The Golden Age Of Hollywood

  The Birth of Hollywood



The barn where DeMille made The Squaw Man is now a museum.

From the 1920s to the 1950s Hollywood was dominated by five major studios : Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox and RKO Radio.

In the second division of the Dream Factories were two studios Universal and Columbia. However some producers preferred to be independent of the Studio System and they released their films through United Artists. Finally on "Poverty Row" were the B-movie specialists Republic and Monogram.

From the earliest days of the cinema major studios existed and influenced the development of the infant industry. It was George Melies the great magician and pioneer of camera tricks and science fiction who opened the first truly professional film studio at Montreuil near Paris. The French domination of the film industry was confirmed by the huge glasshouse of the Gaumont Studio in Paris and the even more lavish Pathe Studios at Vincennes.

Charles Pathe was the first real movie moghul who established a monopoly of production, distribution and exhibition. In some ways Pathe had more influence than any future studio head because he established an international empire opening branches in every part of the world where films were shown. Pathe distributed twice as much film as the entire American film industry in 1908.

If the United States had a Pathe empire and monopoly it was the Motion Picture Patents Company which included many of the now forgotten early film companies : Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Armat, Essanay, Kalem, Selig, Kleine,Lubin,Pathe and Melies. The Patents Company or the Trust as it became known first appeared in 1908 and the members submitted royalties for the right to use Edison's Kinetoscope (the original motion picture device) patents. In 1910 the Trust entered the field of exhibition with the formation of the General Film Company. Now any distributors had to pay two dollars a week. Independents like Carl Laemmle and William Fox rebelled. The Trust retaliated with strong arm tactics reflecting the gangsterism of the Prohibition Era. Gangs smashed equipment shooting holes in the cameras. One way of avoiding the Trust was by going west to California.

The main centre of American film-making before 1911 had been New York but D.W. Griffith filmed in Hollywood in 1910 and soon a group of studios began opening around Sunset Boulevard. Meanwhile the Trust was soon totally defeated and disbanded as the independents were more keen to experiment and link big names with big pictures through the star system.

Hollywood's first important feature production was Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw Man (1913). The early years of Hollywood were characterised by a strong sense of optimism and community feeling. In this atmosphere entrepreneurs who had begun as minor exhibitors founded the companies which were to dominate the industry until the 1950s : the Dream Factories of Hollywood.

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Written content copyright Derek McLellan,2005.
Copyright © The Fedora Chronicles

DeMille barn image from
http://www.seeing-stars.com