Hollywood has dominated the film industry for almost a century, thankful to the story below.For the first two decades of the American film business, Hollywood was just a tiny agricultural village without a studio in vicinity.However, it was Thomas Edison who transformed this agricultural village into the global movie powerhouse present today.
At the beginning of the 20th century, people grew citrus trees in Hollywood. During this time the film industry or movie business was centred in Paris. The two biggest studios in Paris alone produced and distributed twice as many films as all the American studios' production.
Yet,U.S. had played a huge part in the development of film technology,i
n terms of actually making movies. But they were not well-designed to benefit off a cutting edge ;d
uring the first decade of the 20th century there was a battle for the future of the
American movie business: a battle of patents.
Thomas Edison was the most powerful participant: in 1893 he had built America’s first movie
studio and he held many of the most important patents for motion picture cameras and projectors.Using his vast and various resources, Edison would buy up movie patents and file lawsuits against almost anyone who dared to compete with him.
Edison’s approach was so successful.Throughout the 1890s, the American movie industry was effectively his company and the one competitor who had the pockets to oppose Edison’s litigation:a company known as Biograph, which had invented a different camera from the one covered by Edison’s patents.
As Nickelodeons spread across America from 1905 onwards, Edison’s studio became the second biggest one in America, behind only Biograph. It produced over a thousand movies in its first ten years, including what is almost certainly the first cat video in existence.
At one point, however, Edison’s camera started becoming too successful: new studios were
emerging to capture the immense profits to be had in the Nickelodeon business faster than Edison could sue them.
In 1908, Edison finally decided to change strategies: instead of trying to sue everyone,
Edison would bring all the studios together to create one single entity that would dominate the entire industry. That is, by pooling all their patents and connections. His idea was that then the movie studios could ensure that none would challenge them. Unsurprisingly, almost everyone backed Edison in this proposal.
Later, the Motion Picture Patents Company came to encompass all the big names of American film and it secured total control over the Nickelodeon business. The Film Trust, as it came to be known, started charging Nickelodeon theaters for everything.
Nickelodeons could only rent movies now and not buy them from studios as before. Above that, they had to pay a licensing fee for every projector and $2 a week for the theatre itself. The Nickelodeons, of course, had no choice: they could either pay the fees or have no movies to show.
But some of the theaters went with an alternative option: they started importing movies from
Europe. Now, during the patent battles in America, European cinema had matured significantly. Feature-length films were becoming increasingly popular in Paris and from there they made their way to America, where they actually became big hits.
Pretty soon some studio executives were trying to make feature films of their own, but there
was one big problem: the Film Trust would not allow them.
In the eyes of the Film Trust, feature-length films were a competitor to their Nickelodeon
shorts, which is why Edison was fully against them. Now, because the Film Trust was based out of the East Coast, anyone who wanted to make movies “illegally” had to move as far away from there as they reasonably could.
The West Coast and specifically Los Angeles became the destination of choice for renegade
movie makers seeking to usurp Edison’s monopoly. LA had several benefits that made it very attractive: it was connected by rail to the East Coast where all the technology was coming from, and it was also just about a hundred miles from the Mexican border, where any film producer could hide their equipment in case Edison successfully sued them.
Of course, the renegade producers weren’t exactly flush with cash, so they didn’t buy land in LA itself, but rather in a small town on the outskirts where land was cheap:Hollywood. It is there in 1912 that four studios first began their quest in bringing the feature-length film to America.
From 1912 onwards the young
Hollywood movie industry expanded at an incredible pace. As the four studios grew in power they started fighting back and in 1915 they supported antitrust prosecution by the US government, which deemed the Film Trust to be an illegal monopoly and ordered it to be broken up.
With the East Coast monopoly gone, Hollywood was free to take over the movie industry and
not just in America, but in Europe as well, where the First World War had decimated local film production.
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