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1. About Hollywood
Hollywood is a neighborhood in the central region of Los Angeles,
California. It is notable for its place as the home of the
entertainment industry, including several of its historic studios. Its
name has come to be a metonym for the motion picture industry of
the United States. Hollywood is also a highly ethnically diverse,
densely populated, economically diverse neighborhood and retail
business district.
How it all started
Hollywood was a small community in 1870 and was incorporated as
a municipality in 1903. It officially merged with the city of Los
Angeles in 1910, and soon thereafter a prominent film industry
began to emerge, eventually becoming the most dominant and
recognizable in the world.
By 1912, major motion-picture companies had set up production near or in
Los Angeles. In the early 1900s, Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents
Company in New Jersey held most motion picture patents, and
filmmakers were often sued to stop their productions. To escape this,
filmmakers began moving out west, where Edison's patents could not be
enforced. Also, the weather was ideal and there was quick access to
various settings. Los Angeles became the capital of the film industry.

2. Director D. W. Griffith was the first to make a motion picture in
Hollywood. His 17-minute short film In Old California (1910) was
filmed 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 at the corner of
Whitley Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.
The first studio in Hollywood, the Nestor Company, was established
by the New Jersey–based Centaur Company in a roadhouse at 6121
Sunset Boulevard (the corner of Gower), in October 1911.
Industry
Four major film companies – Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, and
Columbia – had studios in Hollywood, as did several minor
companies and rental studios. In the 1920s, Hollywood was the fifth
largest industry in the nation.
Hollywood became known as Tinseltown and Movie Biz City because of
the glittering image of the movie industry. Hollywood has since become a
major center for film study in the United States.
Cinema of the US.
The cinema of the United States, often generally referred to as
Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world
since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into
four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema,
New Hollywood, and the contemporary period. While the French
Lumière Brothers are generally credited with the birth of modern
cinema, it is American cinema that soon became the most dominant
force in an emerging industry. Since the 1920s, the American film
industry has grossed more money every year than that of any other
country.
Motion pictures
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography
to capture motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture
exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's

3. Kinetoscope. The United States was in the forefront of sound film
development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the
U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, Los
Angeles, California. Picture City, Florida was also a planned site for a
movie picture production center in the 1920s, but due to the 1928
Okeechobee hurricane, the idea collapsed and Picture City returned to its
original name of Hobe Sound. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the
development of film grammar. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is
frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time.
Rise of Hollywood
In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph
Company to the west coast with his acting troupe, consisting of
actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel
Barrymore and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near
Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles. While there, the company
decided to explore new territories, traveling several miles north to
Hollywood, a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie
company filming there. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever
shot in Hollywood, In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about
California in the 19th century, when it belonged to Mexico. Griffith
stayed there for months and made several films before returning to
New York. After hearing about Griffith's success in Hollywood, in
1913, many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed by
Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process
Golden age of Hollywood
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of
the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s to the early
1960s, thousands of movies were issued from the Hollywood studios.
The start of the Golden Age was arguably when the Jazz Singer was
released in 1927, ending the silent era and increasing box-office
profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films.
Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula – Western,
slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biographical film
(biographical picture) – and the same creative teams often worked
on films made by the same studio. For example, Cedric Gibbons and
Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman
worked at 20th Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's

4. films were almost all made at Paramount, and director Henry
King's films were mostly made for 20th Century Fox.
Nestor Studios of Bayonne, New Jersey, built the first studio in
Hollywood in 1911. Nestor Studios, owned by David and William
Horsley, later merged with Universal Studios; and William
Horsley's other company, Hollywood Film Laboratory, is now the
oldest existing company in Hollywood, now called the Hollywood
Digital Laboratory. California's more hospitable and cost-effective
climate led to the eventual shift of virtually all filmmaking to the
West Coast by the 1930s. At the time, Thomas Edison owned almost
all the patents relevant to motion picture production and movie
producers on the East Coast acting independently of Edison's
Motion Picture Patents Company were often sued or enjoined by
Edison and his agents, while movie makers working on the West
Coast could work independently of Edison's control
The studio system
Movie-making was still a business however, and motion picture
companies made money by operating under the studio system. The
major studios kept thousands of people on salary — actors,
producers, directors, writers, stunt men, crafts persons, and
technicians. They owned or leased Movie Ranches in rural Southern
California for location shooting of westerns and other large-scale
genre films. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and
towns across the nation, theaters that showed their films and that
were always in need of fresh material.

5. The Hays code
In 1930, MPPDA President Will Hays created the Hays
(Production) Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went
into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by
1930. However, the code was never enforced until 1934, after the
Catholic watchdog organization The Legion of Decency – appalled
by some of the provocative films and lurid advertising of the era
later classified Pre-Code Hollywood- threatened a boycott of motion
pictures if it didn't go into effect. Those films that didn't obtain a
seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to
pay a $25,000 fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the
MPPDA controlled everytheater in the country through the Big
Five studios.
New Hollywood
Post-classical cinema is the term used to describe the changing
methods of storytelling in the New Hollywood. It has been argued
that new approaches to drama and characterization played upon
audience expectations acquired in the classical period: chronology
may be scrambled, storylines may feature "twist endings", and lines
between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The roots
of post-classical storytelling may be seen in film noir, in Rebel
Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's storyline-shattering
Psycho.
Home video market
The 1980s and 1990s saw another significant development. The full
acceptance of home video by studios opened a vast new business to
exploit. Films such as Batman, Showgirls, The Secret of NIMH and
The Shawshank Redemption, which may have performed poorly in
their theatrical run, were now able to find success in the video
market. It also saw the first generation of film makers with access
to video tapes emerge. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and
Paul Thomas Anderson had been able to view thousands of films

6. and produced films with vast numbers of references and
connections to previous works.
Modern cinema
The drive to produce a spectacle on the movie screen has largely shaped
American cinema ever since. Spectacular epics which took advantage of
new widescreen processes had been increasingly popular from the 1950s
onwards. Since then, American films have become increasingly divided
into two categories: Blockbusters and independent films.
Studios have focused on relying on a handful of extremely expensive
releases every year in order to remain profitable. Such blockbusters
emphasize spectacle, star power, and high production value, all of
which entail an enormous budget. Blockbusters typically rely upon
star power and massive advertising to attract a huge audience. A
successful blockbuster will attract an audience large enough to
offset production costs and reap considerable profits.

7. FACTS ABOUT HOLLYWOOD
1. Hollywood was given its name by the real estate developer
Hobart Johnstone Whitley while on his honeymoon in 1886.
2. The huge ‘Hollywood’ sign was put up in 1923 and originally
spelt out the word ‘Hollywoodland’.

8. 3. In 1932, Broadway actress Peg Entwistle committed suicide by
jumping off the letter H.
4. The annual Academy Awards or Oscars were first held in 1929
at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. This fairly cozy banquet was
attended by 270 people. Only 15 different awards were
presented on that night. However, in true Hollywood fashion,
even back then there was an after-party!