Hollywood is a district situated in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical centre of movie studios and celebrities, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema. Even though much of the movie industry has dispersed into surrounding areas such as West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, significant auxiliary industries, such as editing, effects, props, post-production, and lighting companies remain in Hollywood, as does the backlot of Paramount Pictures.
As a district within the Los Angeles city limits, Hollywood does not have its own municipal government. There was an official, appointed by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, who served as an honorary "Mayor of Hollywood" for ceremonial purposes only. Johnny Grant held this position from 1980 until his death on January 9, 2008.
The name Hollywood was coined by H. J. Whitley, the "Father of Hollywood".Whitley arranged to buy the 500-acre (2.0 km2) E.C. Hurd ranch and disclosed to him his plans for the land. They agreed on a price and Hurd agreed to sell at a later date. Before Whitley got off the ground with Hollywood, plans for the new town had spread to General Harrison Gray Otis, Mr Hurd's wife, Mrs.
Daeida Wilcox, and numerous others through the mill of gossip and land speculation.
The film patent wars of the early 20th century led to the spread of film companies across the U.S. Many worked with equipment for which they did not own the rights, and thus filming in New York could be dangerous; it was close to Edison's Company headquarters, and agents of the company set out to seize cameras. By 1912, most major film companies had set up production facilities in Southern California near or in Los Angeles because of the location's proximity to Mexico, as well as the region's favorable year-round weather.
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The Biograph Company filmed the short film ‘A Daring Hold-Up’ in Southern California in Los Angeles in 1906. The first studio in the Los Angeles area was established by the Selig Polyscope Company in Edendale, with construction beginning in August 1909.
Prolific director D. W. Griffith was the first to make a motion picture in Hollywood. His 17-minute short film ‘In Old California’, which was released on March 10, 1910, was filmed entirely in the village of Hollywood for the Biograph Company. Although Hollywood banned movie theaters—of which it had none—
before annexation that year, Los Angeles had no such restriction. The first film by a Hollywood Studio, Nestor Motion Picture Company, was shot on October 26, 1911. The Whitley home was used as its set, and the unnamed movie was filmed in the middle of their groves on the corner of Whitley Ave and Hollywood Boulevard by directors Al Christie and David and William Horsley.
The first studio in Hollywood was established by the New Jersey–based Centaur Co., which wanted to make westerns in California. They rented an unused roadhouse at 6121 Sunset Boulevard at the corner of Gower, and converted it into a movie studio in October 1911, calling it Nestor Studio after the name of the western branch of their company. The first feature film made specifically in a Hollywood studio, in 1914, was ‘The Squaw Man’, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and Oscar Apfel, and was filmed at the Lasky-DeMille Barn among other area locations. By 1911, Los Angeles was second only to New York in motion picture production, and by 1915, the majority of American films were being produced in the Los Angeles area
Four major film companies – Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO and Columbia – had studios in Hollywood, as did several minor companies and rental studios.
Hollywood had begun its dramatic transformation from sleepy suburb to movie production capital. The residential and agrarian Hollywood Boulevard of 1910 was virtually unrecognizable by 1920 as the new commercial and retail sector replaced it. The sleepy town was no more, and, to the chagrin of many original residents, the boom town could not be stopped.
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By 1920, Hollywood had become world-famous as the centre of the United States film industry. In 1918, H. J. Whitley commissioned architect A. S. Barnes to design Whitley Heights as a Mediterranean-style village on the steep hillsides above Hollywood Boulevard, and it became the first celebrity community. The American film industry entered one of its most troubled eras at the beginning of the 1960s. At the time its decline as a medium for mass entertainment appeared unremitting, given the increasing dominance of television. Only in retrospect can those difficult years be seen as a time of transition for the industry, a search for effective new marketing techniques that would come to fruition in the mid-1970s.
The factors causing a crisis in American cinema were many. Besides a continuing drop in motion-picture attendance, a generation of producers and filmmakers who had worked in movies since the days of silent film was reaching the age of retirement. Executives who had decades of show business experience were being replaced by relative novices. A rapid transformation of American cultural values in the era of rock-and-roll music, civil rights struggles, and conflict over the Vietnam War (1959-1975) left many film companies unsure of how to appeal to a young generation that made up the majority of moviegoers.
Weakened by financial setbacks, the film companies were ripe for takeover by large corporations. Whereas in earlier decades—and again in the 1990s—movie companies united with related entertainment businesses, during the 1960s unrelated enterprises, including a parking lot company and an insurance company, acquired motion-picture studios. In some cases these firms decided that the real estate owned by a studio was more valuable than the movies it produced.
Another major development of the 1960s was the elimination of the Motion Picture Production Code and the office that had been set up in the 1930s to monitor studio compliance. Given changes in the public use of language and in sexual candor over several decades, the code’s prohibitions were seen as outdated, and, from a practical viewpoint, detrimental to making films that contemporary audiences wanted to see. After several years in the mid-1960s without industry
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standards, movie producers adopted a rating system for guiding parents and children. The key terms are PG, for parental guidance suggested, and R, for restricted for people under age 17 unless accompanied by an adult. In practice, the ratings board has sought to regulate the representation of sexual activity in motion pictures but has given less attention to the depiction of violence.
The fortunes of the motion-picture industry began to change for the better in the mid-1970s when studios developed a new method of marketing films: By putting motion pictures onto thousands of screens simultaneously, supported by advertising campaigns on national television, studios could maximize revenue on a handful of popular films. Financially thriving once again, most major movie companies became divisions of large entertainment conglomerates that had holdings in publishing, television, music, and other media.