Origins and Fort Lee in
The Great Train Robbery (1903), considered by some to be the first
Western The earliest recorded instance of motion capture was
Eadweard Muybridge’s series of photographs depicting a running horse, which he took in
Palo Alto, California using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make similar devices. In the United States,
Thomas Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the
kinetoscope and kinetograph. in the clock scene from
Safety Last! (1923) The history of cinema in the United States can trace its roots to the
East Coast, where, at one time,
Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the motion-picture capital of America. The American film industry began at the end of the 19th century, with the construction of Thomas Edison's "
Black Maria", the first
motion-picture studio in
West Orange, New Jersey. The cities and towns on the
Hudson River and
Hudson Palisades offered land at costs considerably less than New York City across the river and benefited greatly as a result of the phenomenal growth of the film industry at the turn of the 20th century. The industry began attracting both capital and innovative work forces. In 1907, when the
Kalem Company began using Fort Lee as a location for filming in the area, other filmmakers quickly followed. In 1909, a forerunner of
Universal Studios, the
Champion Film Company, built the first studio. Others quickly followed and either built new studios or leased facilities in Fort Lee. In the 1910s and
1920s, film companies such as the
Independent Moving Pictures Company,
Peerless Pictures Studios,
Solax Studios,
Eclair,
Goldwyn Pictures Corporation,
Star Film (
Georges Méliès),
World Film Company,
Biograph Studios,
Fox Film Corporation,
Société Pathé Frères,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.,
Victor Film Company, and
Selznick International Pictures were all making pictures in Fort Lee. Many notable actors, such as
Mary Pickford, got their start at Biograph Studios. In New York, the
Kaufman Astoria Studios in
Queens, which was built during the silent film era, was used by the
Marx Brothers and
W.C. Fields. The
Edison Studios were located in
the Bronx.
Chelsea, Manhattan, was also frequently used. Other Eastern cities, most notably Chicago and
Cleveland, also served as early centers for film production. In the West, California was already quickly emerging as a major film production center. In
Colorado,
Denver was home to the
Art-O-Graf Film Company, and
Walt Disney's early
Laugh-O-Gram Studio was based in
Kansas City, Missouri. From 1908,
Jacksonville, Florida's motion picture industry saw more than 30 silent film companies establish studios in town, including
Kalem Studios,
Metro Pictures (later
MGM),
Edison Studios, Majestic Films,
King-Bee Films Corporation,
Vim Comedy Company,
Norman Studios,
Gaumont Film Company and the
Lubin Manufacturing Company.
Picture City, Florida was a planned site for a movie picture production center in the 1920s, but due to the
1928 Okeechobee hurricane, the idea collapsed and
Picture City, Florida returned to its original name of
Hobe Sound. An attempt to establish a film production center in Detroit also proved unsuccessful. The film patent wars of the early 20th century helped the spread of film companies to other parts of the US, outside New York. Many filmmakers worked with equipment for which they did not own the rights to use. Therefore, filming in New York could be dangerous, as it was close to Edison's company headquarters and close to the agents the company sent out to seize cameras.
Rise of Hollywood The 1908
Selig Polyscope Company production of
The Count of Monte Cristo, directed by
Francis Boggs and starring
Hobart Bosworth, was claimed as the first to have been filmed in Los Angeles, in 1907. A plaque was unveiled by the city, in 1957, at
Dearden's flagship store on the corner of
Main Street and 7th Street, to mark the filming on the site when it had been a Chinese laundry. Bosworth's widow suggested the city had got the date and location wrong, and that the film was actually shot in nearby
Venice, which at the time was an independent city. ''In the Sultan's Power,'' directed by Boggs for Selig Polyscope Company, also starring Bosworth, is considered the first film shot entirely in Los Angeles, with shooting at 7th and Olive Streets, in 1909. After hearing about Griffith's success in Hollywood, in 1913, many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed by
Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process.
