Cleopatra

As you know, these broadcasts from the Lux Radio Theater are quite an event in Hollywood, and among our many friends here tonight is one of the greatest stars of the silent pictures.

I admired her from afar when she was doing such magnificent spectacles as Cleopatra, and I was just an extra.

Today, she is the wife of one of our leading film directors.

I've known her for many years as a most charming and gracious lady, and I want you to meet her now, Miss Theda Barrett.

Oh, you're very kind, Woody.

We worked awfully hard making those pictures.

For instance, in making Cleopatra, we had no research department at the studio.

I worked myself for months with the curator of Egyptology at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Newport Beach has become ancient Egypt.

The production is Cleopatra, one of the most ambitious silent films of its era, starring Theda Barra, one of Hollywood's first major screen celebrities.

Today, Newport is known, of course, for its expensive real estate, beautiful harbor, and coastal lifestyle.

But more than a century ago, it was undeveloped landscape offered something Hollywood desperately needed, a natural movie set.

Southern California offered sunshine, varied terrain, and easy access to the growing film industry in L.A. Newport Beach offered something particularly valuable.

Its harbor could become almost any maritime setting imaginable.

In 1917, J. Gordon Edwards, the director, brought his production of Cleopatra to the Newport area.

Upper Newport Bay became part of the film's ancient world, while Balboa Beach hosted an elaborate naval battle sequence.