From the Echo Park Historical Society

Years before Hollywood became synonymous with the commercial film industry, Edendale was the center of filmmaking on the West Coast. This film center was located southeast of Hollywood and north of Echo Park, the famous Southern California park surrounding a scenic little lake. Angelus Temple, later built in the 1920s, was close to the park, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson preached in the temple.

A film trade publication, Motography, of July 1911, described the  area this way:  “Edendale…is the motion picture center of the Pacific Coast. With clear air and sunshine three hundred days out of the year, conditions are ideal for perfect picture making. The scenic advantages of the location, too, are unique. From [Edendale] can be seen the Pacific Ocean, twenty-two miles to the west, and the broad panorama of Southern California, with its fruit and stock ranches, its snowcapped mountains and its tropical vegetation, to the east, north and south. Within a short distance of Edendale may be found every known variety of national scenery, seemingly arranged by a master producer expressly for the motion picture camera.”

In the 1910s, several film studios were operating in Edendale and were located on the street that was later renamed Glendale Boulevard, north of Sunset Boulevard. These studios included the Selig Polyscope Company, the Mack Sennett Studios, the Pathé West Coast Film Studio and others.

Several silent-film stars worked in the Edendale studios, including Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Theda Bara, Tom Mix, Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, Marie Dressler and Bebe Daniels. Filmed at Mack Sennett Studios were the first film starring Charlie Chaplin, the first feature-length comedy — starring Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand — and the Keystone Cops comedies. Hal Roach’s early comedies starring Harold Lloyd were also filmed at a studio in Edendale.

The pie toss became a standard routine in slapstick movie comedies. The first pie-in-the-face scene was filmed in 1913 when Mabel Normand tossed a pie at Fatty Arbuckle in the movie A Noise from the Deep, at what later became the Mack Sennett Studios on Glendale Boulevard near Effie Street.

The complex dates back to 1909 and includes one of the area’s first permanent sound stages or filmmaking factories. The complex is now part of a storage facility. The former studio at 1712 Glendale Boulevard is a historic-cultural monument.

Filming continued in local studios through the 1930s, when most of the industry had moved to Hollywood and beyond.