Mary Pickford signing the entrance to the Mary Pickford War Funds bungalow
Summary
Film star Mary Pickford adding her signature to the door of the Mary Pickford War Funds bungalow.
The bungalow, valued at $15,000, was built at 90 Glenwood Crescent in East York Township. One dollar tickets were sold throughout Toronto, with the house as the main prize, in order to raise funds for the following war charities: the Lions British Child War Victims' Fund, the Evening Telegram British War Victims' Fund and the Malta Relief Fund Society of Toronto.
Pickford was born in Toronto and helped develop plans for the project. She contributed the funds from the sale of her Toronto property to finance the construction of the bungalow. The home was furnished with large and small appliances by the Canadian General Electric Company.
By 1908 there were 10,000 permanent movie theaters in the U.S. alone. For the first thirty years, movies were silent, accompanied by live musicians, sound effects, and narration. Until World War I, movie screens were dominated by French and Italian studios. During Great War, the American movie industry center, "Hollywood," became the number one in the world. By the 1920s, the U.S. was producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total. Hollywood's system and its publicity method, the glamourous star system provided models for all movie industries. Efficient production organization enabled mass movie production and technical sophistication but not artistic expression. In 1915, in France, a group of filmmakers began experimenting with optical and pictorial effects as well as rhythmic editing which became known as French Impressionist Cinema. In Germany, dark, hallucinatory German Expressionism put internal states of mind onscreen and influenced the emerging horror genre. The Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. In Spain, Luis Buñuel embraced abstract surrealism and pure aestheticism. And, just like that, at about its peak time, the silent cinema era ended in 1926-1928.
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