Hollywood at the Beach

Fantasy and reality collide in California's first modern motion picture factory. Moviemakers began to arrive in Los Angeles in the early 1900s to escape the control of Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey. Los Angeles also offered plenty of sunshine, inexpensive labor, cheap property, and varying landscapes for all genres of films. Producer/director Thomas Harper Ince was one of those drawn to Los Angeles, where he planned to make westerns and mass-produce other films. In Hollywood at the Beach, in the winter of 1911, young Doctor John Alchemy arrives on a set in Southern California to begin his medical practice at Thomas Ince's first moving picture factory. Unsure what he'll find in this little city of make-believe, John soon discovers a world of ambition, greed, intrigue...and murder.