History of Hollywood
1886
Landowners Harvey & Daeida Henderson Wilcox name their ranch Hollywood after Daeida met a woman in Ohio whose country house was called “Hollywood” for the English holly and woods.
1902
The Electric Theater, the first movie theater built for that purpose, by Thomas Lincoln Tally in downtown Los Angeles. Admission was 10 cents for a one-reel movie.
1907
The first film crew, from the Selig Polyscope Company, films in Los Angeles with Occidental Studios founder Hobart Bosworth starring.
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Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upholds the copyright infringement of written material as it applies to film in the notable case of Kalem Production Company versus Ben Hur publisher Harper Brothers.
1909
Selig Polyscope Company, the first permanent studio in LA, is established in the historic Edendale District. Hundreds of movies are filmed until its demise in 1918. Only a handful survive.
1910
Townsmen vote Hollywood into the City of Los Angeles in order to get running water. “Hollywood Boulevard” replaces “Prospect Avenue.”
D.W. Griffith decides to direct the first film shot in Hollywood, “In Old California,” in Hollywood because of the friendly small-town population and the beautiful location.
1911
The first motion picture studio in Hollywood was built by the Nestor Motion Picture Company on Sunset and Gower corner. Nestor Studios merged one year later with Universal Film Company.
1912
Thomas Lincoln Tally shows the first color movie at the Electric Theater in Hollywood.
Universal Studios founded. Mack Sennett opens the Keystone Film Co.
1914
Hobart Bosworth, a silent screen actor from Ohio, started a production company in Los Angeles in order to make Jack London stories into films. Jack London even cameod as a sailor in the first picture, “The Sea Wolf” (1913). Bosworth finished building the Occidental Studios lot in July.
Charlie Chaplin makes his first movie, “Making a Living,” filmed on 35 mm in Los Angeles under the auspicous banner of the Keystone Pictures Studio, syndicate of the famous Keystone Cops.
Mack Sennett makes the first feature-length comedy, "Tillie's Punctured Romance," starring Charlie Chaplin.
First Feature film in Hollywood is also Cecil B DeMille’s first production, “The Squaw Man,” and the first production of brothers in law Sam Goldwyn and Jesse Lasky who together founded the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. The success of “The Squaw Man” led to a merger with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players and started the Famous Players-Lasky studio, the fore-runner of Paramount.
Mary Pickford, aka. Gladys Louise Smith, signs a deal for $104,000 a year.
CIRCA 1913 BY MARCEAU
1915
William Fox starts the Fox Film Foundation with studios built in New Jersey and Hollywood.
D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" is released. Hailed as the most important film of all time for American movie history for introducing story flashbacks, dramatic close-ups, cross-cutting.
1916
Paramount is created when Jesse L. Lasky Co. merges with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Co.
At the age of 26, Charlie Chaplin signs a deal with Mutual Film Corporation for a record $675,000 a year.
1917
Famous Players-Lasky absorbs the original companies at Occidental Studios, which continues to house Cecil B. DeMille’s own production company, Artcraft.
The Charlie Chaplin Studios are completed and are still standing today on the corner of La Brea and Sunset.
Mary Pickford moves to California in order to make Cecil B. DeMille & Jack London’s “Romance of the Redwoods,” for which she was paid $96,666.67 out of the $135,000 budget. Mary Pickford shoots here at Occidental Studios.
1918
Four brothers, formerly soap salesmen in Ohio, open the Waner Brothers Studio.
Sid Grauman, “Hollywood's Master Showman”, opens one of the first movie palaces in America, the Million Dollar Theater, with "The Silent Man." The building still stands at Broadway and 3rd.
1919
Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford band together under the banner of United Artists, an Idependent film studio.
1921
Actress Virginia Rappe dies from a sexually related assault at a San Francisco party, ending comedian “Fatty”Arbuckle’s career and triggering Will Hays to form a national PR campaign and later to adopt his production code of ethics/censorship.