Nestor Studios of
Bayonne, New Jersey, built the first studio in the Hollywood neighborhood in 1911. Nestor Studios, owned by David and William Horsley, later merged with Universal Studios; and William Horsley's other company, Hollywood Film Laboratory, is now the oldest existing company in Hollywood, presently called the Hollywood Digital Laboratory. California's more hospitable and cost-effective climate led to the eventual shift of virtually all filmmaking to the
West Coast by the 1930s. At the time,
Thomas Edison owned almost all the patents relevant to motion picture production and movie producers on the East Coast acting independently of Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company were often sued or enjoined by Edison and his agents while movie makers working on the West Coast could work independently of Edison's control. on
Hollywood Boulevard In Los Angeles, the
studios and Hollywood grew. Before
World War I, films were made in several American cities, but filmmakers tended to gravitate towards
southern California as the industry developed. They were attracted by the warm, predictable climate with reliable sunlight, which made it possible to film outdoors year-round. War damage contributed to the decline of the then-dominant European film industry, in favor of the United States, where infrastructure was still intact. The stronger early public health response to the
1918 flu epidemic by Los Angeles compared to other American cities reduced the number of cases there and resulted in a faster recovery, contributing to the increasing dominance of Hollywood over New York City. In the early 20th century, when the medium was new, many Jewish immigrants found employment in the US film industry. They were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called
nickelodeons, after their admission price of a
nickel (five cents). Within a few years, men like
Samuel Goldwyn,
William Fox,
Carl Laemmle,
Adolph Zukor,
Louis B. Mayer, and the
Warner Brothers (Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the production side of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise: the
movie studio. The US had at least two female directors, producers, and studio heads in these early years:
Lois Weber and French-born
Alice Guy-Blaché. They also set the stage for the industry's internationalism; the industry is often accused of
Amerocentric provincialism. Other movie producers arrived from Europe after World War I: directors like
Ernst Lubitsch,
Alfred Hitchcock,
Fritz Lang and
Jean Renoir; and actors like
Rudolph Valentino,
Marlene Dietrich,
Ronald Colman, and
Charles Boyer. They joined a homegrown supply of actors—lured west from the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films—to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries. At motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid-1940s, the studios were cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million Americans per week. in costume with his signature
pork pie hat, c. 1939 Sound also became widely used in Hollywood in the late 1920s. After
The Jazz Singer, the first film with synchronized voices was successfully released as a
Vitaphone talkie in 1927, Hollywood film companies would respond to Warner Bros. and begin to use Vitaphone sound—which Warner Bros. owned until 1928—in future films. By May 1928, Electrical Research Product Incorporated (ERPI), a subsidiary of the Western Electric company, had a monopoly over film sound distribution. The organization became the
Motion Picture Association of America after Hays retired in 1945. In the early times of talkies, American studios found that their sound productions were rejected in foreign-language markets and even among speakers of other dialects of English. The
synchronization technology was still too primitive for
dubbing. One of the solutions was creating parallel foreign-language versions of Hollywood films. Around 1930, the American companies opened a studio in
Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets and wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different time-sharing crews. Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights, and winners of photogenic contests were chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they shot parallel versions of English-language films. These parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night, and were directed by second-line American directors who did not speak a foreign language. The Spanish-language crews included people like
Luis Buñuel,
Enrique Jardiel Poncela,
Xavier Cugat, and
Edgar Neville. The productions were not very successful in their intended markets, due to the following reasons: , an icon that became synonymous with the Golden Age of Hollywood. • The lower budgets were apparent. • Many theater actors had no previous experience in cinema. • The original movies were often second-rate themselves since studios expected that the top productions would sell by themselves. • The mix of foreign accents (Castilian, Mexican, and Chilean for example in the Spanish case) was odd for the audiences. • Some markets lacked sound-equipped theaters.
