Before Hollywood, California, became America’s undisputed film capital, silent-film studios flocked to two equally sunny locales to strike it big: Palm Beach and Jacksonville.

These winter movie meccas rich in warmth and inexpensive labor drew some 30 New York- and Chicago-based studios to the thriving Florida cities during the 1910s. Here, studios made over 300 mostly short films and marketed them to a movie-obsessed public. By decade’s end, the studios were gone or bankrupt and its silent films lost to time and neglect — though it wouldn’t be the last time the Sunshine State lured Hollywood back.

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