The Way Florida Was

July 8, 1985|By Julia Reed of The Sentinel Staff

Joel Wells, chairman of Sun Banks and a speaker at a June investment seminar on Florida's film industry, compares Florida to California -- the California of 60 or 70 years ago.

''California's industry grew from capital back east. They had a lot of inexpensive locations and (movie makers) went there for the beautiful scenery.''

If the two states offered the same thing to the country's budding film industry, why didn't Florida become the center of that industry instead of its West Coast counterpart? It almost did.

Today, Florida is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve a goal it first tried to reach in the early part of this century.

In 1905, legendary cinematographer Billy Bitzer made one of the first movies in the state. Called Automobile Races at Ormond Florida, the film attracted interest to the state as a production center.

Two years later, the first permanent studio in the state was established in Jacksonville, and by 1916, there were more than 100 studios in the city.

In addition to providing jobs and boosting Jacksonville's economy, movies provided free publicity to fuel the state's already growing tourism industry. Recognizing the benefits, the local power structure attempted to attract even more California companies.

But it was not to be. Many residents were up in arms over such controversial films made in Florida as The Cracker's Daughter and A Florida Feud, which they said reflected negatively on the state. Also, producers filmed on Sundays, which defied the local ''blue laws,'' and the general behavior of the flamboyant movie people was questioned.

By 1917, the development of a Florida film industry had become a political issue, and in an election that year, the pro-industry forces were defeated. By the following year, most of the Jacksonville companies had gone back to California or New York.

After the exodus, there were sporadic attempts to reestablish the state as a major film center. One of the least successful was the building of a complete city, Hollywood-by-the-Sea in Broward County, specifically for the motion picture industry. Unfortunately, the project was a casualty of the land bust in the 1920s.

The industry was fairly quiet after that, with the notable exception of the filming of the early Tarzan movies near Ocala in the 1940s, which left the area with hundreds of souvenir rhesus monkeys.

Probably the next significant event in Florida's industry history occurred when the feature film Where the Boys Are was released in 1960. Set in Fort Lauderdale, the film made the city the spring break capital of the world and reminded government officials of the film industry's positive effect on tourism.

Also during the 1960s, Florida was the site of television shows such as Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges, Surfside Six, and The Jackie Gleason Show live from Miami Beach.

Also in Miami was Ivan Tors Productions, the largest studio on the East Coast. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tors, a producer on both coasts, produced such successful TV shows as Flipper and Gentle Ben in Florida.

Television shows were not the only productions to move away from California. In the 1970s more films began to move out of the studio to locations. When in 1973, Florida lost two feature films with scripts specifically written for the state, and four to Texas, government once more got behind the industry.

Georgia and Texas both had film offices to work closely with producers and Florida did not. In 1974, the Florida Legislature funded a Motion Picture and TV Services Office. Now called the Motion Picture and Television Bureau, with an annual budget of about $500,000, the state agency is once again attempting to make Florida the capital of the film industry.

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