1922
Working on the lot at Occidental Studios, then Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount Pictures), Film Director William Desmond Taylor, is found murdered at his home bungalow just a few blocks away from his studio office. The crime is never solved.
1922
Rin Tin Tin, a german shepherd trained by an American coporal in France during World War I, appears for the first time. Later he made 26 movies with Warner Brothers and was famed for saving the studio with his box-office success.
1923
To publicize a new housing development, a sign is erected for Hollywoodland. The -land was taken off in 1949.
1924
Louis B. Mayer heads the new MGM Studios, a conglomeration of three studios: Metro Pictures (founded 1916), Goldwyn Pictures (founded 1917), and the Louis B. Mayer Co. (founded 1918), all owned by Marcus Loew.
The CBC, Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales, founded in 1919, reorganizes to form Columbia pictures.
1925
Masquers Club, the fore-runner of SAG, is founded in Hollywood by a number of actors unhappy about Hollywood Studio contracts.
1927
Sid Grauman opens his Chinese Theater for a total cost of 2 million dollars. The premiere of Cecil B DeMille’s “The King of Kings” was so well attended it caused riots.
Al Jolson stars in “The Jazz Singer,” the first feature length talkie, which received an Oscar Nomination for best writing, adaptation.
1928
Mickey Mouse debuted in the first synchronized sound cartoon “Steamboat Willie” by the Disney Brothers Production Company. The cartoon was drawn and filmed in their garage in Los Feliz.
1929
The first Oscar Awards Ceremony is held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, across from the Chinese Theater, by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Warner Brothers relase, ”On With the Show,” is the first all-talkie color feature.
1930
The Hays Production Code, written by a Roman Catholic priest named Father Lord, is adopted by Will Hays. Scenes of childbirth, among other things, are forbidden.
“Greta Garbo Speaks!” advertises her first talkie, “Anna Christie.”
1932
Aspiring actress Peg Entwistle commits suicide by jumping off the “H” from the Hollywood sign.
1933
Variety, established to cover vaudeville in 1905, opens a branch in Los Angeles.
The Screen Actors Guild is organized by 21 actors, including Boris Karloff, who complained of the treatment under his last picture, Frankenstein.
The Writers Guild of America is formed from the Screen Writers Guild, formerly a social club, when the film industry tried to insitute a paycut.
1935
RKO’s “Becky Sharp” is the first feature film shot using the new Three-Strip Technicolor process. Later on, “The Wizard of Oz” would use the same filming technique.
1936
The Screen Director’s Guild, the predecessor of the DGA, is founded by thirteen Hollywood Directors.
1937
Disney releases “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” – the first animated feature – using the new Three-Strip Technicolor process.
1938
The California Child Actor’s Bill, aka. The Coogan Act, is passed in reaction to million dollar child star Jackie Coogan’s infamous legal trial in which his parents refused to give him any of his prior earnings. Later Jackie Coogan becomes known for his role as Uncle Fester on The Adams Family.
1939
Famed as the “Greatest Year in Film History” for such movies as “Gone with the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Women,” "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "Ninotchka,” “Gunga Din,” “Beau Geste,” “The Little Princess,” “Love Affair,” etc.
1940
Bugs Bunny’s first tiff with Elmer Fudd in “A Wild Hare’ prompts him to say “What’s up, Doc?”
1941
Greta Garbo retires at age 36 in order to preserve her mystique. Ironically more than half of her films no longer exist.
The first commercial (aka. sponsored) television broadcast is held by ten stations who received licenses from the FCC.
1942
Orson Welles, at age 25, writes, produces, stars and directs in “Citizen Kane” recieving nine Oscar nominations and one win.
Orson Welles in 1937 photograph by Carl Van Vechten.
1945
10,500 set decorators went on strike after negotiations for a new union were stagnated by the producers at Warner Brothers. October 5, 1945, is dubbed Hollywood Black Friday for the riot.
Jimmy Stewart returns to the US after WWII and decides not to renew his studio contract with MGM and hires an agent instead. His first independent picture, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) guarantees his independent status.
