Out Sick: Playing Hooky at the Movies 100 Years Ago

"Superba," advertisement, Evening Tribune (San Diego, California), Wednesday, 6 Oct 1915, page 3, col 1; digital image, GenealogyBank (http://www.genealogybank.com : accessed 6 Oct 2015).

I'm feeling under the weather and brainless, so I'm off to the movies.

The Superba.  Opened as The Mirror in 1911, then was later called Majestic, Grant, and then Superba (all in 1914).  Building was demolished in the 1930's.

Right behind the Grant Hotel, the old location now appears to be a parking structure.

Copies of "The Quest" apparently no longer exist, so I'll have to miss this storyline:

Millionaire bachelor John Douglas, disillusioned with vapid society girls, muses of a "dream girl." To avoid the coming social season, John sails to the South Seas, and after surviving a shipwreck, he reaches an island inhabited by a white race descended from shipwrecked English emigrants. He falls in love with Nai, the harp playing daughter of Chief Naeto, who also resembles his dream girl. When Nai's fiancé Kaura, the sub-chief, demands that they marry, John and Nai escape and are married by a sympathetic priest. After Kaura is killed by lightning while pursuing them, Naeto sends the priest to persuade Nai and John to return and rule the tribe. Spying a yacht offshore, John attempts to signal it until nightfall. He falls asleep guarding Nai, and starts to dream. The next day, the couple is rescued. In New York, Nai awkwardly adjusts to society's conventions and clothes. In a struggle with De Villiers, John's friend who flirts with Nai, John shoots Nai, but the shot awakens him from a dream. Influenced by his dream, he decides never to return to civilization and goes back with Nai and the priest to the tribe.

Okay then.

At least "Mabel At the Wheel," a Chaplin film, is readily available.




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