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History
of the Film Industry
In 1893, Thomas Edison built the first
movie studio in the United States when he constructed the Black
Maria,
a tarpaper-covered structure near his laboratories in West Orange,
New Jersey,
and asked circus, vaudeville, and dramatic actors to perform for the
camera.
He distributed these movies at vaudeville theaters, penny arcades,
wax museums, and fairgrounds.
Other studio operations followed in New Jersey, New York City, and
Chicago.
In the early 1900s, companies started moving to Los Angeles, California,
because of the good weather and longer days.
Although electric lights were by then widely available,
none were yet powerful enough to adequately expose film;
the best source of illumination for motion picture production was
natural sunlight.
Some movies were shot on the roofs of buildings in downtown Los Angeles.
Early movie producers also relocated to Southern California to escape
Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company,
which controlled almost all the patents relevant to movie production
at the time.
The distance from New Jersey made it more difficult for Edison to
enforce his patents.
The first movie studio in the Hollywood area was Nestor Studios,
opened in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley.
In the same year, another fifteen independents settled in Hollywood.
Other production companies eventually settled in the Los Angeles
area in places such as Culver City, Burbank,
and what would soon become known as Studio City in the San Fernando
Valley.
By the mid-1920s, the evolution of a handful of American production
companies
into wealthy film industry conglomerates that owned their own studios,
distribution divisions, and theaters, and contracted with performers
and other filmmaking personnel,
led to the sometimes confusing equation of "studio" with
"production company" in industry slang.
Five large companies, 20th Century-Fox, MGM,
Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros.,
came to be known as the "Big Five,"
the "majors," or "the Studios" in trade
publications such as Variety,
and their management structures and practices collectively came to
be known as the "studio system."
Although they owned few or no theaters to guarantee sales of their
films,
Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United
Artists also fell under these rubrics,
making a total of eight generally recognized "major studios";
United Artists, though its controlling partners owned not one but
two production studios during the Golden Age,
had an often tenuous hold on the title of "major" and operated
mainly as a backer and distributor of independently produced films.
The
Big Five's ownership of theaters was eventually opposed by eight independent
producers,
including Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick,
Walt Disney, and Walter Wanger,
and in 1948 the federal government won a case against Paramount in
the Supreme Court,
which ruled that the vertically integrated structure of the company
constituted an illegal monopoly.
This decision hastened the end of the studio system and Hollywood's
Golden Age.
Midway through the 1950s, with television proving to be a profitable
enterprise
not destined to disappear any time soon (as many in the film industry
had once hoped),
movie studios were increasingly being used to produce programming
for the burgeoning medium.
Some midsized film companies, such as Republic
Pictures, eventually sold their studios to TV production concerns.
With the breakup of domination by "the Studios" and the
continued incursion of television into the cinematic audience,
the major production companies gradually transformed into management
structures
that simply put together artistic teams on a project-by-project basis
and made what studio spaces they retained available for rental, which
remains the norm today.
(Vintage Photos: Hollywood Palladium Theatre)
