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      FIGURE 1. Inceville, Thomas Ince’s studio by the sea along the Santa Monica coast, c. 1915. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

      Director King Vidor thought that the social insularity and artistic license that the movie colony’s residents displayed would have engendered a similar reaction in many other American towns. Hoping to become a director, Vidor left Texas for Los Angeles in 1915, not long after the newsreel cameraman made his directorial debut with the short story picture Hurricane of Galveston (1913). According to Vidor, the colony’s residents cultivated the experience of living in “a magic bubble,” a sense as much nurtured as imposed. Residents of the movie colony “spoke a silent language, a different language from the orange growers who surrounded them,” Vidor recalled. Yet they “felt camaraderie with all the other members of their clan” who congregated together inside ever more elaborate production lots like the “Studio by the Sea” that Thomas Ince built in 1912 on several thousand acres of land encompassing a stretch of Pacific coastline and the surrounding hills and plateaus of Santa Ynez Canyon at present-day Pacific Palisades and Malibu (figure 1). These environment’s camera-thin walls magnified their workers’ goings-on from multiple angles, acting as both blessing and curse for a business that needed viewers’ curiosity to survive. Like many early residents, Vidor remembered how the community’s isolation encouraged a release from customary restraints, leading inhabitants to believe “they could establish their own habits and behavior,” which could appear outlandish, immoral, or glamorously modern depending on the point of view.²⁸

      The firestorm of local, state, and federal actions to control the movies that swept the country during the 1910s supported Vidor’s judgment that the movies and their makers provoked anxiety not just among some Los Angeles landlords and orange growers but across the land. The Supreme Court decision Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio Industrial Commission (1915) displayed the intensification of concern about protecting moviegoers from the influence of films. The Mutual case made motion pictures the only medium of communication in the United States ever subject to prior restraint censorship, which allowed for the prescreening, cutting, and licensing of films before the public ever saw a foot of celluloid. Chicago pointed the way toward this type of regulation when it passed the first municipal censorship law in 1907. The law required a police permit for every moving picture shown in the city. During the nickelodeon era many other cities and towns had used their police powers to rectify the dangers presented by firetrap theaters. But police licensing proved a blunt instrument, helpful primarily for ensuring that early movie theaters conformed to fire safety codes and for excising scenes that contained obviously criminal behavior, like murder, arson, and robbery. Since most film censorship activists through the early 1910s believed that immigrant, working-class men dominated movie audiences, the approach indicated their intention to prevent films from inspiring anti-social behavior in this group. Two of the very few story pictures that were entirely suppressed, The James Boys in Missouri and Night Riders (both 1908), illustrated this concern.²⁹

      The revised censorship law that Chicago passed in 1914 displayed the shift in regulatory efforts that mirrored the larger change in attitudes about the movies’ cultural identity and location by the late 1910s. Go West! Young Women enters the history of censorship efforts here, when concerns over the impact of America’s newly feminized film audience first peaked. The re orientation of the business toward primarily female consumers caused film reformers to focus more on how film content and stars incited criminal behavior among young women. Chicago’s decision in 1915 to replace its police board with a ten-person commission of salaried civilians composed equally of men and women offered the more delicate touch needed to address problems associated with women’s immorality. The Supreme Court’s Mutual decision that same year also assumed that the movies tended to provoke immoral conduct among viewers. Most legal scholars agree that Mutual’s reasoning that film’s unique capacity to do “evil”—in this case, its special ability to incite sexual immorality—was what justified the Court’s protection of the state’s right to wield singular controls over the medium. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice McKenna suffused his opinion with fears about how the whole atmosphere of story pictures incited erotic havoc among the “promiscuous” crowd that attended movies. In the dark, throngs “not of women alone, nor of men alone, but together” watched “things which should not have pictorial representation in public places,” because of the “prurient interest” they “appealed to and excited,” McKenna declared.³⁰

      Increasingly, reformers argued that the movies’ cultural ascendancy had unleashed a flood of “indecent,” “sexually immoral” images that had made the number of “problem girls” soar. “Problem girl” was a catchall label given by social workers to young, wage-earning women whose appearance and independent participation in consumer culture created novel difficulties with policing their sexuality. Historians Joanne Meyerowitz, Kathy Peiss, Regina Kunzel, and others have skillfully evoked how such women’s new purchase on public spaces generated anxieties as many recently rural women poured into cities to work and play nationwide. These young women’s bold attempts to refashion themselves according to their own design also led them to experiment with cosmetics, products previously reserved for actresses and prostitutes. Thus, like many of the first movie stars, their behavior disrupted visual conventions that had long allowed observers to separate the good girls from the bad. “The way the women dress today they all look like prostitutes,” a waiter reported to one of the many Progressive reformers who cruised dance halls looking for the prostitutes such environments were thought to breed. What these young women may have experienced as “vistas of autonomy, romance, and pleasure,” according to Kunzel, many others judged to be “promiscuous sexuality and inappropriate delinquent behavior.” The result: for the first time, state authorities deemed sizable numbers of women criminals who required rehabilitation in the new juvenile courts and homes that went up in cities across the country.³¹

      The popularity of, and outrage provoked by, a series of so-called white slave pictures in the early 1910s was an early indication of the trend that made “immorality” and “obscenity” the “keywords” that captured the concerns of censorship boards by 1920. Although judged a moral panic by most historians today, concern about white slavery—the belief that large numbers of young white women, often fresh from the countryside, were being forced into sexual slavery—tracked women’s movement into the workplace and onto the city streets after 1900. Muckraker George Kibbe Turner’s “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities” first galvanized Progressive reformers into action on the subject. Turner’s exposé described

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