They  make  the  pictures  at  a  place  called
Hollywood — the  name  may  be  considered  as
symbolic,  since  there  are  also  activities  else
where.  Now  Los  Angeles,  which  is  the  best-
known  suburb  of  Hollywood,  indeed  only  a
few  miles  away  by  the  trolley,  is  rapidly  be
coming  one  of  the  largest  cities  in  the  world.
We  must  of  course  wait  for  the  census  to  be
sure,  but  it  has  quite  possibly  already  passed  its

199


2OO        American   Towns  and  People

rival,  San  Francisco,  and  it  confidently  pre
dicts  that  it  will  soon  have  the  most  numerous
urban  population  west  of  the  Mississippi.  It
is  not  claimed  that  all  these  people  are  in  the
movies;  there  must  be  hundreds  of  thousands
of  unfortunate  creatures  there  who  have  no
connection  with  them.  But  the  pictures  are,
for  all  that,  the  one  preeminent  industry  of  the
great  town ;  they  are  its  obsession,  its  sun  and
moon.
In  Los  Angeles  there  are  a  few  cave-dwel
ling  ladies  (to  borrow  a  Washingtonian
phrase)  who,  deeply  intrenched  in  West
Adams  Street,  the  local  Faubourg  St.-Ger-
main,  still  struggle  to  maintain  the  idea  that
one  may  be  Angeleno  and  yet  be  scornful,  or
even  ignorant,  of  the  movie  world.  They  are
magnificent,  but  they  fight  a  losing  fight.
They  gain  no  support  from  the  distin
guished  visitors  from  out  of  town,  who  indeed
fly  to  the  studios  like  homing  doves.  And  in
deed  when  real  royalty  arrives,  as  nowadays
may  happen  in  a  republic,  they  know  quite
what  it  is  in  California  they  want  to  see.
