Book Review: Edendale by Michael Ventura

Novelist, screenwriter, and essayist Michael Ventura is no stranger to the ways of Hollywood. His nonfiction books include Cassavetes Directs: John Cassavetes and the Making of Love Streams and Marilyn Monroe: From Beginning to End, and he worked as a film critic for the LA Weekly, a publication he co-founded in 1978. Closer to home, many of us here in Austin know him for his biweekly column, “Letters at 3am,” which ran in this publication for over two decades, through 2014.

Ventura taps into his fascination with the early days of Hollywood for Edendale, a marvelous story centered around a 16-year-old whose daredevil aplomb earns her a home at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios. This first major studio in the city is located in what was then Edendale, now the hipster Silver Lake/Echo Park/Los Feliz neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Willie – or “Catch,” as she is either known by her fellow “movies” (the term used then for people working in the film industry) – is literally a farm girl who sets her family’s farmhouse on fire, runs off, and in short order is embraced by a community far more supportive of her gender identity than her rigid family. It is a community that may be patriarchal – this is 1914, after all – but one in which women more than hold their own. Indeed, the character Mabel Normand, based on the real screen actress, is barely out of her teens and already directing successful one- and two-reel “flickers” for Keystone and co-starring opposite a young Charlie Chaplin in his earliest film appearances. Mabel becomes a close ally of Willie, as do two young actresses on the rise, D’Varn and Esther, who become her lovers.

Ventura has given Willie an assertive and compelling voice and, in fact, the story is driven by dialogue for which the author has a particularly sensitive ear when it comes to his female characters. They convey the hopes and dreams and perhaps the naivete that comes with living a charmed, glamorous life, wealthy beyond their wildest dreams and largely free of the repressive social mores faced by women of that era. It’s an insular world to be sure, made all the more apparent when out filming in a public location. While there are hints of the town’s dark underbelly that Raymond Chandler would later portray with such a noir-ish, hard-boiled flair, Ventura instead captures an excitement that comes with forging a new popular art form while chiefly making it up as you go.

Not surprisingly, Ventura is at his best when describing the frenetic shoots that depict the studios’ comedies, many that featured the zany Keystone Cops who would sometimes show up at actual fire and police emergencies to be filmed on location. He relishes the devil-may-care bravado and catch-as-catch-can sensibilities that characterized filmmaking in those early years. Ventura also includes a mix of real film actors and behind-the-camera notables that include Chaplin, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Cecil B. DeMille, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Gloria Swanson, and, of course, Mack Sennett.

Ventura does a splendid job of wrapping up loose ends and blending past with near present for a deeply satisfying ending, one that crystallizes the author’s intimate knowledge of and true love for the silver screen. As a film lover myself, he had me totally entranced.

Edendale

By Michael Ventura

Giant Claw Press, 446 pp., $22.95 (paper)