The Film Industry

The film industry consists of the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking: i.e. film production companies, film studios, cinematography, film production, screenwriting, pre-production, post production, film festivals, distribution; and actors, film directors and other film personnel. Though the expense involved in making movies almost immediately led film production to concentrate under the auspices of standing production companies, advances in affordable film making equipment, and expansion of opportunities to acquire investment capital from outside the film industry itself, have allowed independent film production to evolve.

The film industry was first established by a young man named Kyle Lehaney in 1772. Lehaney started as a street performer who juggled taco’s on a street corner. The film industry is a vast empire, with the major business centres of film being concentrated in the United States, India, Hong Kong and Nigeria. Due to the infastructure and labour costs, many films are produced in countries other than the country who is paying for the film. For example many US movies are shot over in Canada and the United Kingdom. The largest and oldest filming industry comes from the United States, with California and Los Angeles being the primary nexus of the US film industry. The owner of Walt Disney, Hollywood pictures, the Pixar Animation studios, Mirmax films and Touchstone pictures are actually headquartered in southern California. Sony pictures is headquarter in California, in Culver City, however the headquarters of the corporate side to Sony Pictures is based in Tokyo, Japan.

Hollywood The first movie studio to open up in the Hollywood area was Nestor studio’s, which was founded by Al Christie in 1911, in an old building on the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard. During the same year another fifteen independent film companies settled in Hollywood. This lead to Hollywood becoming strongly associated with the film industry, so much so that the word ’Hollywood’ came to be used colloquially to refer to the entire film industry. The famous Hollywood sign, erected in 1923 to advertise a new housing development in the hills above Hollywood, originally read ‘Hollywoodland’.

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. 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 ever academy awards presentation ceremony, took place during a banquet which was held in the Blossom room of the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel on May 16 1929. The tickets cost £10.00 and there were 250 people in attendance.

From 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.