The Move West: How Hollywood Was Born

On a spring afternoon in 1894, a New Yorker could climb the stairs to 1155 Broadway, drop a nickel in a slot, press an eye to a wooden cabinet, and watch a strongman flex or a dancer twirl for twenty flickering seconds. The machine was Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, and the parlor that first showed it — opened that April — sold the movies as a private marvel: one viewer, one peephole, one coin. Cinema began as something you did alone, hunched over a box in the dark.

It did not stay that way for long. Within two years the Lumiere brothers were projecting films onto a wall for a paying crowd in the basement of a Paris cafe, in December 1895, and the solitary novelty became a shared event. A decade after that, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) — twelve minutes of holdups, chases, and a bandit firing his pistol straight into the camera — proved that a moving picture could tell a story audiences would line up to see again. The question was no longer whether people wanted movies. It was who would get rich making them.

The Nickel Madness

The answer arrived in Pittsburgh in 1905, when a showman named Harry Davis converted a storefront into a theater devoted entirely to short films, charged a nickel, and called it the Nickelodeon — nickel plus odeon, the Greek word for a covered theater. The idea was so obvious in hindsight and so lucrative in practice that it detonated across the country. Within three years there were thousands of these little theaters, an estimated eight to ten thousand of them by 1908, crammed into working-class neighborhoods and immigrant districts where a family could escape the heat for the price of a loaf of bread.

The nickelodeon changed everything because it changed the audience. Vaudeville was for people with money and English; the nickelodeon asked for neither. Programs ran continuously, a reel or two at a time, and the same crowd came back twice a week. By 1910 something like a quarter of the American population was reportedly buying a ticket every week. A medium that had begun as a peep-show gimmick had become, almost overnight, the entertainment of the masses — and the men who controlled the machinery of making and showing films understood exactly what they were sitting on.

The Trust

Chief among them was Edison himself, who had spent the previous decade suing nearly everyone in the business over the patents underlying the camera and projector. Endless litigation was bad for profits, so in 1908 the major manufacturers stopped fighting and combined. They formed the Motion Picture Patents Company — the Trust — pooling sixteen key patents among Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Kalem, Selig, Lubin, Kleine, and the American arms of the French firms Pathe and Melies's Star Film. Then they went further: a deal with Eastman Kodak gave Trust members exclusive access to raw film stock, and a new arm, the General Film Company (1910), swallowed distribution so the Trust controlled the pipe from camera to screen.

To operate legally, every exhibitor had to license a Trust projector and pay a fee — two dollars a week — for the privilege. The Trust dictated terms with an iron confidence in its own permanence. It capped films at one or two reels, convinced audiences would never sit still for more. And it deliberately kept its actors anonymous, listing no names in the credits, because a nameless player could not demand a raise. When licenses were flouted, the Trust did not rely on politeness. It sent detectives and enforcers to confiscate unlicensed cameras and, on occasion, to smash them.

That last policy created the very thing the Trust feared. A rival ecosystem of "Independents" — outsiders who refused to pay — sprang up almost as fast as the Trust could sue them. The most pugnacious was Carl Laemmle, a former clothing-store manager who founded the Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP) in 1909 and fought the Trust through hundreds of lawsuits. It was Laemmle who detonated the Trust's cherished anonymity. In 1910 he lured away Biograph's most beloved unnamed actress — known to fans only as "the Biograph Girl" — signed her to IMP, and revealed her name to the world: Florence Lawrence. According to the enduring legend of the stunt, he first planted a false rumor that she had died in a St. Louis streetcar accident, then bought newspaper space to denounce the lie and announce her new pictures.

We Nail a Lie

ran the headline. Crowds turned out to see the resurrected star in person. The star system — the single most valuable idea the movie business would ever have — was born out of spite for a monopoly.

The Road West

The Independents needed more than nerve. They needed somewhere to work beyond the reach of the Trust's process servers and hired muscle, whose base of operations sat in and around Edison's New Jersey. Southern California offered a near-perfect refuge. The sun shone most of the year, which mattered enormously in an era of slow film stock and no artificial lighting; a company could shoot outdoors nearly every day. The landscape supplied mountains, ocean, orange groves, and desert within a short drive, so a single location could stand in for anywhere. Land and labor were cheap. And the Mexican border lay only a long day's travel south — a genuine consideration for filmmakers who wanted to bolt across it if the Trust's men came calling.

Filmmakers had already been drifting toward Los Angeles for a few years. Colonel William Selig's company shot there as early as 1909, and D.W. Griffith brought his Biograph unit west to winter in 1910, filming In Old California in the hills of a quiet, temperance-minded suburb that had been annexed to the city that same year. The suburb was called Hollywood. In October 1911, David Horsley's Nestor Company converted a shuttered roadhouse at the corner of Sunset and Gower into the first film studio located in Hollywood proper. Others followed the sunshine almost immediately, and the name of a sleepy residential district began its slow transformation into a metaphor for an entire industry.

The Trust never adapted. It clung to short films while the Independents in California gambled on longer, more ambitious pictures. And in August 1912 the federal government, which had begun to view the Motion Picture Patents Company as exactly the kind of monopoly the new antitrust laws existed to break, filed suit under the Sherman Act. In 1915 a court ruled the Trust an illegal restraint of trade; by 1918 it was gone entirely, its patents expiring into irrelevance. The companies it had tried to strangle inherited the earth: Laemmle's IMP became Universal, William Fox built Fox, and Adolph Zukor's ventures grew into Paramount.

The men who fled Edison's lawyers had won by building a new capital three thousand miles from his reach. What they had not yet built was the thing that would make Hollywood immortal — the feature-length picture, the palatial theater, and the empire-minded mogul. That story was already being loaded onto westbound trains. In a rented barn near Selma and Vine, a stage actor and playwright named Cecil B. DeMille was about to start shooting, and the studio system was about to begin.