So Florida remained strictly a seasonal production center. The heat and humidity, unleavened by air conditioning that hadn’t yet been invented, could actually melt the emulsion on 35mm film. Some thought was given to establishing year-round studios, but that idea vanished with the summers. One of the first studios to arrive was Paramount, which shot The Palm Beach Girl, starring silent film darling Bebe Daniels, in and around The Breakers hotel in 1926. It was during the real estate boom of the 1920s that the movies came to Palm Beach.
Between 19, about 300 films were made in Jacksonville.
But unpleasantly cold winters led early movie companies to begin looking to the south for winter production, specifically Jacksonville, which at the time was the biggest city (50,000 people, with an infrastructure to match) on the railroad line that was a straight shot from New York City. The movies came to Florida for the same reason as the population: the weather.īefore World War I, the movie industry had been mostly centered around New York and New Jersey. ApA brief history of filming in Palm Beach County and where the industry stands today