Florida Goes to the Movies

I loved our first class session at Rollins College.  The course we're taking in Rollins' Life Long Learning program is titled "Florida Goes to the Movies" and is taught by Floridan historian, Joy Dickinson.  Since you know I love Florida and you know I love movies,  you would assume I'd like the class, right?

Here are a couple of highlights:

- Joy gave us a sheet listing all of the movies made in Florida up to the 1990s.  There are almost 150 movies listed - including some great films like "Midnight Cowboy," some very good films like "Parenthood," and, of course, some bad films.  Oh, and one pornographic film, "Deep Throat."  (I would think this would be hard for anybody to watch in light of Linda Lovelace's real  life full of human trafficking and abuse.)  But I digress.

Oliver (Babe) Hardy 

- Jacksonville was by far the largest Florida city in the early 1900s and a starting place for movie making.  It's where Oliver Hardy started making silent films long before he met Stan Laurel.  Joy showed us a very funny "short" featuring Hardy and some babies.  (By the way, Hardy's nickname at this time was Babe.)  I was a bit nervous about the babies being flipped around and left alone sitting on beds and in rocking chairs - but this was before all those pesky rules about keeping kids safe.

The photo of Hardy is how he looked in this film.  Much different from later on when he had the crazy mustaches.

-  Helen Gardner was an astonishingly  beautiful young woman who was brought to Florida by Duncan Pell, who divorced his wife and married Gardner.  They lived for a short time here in the Orlando area.  But Helen soon tired of him and went to Jacksonville where she formed her own film company.  In 1912 she produced and starred in "Cleopatra."  (And then a few decades later Elizabeth Taylor repeated this whole process.)


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