Hollywood

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.
Studios now aimed to produce entertainment that could not be offered by television: spectacular, larger-than-life productions, while others would lose the rights to their theatrical film libraries to other companies to sell to television.Modern HollywoodIn 1947, the first commercial TV station west of the Mississippi River, KTLA, began operating in Hollywood. In December of that year, the first Hollywood movie production was made for TV, The Public Prosecutor. And in the 1950s, music recording studios and offices began moving into Hollywood. Much of the movie industry remained in Hollywood, although the district's outward appearance changed.Though television broke the movie industry's hegemony in American entertainment, the rise of television would prove advantageous, in its way, to the movies. This is because public opinion about the quality of television content soon declined, and by contrast, cinema's status began to be regarded more and more as a serious art form as worthy of respect and study as the fine arts.

This was complemented with the Miracle Decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States reversed its earlier position and stated that motion pictures were an art form entitled to the protection of the First amendment.First Amendment to The United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights. Textually, it prevents the U.S. Congress from infringing on six rights. It forbids laws that:·Establish a state religion or prefer certain religion·Prohibit the free exercise of religion·Infringe the freedom of speech·Infringe the freedom of the press·Limit the right to assemble peaceably·Limit the right to petition the government for a redress of grievancesThe “New Hollywood” or Post – classical cinema“The New Hollywood” and 'post-classical cinema' are terms used to describe the period following the decline of the studio system in the 50s and 60s and the end of the production code. The Production Code spelled out what was and was not considered morally acceptable in the production of motion pictures for a public audience.It is defined by a greater tendency to dramatize such things as sexuality and violence, and by the rising importance of blockbuster movies.Post - classical cinema' is a term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling in the New Hollywood.

It has been argued that new approaches to drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired in the classical/Golden Age period: chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature "twist endings", and lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The roots of post-classical storytelling may be seen in film noir, in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's storyline-shattering Psycho.Walk of FameThe Walk of Fame was created in 1958 by southern Californian artist Oliver Weismuller, who was hired by the city to give Hollywood a "face lift". Many honorees received multiple stars during the initial phase of installation for contributions to separate categories.The Walk of Fame began with 2,500 blank stars. A total of 1,558 stars were awarded during its first sixteen months. Since then, about two stars have been added per month.The Hollywood SignThe famous Hollywood sign in Los Angel, California was erected in 1923 to advertise a new housing development in the hills above Hollywood. The letters were 30 feet (9 m) wide and 50 feet (15 m) high, and were originally studded with light bulbs. The sign was officially dedicated on July 13, 1923. It originally read "Hollywoodland" and for many years the sign was left to deteriorate. It had only been expected to last a year and a half. In 1932, actress Peg Entwistle committed suicide by jumping to her death from the letter "H".

Seven years later, in 1939 official maintenance of the sign ended.In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in and offered to remove the last four letters (LAND) and repair the rest. The sign, located at the top of Mount Lee is now a registered trademark and cannot be used without the permission of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.The Studios MGMRight fro The name combines those of three film production companies which merged on April 24, 1924: Metro Pictures Corporation (formed in 1916), Goldwyn Pictures Corporation (1917), and Louis B. Mayer Pictures (1918). M-G-M was controlled by Loews, Inc., the vaudeville-and-movie theater chain founded by Marcus Loew in 1904. Louis B. Mayer was made head of the studio.From Goldwyn was inhereted a runaway production, Ben Hur, which had been filming in Rome for months without producing much usable film. Though Ben-Hur was the most costly film made up to its time, it became M-G-M's first great public-relations triumph, establishing an image for the company that persisted for years.MGM tapped into the audience´s need for glamour and sophistication.Having inherited few big names from their predecessor companies, Mayer and Thalberg began at once to create (and publicize) a host of new stars, among them Greta Garbo.

The arrival of talking pictures in 1928-29 gave opportunities to other new stars, many of whom would carry MGM through in 1930´s: Clark Gable and Jean Harlow.Like its rivals, MGM produced 50 pictures a year.Loews theater were mostly located in New York and the northeast, so MGM films were often sophisticated, polished entertainments. No matter how bad the economy, MGM showed a profit every quarter all through the thirties.Before and during the World War II production values remained high, and even ´B´ pictures carried a polish and gloss that made them expensive to mount, and artificial in tone. After 1940, production was cut from fifty pictures a year to a more manageable twenty-five features per year. It was during this time that MGM released very successful musicals with newly-acquired contract players such as Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra to name just a few.MGM´s biggest cartoon stars,however,were the cat-and-mouse duo of Tom and Jerry, created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Tom and Jerry won several Oscars and nominations.

