Institutions
Hollywood History

Lead-in question:

  1. What type of film is a Hollywood film? Give as many characteristics of such films as you can.

A brief history of Hollywood

In 1853, a single adobe hut stood on the site that was to become Hollywood. There was already a flourishing agricultural community by 1870 and in 1886 Harvey Henderson Wilcox, a wealthy property developer from Kansas, moved to Los Angeles with his wife. He bought 160 acres (0.6 km²) of land at the foothills to the west of the city. It was his wife, Daeida, who gave the name “Hollywood” to the family ranch after she had spoken to a woman from Ohio on a train journey whose country home had that name.

Wilcox drew up a grid map for a town, which he filed with the county recorder’s office on February 1, 1887, the first time the name Hollywood appeared officially. He created Prospect Avenue for the main street (this later became Hollywood Boulevard) and began selling lots. Daeida raised money to build two churches, a school and a library. By 1900 there was also a post office, a newspaper, a hotel and two markets, and the population was 500 people. Los Angeles, with a population of 100,000 people at that time, lay seven miles (11km) away and was connected with Hollywood by a single line streetcar which ran infrequently and the journey took two hours. In 1904 a new trolley car track connecting Hollywood with Los Angeles was opened and the travel time to and from Los Angeles was cut drastically.

In 1910, because of the difficulty of obtaining an adequate water supply, the people of Hollywood voted for the town to be annexed into the city of Los Angeles, as the Los Angeles Aqueduct carrying water from the Owens River had recently opened. Another reason was that the town could also have access to drainage through the Los Angeles sewer system. With annexation, the name of Prospect Avenue was changed to Hollywood Boulevard and all the street numbers in the new district changed too.

Hollyood began to attract motion picture companies from New York and New Jersey in the early 1900s because of  climate. At that time the best source of illumination for movie production was natural sunlight. California also offered open spaces and a wide variety of natural scenery. Yet another factor was the fact that at that time Thomas Edison owned almost all the patents relevant to motion picture production and his Motion Picture Patents Company often sued movie producers who acted independently. However, it was much more difficult for Edison to control movie makers working on the west coast. If he sent agents to California word usually reached Los Angeles before they arrived and the movie makers could simply run away to nearby Mexico.

In early 1910, the director D.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his troop of actors. They started filming on a vacant lot in downtown Los Angeles. The Company decided to explore new locations and travelled to a little town that gave them a friendly reception. This place was called Hollywood and Griffith filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood called In Old California. Several films followed before Biograph returned to New York. Word of mouth quickly spread about the wonderful place and in 1913 many moviemakers headed west. Within a few years the town became the movie capital of the world and the name “Hollywood” soon became synonymous with the world of movies and movie stars.


Task 1

Read the text and then decide whether the statements below are true or false.


Task 2

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