The third chapter details the many failed attempts by often shady businessmen to build fully operational studios in Florida to entice major Hollywood players to permanently relocate their operations. In contrast, chapter 4 recounts how several independent producers who were inspired by Florida's unique qualities optimistically opened small studios in Orlando, Winter Park, and Miami. Television showrunner Ivan Tors also showcased the state's water-related resources in Sea Hunt (Syndication, 1958–1961) and Flipper (James B. Clark, 1963) with the expert assistance of underwater stuntman and filmmaker Ricou Browning. The last chapter demonstrates the importance of political support for film industries in Florida and other states to survive, while “End Credits” reveals the negative impact to the state's film industry when political support is withdrawn.The link between a thriving film industry and state politics is a major theme in Motion Picture Paradise. While politics affects the film industry in any state, the impact has been tremendous and long-standing in Florida, dating back to Jacksonville in the 1910s. The history of establishing a film industry in Florida is one of great successes and abject failures depending on whether the state and local governments were cooperative or contentious.Florida has a reputation for embracing peculiar, often destructive political leaders whose personal issues and beliefs define their policies. In 1916, Sidney J. Catts became the twenty-second governor of Florida, running as part of the Prohibition Party. He courted the rural vote with claims of being a political outsider, using extreme rhetoric against Germans, Catholics, and entertainment enterprises such as cinema. He once claimed that the monks of the St. Leo Abbey in Tampa were going to arm African Americans to instigate a revolt in support of Kaiser Wilhelm II, resulting in the Pope moving the papacy to Florida. Catts's sudden rise in popularity shifted the state's politics to the extreme right, which affected the mayoral race in Jacksonville in 1917. J. E. T. Bowden, who had been very supportive of the city's success as a film production center, was defeated by Catts acolyte and anti-film candidate John Wellborn Martin. Though other reasons added to the rapid decline of film production in North Florida after 1917, the change in political climate hastened the exit of the biggest studios.Fast-forward to the boom years for film production in Florida, 1971–2005. After Governor Reubin Askew's (1971–1979) initial outreach to the film industry, four successive Florida governors and their legislatures (1979–2007) supported the film industry throughout this boom period with tax incentives for production companies. According to Morton, this golden age of film production added $1.25 billion to the state's economy. The enormous financial success of the boom years makes the state's recent turnaround more shocking and indefensible. It began with the ambivalence of Governor Rick Scott toward the film industry, intensified with House Speaker Richard Corcoran's outright hostility toward it, and culminated with the state legislature's cutting of tax incentives in 2016. Morton claims that by 2019, Florida had lost $650 million in projects and $1.8 billion in in-state expenditures. Despite these ups and downs, Florida's attempts at establishing a film industry belong in cinema history texts because they represent alternatives to Hollywood's centralized model dependent on vertical control. Florida's film history exposes the dominance and control of the Hollywood model, particularly how difficult it was for those production centers outside Hollywood to secure national distribution for much of cinema history.Some of Morton's strongest and most original findings involve the influence of historical events and cultural moments on the state's film industry. Brian DePalma's Scarface (1983) has become an iconic piece of 1980s cinema, but at the time of release, it was controversial for boosting the “cocaine cowboy” lifestyle associated with Miami by giving it a face—literally—when Al Pacino buries his face in a pile of cocaine. Miami's reputation rapidly deteriorated, and tourism dropped dramatically in South Florida. Conversely, Miami's reputation rebounded because of the television series Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–1990), which featured “ultra-cool” detectives in Florida-inspired fashion battling drug lords against the backdrop of Miami's art deco architecture. “The Miami Vice Effect” jumpstarted Florida's most successful era as a filmmaking center, expanded tourism, and rehabilitated Miami into what Travel and Leisure called the “hippest hangout on Earth” (qtd. in Morton 224). Both Scarface and Miami Vice became milestones in Florida's entertainment history and cultural touchstones for the rest of the country.A more compelling social and cultural moment is explored in chapter 2, when Morton describes Jacksonville as Florida's first center of film production within the historical context of the city's African American population and the rise of the reactionary politics of Sidney Catts. After Catts was elected governor, opportunities for the sizable African American population in Jacksonville became limited. Against this backdrop, Morton notes two interesting developments in the city's filmmaking industry—the innovation of a Southern-based film genre and the construction of a race-film studio.Kalem, the first studio to settle in Jacksonville, developed the Lost Cause subgenre of Civil War dramas, in which the South, its ideology, and its defenders were depicted as heroic. Morton claims that the popularity of Lost Cause movies may have influenced the racist discourse coming from Catts and his acolytes. Morton ponders how much this subgenre—later epitomized by The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915)—may have inspired the increase nationally of white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. In the early 1920s, the Norman Studios—also in Jacksonville—produced race films, movies starring African American actors with relevant, respectful, and relatable topics for African American audiences. While not intentional, the production of race films in the same city that had sparked the Lost Cause dramas represents a pushback by African Americans, a reminder that injustices were not left unaddressed. Though Morton tends to overstate these connections between Florida's politics, racial history, and film history, implying a cause and effect that is not quite there, no other source on the film industry in Jacksonville has pulled these threads together. Doing so paints a more complete portrait of the state's history and offers a more complex interpretation of the early film industry in North Florida. By recounting decades of Florida film history previously lost or ignored, as well as honoring influential figures such as Ricou Browning, Ivan Tors, and Newton Perry, Motion Picture Paradise: A History of Florida's Film and Television Industry is thorough, inclusive, and a welcome addition to American film history.