At the age of 49, William Desmond Taylor was at the top. It was 1922, and
Taylor was one of Paramount Pictures' best directors. He had been
president of the Motion Picture Directors Association for three years. And
then, one night in February,Taylor was dead--shot to death in his home.The killers were never found, though the newspapers of the time were certainly filled with possible suspects, from Irish nationalists to drug gangsters to the Ku Klux Klan. But even though the case was never solved, Taylor's murder and the resulting spotlight that was shined on Hollywood changed the image of the film industry forever.
Seventy-two years later, the mystery of Taylor's death isn't a dead issue. The study of Taylor's life and death is alive and well on the Internet, through a year-old electronic newsletter appropriately titled Taylorology.
The creator and editor of Taylorology, Bruce Long, isn't a motion picture historian. In fact, he's not a historian at all--he's a computer programmer at Arizona State University. Long became interested in Taylor by watching silent films on his 8mm movie camera. Fascinated by the films produced by early Hollywood, he began reading about the history of the film industry.
Looming large was the Taylor murder, a crime that rocked Hollywood. Anti-Hollywood sentiment was never higher than in the months after the Taylor murder, as the papers exposed the private lives of the stars, directors and producers who brought entertainment to the world.
Long's research into Taylor's murder resulted in a book, William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier (Scarecrow Press, 1991). He also wrote another book-length manuscript on the world of Taylor, The Humor of a Hollywood Murder, but couldn't find a publisher. Enter the Internet and Taylorology. "Serializing that book in Taylorology was a way for me to publish that book for free," Long says. "Of course I get no money from it, but the main thing is to put the information out there and make it available to the public."
Long's goal is to provide as much material about the case as possible, so that when a future historian is researching the Taylor case, that person won't just have the conventionally-published books on the subject as resources. They'll also have Taylorology.
Taylorology doesn't spend much time on the fundamentals of the Taylor case, a must for new readers who are interested in the material. Within the first 11 issues of the e-zine (894K of ASCII text), there should've been room for a brief primer on Taylor and the basics of the case. But even without such a primer, Taylorology is both a history lesson and a fun read. The serialized Humor of a Hollywood Murder, which takes up issues 4-11 of Taylorology (issues 1-3 were printed by Long a decade ago), is a funny collection of press accounts of the Taylor case and of '20s Hollywood. ("The leprous colony at Hollywood will not be reformed and consequently will have to be destroyed," wrote one paper.) It's a fascinating look at early 20th century film and journalism, and sometimes it's painfully obvious that we haven't changed very much in all this time.
--Jason Snell
Bruce Long can be reached at bruce@asu.edu.