As audiences drifted away after the war, MGM found it difficult to attract audiences.MGM´s profit margins decreased. L.B. Mayer thought he had found a savior in Dore Schary, a writer and producer. Mayer's taste for wholesomeness and "beautiful" movies conflicted with Schary's charge to cut costs and produce better pictures. In August of 1951, after a period of friendly antagonism with Schary, Mayer's employment was terminated by Nicholas Schenck. An embittered Mayer, dismissed after twenty-seven years as head of the studio, never produced another picture.Schary managed to keep the studio running much as it had through the early 1950s. MGM produced some well-regarded musicals but generally it was a losing fight, as the mass audience preferred to stay home with television. , in 1956, cost overruns and the failure of the big-budget epic Raintree County prompted the studio to release Schary from his contract. By 1960, MGM had released all of their contract players, with many either retiring or moving onto television.MGM fell into a habit in this period which would eventually sink the studio: an entire year's production schedule was reliant on the success of one big-budget epic each year.

This policy began well, in 1959, when an expensive remake of Ben-Hur was profitable enough to carry the studio through 1960. But later attempts at big-budget epics failed.As MGM sank (along with the other main-line studios), a series of studio heads came and went, along with a succession of corporate managers, all hoping to bring back the studio's glory days. ParamountParamount Pictures Inc. can trace its beginnings to the creation in May, 1912, of the Famous Players Film Company. Founder Adolph Zukor, who had been an early investor in nickelodeons, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class by featuring the leading theatrical players of the time. By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success. That same year, another aspiring producer, Jesse L. Lasky, opened his "Lasky Feature Play Company".As their first employee, the Lasky company hired a stage director with no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who would find a suitable location-site in Hollywood, near Los Angeles for his first film, The Squaw Man.In 1916, Zukor maneuvered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky company, and Paramount.Zukor believed in stars - after all, he had begun by offering "Famous Players in Famous Plays," as his first slogan put it. He signed and developed many of the leading early stars, among them Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino. The driving force behind Paramount's rise was Zukor.

Zukor's over-expansion and use of over-valued Paramount stock for purchases led the company into receivership in 1933. A bank-mandated reorganization team kept the company intact, and miraculously, kept Zukor on.By the 1930s, talkies brought in a range of powerful new draws: Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Gary Cooper, Claudette Colbert, the Marx Brothers, Dorothy Lamour, Carole Lombard, and Bing Crosby among them. In this period Paramount can truly be described as a movie factory. Paramount's cartoon division was also a big success because of two major characters: Popeye The Sailor and Betty Boop.When the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department decided to re-open their case against the five integrated studios. This led to the Supreme Court decision of 1948 which broke up Adolph Zukor's amazing creation.This case finally came before the Supreme Court as U.S. vs. Paramount Pictures, et al., and in May, 1948, the court agreed with the government, finding restraint of competition, and calling for the separation of production and exhibition.

Paramount was split in two, with the 1,500-screen theater chain handed to the new United Paramount Theaters.By the mid-1950s, all the great names were gone; only C.B. DeMille, associated with Paramount since 1913, kept making pictures in the grand old style. The Paramount cartoons and shorts went to various television distributors.20th Century FoxThe company is the result of a 1935 merger of two entities, Fox Film Corporation founde by William Fox and Twentieth Century Pictures founded by Darryl F.Zanuck. The growing company needed space, and in 1926 Fox acquired three-hundred acres in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Movietone City," the best-equipped studio of its time. At Warner Brothers, production-head Darryl Zanuck was in a feud over money; tight-fisted Warners had cut costs in the depression by reducing salaries. When Zanuck asked for his pay to be restored, they refused, and he quit. Days later he announced the formation of a new company Twentieth Century Pictures, in partnership with Joseph Schenck. Twentieth Century – Fox Film Corporation, was created on May 31, 1935Zanuck quickly signed young actors who would carry Twentieth Century-Fox for years: Henry Fonda and Betty Grable.

Favoring popular biographies and musicals, Zanuck built Fox back to profitability.With pictures like Wilson, Gentleman's Agreement, The Snake Pit, Boomerang and Pinkie, Zanuck established a reputation for provocative, adult films. Fox also specialized in adaptations of best-selling books and Broadway musicals.Fox mortgaged its studio to buy rights to a French anamorphic projection system which gave a slight illusion of depth without glasses. In February, 1953, Zanuck announced that henceforth all Fox pictures would be made in CinemaScope. Seeing the box-office for the first two CinemaScope features, The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire, Warners, MGM, Universal and Columbia quickly adopted the process.After discovering Zanuck's affair with actress Bella Darvi. Zanuck moved to Paris, setting up as an independent producer; he did not set foot in California again for fifteen years.

Chairman Spyros Skouras brought in a series of production executives, but none had Zanuck's touch. By the early 1960s Fox was in trouble. A remake of Theda Bara's Cleopatra had begun in 1959 with Joan Collins in the lead; as a publicity gimmick producer Walter Wanger offered one million dollars to Elizabeth Taylor if she woud star; Taylor accepted, and costs for Cleopatra began to escalate. The only possible savior was Darryl F. Zanuck. He was installed as chairman; then named his son Richard Zanuck as president. This new management group: seized Cleopatra and rushed it to completion; shut down the studio and laid off the entire staff to save money; axed the long-running Movietone Newsreel; and, with limited funds, made a series of cheap, popular pictures that luckily restored Fox as a major studio.