Welcome to Mitzi of the
Ritz, the story of a plucky Jewish teenager on the run during the
Great Depression.
In
the fall of 1930, fifteen-year-old Mitzi Schector and her mother, Leah, are
forced to leave the Big Apple. They abandon everything to escape the
machinations of a local gangster who wants to possess Mitzi body and soul. The
two make an eventful cross country trek on the Santa Fe Chief and along the way,
Mitzi is introduced to a cast of characters who will eventually change her
life.
By the early 1930s, Los Angeles had metamorphosed
from a sleepy desert village to a vibrant metropolitan center. We see the city
through Mitzi’s eyes, a land of mystery, a sun-drenched planet with an alien
culture that was the scene of a horrible family tragedy in the 1920’s. Mitzi’s
uncle, a rebellious youth, was killed in a fire that also took the life of a
leading actress of the time. Mitzi discovers that fire was deliberate, yet
the culprit has never been charged and no one can tell her what happened to her
uncle’s body.
Mitzi and Leah arrive in Los Angeles during one of
the most interesting times in Hollywood history. Movies are ending their
not-so-rapid transformation from silent to talking pictures but the change could
not have come at a worse economic time. The country is in the grip of an
unparalleled economic disaster, the Great Depression.
After finally settling on the right method to
produce sound pictures, studios are still faced with two dilemmas. How can they
lure back the audience that abandoned movie houses at the beginning of the
Depression? How long will they have to continue supplying silent prints to the
thousands of movie houses around the country that haven’t yet been wired for
sound?
Mitzi finds work playing the organ at the Ritz
Theatre, the last silent movie house on Los Angeles’ famed Broadway theater
district. She attempts to hold onto her job while dealing with the theater
owner, a complex young man who has secrets of his own. Mitzi eventually solves
the mystery of her uncle’s death and in doing so discovers an inner strength she
didn’t know she possessed. Along the way she finds romance and is transformed
from child to woman.
Mitzi of the Ritz is my personal bouquet to Los Angeles, my hometown, to the motion picture industry and the men and women who created it.