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.
Written content copyright Derek McLellan,2005.
Copyright © The Fedora Chronicles
DeMille barn image from
http://www.seeing-stars.com