In 1980s, Harvey Henderson Wilcox of Kansas and his wife, Daeida bought 160 acres (0, 6 km²) of land in the countryside to the west of Los Angeles. Mrs.Wilcow met a woman who spoke of her country home in Ohio named after a Dutch settlement called „Hollywood“.Daeida liked the sound of it and bestowed the name to the family ranch.Harvey Wilcox soon drew up a grid map for a town, which he filed with the county recorder's office on February 1, 1887, the first official appearance of the name Hollywood. By 1900, Hollywood also had a post office, a newspaper, a hotel and two markets, along with a population of 500 people. Los Angeles, with a population of 100,000 people at the time, lay seven miles (11 km) east through the citrus groves.The first section of the famous Hollywood Hotel, the first major hotel in Hollywood, was opened in 1902.Hollywood was incorporated as a municipality in 1903.

Among the town ordinances was one prohibiting the sale of liquor except by pharmacists and one outlawing the driving of cattle through the streets in herds of more than two hundred. In 1904, a new trolley car track running from Los Angeles to Hollywood up Prospect Avenue was opened. The system was called "the Hollywood boulevard." It cut travel time to and from Los Angeles drastically. By 1910, because of an ongoing struggle to secure an adequate water supply, the townsmen voted for Hollywood to be annexed into the City of Los Angeles, as the water system of the growing city had opened the Los Angeles Aqueduct and was piping water down from the Owens River in the Owens Valley.Early DevelopmentThe birth of cinema, as well as its radical development, can largely be traced back to the United States. In the United States, Thomas Alva Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the kinetoscope, whose heavy-handed patent enforcement caused early filmmakers to look for alternatives.In 1908, Thomas Edison irate that others were horning in on “his” movie intentions but aware that compromise was only option, united the 10 biggest operations as “The Trust”. These 10 would control distribution, exhibition, pricing and everything else – in short, a monopoly. But in this wild and wooly time, independent distributors and exhibitors formed their own organization to fight back.

Many of these freelancers migrated west to the Los Angeles area. For one thing, it was as far as you could get from New York, and although there were Trust members in California, the muscle was back East.In the early 1900s, motion picture production companies from New York and New Jersey started moving to California because of the reliable weather. Although electric lights existed at that time, none were powerful enough to adequately expose film; the best source of illumination for movie production was natural sunlight. Besides the moderate, dry climate, they were also drawn to the state because of its open spaces and wide variety of natural scenery which could, of course, come in handy during film-making.In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troop.The Company decided to explore new territories and traveled several miles north to a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. This place was called "Hollywood". D. W. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood called In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about Latino/Mexican-occupied California in the 1800s.

Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about this wonderful place, in 1913 many movie - makers headed west. With this film, the movie industry was "born" in Hollywood which soon became the movie capital of the world.The first studio in Hollywood proper was Nestor Studios, founded in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley. In the same year, another fifteen Independents settled in Hollywood. Creators of dreams began arriving by the thousands.Three years later, Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn took a giant cinematic step with the release of the first feature – length film, The Squaw Man, made in a barn. It was a box office hit and created a demand for longer movies.D.W.Griffith raised the bar immeasurably in 1915 with The Birth of a Nation,which was the first motion picture piece of art. Weighing in at 190 minutes, it signaled the enormous possibilities of the feature film.Indeed, its very length was important: Nation made movies acceptable to a middle class that felt more at ease with a new medium that now provided the familiarity of theater – length shows. And these new devotees had higher standards. Which meant more money would be sunk into the making of motion pictures.

Nation was made during the World War I., which, while derailing the European cinema, left American moviemaking as the leader of the pack.Hollywood boasted famous names like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, and, as much as anything, the star system defined the American movie. People usually chose what they would pay to see by whose name was on the marquee. And then, as now, the cult of celebrity was in full swing. Actors lived in fantasy homes in Holywood. People were thrilled simply to drive by these castles, hoping beyond hope they might catch sight of a star. There were magazines and books devoted to them, photos of them to cut out and kiss.From about 1930, five major "Hollywood" movie studios from all over the Los Angeles area, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros., owned large, grand theaters throughout the country for the exhibition of their movies.

The period between the years 1927 (the effective end of the silent era) to 1948 is considered the age of the "Hollywood studio system", or, in a more common term, the Golden Age of Hollywood.Golden Age of Hollywood During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the virtual end of the silent era in the late 1920s to towards the end of the 1940s, movies issued from the Hollywood studios like the cars rolling off Henry Ford's assembly lines. No two movies were exactly the same, but most followed a formula: Western, slapstick comedy, film noir, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture), etc. Yet each movie was a little different, and, unlike the craftsmen who made cars, many of the people who made movies were artists. For example, To Have and Have Not (1944) is famous not only for the first pairing of actors Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and Lauren Bacall (1924- ) but also for being written by two future winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), author of the novel on which the script was nominally based, and William Faulkner (1897-1962), who worked on the screen adaptation.

Moviemaking was still a business, however, and motion picture companies made money by operating under the so-called studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary--actors, producers, directors, writers, stuntmen, craftspersons, and technicians. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation--theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material.Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented filmmaking. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (1915-1985) and widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time, fits that description.The studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood itself succumbed to two forces in the late 1940s: (1) a federal antitrust action that separated the production of films from their exhibition; and (2) the advent of television. The number of movies being made dropped sharply, even as the average budget soared, marking a change in strategy for the industry.