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Mitzi of the Ritz
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, the sixteen-year-old Mitzi Schector meets David Stein, a handsome young theater owner who is immediately attracted to her. In addition to being brilliant, controlling and cynical, David is a married man and their romance is stillborn. The unwanted advances of a local mobster force Mitzi and her
mother to flee New York make their way across the country to Los Angeles. Along the way, Mitzi reconnects with David and she and her mother meet a group of characters including a hot-tempered studio head, a handsome Fuller Brush man and a resourceful Pullman porter, who ultimately changes their lives. They arrive in Los Angeles when the film industry is in the final stage of transition from silent dramas to talking pictures.
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 Eden with an alien culture that was the scene of a horrible family tragedy in the 1920�s. Mitzi�s uncle, a rebellious youth who died 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 settling on the right method to produce sound pictures, two dilemmas faced the studios. How can they lure back the audience that abandoned movie houses at the beginning of the Depression? How long can they continue supplying silent prints to the thousands of small movie houses around the country that can�t afford the transformation to sound?
David offers Mitzi work playing the Mighty Wurlitzer organ at the Ritz Theatre, the last silent movie house on Los Angeles� famed Broadway theater district. She soon discovers David is a complex young man with 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 transforms herself from child to woman.
Mitzi of the Rizt is my personal bouquet to Los Angeles, my hometown, to the motion picture industry and the men and women who created it.
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