CHAPTER 10
A Slowly Changing Hollywood
It was back in the 1880s that Harvey and Ida Wilcox built their first house in the community that became Hollywood. Today, it is a crowded neighborhood within the city of Los Angeles. More people live in LA than in any other American city, except New York City.
Movies are still filmed in and around the area of Hollywood, but many directors choose other locations, sometimes because it’s cheaper. Peter Jackson, who is from New Zealand, filmed his Lord of the Rings movies there. Wonder Woman was filmed in Italy, England, and France. Besides where movies are made, how they are made has changed drastically. That’s because of technology. The key word is digital. Many directors today use digital cameras instead of film. Editing is done on computers. Special effects are created digitally.
Peter Jackson on the set of a Lord of the Rings film
Big Hollywood studios still make movies. But competition is growing.
HBO started as a cable TV channel and now makes movies. So does Netflix, which only used to deliver movies made by other companies. Amazon, which sells 40 percent of all new books in the United States, is now financing and producing movies, too.
On May 16, 1929, 270 people gathered at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel for the first Academy Awards ceremony. Winners in twelve categories were given gold-plated statues. The ceremony lasted fifteen minutes.
Today, many more award categories have been added. The ceremony, which has been televised since 1953, usually lasts three hours—too long, many TV viewers think!
Watching the awards show year after year makes one thing clear to viewers—the movie industry is still dominated by white men. Women and all people of color hold few of the top jobs. As of 2018, in the ninety-year history of the Oscars, only five black directors had ever been nominated for the best director award. None of them had won. Only five women had ever been nominated for the best director Oscar. Kathryn Bigelow was the only winner. She took home the Oscar in 2010 for a movie called The Hurt Locker. It is about soldiers in a bomb-disposal unit during the Iraq War.
After nominees were announced for the 2016 awards, lots of people grew angry. Many excellent films made by women and nonwhite filmmakers and actors had not been nominated. In particular, critics praised Straight Outta Compton, about Dr. Dre and his former rap group, and Creed, the latest movie in the Rocky series. And all acting nominees—both in the best actress and best actor categories—were white. All director nominees were men.
A protest movement began. It was called Oscars So White. The Academy listened. It changed the list of official voters for the awards. Almost seven hundred new members were chosen. Many were women and people of color. Most were younger.
In 2017, Oscar-nominated movies made by filmmakers of color were Moonlight, Fences, and 13th. Seven actors and actresses of color were nominated. Moonlight, the story of a gay African American boy growing up in Miami, won for best picture. It was directed and coproduced by Barry Jenkins, an African American filmmaker. Mahershala Ali won best supporting actor for the same film. And Viola Davis won best supporting actress for her role in Fences, about a black family in Pittsburgh, which also starred Denzel Washington.
Mahershala Ali and Viola Davis
The Oscars were “less white,” but there was much more work to be done. Independent film companies like HBO, Amazon, and Netflix stepped up. Filmmakers of all races would receive funding to make more diverse movies. There would be more money for women filmmakers. How much of a difference will it make and how soon will change come? Only time will tell.
Whatever its problems, the film industry continues to do what it has been doing for more than a hundred years—creating entertainment on-screen that dazzles and entrances audiences all over the world. Sure, there are other cities that are centers for moviemaking—for example, Mumbai in India, which has become known as Bollywood.
Still, there is only one Hollywood, and it is far more than a geographic location. It is the glamour capital of the United States—the place where movie magic is made.
