Hollywood and its products dominate the film industry so much these days it is hard to imagine cinema without it but for the first decade and a half of American film it didn't exist and the industry survived pretty well without it. New York was the main centre of film production in the US for the first decade of the century. Immigrants who spoke little or no English were the perfect audience for the Nickelodeon. This was an early motion picture theater so called because the price of a ticket was a nickel and it was encouraged in its spread across the country by the success of Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903). At about a reel this early narrative film brought American cinema out of Edison's slot machine parlours into public theaters.

The cost of real estate in New Jersey was lower than in New York and encouraged the establishment of a film factory town. Cold winters led to companies moving to Jacksonville, Florida. Another reason for avoiding the big city was the Trusts' detectives would be operating there ready to prevent filming by shooting holes in the camera. The Trust was a monopoly involving the  pioneering film companies which at first copyrighted the use of the film and other equipment then entered the field of distribution and exhibition as the General Film Company. Unless you paid fees for using the equipment or exhibiting films what amounted to hire charges, fimmakers were harassed into submissioin. This was another reason the new independents, men like Carl Laemmle and William Fox slowly but surely left for the West coast where it was less easy for the Trust to track them down and the Mexican border was a mere one hundred mile drive away.


 

In 1894 Harvey Henderson Wilcox a god fearing conservative bought 120 acres near Los Angeles for his country home. His wife named the area Hollywood. Very few people settled there and they were of the same conservative nature as Wilcox, it wasn't a community likely to receive the film industry with open arms, still slowly but surely the moviemakers were to take over.

Los Angeles just separated by an eight mile rough country road was a magnet because of its cheap labour and 350 sunny days a year. In 1906 Biograph established a studio in LA, a year later some players from Chicago's Selig Company arrived. Colonel Selig soon built a studio. In 1909 Adam Kessel and Charles Bauman set up an open stage in Edendale which would later become Mack Sennett's Keystone studios. D.W. Griffith came to Hollywood in 1910 looking for authentic western backgrounds.

The first Hollywood studio,Nestor was built in 1911. Other studios : Universal,Eclair,Lasky soon followed.  The motion picture people earned the disparaging label "movies" by the locals. Soon though the prejudice withered and died as the picture business often provided work for the local community. The early years of Hollywood have often been described fondly by veterans as a period with a strong sense of optimism and communal feeling.

The Trust's influence declined until it disappeared. There were various reasons for this. The old companies failed to realise that the star system would be the loveblood of the movies. At first film stars weren't named because the studios believed (quite rightly as it turned out) that famous players would demand higher salaries. The public however labelled the stars anyway with the Girl with the Golden Curls, the Vamp, the All American Boy, the Biograph Girl etc. The Biograph Girl was Florence Lawrence : when she joined Carl Laemmle's IMP (Independent Motion Pictures) company he put about the story that she had been killed in a streetcar accident, the resulting publicity meant her name was revealed. It was the end of nameless actors.




The Trust companies also failed to make the move to feature films. Before the First World War American cinema was dominated by short films. Some companies bizarrely believed (at least to us now) that audiences wouldn't sit through longer films. Typical was the attitude of Biograph to D.W. Griffith's ambitious plans for longer films. Griffith was determined to rival the Italians who were making elaborate epic features in the early 1910s. His attempt to do this with Judith of Bethulia (1914) brought him into direct conflict with Biograph's view that people wouldn't sit though longer films, as a result Griffith left the company and it never amounted to anything again.

After making hundreds of shorts for Biograph Griffith unleashed The Birth of A Nation on an unsuspecting American film industry in 1915. This 3 hour plus epic about the civil war and its aftermath made the middle classes sit up and take notice. Technically Griffith surpassed this achievement with Intolerance (1916) an epic which amazed and baffled audiences with its incredible cross-cutting between four stories of intolerance through history.

The new audience was beguiled by the knockabout comedy of Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin. Mary Pickford established herself as America's Sweetheart. Other faves of the teens included dashing Douglas Fairbanks who starred in a series of light satirical comedies and vamp Theda Bara (a suggestive anagram of Arab Death). William Fox through smart publicity established a mystique about her, saying Theodesia Goodman from Cincinatti was born under the shadow of the sphinx or some other phoney hokum. Audiences of the time ate it up.

The outbreak of the First World War brought comedy : Charles Chaplin's Shoulder Arms (1918) and pro government anti-German propaganda like Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918) and the Warner Brothers first production My Four Years In Germany (1918).



The end of the war saw DeMille give into frivolity in the Swanson sex comedies after his psychological and historical dramas of earlier years such as The Cheat (1915), Joan the Woman (1916) and The Whispering Chorus (1918). Erich Von Stroheim also indicated a departure from Griffith's Victorian sensibility with his first film as a director Blind Husbands (1919).

The end of the Great War presented Hollywood with an opportunity. The European industries would take a few years to recover, some would take decades. Hollywood was now established as the centre of world film production, its dominance of the industry was never to be threatened again.