Hollywood: the undisputed capital of the movie industry.
Hollywood’s dominance has endured for almost a century, but it wasn’t always that way;
in fact, for the first twenty years of the American film business, Hollywood was just
a tiny agricultural village without a studio in sight.
In this video, we’re gonna see how Thomas Edison inadvertently transformed this village
into the global movie powerhouse that we know today.
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At the dawn of the 20th century, the people of Hollywood were growing citrus trees.
The center of the film industry wasn’t New York either, nor any other city in America.
Instead, that title belonged to Paris, where the two biggest studios alone were distributing
twice as many films in the US as all the American studios combined.
Ironically, even though America played a huge part in the development of film technology,
in terms of actually making movies the US was practically a backwater and this was not
by chance, but by design.
You see, the first decade of the 20th century saw a massive battle for the future of the
American movie business: a battle of patents.
Thomas Edison was the most powerful participant: in 1893 he had built America’s first movie
studio and he held many of the most important patents for motion picture cameras and projectors.
Using his vast resources, Edison would buy up movie patents by the dozens and he would
file lawsuits against pretty much anyone who dared to compete with him.
Edison’s approach was so successful that throughout the 1890s the American movie industry
was effectively his company and the one competitor who had the pockets to oppose Edison’s litigation:
a company known as Biograph, which had invented a different camera from the one covered by
Edison’s patents.
As Nickelodeons spread across America from 1905 onwards, Edison’s studio became the
second biggest one in America, behind only Biograph.
It produced over a thousand movies in its first ten years, including what is almost
certainly the first cat video in existence.
At one point, however, Edison’s camera started becoming too successful: new studios were
emerging to capture the immense profits to be had in the Nickelodeon business faster
than Edison could sue them.
In 1908, Edison finally decided to switch strategies: instead of trying to sue everyone,
Edison would bring all the studios together to create one single entity that would dominate
the entire industry.
By pooling all their patents and connections, the movie studios could ensure that no one
would challenge them and unsurprisingly, almost everyone backed Edison in this proposal.
The Motion Picture Patents Company came to encompass all the big names of American film
and it secured total control over the Nickelodeon business.
The Film Trust, as it came to be known, started charging Nickelodeon theaters for everything:
in the past Nickelodeons could outright buy movies from the studios, but now they could
only rent them.
On top of that they had to pay a licensing fee for every projector and $2 a week for
the theater itself.
The Nickelodeons, of course, had no choice: they could either pay the fees or have no
movies to show.
But some of the theaters went with a third option: they started importing movies from
Europe.
Now, during the patent battles in America, European cinema had matured significantly.
Feature-length films were becoming increasingly popular in Paris and from there they made
their way to America, where they actually became big hits.
Pretty soon some studio executives were trying to make feature films of their own, but there
was one big problem: the Film Trust would not allow them.
You see, in the eyes of the Film Trust, feature-length films were a competitor to their Nickelodeon
shorts, which is why Edison was fully against them.
Now, because the Film Trust was based out of the East Coast, anyone who wanted to make
movies “illegally” had to move as far away from there as they reasonably could.
The West Coast and specifically Los Angeles became the destination of choice for renegade
movie makers seeking to usurp Edison’s monopoly.
LA had several benefits that made it very attractive: it was connected by rail to the
East Coast where all the technology was coming from, and yet it was also just about a hundred
miles from the Mexican border, where any film producer could hide their equipment in case
Edison successfully sued them.
Of course, the renegade producers weren’t exactly flush with cash, so they didn’t
buy land in LA itself, but rather in a small town on the outskirts where land was cheap:
Hollywood.
It is there in 1912 that four studios first began their quest in bringing the feature-length
film to America.
You can see just how successful they were in this chart: from 1912 onwards the young
Hollywood movie industry expanded at an incredible pace.
As the four studios grew in power they started fighting back and in 1915 they supported antitrust
prosecution by the US government, which deemed the Film Trust to be an illegal monopoly and
ordered it to be broken up.
With the East Coast monopoly gone, Hollywood was free to take over the movie industry and
not just in America, but in Europe as well, where the First World War had decimated local
film production.
Of course, Thomas Edison didn’t really care all that much about this missed opportunity:
he was never really into filmmaking, always more on the technological side of things.
But if you’re passionate about movies and wanna learn how to make them you’re gonna
enjoy watching the awesome selection of courses on Film Production offered by Skillshare.
Whether you’re curious about cinematography or editing, be it for short films or documentaries,
on Skillshare you can learn anything and in fact if you’re one of the first 500 people
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Then, once you’ve made your first blockbuster hit you’re probably gonna have to learn
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on investing in the stock market.
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