Old San Juan's Hollywood Star

Motion picture pioneer and director D.W. Griffith was the first to discover that California’s old Spanish missions were ideal settings for movies. In 1910 he filmed Two Brothers, a "Western" set in "the time of the Dons".  at Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Two Brothers, however, is now historic because it included such future Hollywood legends as Mary Pickford (as The Mexican), 1930s cowboy star Hoot Gibson. and behind the camera lensing for Griffith, Billy Bitzer.

Griffith -- after rain delays at the mission -- grew restless and started a second project before finishing Two Brothers.  Captured by the scenes of the ruined mission around him, Griffith decided to film Helen Hunt Jackson's romantic California sage of Ramona, to star Mary Pickford (as Ramona, the Indian girl).

Pickford returned to the Mission five years later to serve as a witness for a friend's wedding, and while there she celebrated an impromptu renewal of her own marriage vows to then-husband Owen Moore. Father O'Sullivan performed both ceremonies in the Serra Chapel on April 24, 1915, with the post-ceremony scene forever captured in a painting by artist Charles Percy Austin

Another enduring story set in historic Old California that was destined for the movies was an adventure tale written by Johnstone McCulley. Entitled The Curse of Capistrano, the story was serialized in a pulp fiction magazine in 1919. Mary Pickford recommended the story of Don Diego de la Vega to Douglas Fairbanks on their honeymoon trip to Europe., The motion picture version was renamed The Mark of Zorro and was partly filmed at San Juan Capistrano mission.. The movie opened at the Capital Theater in New York in 1920 where it enjoyed the largest single day gross in movie history up to that time.