Media History – Hollywood

In the last article, we learned a bit about the Biograph company, the first dedicated film company in America.

When D.W. Griffiths made his trip to the west coast in 1910 with the actors of the Biograph company, he did so with big ideas. Arriving in Hollywood, he found a setting perfect for shooting the first 17 minute motion picture, called “In Old California” in the area. Yet Hollywood was far from a film mecca. In fact, up to 1910 they did not even allow movie theaters there. (But nearby L.A. with it’s much larger population had no such restrictions). Griffiths found an ideal setting, close enough to a metropolis to have access to the tools he needed, but relatively unspoiled.

Griffiths was not the only one to discover the advantages of Hollywood. Small independent studios began to spring up there. By 1914 the first motion picture was made by a dedicated Hollywood studio, shot by famous director Cecil B. DeMille.

It took just four years, between 1911 and 1915, for the majority of American film production to move from New York to Los Angeles. By 1920, Los Angeles, with Hollywood leading the charge, was the unquestioned capital of media production in the world. The lure of Hollywood extended beyond the film industry, attracting both television and radio production companies well into the 1940s.

The Age of the Studios

The first wave of studios in Hollywood were the independents, in in the year 1911 alone 15 of them located in the area, lead by Nestor Studios.

During the period of the 1920s, media production began to be refined, and features were getting steadily longer from Griffith’s 17 minute motion picture. To accomodate this increase in demand, studio back-lots were created, and five highly profitable studios came to dominate media production. They included 20th Century Fox, RKO Pictures, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and MGM. These studios owned everything about their media production, as well as the distribution of their films and the theaters they were played in. Three more studios, United Artists, Universal Pictures, and Columbia Pictures, were seen as minor studios, since they owned no theaters but did make movies.

During the golden age of the studios, each studio “owned” their staple of actors, and their shooting style would distinguish them from other studios. Back-lots were used extensively, and sets would be constructed to be used across multiple pictures at once.

Eventually, the big five were challenged by a host of smaller independent studios, who in 1948 won a case in Federal court against Paramount Pictures. This case called the studio stranglehold an illegal monopoly. With this, the age of the studios came to an end.

The New Media of 1950

Around this time, the television scene was beginning to take off. While many in motion pictures had hoped TV would prove to be a fad, by 1950 it was apparent that television was not going away. Some smaller film studios were sold for television production, and the large studios gave up their dedicated casts to focus on management of production teams assembled on a per-production basis. Their backlots became open for rental. Their choke-hold on film was at an end.

While television did not mean the end of film, it did spell a change in the major players and the way they operated. It was a disruptive technology.

Television had been around and tested in transmitting moving pictures since 1926, demonstrated in London by John Logie Baird. (Amazingly he was able to record his images using audio recording equipment of the time). In 1928, the world’s oldest television station went live, broadcasting from the General Electric factory in New York. By 1936 the BBC would be broadcasting the first regularly available programming, but television would not come to North America until 1939, at the World’s Fair of that year. However, the outbreak of WWII would prevent large-scale adoption until around 1948. Does that year sound familiar? It’s the same year Paramount lost the crucial anti-trust suit that broke up their (and all the golden-age studios) stranglehold on moving picture production and distribution.

And so, in a flash the next wave of media was ushered in.