Classical Hollywood Cinema and the Golden Age of Hollywood era (). Top row, l-r:
Greta Garbo,
Humphrey Bogart,
Lauren Bacall,
Clark Gable,
Katharine Hepburn,
Fred Astaire,
Ginger Rogers,
Marlon Brando, the
Marx Brothers,
Joan Crawford. Second row, l-r:
John Wayne,
James Stewart,
Buster Keaton,
Claudette Colbert,
Gene Kelly,
Burt Lancaster,
Judy Garland,
Gregory Peck,
Elizabeth Taylor,
Kirk Douglas. Third row, l-r:
Bette Davis,
Audrey Hepburn,
Jean Harlow,
Alfred Hitchcock,
John Ford,
Howard Hawks,
Grace Kelly,
Laurence Olivier,
Marlene Dietrich,
James Cagney. Fourth row, l-r:
Ava Gardner,
Cary Grant,
Ingrid Bergman,
Henry Fonda,
Marilyn Monroe,
James Dean,
Orson Welles,
Mae West,
William Holden,
Sophia Loren. Bottom row, l-r:
Vivien Leigh,
Joan Fontaine and
Gary Cooper,
Spencer Tracy,
Barbara Stanwyck,
Lillian Gish,
Tyrone Power,
Shirley Temple,
Janet Leigh with
Charlton Heston,
Rita Hayworth,
Mary Pickford.
Classical Hollywood cinema, or the Golden Age of Hollywood, is defined as a technical and narrative style characteristic of American cinema from 1913 to 1962, during which thousands of movies were issued from the Hollywood studios. The Classical style began to emerge in 1913, was accelerated in 1917 after the U.S. entered
World War I and finally solidified when the film
The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, ending the silent film era and increasing box-office profits for the film industry by introducing sound to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula—
Western,
slapstick comedy,
musical, animated
cartoon,
biographical—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For example,
Cedric Gibbons and
Herbert Stothart always worked on
MGM films,
Alfred Newman worked at
20th Century Fox for twenty years,
Cecil B. De Mille's films were almost all made at
Paramount, and director
Henry King's films were mostly made for
20th Century Fox. At the same time, one could usually guess which studio made which film, largely because of the actors who appeared in it;
MGM, for example, claimed it had contracted "more stars than there are in heaven." Each studio had its own style and characteristic touches which made it possible to know this—a trait that rarely exists today. For example,
To Have and Have Not (1944) is notable not only for the first pairing of actors
Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) and
Lauren Bacall (1924–2014), but because it was written by two future winners of the
Nobel Prize in Literature:
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), the author of the novel on which the script was nominally based, and
William Faulkner (1897–1962), who worked on the screen adaptation. After
The Jazz Singer was released in 1927,
Warner Bros. gained huge success and were able to acquire their own string of movie theaters after purchasing Stanley Theaters and
First National Productions in 1928. In contrast,
Loews Theaters owned
MGM since forming in 1924, while the Fox Film Corporation owned the
Fox Theatre.
RKO (a 1928 merger between
Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the
Radio Corporation of America) also responded to the Western Electric/ERPI monopoly over sound in films, and developed their own method, known as
Photophone, to put sound in films. By the 1930s, almost all of the first-run metropolitan theaters in the United States were owned by the Big Five studios—
MGM,
Paramount Pictures,
RKO,
Warner Bros., and
20th Century Fox.
