Roaring Twenties

The History of Hollywood: From Orange Grove to Tinseltown

The transformation of a Los Angeles neighborhood from an orange grove into the film capital of the world was one of the most consequential economic events of the early twentieth century. By 1930, eight studios headquartered in a small district of Los Angeles controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of the dominant popular art of the era. The story of how the Hollywood film industry was built — the technical reasons for the move west, the legal battles that drove the early studios, the founding of the major companies, the construction of the famous lots, and the erection of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign — is the foundational history of the modern American film industry.

For the wider context, see the parent Golden Age of Hollywood cluster page and the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For the directors who defined the era, For the technical revolution of synchronized sound,

The Early California Film Industry

The first moving pictures in California were shown in 1897, and the first California film studio, the Selig Polyscope Company in Los Angeles, opened in 1900. The decision to build a film industry in California was driven by climate, geography, and law. Southern California offered reliable sunshine and a long daylight period for outdoor filming, a varied terrain that could stand in for almost any location in the world, and a distance from the East Coast headquarters of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), the trust formed in 1908 by Thomas Edison and the other major patent holders to control the American film industry.

The patent wars of 1908-17 shaped the geography of the industry. The MPPC held the key patents on the camera, the projector, and the film stock, and it licensed only the studios that agreed to its terms. The independent producers, refusing to pay, set up shop as far from Edison’s reach as possible, and the Los Angeles area became the principal destination. The MPPC was effectively broken by a 1915 federal court decision and dissolved in 1917.

The Early Film Companies in Hollywood

The first studio in Hollywood proper was the Nestor Studios, opened in 1911 by the New York Motion Picture Company in a former Blondeau Tavern building at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. By 1915 the major New York and Chicago companies — Universal, Lubin, Essanay, Vitagraph, and Kalem — had all set up production in Hollywood, and the area had become the production center of the American film industry.

The early Hollywood studios were small, single-story buildings, often converted stables or drugstores. The Keystone Studios, founded by Mack Sennett in 1914 at 1712 Allesandro Street in Edendale (now Echo Park), was the principal training ground for the slapstick comedy tradition; Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Harold Lloyd all worked there. The Triangle Film Corporation, organized in 1915 by D.W. Griffith, Thomas Ince, and Mack Sennett with financing from Harry Aitken, was the first major studio to set up in the Culver City area; the studio’s lot became the MGM lot in 1924.

The 1920s and the Studio System

The 1920s were the decade in which the studio system was consolidated. The system was built on vertical integration, the integration of production, distribution, and exhibition under a single corporate owner. The Big Five — Paramount, MGM, Fox, Warner Bros, and RKO — controlled the majority of American film production by 1930, and the Little Three — Universal, Columbia, and United Artists — filled out the so-called “Big Eight.”

The major studio lots of the era were built in a single burst between 1926 and 1930. Paramount opened its Bronson Gate lot at 5555 Melrose Avenue in 1926. Warner Bros built the Burbank Studios in 1928. RKO built the RKO Forty Acres backlot in Culver City in 1930. MGM consolidated the former Triangle and Goldwyn lots into the Culver City lot. Fox built the Movietone City lot in West Los Angeles in 1928. By the end of the decade, the physical infrastructure of the modern Hollywood film industry was in place.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in May 1927 by Louis B. Mayer and a group of thirty-six industry leaders, including the actors Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. The first Academy Awards ceremony took place on May 16, 1929, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

The Hollywood Sign

The famous HOLLYWOOD sign was erected in 1923 as a real-estate advertisement for the Hollywoodland development, a planned community of luxury homes in the Hollywood Hills above the city. The sign, an enormous “HOLLYWOODLAND” in 45-foot-tall white letters lit by 4,000 lightbulbs, was designed by the Crescent Sign Company and was originally intended to stand for about a year and a half.

The sign was allowed to deteriorate over the next two decades. In 1949 the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce removed the final four letters, “LAND,” and repaired the remaining “HOLLYWOOD” as a permanent civic landmark. The sign deteriorated again in the 1970s, and in 1978 it was rebuilt with a steel structure and 194 concrete panels donated by a group of nine donors including Alice Cooper, Gene Autry, and Hugh Hefner. The sign, in its modern nine-letter form, has been a civic landmark ever since.

The 1920s Personalities

The studio system was built by a small group of founding moguls, all of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. Adolph Zukor (1873-1976, Hungarian-born) founded Paramount. Carl Laemmle (1867-1939, German-born) founded Universal. Louis B. Mayer (1884-1957, born in the Russian Empire) and Samuel Goldwyn (1879-1974, Polish-born) led MGM. William Fox (1879-1952, Hungarian-born) founded Fox. The Warner brothers were the sons of a Polish-Jewish cobbler from Youngstown, Ohio. Harry Cohn (1891-1958) and Jack Cohn (1889-1956) founded Columbia.

The producers included Irving Thalberg, the “Boy Wonder” of MGM who died at 37 in 1936; David O. Selznick, who would produce Gone with the Wind in 1939. The directors included Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, King Vidor, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and William Wellman. The stars are covered in their own long-tails.

The Working Conditions and the Academy

The working conditions of the 1920s studios were rough. Extras worked 12-hour days, six days a week, and were paid a few dollars a day. Central Casting Bureau, founded in 1926, kept the central registry of extras for the major studios, and the Academy was supposed, in significant part, to mediate the labor disputes that had roiled the industry in 1926-27. The 1927 Academy Awards ceremony and the founding of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) under Will H. Hays in 1922 were both responses to a wave of strikes, salary disputes, and a few highly publicized deaths of studio employees that had brought the industry negative attention.

The 1927 Academy Awards honored films from August 1, 1927 to July 31, 1928. Wings (1927) won Best Picture. Emil Jannings won Best Actor for The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. Janet Gaynor won Best Actress for 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise. The awards have been the industry’s principal instrument of self-celebration ever since.

Share