David Morton, Lecturer at the University of Central Florida, is the author of Motion Picture Paradise: A History of Florida’s Film and Television Industry. With this expertise in mind, the opening of the conversation covers the American film industry’s halting migration to the southern state, but moves on to American migrations to other locations and censored films.

David received his Ph.D. in Texts and Technology in 2019 from University of Central Florida in 2019. He was a 2017-18 recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship and served as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies at Ghent University.

Films and resources mentioned:

• Ramona (1910) - D.W. Griffith
• Jeffries-Johnson World’s Championship Boxing Contest (1910) - unknown
• The Lad from Old Ireland (1910) - Sidney Olcott
• The White Slave Trade (1910) - August Blom
• Frankenstein (1910) - J. Searle Dawley
• In Old California (1910) - D.W. Griffith
• Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) - Jack Arnold
• Mank (2020) - David Fincher
• Broken Blossoms (1919) - D.W. Griffith
• Ben Hur (1907) - Sidney Olcott and Frank Oakes Rose
• An Irish Honeymoon (1911) - Sidney Olcott
• Mississippi Burning (1988) - Alan Parker
• Psycho (1998) - Gus Van Sant
• The White Slave Trade (1910) - Alfred Cohn
• The Abyss (1910) - Urban Gad
• Taken (2008) - Pierre Morel
• Frankenstein (2025) - Guillermo del Toro
• Frankenstein (1931) - James Whale
• Dracula (1931) - Tod Browning
• The Crowd (1928) - King Vidor
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) - F.W. Murnau
• Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Filmmaking - Charlie Keil
• A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes - Helen Hunt Jackson
• At the Picture Show: Small-town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture - Kathy Fuller-Seeley
• The O’Kalem Collection: Two Views - Michael Patrick Gillespie
• Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon - Shelley Stamp
• Danish, But Not Lutheran: The Impact of Mormonism on Danish Cultural Identity, 1850–1920 - Julie Allen