How did Los Angeles become America's entertainment capital?
Fine, fresh, fierce, we got it on lock
S. in Seattle wants to know: “How did Los Angeles become America’s entertainment capital?”
In 1900, New York was the undisputed center of America’s entertainment industry, home to Broadway and all of the country’s other most-prominent performing arts venues. Los Angeles, on the other hand, was a dusty agricultural center with a population of barely 100,000 people. So how did a one-horse-town with a population 3% the size of NYC’s take away the crown of America’s traditional showbiz capital? As we’ll see this week, it’s sort of a coincidence: Fort Lee, New Jersey, or Jacksonville, Florida both could have easily turned out to be the center of American movie-making, but a couple of things worked out in favor of Hollywood.
The invention of cinema is usually credited to the Lumière brothers, who screened their first movies in Paris in 1895. The Lumière frères were the first to project a moving image on a screen for an audience, but Thomas Edison and his associates had created another movie system they called the Kinetoscope a few years earlier. Rather than projecting on a screen, the Kinetoscope displayed a smaller image inside a box, you had to put your eyes up to a viewport to watch the film. Edison monetized this invention by making it coin-operated, you had to put a nickel in the slot to watch a film clip for a few minutes, they were commonly know as “nickelodeons”.
Kinetoscopes in San Francisco, 1895
To make movies for the Kinetoscope, Edison created America’s first-ever film studio (a glorified shed) on the grounds of his lab in West Orange, New Jersey. Here’s one of the 1890s-era films shot in the shed, titled “The Boxing Cats.”
Boxing Cats is a good illustration of my theory that human nature does not change over time, and whether it’s Ancient Rome, 12th-century China, or 1890s New Jersey, people back in the day were just the same as us.
The combination of Edison’s studio and New York’s performing arts scene made North Jersey the first center of America’s film industry. Actors could commute there easily and be back in time for the opening act of their Broadway performances. But there were some limitations to filmmaking in the Garden State. Early film cameras required strong lighting, and artificial lighting was primitive (lightbulbs being a relatively new invention), so natural sunlight was required. Rooftops in New York and New Jersey were commonly used as filming locations to take advantage of natural light, but glass-roofed buildings created a more controlled environment. Edison’s shed had a small glass roof panel, but once production techniques improved to the point where they were ready to move out of the shed, there wasn’t a lot of existing infrastructure in New York that met the requirements for brightly-lit studio production. Fort Lee, New Jersey had some empty space, so large custom-built glass-roofed studios were built there by the early filmmakers.
Fox’s original glass-roofed studio, Fort Lee, NJ
Besides being a prolific inventor, Thomas Edison was a cut-throat businessman. Edison created the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC), which owned most of the relevant patents in the filmmaking sphere, and he aggressively enforced them. The Edison company sued most of the nascent film studios in the 1890s and either ran them out of business or forced them to pay license fees: his patents were broad enough that you basically couldn’t film a movie or run a film projector without infringing one of them. Some filmmakers paid Edison’s protection money, others who didn’t ran the risk of having their equipment seized, these ones were deemed “independents.” Since Edison was based in New Jersey, independents who wanted to get as far away as possible from his prying eyes went to California. At the time, the Federal circuit court in California gave more leeway to patent infringers vs. the Southern District of New York where Edison normally sued people, so the independents were safer. And the border with Mexico was close by, so with a few hours’ notice they could always pack up and run to a place where the Edison patents weren’t enforceable.
So that’s why the first filmmakers came to LA: to avoid lawsuits. Hollywood was a sparsely-populated farming area in 1900, but there was lots of open space there for new studio buildings, and it was accessible by public transit (don’t get me started on Edwardian rail-based transit). The first studio in Los Angeles was built in 1909, the independents started setting up shop in Hollywood around 1913, and people realized that California had several advantages besides being far away from Edison and his lawyers. The weather is crappy in the Northeast for about half the year, but in Hollywood there was bright sunlight perfect for making movies almost year-round. Southern California also has mountains, forests, beaches, and deserts nearby for shooting any kind of outdoor scene. And it’s hard to imagine now, but back then basically no one lived in LA and the surrounding areas: the whole state of California barely had as many people as Brooklyn. You could raise all sorts of hell, set buildings on fire, stage a charge of medieval knights or the battle of Waterloo, and not run the risk of bothering anyone in sparsely-populated southern California.
A judge ruled in 1915 that the Edison company had violated antitrust laws, so the risk of being sued was no longer hanging over their heads, but at that point the California studios were off to a running start, and they were happy to stay in the sunny climes of LA. Once you had left, what rational person would willingly choose to return to New Jersey?
