Posted Jun 6, 2015, 8:44 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Aug 2013
Posts: 4,245
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tourmaline
From IMDB
Quote:
Horsely was in Europe when war broke out in August 1914. The Bostock Animal and Jungle Show was evicted from its London exhibition rooms due to military necessity. The manager of the Jungle Show sold it to Horsely for $40,000, approximately a tenth of his fortune from the sale of his Universal stock. Horsely transported the show's assets to the US by ship. From the docks of Brooklyn, Horsely shipped the menagerie, which included 58 lions and two elephants, to Los Angeles. Altogether it cost him a total of $15,000 to freight the animals from England to L.A. He spent a further $47,500 to create a new park for his show, including grandstands, arenas, cages, and a concrete fence on a property at Washington and Main that rented for $600 per month.
After he opened the show in 1915 he was facing a daily overhead of $225, though the most tickets the show ever sold in a day was $165, while on a bad day the show took in as little as $1.25. To make the show pay, Horsely built a film studio at the site that he called the Bostock Jungle Films Co., which included its own film processing lab. Horsely began turning out movies, many of which used the wild animals as background. His new studio made five-reel dramas with Crane Wilbur, "Stanley in Africa" pictures, and approximately 200 comedies with George Ovey. By the fall of 1918 his movie-making venture was through, and when he filed for bankruptcy in 1919, the once-rich Horsely was $38,000 in debt.
The loss of his company, his exotic animal show and his fortune broke David Horsely. He died on February 23, 1933, a forgotten man, barely remembered as one of the men who saved the film industry from The Trust and pioneered Hollywood as a filmmaking center. Horsely was interred in Hollywood Cemetery, now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery, reduced to a footnote in American cinema history. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0395438/
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The studio must have been on the side of the Chutes/Washington Park site. Its fleeting existence probably explains why it isn't on the Sanborn maps posted by Flyingwedge in post #19307, or the Baist maps posted by me in post #19077.
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