Rise and decline of the studio system studios in 1922 Motion picture companies operated under the
studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary—actors, producers, directors, writers, stuntmen, craftspersons, and technicians. They owned or leased
Movie ranches in rural Southern California for
location shooting of
westerns and other large-scale genre films, and the major studios owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation in 1920 film theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material. , who was the first actor to win
Best Actor award over two consecutive years for his roles in
Captains Courageous (1937) and
Boys Town (1938) (and received seven other nominations) In 1930, MPPDA President Will Hays created the
Hays (Production) Code, which followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after government threats of censorship expanded by 1930. However, the code was never enforced until 1934 after the Catholic watchdog organization
The Legion of Decency—appalled by some of the provocative films and lurid advertising of the era later classified
Pre-Code Hollywood—threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it did not go into effect. The films that did not obtain a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration had to pay a $25,000 fine () and could not profit in the theaters, as the MPPDA controlled every theater in the country through the Big Five studios. Throughout the 1930s, as well as most of the golden age,
MGM dominated the film screen and had the top stars in Hollywood, and they were also credited for creating the
Hollywood star system altogether. Some
MGM stars included "King of Hollywood"
Clark Gable,
Lionel Barrymore,
Jean Harlow,
Norma Shearer,
Greta Garbo,
Joan Crawford,
Jeanette MacDonald,
Gene Raymond,
Spencer Tracy,
Judy Garland, and
Gene Kelly. This distinction was promptly topped in 1939 when Selznick International created what is still, when adjusted for inflation, the most successful film of all time in
Gone with the Wind. Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented filmmaking. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not everyone had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors:
Citizen Kane, directed by
Orson Welles (1915–1985) and often regarded as the
greatest film of all time, fits this description. In other cases, strong-willed directors like
Howard Hawks (1896–1977),
Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), and
Frank Capra (1897–1991) battled the studios to achieve their artistic visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as
The Wizard of Oz,
Gone with the Wind,
Stagecoach,
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
Wuthering Heights,
Only Angels Have Wings,
Ninotchka and
Midnight. Among the other films from the Golden Age period that are now considered to be classics:
Casablanca, ''
It's a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, the original King Kong, Mutiny on the Bounty, Top Hat, City Lights, Red River, The Lady from Shanghai, Rear Window, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without a Cause, Some Like It Hot, and The Manchurian Candidate''. introduces each of the
seven dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937
Snow White movie trailer The studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood succumbed to two forces that developed in the late 1940s: • a
federal antitrust action that separated the production of films from their exhibition; and • the advent of
television. In 1938, Walt Disney's
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released during a run of lackluster films from the major studios, and quickly became the highest-grossing film released to that point. Embarrassingly for the studios, it was an independently produced animated film that did not feature any studio-employed stars. This stoked already widespread frustration at the practice of
block-booking, in which studios would only sell an entire year's schedule of films at a time to theaters and use the
lock-in to cover for releases of mediocre quality. Assistant Attorney General
Thurman Arnold—a noted "
trust buster" of the Roosevelt administration—took this opportunity to initiate proceedings against the eight largest Hollywood studios in July 1938 for violations of the
Sherman Antitrust Act. The federal suit resulted in five of the eight studios (the "Big Five":
Warner Bros.,
MGM,
Fox,
RKO and
Paramount) reaching a compromise with Arnold in October 1940 and signing a
consent decree agreeing to, within three years: • Eliminate the block-booking of short film subjects, in an arrangement known as "one shot", or "full force" block-booking. • Eliminate the block-booking of any more than five features in their theaters. • No longer engage in
blind buying (or the buying of films by theater districts without seeing films beforehand) and instead have
trade-showing, in which all 31 theater districts in the US would see films every two weeks before showing movies in theaters. • Set up an administration board in each theater district to enforce these requirements. The
United States Supreme Court eventually ruled in
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. that the major studios ownership of theaters and film distribution was a violation of the
Sherman Antitrust Act. As a result, the studios began to release actors and technical staff from their contracts with the studios. This changed the paradigm of filmmaking by the major Hollywood studios, as each could have an entirely different cast and creative team. (left) and
Omar Sharif in
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) The decision resulted in the gradual loss of the characteristics that made Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, RKO Pictures, and 20th Century Fox films immediately identifiable. Certain movie people, such as
Cecil B. DeMille, either remained contract artists until the end of their careers or used the same creative teams on their films so that a DeMille film still looked like one whether it was made in 1932 or 1956.