1948
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" becomes the most infamous question in hollywood history. The “Hollywood Ten” are jailed for six months for contempt by Congress and remain black-listed until the sixties because they refused to answer.
DW Griffith, principal director of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, dies of a stroke at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood.
1949
RCA Records unveils the new 45-rpm record, allowing less than four minutes for recording.
Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, both previously married, conceive a son, shocking society so much that she is denounced by the US Senate as a “perosona non grata,” and is forced to seek exile in Italy.
1951
First commercial color tv program airs. Hollywood responds to decreasing film sales with color and wide-screen presentations.
House Committee on Un-American Activities resumes its hearings, blackballing more than 200 film technicians and stars for fear of communist tendencies.
1953
The first Academy Awards air on television by NBC.
1954
WGA split east and west in order to service their members with the new influx of television writing.
1955
Dorothy Dandridge, star of “Carmen Jones,” is the first African American to be nominated for an Oscar and the African American woman to star on the cover of Life Magazine.
James Dean dies in a car accident.
“Howard Frank Archives" be cited as the source of the image
“Blackboard Jungle” is released as one of the first movies depicting kids as juveniles.
1956
"Rock Around the Clock” becomes the first rock n roll musical.
1960
Joanne Woodward becomes the first actress to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The Screen Director’s Guild and the Radio and Television Directors Guild merge and form today’s Director’s Guild of America (DGA).
1961
Regular in-flight movies begin with a TWA flight between NY and LA who showed “Love Possessed,” starring Lana Turner.
1962
Marilyn Monroe commits suicide. MCA (Music corporation of America) purchases Universal Studios.
1963
Elizabeth Taylor’s “Cleopatra” bombs at the box office leaving an 18 million dollar deficit.
The Cinerama Dome in Seattle opens as the world’s largest screen at 90 feet wide by 30 feet high.
1965
“The Sound of Music” replaces “Gone with the Wind” as the number one box office hit of all time.
1968
The Hays Code is back burnered with the advent of the MPAA Film Rating System.
1967
Clint Eastwood becomes the Man With No Name, one of the first anti-heroes, in “A Fistfull of Dollars.”
BY MARTIN KRAFT
1970
Kirk Kerkorian buys MGM, marking the end of the company’s production era.
1971
"Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song!" is reported to be first Blaxploitation film – black actors starring for the purpose of showing black music for the profit (exploitation) of others.
1973
Marlon Brando sends Indian-rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse his oscar for “The Godfather” in protest of American Indian mis-treatment by Hollywood and the government.
George Lucas makes history by signing a deal with Fox for 40% of the merchandising rights on a little picture known as “Star Wars.”
1974
Z Channel launches in Los Angeles as one of the first paid programming, i.e., cable, channels. It popularized letter box editions, independent and foreign films, as well as the director’s cut.
1976
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" becomes the first film to win best picture, best director, best screenplay, best actor and best actress Oscars, replacing "It Happened One Night" (1934).
1977
Star Wars debuts to gross 200 million dollars and invents the blockbuster season.
Roman Polanski is exiled to France in order to escape incarceration for a guilty rape verdict.
Image provided by Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary
1979
The Weinstein brothers start Miramax Film Corp. as an independent film company in Buffalo, N.Y.
1980
Ronald Reagan, who began as a radio actor and went on to gross several million in box office sales, is elected President of the United States.
Sherry Lansing, at the age of 35, becomes the first female to head a major studio at 20th Century Fox.
1981
“Heaven’s Gate,” director Michael Cimino (“Deer Hunter,” 1978), single-handedly ruins United Artists, who survives only through a buyout from MGM. Oddly enough Z Channel uses this movie to establish the director’s cut by realeasing all 219 minutes of the original version.
MTV opens its doors, 24 hours a day, by playing non-stop music videos.
1982
Katharine Hepburn holds the record for four acting Oscars from her performance as Ethel Thayer in "On Golden Pond."
