In 1921 D.W. Griffith turned Mamaroneck into Paris during the French Revolution for the filming of his melodrama, Orphans of the Storm. In the film, which starred sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Griffith also employed hundreds of local residents as extras to populate his French city. They were paid five dollars a day plus lunch, and many of them stood on ladders for hours behind the building facades.

Griffith made several movies at his Mamaroneck studio on Orienta Point, including America, his epic of the American Revolution. (The battle scenes were filmed in Somers.) Difficulties with finances and with weather finally forced Griffith to move his studio to California, but as this picture shows, for a time in the early 20th century, Mamaroneck was “Hollywood East.”