March 10, 1910: D.W. Griffith launches the Hollywood film industry with In Old California, the first film to be made in the new municipality.
March 10, 1922: Hollywood hires former Postmaster General Will H. Hays to oversee “moral and artistic standards in motion picture production.”
March 10, 1924: Swedish starlet Greta Garbo has her first major film role in director Mauritz Stiller’s The Saga of Gosta Berling.
March 11, 1927: Midtownl Manhattan’s elaborate Roxy Theatre, billed as the world’s largest with nearly 6,000 seats, opens. It will be demolished in 1960.
March 14, 1930: ” Garbo Talks!” in MGM’s Anna Christie. Greta’s first line: “Give me a vhiskey with a ginger ale on the side–and don’t be stingy, baby,”
March 11, 1931: Fritz Lang’s chilling true-crime drama M, starring Peter Lorre as a child killer, debuts in Berlin.
March 11, 1931: The director of Nosferatu and Sunrise, German-born F.W. Murnau, 42, is killed in a car accident on the Santa Barbara Highway.
March 10, 1932: Paramount Pictures abandons the East Coast for Hollywood, shutting down its Astoria, Long Island studios.
March 13, 1934: Walt Disney, accepting his Best Animated Short Academy Award for The Three Little Pigs, is the first winner to refer to the gold statuette as an “Oscar.”
March 9, 1935: A stuttering pig named Porky makes his screen debut in Friz Freleng’s Merrie Melodies short I Haven’t Got a Hat.
March 13, 1940: In roles originally planned for Jack Oakie and Fred MacMurray, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby first team up in Road to Singapore.
March 9, 1945: Filmed over a seven-month period during the Nazi occupation of France, Marcel Carne’s masterpiece, Les Enfants du Paradis, premieres in Paris.
March 14, 1946: Rita Hayworth heats up movie screens with her rendition of “Put the Blame on Mame” in the steamy drama Gilda.
March 10, 1947: Ronald Reagan is elected president…of the Screen Actors Guild, and a month later will agree to notify the FBI of any communist activity in the union.
March 13, 1947: Harold Russell, who lost both hands in a WWII hand grenade explosion, wins two Oscars for playing a returning G.I. in The Best Years of Our Lives.
March 9, 1955: After bit parts on TV and in film, James Dean becomes an overnight sensation with his starring film debut in East of Eden, which premieres today.
March 13, 1956: John Ford’s landmark frontier drama The Searchers, starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter and Natalie Wood, opens.
March 11, 1969: A Boston judge declares The Killing of Sister George obscene and gives the theater owner showing the lesbian-themed drama a six-month jail sentence and a $1,000 fine.
March 8, 1971: Daredevil silent screen funnyman Harold Lloyd, 77, dies from cancer.
March 11, 1971: The sci-fi drama THX-1138, the feature debut of a young filmmaker named George Lucas, opens.
March 9, 1977: Protesting the biodrama Mohammad, Messenger of God, a group of Black Muslims takes hostages at Washington, D.C., theaters showing the film.
March 8, 1996: The Coen Brothers’ “based on a true story” Midwest crime saga Fargo, starring Frances McDormand, opens.
March 9, 1996: A few weeks after celebrating his 100th birthday, cigar-loving comedian and Academy Award-winner George Burns passes away.
March 11, 1997: The ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who died in 1991, are launched into orbit around the Earth.