2020-03-26 The Hollywood Reporter

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 24 MARCH 26, 2020

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picture houses and places of

amusement closed. Soon after,

word arrived from New York that

Bryant Washburn had infected

co-star Anna Q. Nilsson while

shooting Venus in the East. On

Oct. 16, Frank Garbutt, vp of Lasky

Photoplay Corp., announced that

three pictures in production were

being rushed and that most of the

studio would go dark for a month.

The Metro, Mack Sennett and

Triangle studios followed suit.

As silent-film producer

Benjamin Hampton told it, panic

set in as “studios closed entirely,

or operated on part time, and pes-

simists croaked that this was the

beginning of the end.” Matinee

idol Harold Lockwood, 31, died of

the influenza Oct. 19, and Russia’s

first movie star, Vera Kholodnaya,

would also succumb.

It appears that some film work

had resumed by late October even

though influenza was still ravag-

ing L.A. On Oct. 24, the chief of

police issued rules prohibiting

crowd scenes in movies. In early

November, silent superstar Lillian

Gish was struck with the flu while

working at Sunset Studio. Her

sister and fellow actor, Dorothy,

would also be infected. Lillian

I

t should have been a joy-

ous time in Hollywood. The

First World War was about to

come to an end — in November

1918 — and the nascent silent film

industry was booming, distribut-

ing pictures to more than 20,000

theaters across America. But this

rapid progress was threatened

by the outbreak of an influenza

pandemic, one that would claim

millions of lives worldwide.

Much like Hollywood today

amid the COVID-19 crisis, studios

and theaters were forced to come

to terms with an H1N1 viral

threat. “Filmland is full of gloom

and germs,” Moving Picture World

reported in November 1918.

For months, L.A.-based studios

An influenza outbreak 102 years ago closed movie theaters,

shut down production and felled actors: ‘Pessimists croaked

that this was the beginning of the end’ BY HADLEY MEARES

and theater chains believed that

the so-called Spanish influenza

was an East Coast problem. But

the flu was moving westward.

In early October, the National

Association of the Motion Picture

Industry, losing money because

theaters across the U.S. were half-

empty, announced an embargo

on the release of new films for a

month starting Oct. 14. Theater

impresario Sid Grauman, how-

ever, told the Los Angeles Times

that he had “plenty of films on

hand, that no word had come

from anyone to close and that he

had not heard a single sneeze in

any of his audiences.”

On Oct. 11, L.A. City Hall

ordered all theaters, motion

It Happened Before:

How the 1918 Flu

Halted Hollywood

Gish would later make light of her

illness, claiming that “the only

disagreeable thing was that it left

me with flannel nightgowns ...

horrible things.”

According to Richard Koszarski,

author of Flu Season: Moving

Picture World Reports on Pandemic

Influenza, 1918-19, guards at some

studios sprayed down visitors

with disinfectant, while some

people believed that a “yeast cake

a day keeps influenza away.”

Although many were still seri-

ously ill or would soon become ill

(Mary Pickford among them), the

Los Angeles Times reported Dec. 2

that L.A. theaters, which claimed

to have lost a million dollars a

week ($17.1 million in today’s

dollars) during the seven weeks

of closure, were to reopen. The

“funless season” had ended, and

Angelenos could “rest assured

that ... the motion picture palaces

have made active preparations for

a rousing welcome for us.”

By early spring of 1919, the

pandemic had slowed. Soon the

studios were running to capacity,

and the losses suffered because of

the flu were tempered by the mad

entertainment crush and money

rush of the 1920s.

1 Flu survivors Dorothy (left) and Lillian Gish

in 1921’s Orphans of the Storm.

2 In a train-station scene from the 1919 Mary

Pickford silent film Daddy-Long-Legs, a woman

sneezes and everyone scatters, including

people wearing masks.

1 Charlie Chaplin wore

stilts to promote a film

in 1918 before the flu

shut down production

across the nascent

movie industry.

2 Red Cross nurses

carried a patient

on a stretcher in

Washington, D.C.,

during the pandemic.

3 Nurses in

Massachusetts

provided fresh air to

patients in 1918.

Behind the Headlines

The Report

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