accidentally fall on her head, such that "the situation [would] carry] the action from

there. All Sturges had to do then was develop his characters and see how they responded"

(Curtis 110). The script, then, held the idea of chance, but for Sturges that was purely a

narrative device. As we saw earlier, he did not believe chance could be filmed.

 But in Hollywood chance was not just a concept, and chance encounters were not

uncommon. Despite its reputation as a rational system, the story of the American film

industry began with a classic accidental encounter. A year after a young fur coat dealer

named Adolph Zukor successfully distributed the Frenchfilm d'art Queen Elizabeth in

1912-a film that was immensely popular in the U.S. primarily because of its spectacular

costumes-DeMille formed a partnership with Jesse L. Lasky and Samuel Goldfish (who

became Samuel Goldwyn of MGM) to create the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company,

which later grew into Paramount. Having purchased rights to the Western novel The

Squaw Man, DeMille and co-director Oscar C. Apfel went to Flagstaff to shoot on

location. But they found the snow-capped Arizona mountains unsuitable for their tale.

Frustrated, they packed up, got back on the train, and rode to the end of the line. Last

stop, Hollywood. Having stumbled upon this new setting, DeMille went on to transform

the little-known site into a spectacular dream factory.

 Soon, others followed.15 Among them was an inspired young designer named

James Mitchell Leisen. In 1919, he went to Hollywood to become a movie star. But he

was not much of an actor and spent most of his time with his family friends, who

happened to know Philip Smalley and his wife, Lois Weber.16 Let me recount his entry

into Hollywood, which was as coincidental as the meeting between Paul Eluard and

Andre Breton at the birth of Surrealism just a year earlier. During a party at the