By the 1920s, motion picture regularly provided audiences with a unifying language through which to read visual messages with a greater level of sophistication. The population of Los Angeles doubled from 1920 to 1925, and home designers, recognizing this new population’s media literacy, responded by producing residential architecture that scholars have termed “California eclectic”: the random grazing among historical styles that reflected a growing interplay between film architecture and locale architecture. This paper will explore California eclectic as a form of cinematic intertext, architecture as one of a film’s multiple voices extended beyond the screen world to residents who were well-versed in the immersive, near-cinematic experiences of turn-of-the-century visual culture. Two key factors behind California eclectic’s ascendancy will be considered. First, the San Diego and San Francisco expositions of 1915 promoted a distinct California look-and-feel, a standard to which complex multimedia forms, such as California eclectic, could aspire. Second, the increased popularity of historical drama films during the 1920s fueled the rise of studio-based research libraries that made thousands of photographs and illustrations available to art directors, production designers, and, by extension, residential architects