I said in a prior article there were 3 things in the world I’m biased against. Let’s go ahead and add a fourth.
But another sunshine-filled rival emerged at the same time: Jacksonville, Florida. Several companies and studios moved there in the early days, and the relative proximity to New York (as compared to California) made Florida seem more appealing at first. Promotional materials for Jacksonville touted the fact that it was only “twenty six hours from Broadway,” whereas it would take a couple of days by train to get from New York to LA. But the activities of the filmmakers bothered the local conservative townsfolk: in addition to filming scenes like car chases and riots that were disruptive to the peace, the studios made several flicks making fun of people from Florida, with titles like The Cracker’s Bride. Yes, “cracker” in that sense. I’d love to find a copy of The Cracker’s Bride but I’m not sure it still exists: a lot of these early movies have been lost, since old film stock was just slightly less flammable than gunpowder. Bothered by the movie folk with their fast-talking, fast-living ways, the people of Jacksonville elected an anti-moviemaking mayor in 1917, and the local climate became hostile. At the same time, the Hollywood studios that were beginning to create the star system became more commercially successful than the eastern studios. So, the Florida companies either went out of business or moved to California during the WW1 years, until there was nothing left of this one-time rival to Hollywood.
From 70 American film production companies active in 1914, dispersed around the country in places like Chicago and Ohio, but mostly located on the East coast, by the 1920s the field had narrowed to 8, all based in the Los Angeles area. Oddly enough, considering that Edison and most of the of the early movie producers during the kinetoscope days were native-born Protestants, 7 out of these 8 successful studios were started by Jewish immigrants. So why were Jews so prominent in the early days of Hollywood?
Paramount (Adolph Zukor, born in Hungary), Fox (Wilhelm Fuchs, born in Hungary), RKO (David Sarnoff, born in Belarus), Warner Bros. (Albert, Harry and Sam Warner, born in Poland as Aaron, Hirsz, and Szmuel Wonsal, final brother Jack Warner born in America), Universal (Carl Laemmle, born in Germany), Columbia (Jack and Harry Cohn, born in New York to immigrant parents) and MGM (Louis B. Mayer, born in Belarus) were all founded by Jewish entrepreneurs from poor immigrant backgrounds: some of them were quite literally the fabled type who came to America with only the shirts on their backs and $5 in their pockets. There wasn’t any innate reason why Jews would be particularly suited towards film production: they weren’t making movies back in the shtetl in Poland. None of the Jewish studio founders had any prior experience in the world of performing arts: Zukor was a clothing designer, the Warner Bros. ran a shoe repair shop, and Mayer was a scrap metal dealer. But each of them started investing in cinemas and kinetoscopes when they were becoming a popular craze, and they saw the business potential in movies even during the early years. Their humble origins may explain why movies appealed to them: the high-brow world of the arts would have scorned a Yiddish-speaking cobbler, but silent movies could still be enjoyed by immigrants who didn’t speak good English. Protestant and Catholic morality at the time considered moving pictures to be rather disreputable: the mayor of Asbury Park, New Jersey was shocked by an excess of ankle shown in a kinetoscope movie of a dancer, so he ordered that film to be seized and replaced by Boxing Cats. But Jews generally didn’t share in the spirit of censoriousness and puritanism of those times, they just knew that the sensational new technology was bringing in huge crowds. Tickets to the movies were 1/10th the cost of attending a Broadway show, making them accessible to anyone. Those aspects probably appealed to these outsider entrepreneurs and led them to invest in luxurious movie theaters, but in the process they kept the egalitarian aspects that couldn’t be found at the concert hall or the opera. The money they made from running movie theaters helped them to raise capital to produce movies, and once they made it to Hollywood, they started releasing popular films by cultivating certain actors as “stars” and binding them to their studios with contracts.
Without being tied to the artistic traditions of the day, the Jewish immigrant producers were more willing to take risks on sensational and non-traditional content that would draw in a crowd, as producer Samuel Goldwyn (born Szmuel Gelbfisz in Poland) described:
“If the audience don't like a picture, they have a good reason. The public is never wrong. I don't go for all this thing that when I have a failure, it is because the audience doesn't have the taste or education, or isn't sensitive enough. The public pays the money. It wants to be entertained. That's all I know.”
These are not the words of a New York theatre critic, but it’s a straight line from Goldwyn‘s thought-process to Jaws, Psycho, and Star Wars. Without the Jewish movie pioneers, the industry probably would have relied on the stilted conventions of 1900s theatre, and never would have taken the risks to produce the sensational successes that made Hollywood movies popular worldwide.
Immigrants: they get the job done.
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