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Wanted: writer/chauffeur
Odd jobs in Los Angeles
Groening moved to Los Angeles in 1977 to become a writer, and while he waited, he washed dishes at a nursing home, clerked at the Hollywood Licorice Pizza record store, and landscaped at a sewage treatment plant. The writer/chauffeur job combined what he wanted to do with something that paid. He drove the director around Beverly Hills during the day, and at night he worked on the man's autobiography.
Tours of old Hollywood
The drives were tours of old Hollywood. The director pointed out a house and called it Tom Mix's, then drove past the same house the next day and called it the place where Laurel and Hardy lived. Groening doubted the two had lived together, and the director told him to shut up.
The autobiography
A number of writer/chauffeurs had already worked on the autobiography. One of them sat typing it up at the dining room table while Groening drove. The pages were obsessed with the director's mother: on the day he met Cecil B. DeMille, he ran home to tell her.
How did Cecil B. DeMille help build Hollywood?
DeMille, Jesse Lasky, and Samuel Goldfish, later known as Samuel Goldwyn, formed a film company in 1913. Their first film, The Squaw Man, was shot in a rented barn in Hollywood and is often called the first feature-length film made there. The company later merged into Paramount Pictures. DeMille returned to Paramount to direct The Ten Commandments, released in 1956.
How did Laurel and Hardy become a team?
Stan Laurel, born in England, and Oliver Hardy, from Georgia, each worked at Hal Roach Studios in the 1920s and appeared in some of the same films before they were a team. Their partnership took shape around 1927, and they made short comedies and then features for the next two decades. Hardy died in 1957, and Laurel died in 1965.
Why was Tom Mix such a big star?
Tom Mix made roughly 300 films between 1909 and 1935, nearly all of them Westerns and most of them silent. He starred at the Fox Film Corporation in the late 1910s and 1920s, and his horse Tony became famous too. A radio serial, Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters, began in 1933 and kept his name in front of audiences after he stopped making films.
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