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The History of American Cinema: 1930

January-June

The first Mickey Mouse Club meeting takes place at the Fox Dome theater in Ocean Park, California.  [ADD]

Maurice Chevalier’s second US film for Paramount, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade premieres in Los Angeles to general acclaim. [ADD]

Leon Schlesinger begins production of Warner Brother’s Looney Tunes cartoons to plug songs to which they own publishing rights. [ADD]

In a speech given at New York’s Trade Organisation banquet, Will Hays, President of the MPPDA declares that sound cinema has attracted an additional 10 million people to American cinemas than in 1929. [ADD]

In a move to avoid federal film censorship, the major studios accept a new code of production proposed by Martin Quigley, editor of the Motion Picture Herald and Catholic priest Reverend Daniel A. Lord and backed by Will Hays, head of the MPPDA. [ADD]

Anna Christie, Greta Garbo’s first sound picture is released following frenetic publicity – Garbo Talks! Scream the posters.   The actresses first lines are, “Gimme a visky with a ginger ale on the side -- and don't be stingy baby.” [ADD]

Caviar, the first Terrytoons cartoon, is released by 20^th Century Fox. [ADD]

Release of Kenneth Hawks’ Such Men are Dangerous, notable today chiefly for the fact that ten of the film’s crew were killed when two aircraft en-route to location shooting collided in mid-air. [ADD]

Silent heartthrob John Gilbert’s career is in question following disastrous voice tests. [ADD] 

William Fox suffers the ignoble fate of being dismissed by the board of directors from his position of President of the company he founded in 1915 due to his costly but unsuccessful attempts to take control of MGM. [ADD]

The first Looney Tunes cartoon, Hugh Harmon and Rudolf Ising’s Sinkin’ in the Bathtub, is released.   The star of the cartoon is a character called Bosko, a variation on Disney’s Mickey Mouse character. [ADD]

Universal’s King of Jazz contains an animated four-minute Technicolor prologue created by Walter Lantz. [ADD]

Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a searing and violent indictment of the futility of war, premieres in Los Angeles. [ADD]

David O. Selznick marries Irene Mayer, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer. [ADD]

RKO experiments with theater television at the Proctor Theater in Schenectady, NY. [ADD]

The MPPDA adopts an advertising code. [ADD]

The success of Victor Fleming’s The Virginian, which stars the laconic Gary Cooper, sparks a brief revival in the fortunes of the Western genre. [ADD]