New Hollywood and post-classical cinema , co-founder of
DreamWorks Studios and
Amblin Entertainment, Inc Post-classical cinema is the changing methods of storytelling in the New Hollywood. It has been argued that new approaches to drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired in the classical period: chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature "
twist endings", and lines between the
antagonist and
protagonist may be blurred. The roots of post-classical storytelling may be seen in
film noir, in
Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's storyline-shattering
Psycho. The
New Hollywood is the emergence of a new generation of film school-trained directors who had absorbed the techniques developed in Europe in the 1960s as a result of the French New Wave; the 1967 film
Bonnie and Clyde marked the beginning of American cinema rebounding as well, as a new generation of films would afterward gain success at the box offices as well. Filmmakers like
Francis Ford Coppola,
Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas,
Brian De Palma,
Stanley Kubrick,
Martin Scorsese,
Roman Polanski, and
William Friedkin came to produce fare that paid homage to the history of film and developed upon existing genres and techniques. Inaugurated by the 1969 release of
Andy Warhol Blue Movie, the phenomenon of
adult erotic films being publicly discussed by celebrities (like
Johnny Carson and
Bob Hope), and taken seriously by critics (like
Roger Ebert), a development referred to, by Ralph Blumenthal of
The New York Times, as "
porno chic", and later known as the
Golden Age of Porn, began, for the first time, in modern American culture. According to award-winning author
Toni Bentley,
Radley Metzger 1976 film
The Opening of Misty Beethoven, based on the play
Pygmalion by
George Bernard Shaw (and its derivative,
My Fair Lady), and due to attaining a mainstream level in storyline and sets, is considered the "crown jewel" of this '
Golden Age'. At the height of his fame in the early 1970s,
Charles Bronson was the world's No. 1 box office attraction, commanding $1 million per film. In the 1970s, the films of New Hollywood filmmakers were often both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. While the early New Hollywood films like
Bonnie and Clyde and
Easy Rider had been relatively low-budget affairs with amoral heroes and increased sexuality and violence, the enormous success enjoyed by Friedkin with
The Exorcist, Spielberg with
Jaws, Coppola with
The Godfather and
Apocalypse Now, Scorsese with
Taxi Driver, Kubrick with
2001: A Space Odyssey, Polanski with
Chinatown, and Lucas with
American Graffiti and
Star Wars, respectively helped to give rise to the modern "
blockbuster", and induced studios to focus ever more heavily on trying to produce enormous hits.
Rise of the modern blockbuster and independent films , who has won two Academy Awards for Best Actor for his performances in
Philadelphia and
Forrest Gump and has starred in numerous beloved films such as
Saving Private Ryan,
Cast Away and
Toy Story In the US, the
PG-13 rating was introduced in 1984 to accommodate films that straddled the line between PG and R, which was mainly due to the controversies surrounding the violent content of the PG films
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and
Gremlins (both 1984). Filmmakers in the 1990s had access to technological, political and economic innovations that had not been available in previous decades.
Dick Tracy (1990) became the first
35 mm feature film with a
digital soundtrack.
Batman Returns (1992) was the first film to make use of the
Dolby Digital six-channel stereo sound that has since become the industry standard. Computer-generated imagery was greatly facilitated when it became possible to transfer film images into a computer and manipulate them digitally. The possibilities became apparent in director
James Cameron's
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), in images of the shape-changing character
T-1000.
Computer graphics or CG advanced to a point where
Jurassic Park (1993) was able to use the techniques to create realistic-looking animals.
