1. The Hollywood Industry
By: Hafsa Aamir
What is Hollywood?
Hollywood is a district in the central region of Los Angeles, California, in
the United States.
It is notable for its place as the home of the entertainment industry, including
several of its historic studios. Its name has come to represent the motion
picture industry of the United States. Hollywood is also a highly ethnically
diverse, densely populated, economically diverse neighborhood and retail
business district. Hollywood was a small community in 1870 and was
incorporated as a municipality in 1903. It merged with the City of Los
Angeles in 1910, and soon thereafter a film industry began to emerge,
eventually becoming dominant in the world.
The name Hollywood was coined by H. J. Whitley, the "Father of
Hollywood".
Industry in the United States of America
The United States has one of the oldest film industries (and largest in terms
of revenue), and Hollywood is the primary nexus of the U.S. film industry.
However, four of the six major film studios are owned by East Coast
companies. Only The Walt Disney Company — which owns Walt Disney
Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Lucasfilm Limited, the
Pixar Animation Studios, and Marvel Studios — is fully based in Southern
California. And while Sony Pictures Entertainment is headquartered in

2. Culver City, California, its parent company, the Sony Corporation, is
headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. New York, Louisiana, Georgia, North
Carolina, Florida, and California are considered the most productive areas
for the film industry.
The Hollywood film Industry
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.
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

3. 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 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.
SOURCES
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry
www.industryhollywood.com
www.thetakeaway.org