[Liz]

AP Giannini made a career out of lending to out-of-favor industries. He helped the California wine industry get started, then bankrolled Hollywood at a time when the movie industry was anything but proven.

In 1923 he created a motion-picture loan division and helped Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith start United Artists. When Walt Disney ran $2 million over budget on Snow White, Giannini stepped in with a loan.

Giannini, had helped Cecil B DeMille complete The Ten Commandments in 1923, when the film's producers threatened to cut off DeMille's funding. Organizers have filmed over 40 hours of interviews with old-timers and DeMille associates, all now deceased, who worked on The Ten Commandments. The interview material will eventually be donated to the Arts and Communication Archives at Brigham Young University, which houses the collected papers of Cecil B. DeMille.


A PBS documentary profiled Bank of America founder Giannini on or about November 14, 2004. Just after the big San Francisco earthquake in 1906, an Italian fruit peddler guided a horse-drawn cart of oranges through North Beach. But there was bread as well as oranges on that cart, and that was no produce man: It was banker A.P. Giannini, secretly moving $80,000 in cash and gold from his recently founded Bank of Italy to his home in San Mateo. He then deposited the deposits in his fireplace's ash bin.

In the next few days after the disastrous quake, banks were ordered closed -- most of their vaults were too hot from the fires to open anyway. Only Giannini was paying out, lending San Franciscans money to rebuild their lives: He'd opened a loan office on the street.

[LS]

Yes, you're right on A.P. Felice Bonadio, the last historian to write a bio of A.P., was on the faculty of UCSB when I did my Ph.D. there. I met him and talked to him, but even though I was a business historian specializing in . . . BANKING history, Bonadio would have nothing to do with me. He wanted the Giannini papers all for himself. The result was an entertaining book that failed to get into the real finances of the Bank of Italy/Bank of America empire---superficial fluff.

The film that is referred to here is "They Made America" by Harold Evans, who did a 15 minute segment on Giannini.

A.P. was a BIG FDR supporter, even though the Dems screwed him on his nation-wide branch banking bill. FDR did, apparently (and this was something Bonadio didn't bother to check) allow the BofI to reopen in the "Bank Holiday," even though by government standards some think it was not solvent.