1983
The CD debuts in the American market replacing the BBC’s Digital Delay, the first digital audio device.
1984
The Betamax Decision, ruled by the Supreme Court, allowed home use of the video-tape machine on the basis that it did not violate copyright law because the material was not used for a “commercial or profit-making purpose.”
The Sundance Institute takes over the U.S. Film Festival in Utah and Robert Redford at its head creates the most influential festival for independent film in the United States.
Rock Hudson is famed for “giving AIDS a face” when he dies of AIDS at age 59 in Beverly Hills.
1986
Ted Turner buys the MGM movie library for 1 billion dollars and begins to colorize classic black and white movies and air them on his cable network.
Salah Malkawi/Stringer Getty Images
1988
The Writers Guild of America strikes for a total of 22 weeks, virtually shutting down television production and birthing reality (un-scripted) television.
1989
Sony Corp. buys Columbia Tri-Star off of coca-cola for $3.4 billions. Warner Communications and Time Inc. merge.
1990
The Internet Movie Database is made up of several independent movie lists created prior to the world wide web.
1993
Heidi Fleiss becomes infamous as the Hollywood Madam and spends time in prison for tax evasion, money laundering and attempted pandering. In 2004 she sold her life story to Paramount for $5 million.
1994
DreamWorks SKG is formed by former Disney head Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, and record mogul David Geffen, marking the first creation of a major film studio in half a century.
by John Mueller
The Birth of TCM (Turner Classic Movies) a network featuring commercial-free classic films 24 hours a day.
1995
Pixar is founded by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
1998
“Titanic” beomes the most expensive film ever made at 200 million dollars and recieves 14 Oscar Nominations and 11 wins.
BY flickr user: STEEPWAYS- photographer
The American Film Institute announces the Top 100 American Films of All Time in order to honor the film centennial. "Citizen Kane," “Casablanca,” and “The Godfather”
1999
TiVo is invented, allowing home viewers to pause or rewind live TV.
2002
African Americans sweep the best actor and best actress Academy Awards with Denzel Washington for "Training Day" and Halle Berry for "Monster's Ball."
2003
Austrian movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes governor of California.
2005
Michael Eisner is ousted from CEO at Disney by his former number two, Robert Iger. Iger disbands the company's infamously bureaucratic Strategic Planning division.
2006
Walt Disney Co. buys Pixar for $7.4 billion, making the former CEO of Pixar and the current CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, the largest shareholder at Disney.
2007
Hollywood Film Office opens its doors.
Introduction
In 1983, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) donated the records of the Hollywood film industry's Production Code Administration (PCA) to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California. This collection of documents, covering forty years of self-regulation and censorship in the motion picture industry, contains detailed case files (commonly referred to as "censorship files") for nearly twenty thousand film projects that were submitted to the Production Code staff for consideration.
Files normally include correspondence between studios or producers and the staffs of the PCA or the MPAA; letters to and from theater owners, censor boards, religious organizations, government entities, and other special interest groups concerned with the content of motion pictures. Files may include PCA interoffice communications such as telegrams, memoranda, and meeting notes; literary materials submitted for evaluation including stories, script synopses, script readers' reports, and treatments; song lyrics; and wardrobe photographs. Files may also include articles and reviews from newspapers, magazines, and trade journals; reports from state and national censor boards; copies of the official Code certificate letter; and a PCA analysis sheet detailing the characters and story of the finished film.
The History of Cinema: Hollywood and the Production Code microfilm collection includes a selection of five hundred files, each one relating to a particular film. The files are arranged in chronological order by the year of the film's release. Films released within the same year are arranged in alphabetical order by title. An online index of the film titles for which files are included in the collection is available at the tab above. For an index of the files by chronology or by director of the film covered, please consult the printed guide available on top of the third floor microfilm cabinets, call number PN1993.5.U6 H57 2006.
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Using Microfilm and Microfiche
The library's microfilm (reels) and microfiche (cards) collections can be found on the third floor. Manual readers for viewing microfilm and microfiche are available in the same area, but to scan or make printouts from microfilm or microfiche, you will need to use one of the several readers in the reference room on the fourth floor.
