He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Projecting America: The Epic Western and National Mythmaking in 1920s Hollywood, and shared the following:
Page 99 finds me moving between two major case studies from Chapter Two of Projecting America, wrapping up a discussion of North of 36 (1924)—a film that looked to present the first post–Civil War cattle drive from Texas to Kansas in 1867 as a decisive episode in America’s national story—and beginning one centered around The Pony Express (1925)—which looked to do similar for the eponymous mail service. A heading, “‘Saving California for the Union’: The Pony Express (1925)”, divides the two and hints at what they look to do with their respective topics. As is indicated here, both the cattle drive linking the postbellum South with markets to the north and the express riders racing west to California against the backdrop of a looming Civil War are presented on film as episodes where “the very course of national history is at stake”. In turn, page 99 signals why 1920s Hollywood was attempting to contribute to, and even reshape, popular understandings of what was then widely seen as the most important period in American history, quoting Billboard magazine’s assessment of North of 36’s success: “That the public is not supporting socalled [sic] sex pictures, society dramas, stories of beer-drinking revels, petting parties and whatnot overloaded with Boccaccio frankness is borne out in blazing proof.”Learn more about Projecting America at the University of Oklahoma Press website.
Here we see why the Page 99 Test works well for Projecting America. One of my book’s larger arguments is that silent-era Hollywood turned to epic Western production in a moment in which the morals of its films and stars were under scrutiny, and the chapter this page comes from is a detailed exploration of what this actually entailed in terms of film production and promotion. My quotations and framing here give a sense of how this effort was received and what the intent behind it was: by linking the nation’s most pervasive form of mass entertainment to a stated aspiration to educate the public, the new American film capital positioned their historical films about the frontier as interventions in the period’s pressing debates around cinema and, in particular, its social influence.
The result was that epic Westerns were acclaimed by many at the time as a new, distinctly American way of engaging with history that could unite diverse filmgoers via inspiring lessons in the “making” of the nation. What the Page 99 Test highlights is that, in doing this, the film industry of the 1920s actively looked to expand standard narratives of Westward expansion, presenting those responsible for the Texan cattle drive and the express riders delivering news to the frontier as “pioneers” comparable to those who had traversed the Oregon Trail in The Covered Wagon (1923)—the film that inaugurated the cycle. This was a major aim of my study. While it is tempting to assume that the film industry simply restated the favorite myths of American audiences, the idea that cinema could offer a new way of engaging with history—visual, wide-reaching, and understood across linguistic and national divides—was a crucial part of these discussions. Revisiting this page brought me back to the simple questions that first guided my research: what did it mean to make a successful historical film in the first decades of Hollywood, and why did it matter?
--Marshal Zeringue