Although we won't find the location in the photo below, although one never knows
with some of the sleuths we have on this forum, if one wants to know what Culver
City looked like in the past, you could do no better than to watch the Our Gang
shorts. While I was looking at the Culver City photos yesterday for the M-G-M posts,
I saw this one of Our Gang, only referenced as filming "in the residential backyards
of Culver City", dated "1930's" and naming only Jackie Cooper (right) as one of the
actors.
I decided to find out all I could about it.
Bottom line: what I found out.
--The people in the photo, left to right, are:
Art Lloyd, the cameraman (you can see his name on the clapboard he's holding), Mary Ann Jackson, Miss Laurel Peralta, Allen "Farina" Hoskins, Bobby "Wheezer" Hutchins, Norman "Chubby" Chaney, Jackie Cooper and...Pete the Pup.
--They were filming short #96 titled "The First Seven Years", which was basically about two boys competing
for the attention of the same girl--Jackie, another boy not shown (Donald "Speck" Hines) and Mary Ann.
--It was only the 8th "talkie" that was made.
--It was released in theaters March 1, 1930.
--What interested me in the photo was the word SPANISH on the clapboard. What did that mean?
Obviously, silent films could change the title cards to whatever language they wished for foreign
distribution. Not so with sound films and the studios were worried about losing their export trade.
Miss Laurel Peralta was a spanish teacher and coach. This is a quote from a Leonard Maltin site:
"Even more remarkable is the fact that these kids repeated their roles in foreign language versions
of the same short, learning to speak the Spanish, French, and German dialogue phonetically!
Sound shorts also added a 20% increment to production costs and faced with the loss of revenue
from foreign markets, Hal Roach and other producers solved the problem temporarily by hiring
language tutors (like Miss Peralta) to coach their stars through as many as four separate foreign
editions of each film. Highly impractical today, the idea made sense at the time, since Hal Roach
comedies weren't talkfests, and signage with phonetic dialogue could be placed out of camera
range to prompt the stars. Each scene was shot first in English, and then immediately afterward
in French, Spanish, German and sometimes Italian. This was an impressive feat for adult performers
like Laurel & Hardy, but for the children of Our Gang who were still learning to read and write in
English, it is nothing less than astounding."
--In Spanish, this short was titled "Los Pequenos Papas." I don't know about you, but I'd kind of like
to see one of these shorts in their different language versions. Since they actually filmed the scenes
over, there has to be some differences in each of them.
--It's also noted that foreign actors often replaced many of the incidental roles in these films,
because they could speak the language and also could carry the expository dialogue if necessary,
though I don't know how that would save costs if you had additional actors for 4-5 different versions
of the films.
Pretty incredible nonetheless.
Prev
Or megaphones ?
Fairfax Ave images, is this (relatively) undated (< '38) aerial of the above area. 
They did a nice job of restoring the facade. Very cool that you have memories of it before it became lofts!
Linear Mode