When you are finished looking at microfilm reels, place the reels in their boxes in the wire baskets on top of the microfilm cabinets. Place microfiche cards in their sleeves in the black boxes on top of the cabinets. Please do not put the microfilm or microfiche back in the drawers, keep microfilm in your library locker, or take it out of the library.
Reporting from Guadalupe, Calif. — Strong winds scour the dunes, which hide a curious history. Nails and fragments of concrete are scattered everywhere. Steel cables, carved pieces of wood and slabs of painted plaster poke out of the ground, ghosts rising from the grave.
In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille came to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes on California's Central Coast and built a movie set that still captures the imagination -- a colossal Egyptian dreamscape for the silent movie version of "The Ten Commandments."
Under the direction of French artist Paul Iribe, a founder of the Art Deco movement, 1,600 craftsmen built a temple 800 feet wide and 120 feet tall flanked by four 40-ton statues of the Pharaoh Ramses II. Twenty-one giant plaster sphinxes lined a path to the temple's gates. A tent city sprung up to house some of the 2,500 actors and 3,000 animals used to tell the story of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land.
"Your skin will be cooked raw. You will miss the comforts of home. You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history," DeMille told his army of actors. "I expect of you your supreme efforts."
When he was done, the set proved too expensive to haul away, but too valuable to leave intact for rival filmmakers to poach. DeMille had it bulldozed into a 300-foot-long trench and covered with sand.
Peter Brosnan was a 30-year-old New York University film school graduate when he first heard the story in 1982. Over beers one night, a former college roommate laid out the fantastic tale of DeMille's lost city.
"I thought my friend was nuts," Brosnan said.
Then his friend showed him DeMille's autobiography, in which the director seemed amused at the prospect that his city would be unearthed someday.
"If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe," DeMille wrote, "I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization . . . extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America."
Captivated, Brosnan embarked on a journey that has yet to end -- a quest to find DeMille's set, exhume it and produce a documentary about this unusual piece of Hollywood history.
The project would take him from film industry archives to the living rooms of aging ranchers who worked as extras on "Ten Commandments." He filmed their stories: How the "Hollywood boys" got thrown from unbroken horses; how a local 10-year-old with no acting experience played the pharaoh's son and was schooled by DeMille to put some mustard into his whipping of Moses; how the director ferried 240 elderly Jews from Los Angeles to witness the Exodus reenacted. The recent immigrants broke out into an impromptu dirge that stunned the crew.
Brosnan also collected stories from locals about the dozens of films shot outside Guadalupe from the silent era to the 1940s -- a time when the dunes were Hollywood's backlot for desert movies and ranch hands had fleeting encounters with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich.
Clarence Minetti, 92, is among the few still around with a connection to those days. He appeared in "The Last Outpost," a 1935 film starring Cary Grant. The dunes were colonial Iraq.
We were British soldiers or something," Minetti said. "Paid $5 a day for me and my horse."
Minetti pointed Brosnan to one dune out of the hundreds that flow across miles of the spectacular nature preserve. It didn't shift in the wind. In fact, it never moved. One foggy morning in June 1983, Brosnan and two friends climbed Minetti's dune with brooms and a movie camera. Hours later they hit pay dirt: dozens of pieces of statuary, including a 6-foot-wide bas-relief of a horse head.
Brosnan and archaeologist John Parker developed a plan for the excavation. DeMille's estate offered encouragement. A Smithsonian Institution curator expressed interest in displaying pieces of the set. Charlton Heston, who played Moses in DeMille's far more famous 1956 remake, sent his best wishes.
"We were ecstatic," Brosnan said. "We were young, idealistic and thought: What a wonderful movie this is going to make! We thought certainly we could get some money from Hollywood and we'd be finished with this project in a year or two."
