The first movie studio in the Hollywood area, Nestor Studios, was founded in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley in an old building on the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard
and Gower Street. In the same year, another fifteen Independents
settled in Hollywood. Hollywood came to be so strongly associated with
the film industry that the word “Hollywood” came to be used colloquially
to refer to the entire industry.
In 1913, Cecil B. DeMille, in association with Jesse Lasky,
leased a barn with studio facilities on the southeast corner of Selma
and Vine Streets from the Burns and Revier Studio and Laboratory, which
had been established there. DeMille then began production of The Squaw Man (1914). It became known as the Lasky-DeMille Barn and is currently the location of the Hollywood Heritage Museum.
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| Hollywood 2050 |
The Charlie Chaplin
Studios, on the northeast corner of La Brea and De Longpre Avenues just
south of Sunset Boulevard, was built in 1917. It has had many owners
after 1953, including Kling Studios, which housed production for the Superman TV series with George Reeves; Red Skelton, who used the sound stages for his CBS TV variety show; and CBS, who filmed the TV series Perry Mason with Raymond Burr there. It has also been owned by Herb Alpert‘s A&M Records and Tijuana Brass Enterprises. It is currently The Jim Henson Company, home of the Muppets. In 1969, The Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board named the studio a historical cultural monument.
The famous Hollywood Sign
originally read “Hollywoodland.” It was erected in 1923 to advertise a
new housing development in the hills above Hollywood. For several years
the sign was left to deteriorate. In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of
Commerce stepped in and offered to remove the last four letters and
repair the rest.
The sign, located at the top of Mount
Lee, is now a registered trademark and cannot be used without the
permission of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which also manages the
venerable Walk of Fame.
The Hollywood Sign as it appears today.
The first Academy Awards
presentation ceremony took place on May 16, 1929 during a banquet held
in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood
Boulevard. Tickets were USD $10.00 and there were 250 people in attendance.
From about 1930, five major Hollywood movie studios from all over the Los Angeles area, Paramount, RKO, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Bros., owned large, grand theaters
throughout the country for the exhibition of their movies. The period
between the years 1927 (the effective end of the silent era) to 1948 is
considered the age of the “Hollywood studio system”, or, in a more
common term, the Golden Age of Hollywood. In a landmark 1948 court decision, the Supreme Court ruled that movie studios could not own theaters and play only the movies of their studio and movie stars,
thus an era of Hollywood history had unofficially ended. By the
mid-1950s, when television proved a profitable enterprise that was here
to stay, movie studios started also being used for the production of
programming in that medium, which is still the norm today.
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