History of Hollywood Film Industry : Case Study

Hollywood: the undisputed capital of the movie industry. For almost a century, Hollywood has maintained its supremacy, though it wasn’t precisely the same like today. Here, We came with an Amazing Case Study of History of Hollywood Film Industry which Includes some Amazing Facts & Incidents, The Journey that Created The Hollywood.

History of Hollywood Film Industry: [Beginning of the Century 20th]

At the dawn of the 20th century, the people of Hollywood were growing citrus trees. In fact, for the very first twenty years of the American film industry, Hollywood was only a small farming town without any studios in reach. Neither New York nor any other city in America has been the hub of it’s entertainment industry.

Sure, the title did belong to Paris, where even the two largest studios alone distributed twice as many movies across the Us as all of the American studios combined. Ironically, even though America played a huge part in the development of film technology, in terms of actually making movies the US was practically a backwater and this was not by chance, but by design. The first decade of the 20th century saw a massive battle for the future of the American movie business: a battle of patents.

Thomas Edison Contribution to Hollywood Film

Thomas Edison has been the most popular participant; he had founded America’s first film studio in 1893 and raised several of the most valuable patent rights for motion pictures and projectors. Edison’s Contribution in creation of Hollywood is Unremarkable yet Accidental in the History of Hollywood Film Industry. Using his vast resources, Edison would buy up movie patents by the dozens and he would file lawsuits against pretty much anyone who dared to compete with him.

Edison’s approach was so successful that 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 onward, 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. Edison’s camera, however, seemed to become much more popular at one point: new studios were developing to catch the enormous profits to be made quicker in the Nickelodeon industry than Edison could prosecute them.

Set Up of Hollywood Films Union

In 1908, Edison finally decided to switch 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. This was the biggest Revolution in the History of Hollywood Film Industry. The movie studios could guarantee that no one would threaten them by pooling all their patents and contacts and, predictably, almost everyone joined Edison in this initiative. All the major names of American film came to include the Feature Film Patents Corporation and it acquired total power over the Nickelodeon market.

The Film Trust, as it came to be known, started charging Nickelodeon theaters for everything: in the past Nickelodeons could outright buy movies from the studios, but now they could only rent them. In addition, for each projector, they had to spend a licensing fee and $2 per week for the theater itself. The Nickelodeons, of course, had no choice: they could either pay the fees or have no movies to show. However several theaters opted with a third alternative: they began importing films from Europe.

European cinema has evolved greatly since the patent wars in America. In Paris, feature-length films had already become immensely available and those who found their way to America after this, in which they truly have become major successes. 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.

The Expansion of Hollywood in LA

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 faraway 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 yet 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. The rogue producers, of course, were not entirely strapped for cash, so they won’t purchase land on their own in LA, but rather in a small village on the suburbs 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.

It has been easily observed how successful they were in this chart: from 1912 onward the young Hollywood Movie industry expanded at an incredible pace. They began fighting back while the four studios increased in strength and backed the US government’s antitrust lawsuit in 1915, that declared the Movie Alliance to be an unconstitutional cartel and directed to be separated.

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. Of course, Thomas Edison didn’t really care all that much about this missed opportunity: he was never really into film making, always more on the technological side of things.

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