By Ross Eric Gibson

When a major forest fire swept the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1899, Josephine Clifford McCrackin didn’t see her home as the loss but rather the majestic redwoods that burned. She made it her mission to join with other Santa Cruzans and protect Big Basin from logging. McCrackin, a journalist, also connected with Carrie Stevens Walter to write articles, and Walter’s 200-member San Jose Women’s Club made saving Big Basin a top priority.

Santa Cruz County Bank President William T. Jeter convinced the basin’s owners, Henry Middleton and Timothy Hopkins, to unite their lumber enterprises, in the belief dealing with one company would make it easier for the state to purchase Big Basin’s idyllic redwood forest for California’s first redwood state park. Middleton became an enthusiastic advocate of preserving the redwoods, hosting many a tour for journalists and officials, helping build a movement resulting in the legislation that established the park in 1902. (“Big Basin Redwood Forest,” Traci Bliss, 2021).

Henry’s son was George Middleton Jr., who owned the Middleton Auto Car Co. of San Francisco. In 1912, George founded the California Motion Picture Co. in San Rafael, in order to present his celebrity wife, opera singer Beatriz Michelena, promoting his automobiles on film as a status symbol of refined people. Beatriz was the daughter of Fernando Michelena, once “the San Francisco Caruso.” George hired Santa Cruz native Earl Emlay of San Francisco’s Alcazar Theater Stock Co. to be his film director. Michelena appeared at a San Francisco auto show in 1913 and sang at the inauguration of the first transcontinental motorcar road, the “Lincoln Highway,” which terminated in San Francisco.

Feature films dawn

Films up to that time had been 5 or 10-minute shorts; 20 minutes at most. But in 1912 the first few feature-length movies became a turning point. Cecil B. DeMille produced “The Squaw Man” at 74 minutes, “Quo Vadis” from Italy was two hours, a laughably stilted “Cleopatra” was 88 minutes. But Middleton was most impressed by Sarah Bernhardt in “Queen Elizabeth” at 40 minutes. Few actors kept their reputation as serious artists by doing cinema. But Sarah Bernhardt confined herself to serious and classic subjects and only showed her films in legitimate theaters (not nickelodeons). Middleton decided to star Michelena in his own feature-length films, of classic tales shown in legitimate theaters. Without Michelena’s magnificent voice, the film would showcase her naturalistic acting, and versatile range of characterizations, changing with each role.

Meanwhile, San Francisco landed the Panama-Pacific International Exposition for 1915, so in 1913, Middleton and Emlay launched the Golden Gate Weekly newsreel series, promoting Bay Area activities, car stories presented as news, touting an upcoming automobile show at the exposition. In 1914 Emlay filmed a pageant about Portola’s discovery of San Francisco, with Nicholas Covarubbias playing his direct ancestor, Portola. (The film was released in 1915).

Meanwhile, Middleton got exclusive rights from Bret Harte’s impoverished daughter, Jessamy Harte Steele, to film Harte’s classic western stories of indelible characters. This was a good fit for Santa Cruz County, where Harte had lived in the 1860s and wrote his original stories inspired by picnics in the mountains. McCrackin had worked for Bret Harte as a writer and close friend, still corresponding with Harte in England, up to his death in 1902.

The first of the Bret Harte stories filmed was “Salomy Jane,” from Paul Armstrong’s 1907 hit Broadway stage-play, based on Harte’s story “Salomy Jane’s Kiss.” George’s uncle Henry Middleton donated his Boulder Creek ranch for a film set in 1914. Michelena insisted on doing her own stunts, even after she ended up in the hospital for one.

“Salomy Jane” ran over 70 minutes, shown in legitimate theaters across the country, with rave reviews in New York as “the first classic of the American screen.” Michelena did two more films in 1914: the feature comedy, “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,” followed by “Mignon,” a gypsy opera she had sung on stage, based on a Goethe tale. The film “Mignon” debuted at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel where Beatriz sang in person but had to beg off any further appearances as she was departing to film Bret Harte’s “The Lily of Poverty Flat” in Boulder Creek. Poverty Flat was a gold camp of hard-luck miners.

Poverty Flat

The cast arrived February 1915 at the Boulder Creek train station in a pouring rain, and local officials apologized that the brass band they sent hadn’t arrived. “Better you should have sent a boat,” an actor commented. Most of the cast stayed in Boulder Creek at the Big Basin Hotel, owned by Middleton.

On a regular workday, actors put on their costumes and makeup at the hotel, and seeing pioneer costumed people around Boulder Creek made the old town relive its past. The Gold Rush was only 65 years old at the time, and elderly ’49ers took part in the filming. Cast and crew would take the Big Basin stagecoach or a bench-filled wagon to the movie ranch, or ride any horses or covered wagons to be used on the set. Along the side of the wagon full of film folk were rodeo cowboys on horseback singing western songs. One of these Salinas rodeo champions was Curley Fletcher, better known nationally as the Cowboy Poet.

