Trivia
This Biograph film was the first movie ever made in Hollywood. Director D.W. Griffith discovered the little village on his trips to California and decided to shoot there because of the beautiful scenery and friendly people. On 6 May 2004 a monument was erected at 1713 Vine Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard. The monument was made by Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and the actual rare film which was once thought lost was screened at the Beverly Hills Film Festival attended by Mikhail Vartanov. This is the first time the movie was seen by the public in 94 years. The film was then scheduled for restoration, and the restored version premiered at a later date.
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For years the first film thought shot in Hollywood was Cecil B. DeMille's, The Squaw Man. The discovery of this film not only made it the first ever movie filmed in Hollywood, but that it was a 'Latino' storyline based film.
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The monument to this film was erected and dedicated near the site on which this film was made at the Forbidden City Restaurant. The 2.8 ton monument was stolen overnight, under mysterious circumstances in April 2005, but was found almost one year later near a garbage bin not far from where the monument stood on Vine Street in Hollywood. Because of this vandalism and questionable theft of the monument, and its controversy that the first movie in Hollywood was of a Latino based storyline, the company felt this was discriminatory to the Latino community, and disassociated its business with the district of Hollywood, and moved its corporate headquarters to downtown Los Angeles. Today Biograph's main corporate headquarters are in Beverly Hills, CA.
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