Jackpot (2001) became the first film that was shot entirely in digital. In the film
Titanic, Cameron wanted to push the boundary of special effects with his film, and enlisted
Digital Domain and
Pacific Data Images to continue the developments in digital technology which the director pioneered while working on
The Abyss and
Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Many previous films about the RMS
Titanic shot water in
slow motion, which did not look wholly convincing. Cameron encouraged his crew to shoot their
miniature of the ship as if "we're making a commercial for the White Star Line". Even
The Blair Witch Project (1999), a low-budget indie horror film by
Eduardo Sanchez and
Daniel Myrick, was a huge financial success. Filmed on a budget of just $35,000, without any big stars or special effects, the film grossed $248 million with the use of modern marketing techniques and online promotion. Though not on the scale of
George Lucas's $1 billion prequel to the
Star Wars Trilogy,
The Blair Witch Project earned the distinction of being the most profitable film of all time, in terms of percentage gross. In 2023 and 2024, however, Hollywood experts pointed to 'superhero fatigue' as an emerging trend. Actors such as
Paul Dano and directors like
Matthew Vaughn have made similar arguments. In 2021, despite the
COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, blockbuster films such as
Black Widow,
F9,
Death on the Nile and
West Side Story were released in theaters after being postponed from their initial 2020 release dates. Various studios responded to the crisis with controversial decisions to
forgo the theatrical window and give their films
day-and-date releases.
NBCUniversal released
Trolls World Tour directly to
video-on-demand rental on April 10, while simultaneously receiving limited domestic theatrical screenings via drive-in cinemas; CEO
Jeff Shell claims that the film had reached nearly $100 million in revenue within the first three weeks. The decision was opposed by
AMC Theatres, which then announced that its screenings of Universal Pictures films would cease immediately, though the two companies would eventually agree to a 2-week theatrical window. By December 2020,
Warner Bros. Pictures announced their decision to simultaneously release its slate of 2021 films in both theaters and its streaming site
HBO Max for a period of one month to maximize viewership. However, by 2023, industry strikes by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) highlighted growing disputes over streaming residuals, AI technology in writing and acting, and fair compensation, reflecting the broader challenges faced by Hollywood's evolving economic model. The move was vehemently criticized by various industry figures, many of who were reportedly uninformed of the decision before the announcement and felt deceived by the studio. 2019 onwards has seen the rise of American streaming platforms, such as
Netflix,
Disney+,
Paramount+, and
Apple TV+, which came to rival traditional cinema. Industry commentators have noted the increasing treatment of films as "
content" by corporations that correlate with the increased popularity of streaming platforms. This involves the blurring of boundaries between films, television and other forms of media as more people consume them together in a variety of ways, with individual films defined more by their brand identity and commercial potential rather than their medium, stories and artistry. Critic
Matt Zoller Seitz has described the release of
Avengers: Endgame in 2019 as "represent[ing] the decisive defeat of 'cinema' by 'content due to its grand success as a "piece of entertainment" defined by the Marvel brand that culminates a series of blockbuster films that has traits of serial television. while the latter is a $200 million heist film from Netflix that critics described "a movie that feels more processed by a machine [...] instead of anything approaching artistic intent or even an honest desire to entertain." Some have expressed that
Space Jam demonstrates the industry's increasingly cynical treatment of films as mere intellectual property (IP) to be exploited, an approach which critic Scott Mendelson called "IP for the sake of IP."
Quentin Tarantino has opined that the current era of cinema is one of the worst in Hollywood history. During a masterclass at the 2023
Sarajevo Film Festival,
Charlie Kaufman criticized mainstream blockbusters, stating that "[a]t this point, the only thing that makes money is garbage" and encouraged industry professionals to "make movies outside of the studio system as much as possible".
James Gray noted in an interview with
Deadline, "When you make movies that only make a ton of money and only one kind of movie, you begin to get a large segment of the population out of the habit of going to the movies", which causes viewership to decrease, though clarified that he has "no problem with a comic book movie". As a solution to the lack of "investment in the broad-based engagement with the product", he suggests that studios "be willing to lose money for a couple of years on art film divisions, and in the end they will be happier." The
proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance represents potential further consolidation of major film studios. ==Hollywood and politics==