American Cinematographer - March 1989 - 54

Allen

Davey, ASC, went on to become an acclaimed
cinematographer. His credits included The
Wizard of Oz with Hal Rosson, Typhoon, and Sweet¬
hearts, which won him an Oscar in 1938). May's other
brother, Alfred, rented out the elephants for $100 a day
with a trainer. The caravan was often in tow to the Selig
Studio, and the sight of the fatigued pachyderms rest¬
ing on the Los Angeles intersection of 7th and Broad¬
way became a frequent traffic-stopper. May Davey later
bought her husband's film lab and moved it to 1121
Lillian Way in Hollywood as a rental, but lost it in the
Depression and the building was repossessed. Charles
Gay, a shrewd financier, bought the animals, and
Gay's Lion Farm soon provided the roar for MGM's
awesome
logo.
Monetary loss was a sad blow to David
Horsley, but not as much as the waning of his energy
and enthusiasm. He ceased to play a key role in the
evolution of the business and died on February 23,
1933, an all but forgotten pioneer, whose "washtub and
a sink" had laid the groundwork for the entire Holly¬
Technicolor

wood

arena.

His younger

brother, William, prospered.
Dismayed by the rampant nepotism of Laemmle at
Universal, he sold out his shares and launched the
William

Horsley Film Laboratories

Sunset Boule¬

vard, catacorner to the old Nestor site. When Walt

Disney came to Hollywood, the lab began processing 8
and 16 millimeter animated subjects for home distribu¬
tion, beginning with Steamboat Willie. (During his first
year, William claimed to have paid over $38,000 in
royalties to Disney for the use of his cartoons.) He
operated the lab and later Hollywood Film Enterprises
up to his retirement after World War II, and spent his
twilight years dabbling in real estate near the Indio
desert. He died in 1957 at the age of 88.
David Stanley Horsley, ASC, perpetuated the
clan. A baby actor in the early Centaurs, he worked
precariously as an extra at "Mixville" in Edendale
under the direction of Horace Davey before the advent
of child labor laws. His aunts, Ethel and Grace Davey,
were film editors for Kessel & Bauman and taught him
the art. In 1916, he worked as a

switchboard operator at

his father's Los

Angeles studio. In 1917, at age 11, he
was backpatching splices and polishing watermarks
off motion picture negative at the old Morosco Lab on
Occidental Boulevard.
Stan became

assistant

cameraman

versal in 1923, loading and hauling Akeleys
Horne on productions like The Hunchback

at Uni¬

for Pliny
of Notre

Dame. At MGM, he assisted cameraman John Leezer
on the Ben Hur chariot race, Milton Moore, ASC, on

Altars

of Desire, and Merritt Gerstad, ASC,

He also assisted Charles

process unit at Universal and remained
there until the outbreak of World War II. In 1945, he

called back by studio manager Martin Murphy to
spearhead the Universal effects department, a position
he held until 1954. During that period, he hands-on
invented a 3D system, the "linear actuator" (a motion
control device), and many of the camera mechanisms
used to film It Came from Outer Space and This Island
was

Earth. In 1960, he shot

supervised the blue screen photogra¬
phy in Paris for Darryl Zanuck's The Longest Day.
Stan Horsley was an enigmatic visionary. He
described in great detail the advent of VCR's as far back
as 1968. In the seventies, he maintained 35 international
patents on an electronic motion picture printer, the
prototype of which sat in his garage. He was unsuc¬

cessful in

getting backing from the General Dynamics
Corporation and donated most of his holdings to the
AFI. He died in 1976 at the age of 70, embittered by his
inability to thrust the industry into a revolutionary age,
the way he saw it coming. His greatest ambition, he
would often lament, was to live longer than his father,
whom he idolized. He did so by a year.
Today, on the site of what was once the woodand-spit Nestor Studio stands the colossus known as
CBS. Television has shunted the icons of Old Holly¬
wood into sprawling Burbank neighborhoods. "Holly¬
wood',' once a glitzy invocation, has become a mere
euphemism for California film production. Number 1
Union Square, once a bustling mecca for renegade
picturemakers in the Lost City of New York, teems
with bargain basement street racks and fast food joints.
Try pinpointing the site of 11 East 14th Street, the regal
Biograph brownstone, and you will find in its place an
Off Track Betting station - an echo of the cinema's lessthan-legitimate days, an evil trick of time. Far more
surreal is the image of Bayonne, New Jersey, as a
playground for cowboys and Indians, surrounded as it
is by chemical plants, third-world dwellings, and the
waters of the Newark and East River Bays.
There is no monument, no plaque at 900
Broadway, where Centaur and the entire film business
first rumbled. No resident of Bayonne would know the
name David
Horsley His is but a footnote in film
history books, a sentence or two in passing. Chances
are that other
picture-makers would have invaded the
sleepy California town before the first World War. But
the fact remains that on a lousy, gray day in 1911, a man
with one arm burned his bridges behind him, gambled
every buck he could raise, put a throng of thirty-nine
on a train west, and
single-handedly turned Holly¬
wood into "the movies'.'
Remarked his brother William in 1934: "Hol¬

Freaks.

Rosher, Glenn MacWilliams,

Jack the Giant Killer for Edward

Small and in 1962

lywood

ASC, and William Daniels, ASC, on scores of Fox
pictures, and Joseph Walker, ASC, on the Rin Tin Tin

than it

shows at Warners.

army

spirit

the memory of David Horsley more
repay. His everlasting grit and fighting

owes to

can ever

overcame odds that would have defeated an
of ordinary mortals."
A

Horsley found his calling in 1934 at Universal
special effects master John Fulton, ASC, whom
he had assisted on Henry King's Eyes of the World. After
putting together the "bottled people" sequence in The
Bride of Frankenstein with traveling mattes, he took

by Kevin Brownlow in July
interviewed by Paul Mandell in
March-June 1974. His oral history of Horsley is being
planned for publication by Scarecrow Press.

American

March 1989

with

charge of the

Cinematographer

Charles Rosher was interviewed
1966. Stan

Horsley

was

American Cinematographer - March 1989

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