But in Hollywood, green lights are as ephemeral as a starlet's blown kisses. Despite years of effort, Brosnan could raise only a portion of the $175,000 needed for a full-blown archaeological dig.
Yet his passion for DeMille's lost city never waned. Now, after 27 years, Brosnan believes he's close to obtaining a grant that will allow him to use inexpensive editing software to fulfill part of his project -- a film showcasing his oral histories on Guadalupe's days as a stand-in for exotic locales.
"I didn't realize when I started this project that it was going to become an epic of its own," he said.
Reds in Hollywood
In the years following World War II (1939-45), the United States and Soviet Union engaged in a tense military and political rivalry that became known as the Cold War. Although the U.S. and its communist rival rarely confronted each other directly, they both attempted to extend their influence and promote their systems of government around the world. A number of Americans believed that their nation's security depended on preventing the spread of communism, and this attitude created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in many parts of the country.
The House Un-American Activities Committee was charged with investigating allegations of communist influence and subversion in the U.S. during the early years of the Cold War. Committee members quickly settled their gaze on the Hollywood film industry, which was seen as a hotbed of communist activity. This reputation originated in the 1930s, when the economic difficulties of the Great Depression increased the appeal of leftist organizations for many struggling actors and studio workers.
With the dawning of the Cold War, anti-communist legislators grew concerned that the movie industry could serve as a source of subversive propaganda. Although popular Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s offered little evidence of an overriding Socialist agenda, the investigation proceeded. In October 1947, more than 40 people with connections to the movie industry received subpoenas to appear before HUAC on suspicion of holding communist loyalties or being involved in subversive activities.
Accusing the Accusers
During the investigative hearings, members of HUAC grilled the witnesses about their past and present associations with the Communist Party. Aware that their answers could ruin their reputations and careers, most individuals either sought leniency by cooperating with investigators or cited their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. However, a group of 10 Hollywood screenwriters and directors took a different approach and openly challenged the legitimacy of the committee's investigations.
The 10 individuals who defied HUAC were Alvah Bessie (c. 1904-85), Herbert Biberman (1900-71), Lester Cole (c. 1904-85), Edward Dmytryk (1908-99), Ring Lardner Jr. (1915-2000), John Howard Lawson (1894-1977), Albert Maltz (1908-1985), Samuel Ornitz (1890-1957), Robert Adrian Scott (1912-73) and Dalton Trumbo (1905-76). These men, who became known as the Hollywood Ten, not only refused to cooperate with the investigation but denounced the HUAC anti-communist hearings as an outrageous violation of their civil rights, as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to belong to any political organization they chose. Some compared the committee's coercive methods and intimidating tactics to the oppressive measures enacted in Nazi Germany. "I am not on trial here," declared screenwriter Lawson. "This committee is on trial."
Imprisoned and Blacklisted
The Hollywood Ten paid a high price for their actions at the HUAC hearings. In November 1947, they were cited for contempt of Congress. Facing trial on that charge in April 1948, each man was found guilty and sentenced to spend a year in prison and pay a $1,000 fine. After unsuccessfully appealing the verdicts, they began serving their terms in 1950. While in prison, one member of the group, Edward Dmytryk, decided to cooperate with the government. In 1951, he testified at a HUAC hearing and provided the names of more than 20 industry colleagues he claimed were communists.
A more lasting punishment came as a result of the movie industry blacklist. Studio executives did not want their business to be associated with radical politics in the minds of the movie-going public and therefore agreed that they would not employ the Hollywood Ten (with the exception of Dmytryk) or anyone else suspected of being affiliated with the Communist Party. The motion picture industry blacklist grew steadily larger as Congress continued its investigations into the 1950s, and numerous careers were damaged as a result. The blacklist ended in the 1960s.
The Hollywood Ten were controversial figures at the time they launched their protest, and their actions continue to inspire debate decades later. Some tend to view their punishment as justified, since the individuals were admitted communists, while others generally view them as heroic figures who spoke out against the abuses of the Red Scare--and in defense of the U.S. Constitution--when many of their colleagues remained silent.
