Rather than disappearing after his professional disgrace, Brown reinvented himself in the emerging movie business. After launching experimental “Boy Cities” in Charlevoix, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, he relocated to Southern California and founded the Boy City Film Company in Culver City in 1917. The enterprise was an unusual hybrid: part film studio, part shelter for homeless boys, and part propaganda machine for Brown’s philosophy of juvenile reform. He financed a series of short films built around moral lessons and promotional messages, appearing as himself in all but the first and giving a young King Vidor his first directing opportunities; Vidor ultimately directed at least ten of the pictures. The films also contained unusually pointed social material for their period. The Chocolate of the Gang, for example, dealt with a Black child being refused membership in an all-white club and used Black actors in leading roles rather than relying on the then-common practice of white performers in blackface. Brown’s operation did not become a lasting Hollywood institution, but its strange combination of personal rehabilitation campaign, social shelter, and filmmaking incubator briefly connected a disgraced pseudo-judge with the early career of one of American cinema’s major directors.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1910s
The Boy City Film Company: Willis Brown’s Moral-Reform Studio and King Vidor’s First Directing Job
Boy City Film Company / 1910s
Rather than disappearing after his professional disgrace, Brown reinvented himself in the emerging movie business. After launching experimental “Boy Cities” in Charlevoix, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, he relocated to Southern California and founded the Boy City Film Company in Culver City in 1917. The enterprise was an unusual hybrid: part film studio, part shelter for homeless boys, and part propaganda machine for Brown’s philosophy of juvenile reform. He financed a series of short films built around moral lessons and promotional messages, appearing as himself in all but the first and giving a young King Vidor his first directing opportunities; Vidor ultimately directed at least ten of the pictures. The films also contained unusually pointed social material for their period. The Chocolate of the Gang, for example, dealt with a Black child being refused membership in an all-white club and used Black actors in leading roles rather than relying on the then-common practice of white performers in blackface. Brown’s operation did not become a lasting Hollywood institution, but its strange combination of personal rehabilitation campaign, social shelter, and filmmaking incubator briefly connected a disgraced pseudo-judge with the early career of one of American cinema’s major directors.
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