AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Los Angeles Times

A two-day conference examines the film capital’s contribution between the wars.

Even as the country went through the prosperity of the Roaring ’20s followed by the economic woes of the 1930s and on into the outbreak of World War II, Hollywood too went through its own upheavals and transitions during those years — including the rise of the studios and their power-wielding moguls, the golden era of silent movies and the introduction of sound to motion pictures.

These pivotal decades are the subject of an ambitious two-day conference, “Moguls, Millionaires & Movie Stars: Hollywood Between the Wars, 1920-1940,” which takes place Friday and Saturday at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

A partnership between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the two-day event will feature panels on such moguls as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph P. Kennedy and Howard Hughes; a look at Hollywood and its connection to New York vaudeville; an examination of the early years of the academy; and a retrospective discussion of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.” Friday evening the academy will also screen a new print of the 1937 Technicolor classic “A Star Is Born” at the Linwood Dunn Theater.

Panelists for the two-day event will include such historians and scholars as Taylor Coffman, who is one of the conference’s organizers, Cari Beauchamp, Neal Gabler, Richard Schickel, Leo Braudy and David Thomson. Los Angeles Times columnists Patt Morrison, Tim Rutten and John Horn will be among the moderators.

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