The Poverty Flat town set was designed by company architect Al Burrell, who had relatives in the area. The buildings were authentically detailed and became a popular tourist attraction. Even the businesses inside them were real, set up to serve the cast — who had little time to shop in town — but the stores also catered to tourists. Staple goods could be bought at the general store, and the drugstore served the cast’s medical needs. Film folk and tourists bought film set postcards and mailed them at the film set post office, which had been initially set up to serve the cast.

The town set even had its own newspaper, The Poverty Flat Nugget, which was edited tongue-in-cheek by Earl Emlay, and distributed in eight editions as a supplement to Boulder Creek’s Mountain Echo. Emlay played the comically crooked lawyer, Culpepper Starbottle, in most of the company’s Bret Harte films. The only “fake” business was the Bear Trap Saloon, whose whiskey bottles contained only cold tea. The saloon functioned as the crew’s coffee shop, with fresh doughnuts brought in daily from a Boulder Creek bakery. The real liquor was distributed “medicinally” at the drug store, which some jokingly called a Blind Pig (or speak easy) at a time national prohibition was under debate.

Soon a costume ball was held at Middleton Hall, to welcome the movie folk. Guests could enjoy the spectacle of elaborate costumes in a ballroom decorated in stage-set splendor. The film’s director was Harold Entwistle, a British-born Broadway producer, whose son was my friend Milt Entwistle of Santa Cruz. Director Harold Entwistle dressed as a baby doll at the masquerade ball. For a proper English gentleman, Harold had a playful sense of humor, and a trained tenor voice. He joined opera-singing cast-members Michelena, D. Mitsoras and Madame Tarney in Middleton Hall singing concerts, including some original numbers Entwistle wrote himself.

Film technique

At the movie town, the buildings were designed with removable back walls so interiors could be filmed on-site. This saved a trip to San Rafael to do staged interiors, where continuity had to be replicated (like the same costumes, with the same stains), and the movie town interiors had the overlapping advantage of live street scenes occurring out the window.

Each scene was rehearsed a dozen times before it was committed to film. The reason was that the expensive Bell & Howell camera shot two copies of each scene. Only two cameras were used at each location scene, with cameramen Frank Padilla and Mo Snow. They acted more as cinematographers than mere crank-turners, in charge of lighting and shot composition, in collaboration with the director. A film lab was built in Boulder Creek adjoining Middleton Hall, where the day’s rushes were shown each evening, to see if anything needed to be reshot the next day.

The film had 70 actors and 30 crew members. The 100 horses were under the supervision of Jack Millerick, who played the stage-driver in the film, and Nicholas Covarrubias who played the sheriff and served as animal trainer.

Josephine McCrackin attended a number of the filmings on behalf of the Sentinel. During the shooting of one scene, an actress balanced on a small mound of stones, slipped off. McCrackin said “It’s too small.” Middleton replied, “But that mound cost me $300! My costs are $1,500 a day for a five-hour workday, and since that mound took an hour, I calculate that’s $300!”

Once McCrackin brought a scrawny, awkward teenager, whose theatrical aspirations McCrackin was trying to encourage. When introduced to Beatriz Michelena, the girl blushed shyly and said, “Uh … hello. I’m ZaSu Pitts.” John O’Keeffe wrote in the Sentinel, that filmmaking is not like a stage play, for some stunts are truly dangerous. Michelena was riding a stagecoach pursuing by outlaws while filming “The Lily of Poverty Flat,” but the horses spooked and ran a quarter of a mile, throwing the driver and guard to the ground, with the coach soon dangling over a cliff. The men thrown off had landed safely, and George Middleton rescued his wife in the nick of time. In another scene, Michelena was swimming her horse across a river at floodtide and was nearly drowned. But Michelena preferred to do her own stunt work and was known to encourage girls to enter films. ZaSu may have trembled at the thought, gasping “Oh my!” but soon her gawky demeanor was the very thing that put her in moving pictures.

When “The Lily of Poverty Flat” was shown at the Jewel Theater in Santa Cruz in 1915, the line for tickets stretched down the block and across the street, with part of the crowd there to see it a second time. For the moment, California Motion Picture Corporation was one of the top financed film companies, Beatriz Michelena was a leading star, being compared to Sarah Bernhardt, and Boulder Creek was an acknowledged center of quality motion pictures.

Further reading

“The Golden Gate and the Silver Screen—San Francisco in the History of the Cinema,” by Geoffrey Bell.